Articles by Slashdot from December 2018

Some of the most popular apps for Android smartphones, including Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and MyFitnessPal, are transmitting data to Facebook without the consent of users in a potential breach of EU re...

The rarest bird in the world -- a species of duck called the Madagascar pochard -- has been given a new home in time for the new year. From a report: An international team of researchers released 21 o...

Corn and soybean crops have been good to farmers in the American Midwest and Plains. But these staple crops have taken a toll on the very earth they draw nourishment from. Now, a new generation of far...

New York City police will deploy a camera-equipped drone above Times Square, along with new "counter-drone technology" blocking other devices from the area, where they expect as many as 2 million New ...

An anonymous reader shared a report: Sam Schreiber was mid-shampoo at a Drybar blow-dry salon in Los Angeles when someone from the front desk approached her stylist with an emergency: a woman was tryi...

Here's an analysis by OverOps on how shared accountability affects the delivery of reliable software in a DevOps environment, and what are some of the top challenges teams face when it comes to buildi...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. From a report: In June 1983, newspaper ...

In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America's leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced n...

A computer virus hit newspaper printing plants in Los Angeles and at Tribune Publishing newspapers across the country. From a report: Tribune Publishing said Saturday night that malware affected its a...

Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR:The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and...

"In Japan, a robot may create a new way to mourn," reports one Colorado news team:This robot is supposed to sound like a loved one. Now imagine the same robot having a 3D-printed mask of their face. Y...

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:Every time Microsoft releases a Windows 10 feature update, it runs some efficiency tests to prove that its Edge browser is significantly faster than the competition, ...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from New York magazine:In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 m...

An anonymous reader quotes MIT's Technology Review:Silicon Valley loves the idea of universal basic income. Many in the tech elites tout it as the answer to job losses caused by automation, if only pe...

Wave723 quotes IEEE Spectrum: On New Year's Eve, millions of people will use Facebook's Messenger app to wish friends and family a 'Happy New Year!' If everything goes smoothly, those messages will re...

"What's the worst that can happen?" thought Nicko Feinberg last December when he listed his house on Airbnb.The listing explicitly said no parties. Then a request came through to book the house for on...

Three-quarters of Canadians own smartphones-- and 94% of 15- to 34-year-olds. But this week the Globe and Mail profiled "digital refuseniks" who are "deliberately logging off -- and they say it's done...

YouTube's controversial year-end "Rewind" video has become "the most-loathed video in the entire history of YouTube," reports Inc., adding that with 14 million down votes, it now "might just be the mo...

"It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge:Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance ra...

If you've been dreaming of moonlight in Vermont -- and getting a re-location subsidy -- "the time has come to make your maple-syrup-coated dreams a reality," reports Fast Company:[F]or those who reloc...

Julia Reda is a member of Germany's Pirate Party, a member of the European Parliament, and the Vice-President of The Greens-European Free Alliance. Thursday her official web site announced:In 2014, se...

The CBC is marking the 20th anniversary of the notorious Hampsterdance web site with a 10,000-word oral history by arts reporter Leah Collins, promising "the twisted true story of one of the world's f...

The Federal Trade Commission has sent out a flare to warn Netflix users that there are some grinches out there looking to take advantage of everyone's holiday bliss and vulnerability. From a report: I...

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Every major user interface (UI) redesign project is a hit and miss game, and Google's new Chrome UI appears to be a colossal miss. Designed with mobile devices in m...

An anonymous reader writes: Three co-creators of the MIT-incubated Julia programming language are the recipients of the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. With origins in the Comput...

Samsung's 2019 smart TVs will allow consumers to browse the web, access their PCs and even edit work documents from the comfort of their living room couch. From a report: The company previewed a new f...

Researchers at Google's AI labs created a couple of novel neural networks that can succeed in navigating web forms, such as an online flight-booking site. Although baby steps at the moment, the progra...

The Trump administration announced on Friday a plan designed to make it easier for coal-fired power plants, after nearly a decade of restrictions, to release into the atmosphere more mercury and other...

Over the last two years, we have heard numerous reports about Fuchsia, new operating system for phones, computers, and just about everything else by Google. We've seen it in a variety of demos, all of...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Netflix is further distancing itself from Apple's 15% iTunes tax bracket. Earlier this year, the streaming giant enabled iOS users in more than two dozen markets t...

It's nearly the new year, which means time for some reflection on what's happened and what's to come. For Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that means looking back on one really tough year. From a report:...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sears, the employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its chairman, Eddie La...

Retron shares a report: Music retailer HMV has confirmed it is calling in KPMG as administrators. The move, the second in six years, involves 2,200 staff at 125 stores. Owners Hilco, which took the co...

Retron shares a report: Music retailer HMV has confirmed it is calling in KPMG as administrators. The move, the second in six years, involves 2,200 staff at 125 stores. Owners Hilco, which took the co...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sears, the employer of more than 68,000 filed for bankruptcy in October. Its last shot at survival is a $4.6 billion proposal put forward by its chairman, Eddie La...

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said on Friday the agency had launched an investigation into a nationwide CenturyLink outage that has affected 911 service for consumers across the ...

schwit1 shares a report: Google has removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant's search ...

schwit1 shares a report: Google has removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant's search ...

The Apache Software Foundation has released NetBeans 10.0, the second major release of the Apache NetBeans IDE. The release, said the Apache Software Foundation, is focused in adding support for JDK 1...

An anonymous reader shares a report: When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitali...

A gene editing technique has been used to produce asexual rice, which could carry traits such as high yields and drought resistance. From a report: After more than 20 years of theorizing about it, sci...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking to a source familiar with the company's plans, we've learned that Google intends to launch two new Pixel smartphones on Verizon in early spring 2019 -- th...

One of the most refreshing aspects of Linux in 2018 was the popularity of Snaps. Canonical revealed that the containerized packages have been a smashing success. Today, the Ubuntu-maker highlights wha...

There was a boom; then a hum. The lights flickered. A giant plume of smoke filled the New York City sky, and turned it blue. From a report: "A sort of unnatural, fluorescent shade of blue," said Bill ...

schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results...

Crippling drought this year has caused more than $1 billion in damage. As it has played out, anyone affected by the drought or trying to manage it has turned to a once obscure map that has become key ...

Are you having trouble accessing your CenturyLink internet today? Well, you're not alone. From a report: Several Treasure Valley residents reached out to KTVB Thursday morning to report they had no ac...

Higher education is supposed to be the ticket to employment. But in some Bay Area counties, workers with a high school diploma have lower unemployment rates than those with bachelor's degrees or highe...

This year Fortnite became the world's most popular game, growing its parent company, Epic Games' valuation to $15 billion. It also helped the company pile up cash. Epic grossed a $3 billion profit for...

Bottled water, which recently dethroned soda as America's most popular beverage, is facing a crisis. From a report: A consumer backlash against disposable plastic plus new government mandates and bans...

French tech company Sigfox has developed a bite-size tracker that can be inserted into the horns of rhinos to help conservationists monitor and protect the endangered species. From a report: With the ...

A hacker -- or potentially a group of hackers -- has made over 200 Bitcoin (circa $750,000 at today's exchange) using a clever attack on the infrastructure of the Electrum Bitcoin wallet over the last...

The developer of the popular image editing tool Paint.NET, Rick Brewster, has shared his vision of what the coming year holds for his software. The 2019 roadmap for Paint.NET is an exciting one, promi...

Several remarkable movies and shows hit the theaters and TV this year. We had "Black Panther", new "Incredibles", "Avengers: Infinity War", more "Star Wars" and "Mission: Impossible" hit the cinemas. ...

In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, three-day-old Oskar Lunde sleeps soundly in his hospital cot, snuggled into a lime green blanket decorated with red butterflies. Across the room, his father turns o...

Prices hospitals charge for their services will all go online Jan. 1 under a new federal requirement, but patient advocates say the realities of medical-industry pricing will make it difficult for con...

MojoKid writes: ARM-based server processors have threatened to take on Intel in the data center for some time but not much has materialized thus far in terms of significant deployments. However, a new...

The Indian government dealt a surprise blow on Wednesday to the e-commerce ambitions of Amazon and Walmart, effectively barring the American companies from selling products supplied by affiliated comp...

Zimbabwe is too far for many people to visit, but 37-year-old Tawanda Kanhema grew up there before moving to the United States. Thanks to Kanhema, though, you'll soon be able to play virtual tourist, ...

The final miles of a nearly two-month race across Antarctica -- a lonely effort marked by long days, short nights and stunning endurance -- ended Wednesday with a sprint to the finish.From a report: A...

An anonymous reader shares a column: I've been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it's beca...

In San Francisco and Bangalore, street-vendor unions and nonprofits are helping informal food workers eke out a living -- but their future is still uncertain. From a report: Bangalore and the Bay Area...

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can automatically differentiate between different types of cancer cells and their sensitivity to radiotherapy. From a report: A team o...

New York Public Library's Tony Ageh was recently in Seattle to talk about libraries' digital transformation. Ageh made the point that tech now permeates pretty much all of a library's operations, from...

Three decades ago, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams wrote about a foundational weight-calculating technique -- backpropagation -- in a monumental paper titled "Learning Representa...

Scientists in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Guam have found that whale shark tourism in Tan-awan, Oslob, the Philippines, has led to degradation of the local coral reef ecosystem. They reported their...

A hacker has stolen the personal details of over 500,000 San Diego Unified School District staff and students, the district revealed in a breach notice posted on its website Friday. From a report: The...

Google's Android TV platform has now been deployed by more than 100 pay TV operators around the world, the technology's top product manager told news outlet MCN. From a report: According to Shalini Go...

Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at ...

A top Amazon executive privately advised the Trump administration on the launch of a new internet portal that is expected to generate billions of dollars for the technology company and give it a domin...

Japan is withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and will resume commercial whaling next year, a government spokesman said on Wednesday, in a move expected to spark international c...

That shocking statistic comes from a study conducted by Amnesty International and AI software startup Element AI. From a report: In the study, called Troll Patrol, Amnesty International and Element AI...

Google is relatively new to the hardware game -- at least compared to rivals Apple and Samsung. But it's not just what's outside that matters. An analysis, by Engadget : The Pixel 3 is the best exampl...

A growing number of Chinese companies are throwing their support behind Huawei Technologies following the recent arrest of its chief financial officer in Canada, taking such steps as offering subsidie...

Earlier this month, Microsoft issued an emergency patch for Internet Explorer to fix a zero-day vulnerability in the web browser. The problem affects versions of Internet Explorer from 9 to 11 across ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Epic Games managed to produce a hit, sure, but the genius of it is how it's rewritten the idea of what hanging out online can be. Fortnite is a game, but it's also...

Thousands of hot tubs can be hacked and controlled remotely because of a hole in their online security, BBC Click has revealed. From a report: Researchers showed the TV programme how an attacker could...

For most of us, using up the Christmas leftovers means endless rounds of turkey sandwiches and lashings of Brussel sprout curry in the days leading up to New Year. So, to help inject some creativity i...

According to several reports, iPhone users around the world who have upgraded to the latest version of iOS are finding that it cuts off mobile data services. From a report: One Twitter user @kevbruh s...

Detection systems are now able to be deployed throughout the UK to combat the threat of drones, ministers say. It follows three days of disruption at Gatwick airport last week, when drones were sighte...

Squeamish from the start about pursuing profits in one of the darker corners of finance, established firms this year slowed their already halting efforts to make a business out of Bitcoin mania. While...

India's government wants to make it mandatory for platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Google, to remove content it deems "unlawful" within 24 hours of notice, and create "automated tools" ...

Mark Wilson, writing for FastCompany magazine: That little Prime logo used to mean something. Now it feels like a ruse that lulls shoppers into a false sense of security, until they go to checkout and...

An underwater landslide caused by activity from the Anak Krakatau volcano is being blamed for a tsunami that struck Indonesia late Saturday, killing at least 222 people and injuring more than 800 othe...

The U.S. has added 10,000 of these budget retail outlets since 2001. But some towns and cities are trying to push back. From a report: A recent research brief [PDF] by the Institute of Local Self Reli...

Stephen Follows, a writer and producer who also researches data and statistics on the film industry, writes: Today we're going to use data to answer the question "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" Along...

The small Pacific island Tokelau is still the most populated country-level domain in the world, outnumbering the 20.8 million domains that use China's .cn. From a report: UK registry for .uk domains h...

No one told them to look for the Earth. It was Christmas Eve 1968 and the first manned mission to the moon had reached its destination. As Apollo 8 slipped into lunar orbit the crew prepared to read p...

The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrucken (a city in Germany) concluded Key-Systems, a German-based registrar, can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to tak...

Free online courses -- also called Massive Open Online Courses -- have quite a year. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It's been seven years since these courses rose to prominence, when a few St...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Congress has passed a bill that could make it easier for you to access public data released by the government. The House approved the OPEN Government Data Act on S...

President Donald Trump last week signed legislation ramping up quantum computing research and development. From a report: The National Quantum Initiative Act (H.R. 6227) authorizes $1.2 billion over f...

Two years after a congressional report labeled Huawei a national-security threat, the Chinese firm unexpectedly scored a big-name ally in Washington. It was the Redskins, the capital's National Footba...

In new book Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, John Warner dispenses with arguments that the current moment of compositional crisis is related to screen time...

When one side isn't reserved for walkers, it saves time for everyone. But transit users around the world just can't be convinced. Linda Poon, writing for CityLab: I'm one of those people who speed pas...

Linus Torvalds has announced the general availability of v4.20 of the Linux kernel. In a post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds said that there was no point in delaying the release of the lat...

As we inch closer to the end of the year, we will be running a couple of year-ender posts in the next few days. We're starting with books. What were some books you read this year that you would recomm...

One of the first men to orbit the Moon has told BBC Radio 5 Live that it's "stupid" to plan human missions to Mars. Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, the first human spaceflight to leave Ea...

Huawei's 2018 was tumultuous, to put it mildly, but the company has at least a few reasons to brag. The Chinese mobile giant has revealed that it shipped over 200 million smartphones in the year, sett...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life and streaked away from Cape Canaveral early Sunday carrying the first in a powerful new generation of GPS navigation satellites into orbit. It was the Californi...

Remote teams incorrectly overwrote data developed by volunteer mappers in Thailand. TechCrunch reports: Grab, Southeast Asia's top ride-hailing company, has hit a roadblock in its efforts to improve i...

If you drive a car into the city center of Oslo next month, you shouldn't plan on staying long: There won't be any parking spots. The Norwegian capital is in the process of eliminating the remaining 7...

Basic income is going to be tested in Germany next year. From a report: The setup of the experiment will be similar to the one now ending in Finland, which means there will be an unconditional cash tr...

Where are you? That's not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position. From a report: Countries arou...

NVIDIA has launched the "GeForce NOW Recommended Routers" program to help gamers choose the best router for them. From a report: "The GeForce NOW game-streaming service has transformed where and how y...

Reader Beeftopia shares a report: Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump f...

Google will add a new security feature to Chrome OS, the company's web-based operating system that powers its Chromebooks devices, it announced this week. From a report: The new feature, named USBGuar...

Intel's channel organization is vowing increased communication and transparency with partners on issues such as the current CPU shortage, which has caused delays, price hikes and other challenges this...

The Federal Trade Commission is being asked to investigate how apps that may violate federal privacy laws that dictate the data that can be collected on children ended up in the family section of the ...

As we inch closer to the end of the year, we will be running a couple of year-ender posts in the next few days. We're starting with books. What were some books you read this year that you would recomm...

As we inch closer to the end of the year, we will be running a couple of year-ender posts in the next few days. We're starting with books. What were some books you read this year that you would recomm...

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Faraday Future is almost out of cash. From a report: At the tail end of 2017, the much-hyped EV startup was sliding toward financial oblivion. But then a cruci...

The catch is shifting northward as water temperatures rise, forcing crews to retool their boats and rework their businesses. From a report: Aboard the Stanley K and the Oracle, two 58-foot vessels, Bu...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed Pluto in 2015. But now it's getting strange readings while approaching its next destination, the Ultima Thule asteroid. Popular Mechanics reports:Ultima Thule app...

An anonymous reader quotes CBS News:Parents are realizing that it's not just Santa who's keeping tabs on their kids. Many popular high-tech gadgets that may end up being given as holiday presents can ...

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek:The makers of PUBG sent down the banhammer Thursday afternoon in a ban wave believed to iimpact more than 30,000 fraudulent player accounts. What PUBG Corp likely d...

An anonymous reader writes: An updated version of the singing "Big Mouth Billy Bass" plastic fish toy now speaks (with synchronized lip movements) with the voice of Alexa. "Your humdrum life will be t...

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents." The user w...

"The working poor are spilling into Bay Area streets for lack of safe, affordable shelter," report two Silicon Valley newspapers describing a "pop-up neighborhood" that's now banding together, "a smal...

chalsall (Slashdot reader #185), writes:The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1, having 24,862,048 digits. A computer volunteered...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer's administration is seeking a way to donate or sell at a steep discount as much as $10 million in unused computer equipment ...

schwit1 shared an interesting article from Bloomberg:Though genetic tests are frequently marketed as family-friendly entertainment, they sometimes wind up surfacing life-altering surprises. And when t...

Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma shared Eurogamer's report about a rare Amiga 3000 auctioned on eBay:Mike Clarke, who worked at legendary UK game company Psygnosis from 1992 to 1999 doing audio wo...

The AP reports that self-driving cars have reached a new milestone in California:The Public Utilities Commission granted Zoox the first permit to ferry riders in autonomous vehicles under a pilot prog...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares this article from the Verge:An autonomous food delivery robot burst into flames on a Berkeley, California walkway, as first reported by The Daily Californian. ...

A Bloomberg columnist asks whether this week's rise in bitcoin's price is a turning point -- or just a "dead cat bounce"?After hitting a year's low of about $3,143, down about 80 percent from January ...

What's new with Oracle's free and open-source hosted hypervisor? Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Oracle has released major version 6.0 of VirtualBox with a variety of new features, i...

Tim May, co-founder of the influential Cypherpunks mailing list and a significant influence on both bitcoin and WikiLeaks, passed away in mid-December at his home in Corralitos, California. The news w...

theodp writes: "Have you ever made something wonderful but were too afraid to share it?" asks Apple's heartwarming "Share Your Gifts" 2018 holiday ad, which features a girl who keeps her creations sec...

After issuing a firmware update that reportedly cut off local access for Harmony Hubs, Logitech says it will offer yet another update to undo the move and restore local network control. The Verge repo...

Swarm Technologies will pay a $900,000 fine for launching and operating four small experimental communications satellites that risked "satellite collisions" and threatened "critical commercial and gov...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Just in time for the winter solstice, scientists may have figured out how short days can lead to dark moods. Two recent studies suggest the culprit is a b...

dmoberhaus shares a report from Motherboard: A team of Japanese researchers from Keio University in Tokyo have demonstrated that an amoeba is capable of generating approximate solutions to a remarkabl...

Companies around the world have cut their work week down to just four days and found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout. Reuters highlights some of those compa...

Four months after a mysterious group was outed for a digital espionage operation that used novel techniques to target Mac users, its macOS malware samples continued to go undetected by most antivirus ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It's not a great time to visit the UK as a tourist. Besides all the Brexit nonsense and the December weather, one of our greatest tourist spots is und...

In September, JD.com's billionaire founder, Richard Liu, was accused of rape nearly four months ago by a young Chinese student at the University of Minnesota. He was reportedly in Minneapolis for his ...

New submitter ArchieBunker writes: A viral video featuring a booby-trapped HomePod box that pranked package thieves with a glitter bomb has been criticized for faking some of the reactions of the woul...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year -- not because they're using a 5G phone connected ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water fr...

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with Privacy International, a similar organization based in the United Kingdom, have now sued 11 federal agencies, demanding records about how those agencies ...

A day after the US Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals for being members of a state-sponsored hacking group and accused the Chinese government of orchestrating a string of hacks around...

Research firm Loop Ventures published its annual Smart Speaker IQ Test this week. Like earlier iterations of the test, it put the top smart assistants and speakers head-to-head, grading them on a wide...

The creator of the year's biggest game is facing a slew of lawsuits over its alleged use of famous dance moves. But will courts tap to the same tune? From a report: Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Alfons...

In the wake of reports that Google didn't follow normal procedure in the development of a censored search product for China -- with execs said to have circumvented standard company procedures and shut...

Technological changes such as automation and artificial intelligence are expected to transform the employment landscape. The question is: will our education system keep up? From a report: The answer m...

Lubuntu, a popular Ubuntu flavor which announced earlier this year that it would stop supporting old hardware, is now dropping support for 32-bit x86 releases. BetaNews adds: "Lubuntu has been and con...

Children as young as 14 are making thousands of pounds a week as part of a global hacking network built around the popular video game Fortnite. From a report: About 20 hackers told the BBC they were s...

Facebook is working on making a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app, focusing first on the remittances market in India, Bloomberg reports. From the report: ...

Technology giants rely heavily on Wikipedia's extensive database to source information for their platforms. So it's only fair that they show interest in the long-term sustainability of the online ency...

Several readers have shared a report: The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privac...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Microsoft has released an out-of-band security update that fixes an actively exploited vulnerability in Internet Explorer. This vulnerabilit...

Several readers have shared a report: The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privac...

Iwastheone shares a report from The Verge: Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis. But according to the company, ...

Privately funded space startups are changing China's space industry, helping it become a space power on par with the United States. "2018 is shaping up to be the first year in which more rockets reach...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is m...

According to a Navy Inspector General report, U.S. military troops used two Android apps that contained severe vulnerabilities in live combat scenarios. "The two apps are named KILSWITCH (Kinetic Inte...

Bloomberg reports that Amazon is struggling in the $840 billion grocery market, more than a year after it spoked the industry with the $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods last year. "The number o...

Nine months after an Uber self-driving car struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, Uber has decided that it's time to resume testing its self-driving cars on public roads. The ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: This week the Federal Court has issued the largest pirate site blocking injunction thus far in Australia, judging by the number of targeted sites...

"Qualcomm was granted a second injunction against Apple on Thursday, banning it from selling some iPhone models in Germany that use chips from Intel and parts from another supplier, Qorvo," reports CN...

The FBI has shut down the domains of 15 high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) websites. "Several seizure warrants granted by a California federal judge went into effect Thursday, removing ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Hackers working on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security breached the networks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM, then used the access to h...

Videos and pictures of children being subjected to sexual abuse are being openly shared on Facebook's WhatsApp on a vast scale, with the encrypted messaging service failing to curb the problem despite...

merbs writes: Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to...

The Python Software Foundation has settled on a new governance model for the programming language Python. The decision to come up with a new model was made after Python creator and chief Guido van Ros...

Earlier this year, business communication service Slack began to block users in Syria, Iran, and select other embargoed countries to comply with U.S. regulations. This week, the company has broadened ...

U.S. authorities on Thursday unveiled indictments against two Chinese nationals linked to China's government who took part in a cyber spying campaign that hacked a range of American government agencie...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Latest registration figures released by Verisign, an internet network company that oversees some domain name endings, seem to indicate that after a rocky few years...

quantic_oscillation7 shares a report: The latest notes from the Debian anti-harassment team on Wednesday caught my attention when reading, "We were requested to advice on the appropriateness of a cert...

In an official statement Thursday, Intel called out Qualcomm for allegedly continuing to pursue its use of patent lawsuits and threatening lawsuits against its own customers and competitors even as mu...

Fascinating article on The Verge on the many ways Amazon Marketplace, the ecommerce giant's the company's third-party platform, sellers sabotage each other and defraud customers, and how Amazon is run...

An anonymous reader shares a column: AT&T may be meeting its self-imposed deadline to launch "5G" service in 12 cities this week, but based on what the company has said -- and not said -- I can on...

Mark Wilson writes: Microsoft has a new open source project -- Project Mu. This is the company's open-source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core which is currently used by...

A user of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of "a human error" by the company. From a report: The customer had asked to ...

Gatwick's runway has been shut since Wednesday night, when two devices were seen flying over the perimeter fence. The airport said at about 12:00 GMT on Thursday a drone had been spotted "in the last ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Treasury Department has leveled sanctions against 16 current and former GRU intelligence officers (some of whom were targeted in earlier indictme...

"At midnight on New Year's Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain," reports Smithsonian Magazine. "It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration...

Google said in a blog post that its AI-powered "Google Lens" camera tool can now recognize over a billion items. When it launched last year, it was only able to detect around 250,000 items. The Verge ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Now, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have genetically modified a common houseplant -- pothos ivy...

In September, a nonprofit deployed a multimillion-dollar floating structure designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean. But, according to CBS News, the 2,000-foot-long structure has...

Last night, Elon Musk unveiled his vision of a high-speed tunnel system he believes could ease congestion and revolutionize how millions of commuters get around cities. CNBC reports: Musk, who founded...

Apple released a tiny update to iOS this week designed to avoid a sales ban in China. iOS version 12.1.2 contains software changes exclusive to China that are designed to circumvent Apple's patent dis...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: There are about 1.47 million individual solar panel installations in the US. That number comes courtesy of an artificial intelligence system developed by...

According to MacRumors forums, some users are complaining of a display issue that causes a bright spot to appear right above the Home button on some 2017 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models. The f...

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: Many users of Logitech's Harmony Hub smart home hub and remote were recently met with a nasty surprise. The device's latest firmware update, version 4.15...

Jason Koebler from Motherboard argues "we should replace Facebook with personal websites." An anonymous reader shares the report: As a freshman in high school, in the year of our lord 2002, I made a w...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Work four days a week, but get paid for five? It sounds too good to be true, but companies around the world that have cut their work week have found that it leads ...

Alibaba founder Jack Ma fired a shot at the United States in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. An anonymous reader shares a report: Ma was asked by CNBC's Andrew Ross Sor...

Earlier this week, a former Microsoft Edge intern alleged that Google deliberately introduced bogus changes to YouTube to break the functionality of the video portal when users on Edge and other brows...

Microsoft has been looking for ways to simplify the way users log into Office and find their documents via its Office.com portal. On December 19, the company is taking another step in this area by int...

The attorney general for the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, to gain access to the names, "likes" and othe...

India successfully squeezed a seventh launch into the year Wednesday, using an upgraded version of the country's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle to place a massive communications satellite int...

A previously unknown hacker group is behind a mounting number of breaches that have been reported by local governments across the US. From a report: In a report published today, US cyber-security vend...

UK chip-maker Arm, better known for developing the hardware that powers most smartphones, is working on a new generation of smart chips that embed artificial intelligence inside devices. One of these ...

Microsoft has officially unveiled "Windows Sandbox," a feature that was expected to be unveiled next year. Windows Sandbox, the company says, creates "an isolated, temporary desktop environment" where...

Google engineers are currently working on a Chrome browser update that will block malicious websites from hijacking the browser's history and, indirectly, the Back button. From a report: The issue at ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: By now, of course, you're aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into "Oath" with AOL...

Two of 2018's best statistics from the Royal Statistical Society are about the environment. "The winning international statistic of the year was 90.5% -- the proportion of plastic waste that has never...

A new study published in the journal Icarus found that Saturn is losing its signature rings at a "worst-case scenario" rate, and the bands could disappear completely within 100 million years. USA Toda...

The New York Times obtained hundreds of pages of Facebook documents which were generated in 2017 that show that the social network considered these companies business partners and effectively exempted...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from Austria, Italy and Sweden has successfully demonstrated teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots. In their ...

According to the Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is raising a $500 million round of fundraising to help build its massive satellite internet project, called Starlink. "The new funding puts SpaceX's valuat...

According to Windows Central, there are two upcoming next-generation Xbox consoles in the works -- a cheaper "S"-style console to succeed the Xbox One S, and a more beastly "X"-style console to succee...

Twitter is introducing a new toggle in the app to allow users to switch from the ranked timeline to the original, reverse-chronological feed. "The company says the move comes in recognition of the fac...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: T-Mobile has denied an allegation that it lied to the Federal Communications Commission about the extent of its 4G LTE coverage. A group that rep...

"Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the heart of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, claims to have built an automated car that drove from San Francisco to New York without any human int...

Kroger is launching its unmanned grocery delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company first announced the pilot with robotics company Nuro in June, and since August, "they have tested an auton...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM...

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you often find yourself needing to remove the backgrounds from photos but don't have the time to manually do it, you might want to bookmark Remove.bg. It's a si...

Even if you explicitly tell Facebook to not track your location, it says it will still use your IP address to track your location. Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Aleksandra Korolova has turned o...

Google has listened to user feedback and is currently testing a feature that will let G Suite users invite non-Google account holders to view, comment, suggest edits, and even directly edit Google Doc...

London's Metropolitan Police is testing its facial recognition technology in the capital this week. From a report: It's the seventh time the Metropolitan Police, the UK capital's police force, has tri...

Amazon may have turned off its Oracle data warehouse in favor of Amazon Web Services database technology, but no one else in their right mind would, Oracle's outspoken co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison...

AT&T said Tuesday its network is now live in parts of 12 cities across the United States, with the first mobile 5G device arriving on Friday, December 21. From a report: According to an AT&T s...

Sphero's hinted that it's getting out of the licensed product game, but this week CEO Paul Berberian confirmed that the company is clearing out its remaining licensed inventory and won't be restocking...

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But for Mark Rober, it's much sweeter served smart, smelly and covered in glitter. From a report: The former NASA engineer-turned-YouTube star has received...

Consumers in Taiwan will only be able to use 4G services from 2019 as the government will shut down 3G services by the end of the year, according to a Sina news report on Monday, citing local Taiwan m...

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the yearly report published by Stockholm-based phone number-identification service Truecaller, spam calls grew by 300 percent year-over-year in 2018. ...

One of the great hopes of the UK tech sector, Blippar, has collapsed into administration over a funding row. BBC News reports: The augmented reality firm was co-founded by Ambarish Mitra, and its tech...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: France won't wait on the rest of the European Union to start taxing big tech. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire says the country will move ahead w...

Iwastheone shares a report from Ars Technica's Peter Bright: With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally ...

Rick Zeman writes: Astronomers in Hawaii have discovered the furthest object in our solar system, a dwarf planet aptly named "Farout." This planet is 100 times farther than Earth is from the sun (120 ...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: No data encryption, no antivirus programs, no multi-factor authentication mechanisms, and 28-year-old unpatched vulnerabilities are just some of the...

Earlier this month, Tumblr announced that it would be permanently banning adult content from its platform on December 17th. Well, that day has arrived and the social media site is now hiding all posts...

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Russia used every major social media platform to influence the 2016 US election, the report claims. New research says YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and PayPal -- as ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Peters and colleagues describe how they recruited 32 healthy men aged between 19 and 33 and gave all of t...

thomst writes: "After being ordered to block a number of piracy-related domains following a complaint from academic publisher Elsevier, Swedish ISP Bahnhof retaliated by semi-blocking Elsevier's own w...

hackingbear writes: Germany's IT watchdog has expressed skepticism about calls for a boycott of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, saying it has seen no evidence the firm could use its equipment to spy fo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: California telecom regulators have abandoned a plan to impose government fees on text-messaging services, saying that a recent Federal Communicat...

Mark Wilson writes: Earlier in the year open-source software startup Whitewater Foundry brought WLinux to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Not content with creating the first native Linux distri...

In a letter addressed to the FCC, Senator Ron Wyden urged commissioners to create a three-digit, 911-style suicide hotline number. The Oregon senator cites the CDC's report that more than 40,000 Ameri...

Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern on the Edge team at Microsoft, says one of the reasons why Microsoft had to ditch EdgeHTML rendering engine in Edge browser and switch to Chromium w...

Suspicious traffic to a Twitter user forum appears to be part of a government-backed activity coming from China and Russia, a Twitter spokesman told Reuters Monday. The company said it is yet to deter...

Junko Yoshida, writing for EETimes: Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then. By 2019, ...

Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in existence. It is second only to water as the most-consumed resource on the planet. But, while cement -- the key ingredient in concrete -- has shap...

CenturyLink briefly disabled the Internet connections of customers in Utah last week and allowed them back online only after they acknowledged an offer to purchase filtering software. From a report: C...

Less than five months after Google's plan to build a censored search engine and other tools for the Chinese market became public, the company has "effectively ended" the project, reports The Intercept...

The European Union has a target of making all new buildings zero-energy by 2020, but in Norway, carbon neutrality isn't enough. From a report: A consortium in Oslo made up of architects, engineers, en...

California has became the first state to mandate a full shift to electric buses on public transit routes, flexing its muscle as the nation's leading environmental regulator and bringing battery-powere...

Although the economy saw new peaks in 2018, not all Americans report reaping the benefits. An anonymous reader shares a report: The majority of workers say they saw no salary increases this year, acco...

Amazon is rethinking its strategy around some items it sells which it calls internally "Can't realize a profit" -- or "CRaP" for short, according to the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Inside Am...

Lab-grown meat is becoming closer to a reality. But this new technology poses new questions for people who typically avoid meat for religious or ethical reasons. An anonymous reader shares a report: L...

Google will invest $1 billion in a new campus in New York City, the company said Monday. From a report: The new 1.7 million square foot "Google Hudson Square" campus will include two buildings located...

AmiMoJo shares a report: Taylor Swift used facial recognition technology at her live performances so that technicians running the system could then check those face scans against a private database of...

dmoberhaus writes: An investigation into the decline of America's peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus that is critically important to the rituals of the Native American Church, the largest pan-tribal reli...

aafrn writes: Microsoft is sending users who search for Office 2019 download links via its Bing search engine to a website that teaches them the basics about pirating the company's Office suite. This ...

On Sunday night, a comet that orbits between Jupiter and the sun will make its closest approach to Earth in centuries. According to Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the astronomy department at th...

Cydia, the App Store for jailbroken devices, is shutting down purchases as its creator moves to shut down the store entirely in the near future. "Cydia's creator Saurik made the announcement on Reddit...

Last week, Samsung introduced its latest smartphone, the Galaxy A8s. Not only is it the first phone of theirs with a laser-drilled hole in the display for the front-facing camera sensor, but it is als...

Thelasko quotes a report from Ars Technica: A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart -- then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: You might guess that a surefire way to make a hit video on YouTube would be to gather a bunch of YouTube megastars, film them riffing on so...

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Instagram has placed more hashtags which could promote eating disorders on an "unsearchable" list after a BBC investigation found that users were finding ways aro...

Facebook has disbanded its secretive research lab, where the company developed new hardware like its Portal speakers and researched moonshot projects like brain computer interfaces. "Building 8, the d...

TechCrunch has confirmed with TMZ that Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app and co-founder of Vine, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment. T...

An anonymous reader writes: A new variant of the Shamoon malware was discovered on the network of an Italian and UAE oil and gas company. While the damage at the UAE firm is currently unknown, the mal...

"Nearly 200 countries overcame political divisions late on Saturday to agree on rules for implementing a landmark global climate deal," reports Reuters. "After two weeks of talks in the Polish city of...

A lawsuit filed Friday is accusing Apple of falsely advertised the screen sizes and pixel counts of the displays in its iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max devices. The two plaintiffs, who filed th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The year was 2010 and the future of mobile computing was looking bright. The iPhone was barely three years old, Google's Android had yet to swallo...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:A tech billionaire whose elaborate wedding in a redwood grove violated California rules has helped create a smartphone app that shows users a map of mor...

An anonymous reader quotes BGR:One of the more interesting 2018 retrospectives we've seen focuses on which Google searches were the most popular across each state. Specifically, AT&T tapped into d...

In the future, "A massive convergence of technologies will enable us to use computers and the internet without really using them," argues Computerworld.At the dawn of the personal computing revolution...

Steve Dower, a Python developer at Microsoft, describes how the language become popular internally:In 2010, our few Pythonistas were flying under the radar, in case somebody noticed that they could re...

Waymo's testing dozens of self-driving mini-vans near Phoenix. Now the Arizona Republic asks why the vehicles are getting so much hate, citing "a slashed tire, a pointed gun, bullies on the road..." "...

An anonymous reader quotes a CNN opinion piece by Stanford business school lecturer David Dodson: "Senator, we run ads." That's what Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Orrin Hatch earlier this year during h...

"it is clear to me that open source -- now several decades old and fully adult -- is going through its own midlife crisis," writes Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill.[O]pen source business models are really to...

An anonymous reader quotes Inc:Our attention in the workplace is a precious resource that often falls victim to tools like email, Slack, and so on, which bring a nonstop supply of things to read, thin...

dryriver asks:Is there an open source video analysis tool available that can take a folder full of video captures (e.g. news, sports, movies, music videos, TV shows), analyze the video frames in those...

CNET just published a fierce pro-net neutrality editorial co-authored by Nancy Pelosi, the soon-to-be Majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mike Doyle, the expected Chairman of th...

Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma quotes Gizmodo:Despite being ahead of its time when it was unveiled in 1985, the Commodore Amiga didn't survive past 1996. The machine, which went up against with ...

AmiMoJo quotes the BBC: The next series of Doctor Who won't start until 2020, it's been confirmed. Series 11 ended on Sunday night, but after the festive special on New Year's Day, Jodie Whittaker won...

schwit1 shared this article from Bloomberg:Brain scans of adolescents who are heavy users of smartphones, tablets and video games look different from those of less active screen users, preliminary res...

Thursday a bug report complained that the source code for OpenJDK, the free and open-source implementation of Java, "has too many swear words." An anonymous reader writes:"There are many instances of ...

shanen writes about Vitaminwater's latest "publicity stunt," where they will pay $100,000 to one select contestant who can live without their smartphone for a year: All you have to do is come up with ...

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: CleanTechnica is reporting that someone hacked the infotainment system of a Tesla Model 3 and got root access and installed Linux distribution Ubuntu. Redditor trsohmers is ...

Researchers at the University of Geneva Switzerland have used NASA's Hubble telescope to find an exoplanet that's evaporating. The exoplanet, GJ 3470b, shows signs of losing hydrogen in its atmosphere...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A panel of 19 scientists drawn from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended yesterday that the Department...

schwit1 shares a report from Variety: Streaming services snatched their biggest piece of the TV pie ever in 2018. According to FX's annual report on the number of scripted originals on TV, the number ...

Cloudflare is facing accusations that it's providing cybersecurity protection for at least seven terrorist organizations. "On Friday, HuffPost reported that it has reviewed numerous websites run by te...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: The biggest and perhaps best source of data about what people like to watch on the internet and what they would pay for doesn't come from streaming gia...

According to CNBC, T-Mobile and Sprint are expecting their merger to be approved by a U.S. national security panel as early as next week, after their respective parent companies said they would consid...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Apple said it would update the software of iPhones in China (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) to try to resolve a legal dispu...

Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime warned that the NES Classic and SNES Classic will sell in the Americas through the holidays, but will be "gone" once they sell out. Engadget reports: If you want to walk do...

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: Discord has announced that it will start taking a reduced, 10-percent cut from game revenues generated on its online store starting next year, one-upping...

An anonymous reader writes: Job-search site Indeed crunched its Silicon Valley hiring numbers for 2018, looking at tech job searches, salaries, and employers, and found that engineers who combine tech...

In addition to relying on Windows Insiders, employees, and willing participants for testing updates, Microsoft is pushing patches before they are known to be stable to regular users too if they opt to...

Grupo Aeromexico SAB is investigating whether a drone slammed into a Boeing Co. 737 jetliner as the aircraft approached its destination in Tijuana, Mexico, on the U.S. border. From a report: Images on...

A notorious millennial dating practice is starting to creep into the workplace: ghosting. Employers are noticing with increasing frequency that workers are leaving their jobs by simply not showing up ...

An anonymous reader shares a report (may be paywalled): Every morning, time once was, a giant roar from Heathrow Airport would announce the departure of flight BA001 to New York. The roar was caused b...

A day after hosting a pop-up store in New York City's Bryant Park to explain how privacy is the "foundation of the company," Facebook disclosed that a security flaw potentially exposed the public and ...

Some YouTube channels are publishing full-length episodes of TV shows, rights of which they obviously do not own, and on top of this, they are trying to crowdfund their piracy efforts by asking viewer...

Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities, WSJ reported Friday, citing ...

An anonymous reader writes: Plenty of high-tech electronic components, like solar panels, rechargeable batteries, and complex circuits require specific rare metals. These can include magnetic neodymiu...

Imax is making its exit from virtual reality (VR) official: The company notified shareholders with a SEC filing this week that it will close down its remaining three VR centers, and write off "certain...

A week after releasing v5.0 major update, WordPress has pushed the first security patch for its popular CMS service. ZDNet: Released hours ago, WordPress version 5.0.1 fixes seven security vulnerabili...

A corporate-issued laptop lifted from a Lenovo employee in Singapore contained a cornucopia of unencrypted payroll data on staff based in the Asia Pacific region, news outlet The Register reports. Fro...

Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company...

Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at ...

NASA's Juno mission to the gas giant Jupiter has reached its halfway mark and has revealed new views of cyclones at the poles. The BBC reports: As it orbits the planet every 53 days - Juno performs a ...

"The Register has an article on the possibility that a supernova or a series of them could explain a mass die-off of marine animals around 2.6 million years ago," writes Slashdot reader KindMind. From...

Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Surgical instruments used in brain operations should be treated to ensure they are not contaminated with proteins linked to Alzheimer's disease, ...

schwit1 shares a report from The Times: It will shake houses and tall buildings, and unleash a 100ft tsunami on one of the most densely populated and industrialized coastlines in the world. It could k...

Microsoft is working on a new "Microsoft 365 Consumer" bundle that "will be the consumer-focused complement to Microsoft's existing Microsoft 365 subscription bundle for business users," reports ZDNet...

After securing a win in court earlier this week to ban Apple's older phones, Qualcomm is trying to get the newer iPhones banned too. "According to the Financial Times, Qualcomm has now asked Chinese c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A recent phishing campaign targeting U.S. government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the atta...

Louisiana is rolling out a new digital driver's license app, called LA Wallet, that will let retailers digitally verify the age of their customers, if required. "According to IEEE Spectrum, Louisiana'...

In a blog post today, Google detailed how its facial recognition technology will and won't be used. Citing a number of risks associated with the technology, the company vowed to refrain from selling f...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: On Wednesday afternoon, a wave of bomb threats were reported at various locations across the United States. On social media, numerous law enforcement ...

Amazon upended the book industry more than two decades ago by bringing sales onto the web. Now, during the heart of the holiday shopping season, the company is wreaking havoc on used booksellers who h...

Microsoft said in 2015 that it would build OpenSSH, a set of utilities that allow clients and servers to connect securely, into Windows, while also making contributions to its development. Neowin: Sin...

Earlier today, ASUS announced that long-time CEO Jerry Shen is stepping down ahead of "a comprehensive corporate transformation" -- part of which involving a new co-CEO structure, as well as a major s...

When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went...

An anonymous reader writes: A new variant of the Shamoon malware was discovered on the network of an Italian and UAE oil and gas companies. While the damage at the UAE firm is currently unknown, the m...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The quantum internet is starting small, but growing. Researchers have created a network that lets four users communicate simultaneously through channels secured by...

Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at ...

It turns out that cryptocurrency enthusiasts were committed well beyond the HODL rallying call that urged them to hold on during this year's digital-asset market collapse. From a report: The number of...

The latest test flight by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic successfully rocketed to space and back. From a report: The firm's SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship reached a height of 82.7km, beyond...

It turns out that cryptocurrency enthusiasts were committed well beyond the HODL rallying call that urged them to hold on during this year's digital-asset market collapse. From a report: The number of...

"Blockchain developer" is the top emerging job in the U.S. -- according to data published in LinkedIn's 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs report. From a report: [...] Using data gleaned from the LinkedIn Econom...

The blockchain system has daunting technical problems to fix. But first, its disciples need to figure out how to govern themselves. From a report: The handful of idealistic researchers, developers, an...

Forbes magazine tested four of the most popular handsets running Google's operating systems and Apple's iPhone to see how easy it'd be to break into them with a 3D-printed head. All of the Android han...

Apple said Thursday it plans to invest $1 billion building a new corporate campus in Austin, Texas, that could eventually create 15,000 jobs. From a report: The iPhone maker will also set up new offic...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla is seeking more than $167 million in a lawsuit against former employee Martin Tripp, recent legal filings revealed. In the lawsuit, which was filed...

According to a new report released on Tuesday by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Arctic had its second-hottest year on record in 2018. "Arctic air temperatures for ...

A "hi-tech robot" shown on Russian state television turns out to be a man in a suit. While airing footage of a technology forum aimed at kids, a Russian state TV reporter proclaimed that Boris the rob...

With the price of bitcoin down 80% from its peak a year ago, and the larger cryptocurrency market in systemic collapse, has "peak crypto" come and gone? From a column: Perhaps, but don't expect to see...

An anonymous reader writes: IT systems on boats aren't as air-gapped as people think and are falling victims to all sorts of cyber-security incidents, such as ransomware, worms, viruses, and other mal...

The FCC's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC), which includes members like AT&T, Comcast, Google Fiber, Sprint, and other ISPs and industry representatives, is proposing a tax on websit...

"An internal Google training document exposed by The Guardian reveals how the company instructs employees on how to treat temps, vendors, and contractors (TVCs)," writes Slashdot reader Garabito. "Thi...

hackingbear shares a report from Politico, adding: "This fuels the suspicion that the Chinese executive is held as a hostage for the ongoing trade negotiation with China." From the report: President D...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple is apparently working on its own, in-house developed modem to allow it to better compete with Qualcomm, according to several new Apple job lis...

According to a report from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), California may soon tax text messaging to help fund programs that make phone service available for low-income residents. T...

"Gaming giant ZeniMax Media's lawsuit against Facebook over the misuse of intellectual property related to the founding of Oculus VR has finally been settled," reports TechCrunch. In a statement, Zeni...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The Federal Communications Commission said it's getting tough on text message spam by clarifying that phone companies can block unwanted texts. At its mo...

LG has unveiled two new laptops in its Gram lineup in advance of CES in Las Vegas next month, and the Gram 17 looks like a stunner. LaptopMag: It weighs just 3 pounds, which is crazy light for a noteb...

The popular narrative around artificial intelligence research is that it's mainly a war between China and the United States. Not so fast, says Europe. From a report: New data released today (Dec. 12; ...

Intel on Wednesday surprised a number of people when it shared not one roadmap on CPUs, but two. AnandTech: For the high performance Core architecture, Intel lists three new codenames over the next th...

Long criticized for reusing old cores in its recent CPUs, Intel on Wednesday showed off a new 10nm Sunny Cove core that will bring faster single-threaded and multi-threaded performance along with majo...

New submitter vivekgite writes: The 12th version of the FreeBSD has been released, bringing support for updated hardware. Some of the highlights include: OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LT...

Chemists have found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingl...

An anonymous reader shared a report: It was just several years ago that the open-source ecosystem began supporting the x32 ABI, but already kernel developers are talking of potentially deprecating the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: A Chinese intelligence-gathering effort was behind the massive Marriott hotels data breach that exposed the personal information for up to 500 million pe...

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: A Russian online mapping company was trying to obscure foreign military bases. But in doing so, it accidentally confirmed their locations -- many of whi...

"South Australia, which has a history with space events long ago, is set to become the base for the Australian space industry," writes Slashdot reader Badooleoo. ABC News reports: Prime Minister Scott...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Legislation to restore net neutrality rules now has 180 supporters in the U.S. House of Representatives, but that's 38 votes short of the amount ...

After investigating claims that its employees are taking bribes to sell internal data to merchants to help them increase their sales on the site, Amazon has reportedly fired several employees involved...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks Android users have a good understanding of the volume of data Google collects on them, when they agree to use the A...

dryriver writes: As anyone who buys professional computer monitors knows, the dynamic range of the display device you are looking at can be expressed quite usefully in terms of percentage sRGB coverag...

A judge in Vancouver, British Columbia, has set a $7.5 million U.S. bail for Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested last week on suspicion of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. "The Unite...

The Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog, known as the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that the majority of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents fail to delete th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Verizon is conceding defeat on its crusade to turn a patchwork of dot-com-era businesses into a thriving online operation. The wireless carrier slas...

A small Massachusetts town has rejected an offer from Comcast and instead plans to build a municipal fiber broadband network. From a report: Comcast offered to bring cable Internet to up to 96 percent...

It's an ad duopoly battle. From a report: Facebook is starting to test search ads in its search results and Marketplace, directly competing with Google's AdWords. Facebook first tried Sponsored Result...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted today that YouTube needs to do better in dealing with conspiracy content on its site that can lead to real-world violence. From a report: During his testimony on Tues...

Organizations desperate for software engineering talent tend to follow similar plays when it comes to attracting student developers about the enter the workforce, including offering perks like free fo...

Starting Tuesday, Firefox will nudge you to try out options designed to make the web more interesting, more useful or more productive. From a report: Mozilla's new Firefox 64 keeps an eye on what you'...

Starting Tuesday, Firefox will nudge you to try out options designed to make the web more interesting, more useful or more productive. From a report: Mozilla's new Firefox 64 keeps an eye on what you'...

ESET researchers have discovered a new Android Trojan using a novel Accessibility-abusing technique that targets the official PayPal app, and is capable of bypassing PayPal's two-factor authentication...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketin...

Chris Siebenmann, a Unix Systems Administrator at University of Toronto, writes about the inability to figure out the bottleneck when an SSD dies: What unnerves me about these sorts of abrupt SSD fail...

On December 10, 1993, after a marathon 30-hour coding session, the developers at id Software uploaded the first finished copy of Doom for download, the game that was to redefine first-person shooter (...

To build a fleet of giant airliners requires a building just as big. Boeing's Everett Factory, built to construct the famous 747, is the biggest enclosed structure in the world. BBC Future: When you'r...

Computer hardware maker Super Micro Computer told customers on Tuesday that an outside investigations firm had found no evidence of any malicious hardware in its current or older-model motherboards. F...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A panel of censors set up to vet mobile video games in China has signaled it will be hard to please. State media reports that of the first 20 titles i...

According Veloz -- an electric car industry group -- electric vehicle sales in California hit a cumulative 512,717 since 2010. "Months of strong U.S. sales in 2018, preceded by a strong 2017, are star...

Facebook has filed several patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict where you're going and when you're going to be offline. ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Droid Life: Samsung was doing its song and dance in China today at an event where they announced the Galaxy A8s, their first phone equipped with an Infinity-O ...

UnderAttack writes: Scammers are attempting to trick Chinese victims into sending thousands of dollars in order to secure the release of Chinese Huawei executive Meng who was arrested in Canada last w...

The Pew Research Center has found that more adults get their news from social media than newspapers. "In a survey conducted earlier this year, 20 percent of adults said they often get news via social ...

Flippy, a burger-flipping robot that's been trialed in a number of restaurants this year, is coming to Walmart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, to see whether or not it's the right fit for its...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Four months after receiving a complaint claiming that Verizon "grossly overstated" its 4G LTE coverage in government filings, the Federal Communi...

In an effort to counter the potential impact from new tariffs, GoPro is moving most of its U.S.-bound camera production out of China by the summer of 2019. The company said international-bound camera ...

Verizon today announced that 10,400 employees -- about 7 percent of its worldwide workforce -- are taking buyouts to leave the company. "This is part of an effort to trim the telecom giant's workforce...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Equifax data breach, one of the largest in U.S. history, was "entirely preventable," according to a new House committee investigation. The House ...

In a report published last week by cyber-security firm ESET, the company detailed 21 "new" Linux malware families. All operate in the same manner, as trojanized versions of the OpenSSH client. From a ...

The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to "deep life" studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of that found in all the world's ocean...

Malware authors, ad farmers, and scammers are abusing a Firefox bug to trap users on malicious sites. From a report: This wouldn't be a big deal, as the web is fraught with this kind of malicious site...

An anonymous reader shares a World Economic Forum report: A lot of us spend long stretches in the office, but outdated design could be damaging our wellbeing and mental health. What's more, it's killi...

A lack of personal savings, competition from abroad, and the threat of another economic downturn make it harder for Millennials to thrive as entrepreneurs. From a story: Research suggests entrepreneur...

Google+ has suffered another data leak, and Google has decided to shut down the consumer version of the social network four months earlier than it originally planned. From a report: Google+ will now c...

The Olympic Games regularly add new events, but officials aren't quite ready to embrace eSports. From a report: This weekend, the International Olympic Committee met for the 7th Olympic Summit, where ...

The Voyager 2 probe, which left Earth in 1977, has become the second human-made object to leave our Solar System. From a report: It was launched 16 days before its twin craft, Voyager 1, but that prob...

Qualcomm says it has won a ruling in China against Apple that bans the sale of some iPhone models in that country. From a report: The Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court ruled that Apple is infringing ...

The UK's NHS will be banned from buying fax machines from next month -- and has been told by the government to phase out the machines entirely by 31 March 2020. From a report: More than 9,000 fax mach...

Long time reader theodp writes: At Monday's kickoff event with Melinda Gates for Computer Science Education Week 2018, Microsoft President Brad Smith revealed how a 2013 driveway encounter led to Micr...

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings loves to identify sleep as the biggest competition of its service. "Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon, but think about...

Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it's anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is. From a report: The millions of dots on the map tr...

Global carbon emissions will jump to a record high in 2018, according to a report, dashing hopes a plateau of recent years would be maintained. It means emissions are heading in the opposite direction...

In a developer blog post published this week, Alexa AI director of applied science Ruhi Sarikaya detailed the advances in machine learning technologies that have allowed Alexa to better understand use...

An anonymous reader shares a report: An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now -- flying almost as far and almost a...

There are some 8 million abandoned homes -- or akiya -- in Japanese suburbia, according to The Japan Times . And if you've got a visa allowing you to live in Japan, some of them can be yours for free ...

China has established a new body that reviews ethical issues in video gaming, marking the country's latest attempt to tighten control over the world's biggest games market. From a report: The recently...

In a space no longer than 500 metres, researchers say they recorded at least 195 different species of corals. From a report: A team of researchers says it has discovered the most diverse coral site ev...

From a story: Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A's. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have join...

Like Google's Duplex, Chinese internet giant Alibaba has its own humanlike voice assistant capable of making restaurant reservations and salon appointments. But unlike Google, which has rolled out the...

Tech executives worry China will turn to tit-for-tat arrests of Americans in response to the detention of Meng Wanzhou. And the worries don't stop there. Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times: I...

It's been a rough week or so to be invested in a Google messaging service, hell it's been a rough decade to be invested in a Google messaging service. Phandroid: The latest victims are Allo, which wil...

Tim Berners-Lee, writing for The New York Times: All technologies come with risks. We drive cars despite the possibility of serious accidents. We take prescription drugs despite the danger of abuse an...

Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company -- and the Internet. An anonymous reader writes: The New Yorker has profiled Jeff Dean and Sanjay ...

Salts that de-ice roads, parking lots and sidewalks keep people safe in winter. But new research shows they are contributing to a sharp and widely rising problem across the U.S. From a report: At leas...

With providers like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, and more creative risks, network leaders are placing bets on how audience experience will evolve [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report...

SwiftOnSecurity, regarding Microsoft's switch to Chromium as Windows's built-in rendering engine: This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in fea...

Linux.org reports:Wednesday afternoon around 5pm EST someone was able to get into the registrar account for our domain and point DNS to another server -- as well as lock us out from changing it. They ...

"Half of tech employees think their work culture is toxic," reports one Texas news site, citing a new survey by Blind:Blind, an anonymous work talk app, asked more than 12,000 tech staffers to respond...

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a Guardian article which argues that Apple Store employees "are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction story" who "use emotional guile to...

"Democrats are expected to use their upcoming control of the House to push for strong net neutrality rules," reports NBC News:"The FCC's repeal sparked an unprecedented political backlash, and we've c...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:Elon Musk wants electric vehicles to be successful -- even if Tesla goes under trying. In an interview for CBS' "60 Minutes," the Tesla CEO and Silicon Valley billionair...

Democrat Senator Mark Warner "says Google is profiting off advertising fraud and has no interest in addressing it," reports ZDNet -- and he's laying part of the blame on America's trade commissioners....

Long-time Slashdot reader Feneric writes: Cragne Manor , a 20th anniversary tribute to the classic work of horror interactive fiction Anchorhead by Michael Gentry, is now available for free public dow...

Marvel's last Avengers movie ended with a cliff-hanger -- leading hundreds of millions of fans to watch the trailer for the franchise's next film, Variety reports:The "Avengers: Endgame" trailer was v...

In 2018 the most-downloaded iPhone app was YouTube, reports USA Today, while Amazon's best-selling item was their Fire TV Stick for streaming video. "Sense a trend? We love to stream video."If you're ...

"A Google software engineer has been found dead inside the company's Chelsea headquarters," reports the New York Post: A janitor found 22-year-old Scott Krulcik unconscious at his work terminal on the...

"Strange waves rippled across earth and only one person spotted them," reported Forbes, noting that the seismologist then "quickly put out an alert to see if other systems detected the same unusual wa...

"The biggest-ever bet on Bitcoin options is about to expire worthless," reports Bloomberg:Purchased for almost $1 million on LedgerX's trading platform just days after Bitcoin peaked a year ago, the c...

Cryptocurrency prices "fell sharply on Friday, as another bout of selling took digital currencies to fresh lows," reports MarketWatch, adding that Friday the price of Bitcoin "crashed through support ...

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic:PHP 7.3, the newest update to the widespread server-side web development language, was released on Thursday, bringing with it a handful of new features, moderni...

Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET now ranks above JavaScript, PHP, SQL on TIOBE's index of programming language popularity, which ZDNet notes is "the highest it's ever been since [TIIOBE] started tracking...

Uber's terms of service prohibit its drivers from joining class action lawsuits, Gizmodo writes, adding that over 12,000 drivers have now "found a way to weaponize the ridesharing platform's restricti...

"The Rust programming language team has announced the first major edition of Rust since 1.0 was released in 2015," reports SD Times -- specifically, Rust 1.31, the first edition of "Rust 2018," descri...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rapid global warming caused the largest extinction event in the Earth's history, which wiped out the vast majority of marine and terrestrial anim...

AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: Researchers at Flinders University knocked out a gene known as RCAN1 in mice, hypothesizing that this would increase "non-shivering thermogenesis," which "exp...

NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on Mars less than two weeks ago, has recorded vibrations -- low-pitched, guttural rumblings -- caused by wind blowing across the science instruments on the sp...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon is looking at bringing its futuristic checkout-free store format to airports in an effort to win business from hungry, time-pressed travelers, ...

The FCC is launching an investigation into whether one or more major carriers gave the agency inaccurate maps of their broadband coverage, violating the rules of an initiative that provides subsidies ...

Google is pulling support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich more than seven years after it was first introduced. The company announced in a blog post that Google Play services will no longer provide ...

"Today, a bail hearing was held for Huawei's chief financial officer, who was arrested in Canada on Saturday at the request of U.S. law enforcement," reports The Verge. "The CFO, Meng Wanzhou, is faci...

Stephen Mihm, Bloomberg contributor and associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, argues against the use of noncompete agreements (NCAs) because they limit the free flow of employee...

"IBM has agreed to sell select software products to HCL Technologies," writes Slashdot reader virtig01. "Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino....

William P. Barr, President Trump's pick to become the nation's next Attorney General, is a former chief lawyer for Verizon who has opposed net neutrality rules for more than a decade. "Barr, who serve...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: China is aiming to go where no one has gone before: the far side of the moon. A rocket carrying the Chang'e-4 lunar lander blasted off at a...

Gmail users are reporting that promotional emails (meant to showcase deals, offers, and other marketing emails) from companies are ending up in their main "Primary" inbox (meant for person-to-person c...

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is interested in acquiring technology solutions that can track newer cryptocurrencies, such as Zcash and Monero. From a report: According to a pre-solicita...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pushing the cargo bike across a rain-soaked parking lot at a UPS distribution center in Seattle, where the shipper showed off its newest delivery vehicle, I had a ...

Solar panels will be a required feature on new houses in California, after the state's Building Standards Commission gave final approval to a housing rule that's the first of its kind in the United St...

Solar panels will be a required feature on new houses in California, after the state's Building Standards Commission gave final approval to a housing rule that's the first of its kind in the United St...

Chinese mobile app companies pose the same national security risk to the US as telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE, Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. From a report: Recent US legislation largely b...

Chinese mobile app companies pose the same national security risk to the US as telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE, Sen. Mark Warner said in an interview. From a report: Recent US legislation largely b...

An anonymous reader shares a report: One day this fall, Ashutosh Garg, the chief executive of a recruiting service called Eightfold.ai, turned up a resume that piqued his interest. It belonged to a pr...

EU governments agreed on Friday to toughen up draft rules allowing law enforcement authorities to get electronic evidence directly from tech companies such as Facebook and Google stored in the cloud i...

The Federal Trade Commission's top consumer protection official is prohibited from handling the cases involving 120 different companies, including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Uber, according to ...

Ericsson has confirmed that a fault with its software was the source of yesterday's massive network outage, which took millions of smartphones offline across the UK and Japan and created issues in alm...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has never made cheap stuff. But this fall many of its prices increased 20 percent or more. The MacBook Air went from $1,000 to $1,200. A Mac Mini leaped from...

The European Union should be worried about Huawei and other Chinese technology companies because of the risk they pose to the bloc's industry and security, the EU's technology commissioner said on Fri...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Luxembourg is set to become the first country in the world to make all its public transport free. Fares on trains, trams and buses will be lifted...

Aston Martin announced this week that it's starting a "Heritage EV" program where owners of classic Aston Martins can have their cars converted to an all-electric powertrain. The British automaker sai...

With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient's bloodstream. The cheap and simple test use...

DeepMind has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. "The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last yea...

A new report (PDF) from the AINow Institute calls for the U.S. government to take general steps to improve the regulation of facial recognition technology amid much debate over the privacy implication...

Google is working to make Translate less gender-biased by giving both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word. "Previously, the service defaulted to the masculine options," reports CNET...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, with an update to watchOS, Apple is making its electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) reading feature available to Apple Watch Series 4 owners. It's ...

Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia to feed the country's shaky power grid for the first day of summer. Neoen, the owner of the giant battery sy...

An anonymous reader writes: Karspesky security researcher Sergey Golovanov writes about recent cybertheft incidents involving hardware backdoors planted by criminals. Each attack had a common springbo...

China is demanding the release of a senior executive at Huawei after she was detained in Canada on extradition charges to the U.S. Wanzhou Meng, who is also the deputy chair of Huawei's board and the ...

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform, a new flagship "Extreme" chipset for Windows on Arm notebooks, tablets, and 2-in-1s that promises more connectivity, more power, and battery...

From a report: Originally planned to enter mass production in the second half of 2016, Intel's 10 nm process technology is still barely used by the company today. Currently the process is used to prod...

As India inches closer to its general elections, Facebook announced today that it is bringing transparency to political ads on its platform in the country early next year. From a report: This would ma...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced Edge is coming to all supported versions of W...

An anonymous reader shares a report: At 9:46 last night, Tom tweeted an 87-second video in which he and his go-to director Christopher McQuarrie explained the concept of video interpolation and why it...

Microsoft has changed the way it approaches design. The new Office icons unveiled this week are the first glimpse at a far bigger design overhaul that's going on inside the company. Windows is also ge...

Charlie Osborne, writing for ZDNet: However, there is a problem that no-one is talking about: the conflict between the rapid acceleration of wireless technologies and politics which is, unwittingly, g...

Facebook's reputation has only continued to get more sullied in recent weeks, and it's taking a toll on employees. According to a new report, things over at the old FB are, well, kind of grim. From th...

Marriott said last week that a hack that began four years ago had exposed the records of up to 500 million customers in its Starwood hotels reservation system. Private investigators looking into the b...

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new study by Microsoft researchers casts a light on the actual use of high-speed internet across the country, and the picture it presents is very different from ...

Cuba's population is to be offered internet access via a 3G mobile network from later this week. From a report: Telecom provider Etecsa said citizens would be able to start subscribing to the service ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising sea levels could become overwhelming sooner than previously believed, according to the authors of the most comprehensive study yet of the ...

Joe_Dragon shares a report from ABC News: Twenty-four Amazon workers in New Jersey have been hospitalized after a robot accidentally tore a can of bear repellent spray in a warehouse, officials said. ...

Earlier today, Australia's House of Representatives passed the Assistance and Access Bill. The Anti-Encryption Bill, as it is known as, would allow the nation's police and anti-corruption forces to as...

Earlier today, Australia's House of Representatives passed the Assistance and Access Bill. The Anti-Encryption Bill, as it is known as, would allow the nation's police and anti-corruption forces to as...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The world relies on encryption to protect everything from credit card transactions to databases holding health records and other sensiti...

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has admitted that around 500,000 comments submitted during the net neutrality public comment period were linked to Russia email addresses. "Pai noted in a court filing that most ...

On Monday, Tumblr announced that it will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th, alienating a large portion of the site's users who enjoy sharing and consuming NSFW content. ...

Canada has arrested Huawei's chief financial officer on suspicion of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. "Wanzhou Meng, who is also the deputy chair of Huawei's board and the daughter of comp...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A healthy baby girl has been born using a womb transplanted from a dead person. The 10-hour transplant operation -- and later fertility treatment -- t...

According to 9to5Google, citing a source familiar with the plan, Google will "soon" announce that it will be shutting down its Google Allo messaging app. "This development comes almost 8 months after ...

On Wednesday, SpaceX successfully sent a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to deliver supplies, but unfortunately it wasn't able to recover the Falcon 9 rocket that launched with it...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: According to Markham automotive security specialist Jeff Bates, owner of Lockdown Security, wireless key fobs have a role to play in many recent car th...

In what appears to be a first on the cyber-espionage scene, a nation-state-backed hacking group has used a Google Chrome extension to infect victims and steal passwords and cookies from their browsers...

Newly public documents reveal just how paranoid Facebook was of its potential competitors and shines new light on some of the company's most important acquisitions. From a report: The internal documen...

An anonymous reader writes: The best job for someone is not always in the area where they live. Often times, the job that will pay them most, and make the best use of their skills means moving to anot...

One of the most galling mysteries in physics is that of the dark matter and dark energy. Scientists believe that together, these could account for up to 95 percent of the total mass in the universe. N...

Earlier this year, many Android users were shocked to discover that Facebook had been collecting a record of their call and SMS history, as revealed by the company's data download tool. Now, internal ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sitting in front of a Converus EyeDetect station, it's impossible not to think of Blade Runner. In the 1982 sci-fi classic, Harrison Ford's rumpled detective ident...

The days of double-digit smartphone growth are over -- and the next decade may start to see smartphone sales decline. A report adds: From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an asto...

An anonymous reader writes: Over at DIYPhotography (which we spotted via Daring Fireball), writer and photographer Dunja Djudjic says that she caught Samsung Malaysia using one of her photos to advert...

Members of Google's "shadow workforce" of temporary workers and contractors is demanding higher wages and equal benefits to full employees in an open letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai. From a repo...

Get ready for lots of 5G phones in time for the holidays next year. From a report: The first devices for the fast, next-generation network will hit the market in early 2019. Samsung, for one, said it ...

Get ready for lots of 5G phones in time for the holidays next year. From a report: The first devices for the fast, next-generation network will hit the market in early 2019. Samsung, for one, said it ...

Russia's Yandex has launched its first ever smartphone as the company seeks to leverage its dominant position in apps and services into hardware sales. Yandex, which runs the most popular search engin...

Russia's Yandex has launched its first ever smartphone as the company seeks to leverage its dominant position in apps and services into hardware sales. Yandex, which runs the most popular search engin...

Australia is set to give its police and intelligence agencies the power to access encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp, becoming the latest country to face down privacy concerns in the nam...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG expects the era of the combustion car to fade away after it rolls out its next-generation gasoline and diesel cars beginning in 2026. ...

Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates "Add something...

On December 1, 2013, Amazon announced its plans to deliver packages by drone in just "four or five years" on a 60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's off...

Google has launched Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of its open source, cross-platform UI toolkit and SDK. "Flutter lets developers share a single code base across Android and iOS apps, with a f...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: Three academics from Northeastern University and three researchers from IBM Research have discovered a new variation of the Spectre CPU vulnerabilit...

Tokyo Telemessage, Japan's last pager provider, has announced that it will end service to its 1,500 remaining users in September 2019. It will bring a national end to telecommunication beepers, 50 yea...

AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: Apple is facing a new class action lawsuit claiming that it sells select iMac and MacBook models without needed dust filters. In turn, this causes issues such as ...

The Secret Service is planning to test facial recognition surveillance around the White House, "with the goal of identifying 'subjects of interest' who might pose a threat to the president," reports T...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission voted to set a minimum pay rate for Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand ride-hailing driver...

China has announced an array of punishments that could restrict companies' access to borrowing and state-funding support over intellectual-property theft. The news comes after the G20 Summit in Argent...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Streaming TV services offered by companies like Hulu and AT&T are testing the waters for a new type of advertising called "pause ads." The idea ...

schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: Information sharing website Quora has announced a data breach which has exposed "approximately 100 million users'" personal data. The company said in a statement...

An anonymous reader writes: At its Microsoft Connect(); 2018 virtual event today, Microsoft announced the initial public preview of Visual Studio 2019 -- you can download it now for Windows and Mac. S...

Qualcomm announced its new flagship 855 mobile platform today. While the company didn't release all of the details yet, it stressed that the 855 is "the world's first commercial mobile platform suppor...

Kubernetes has become the most popular cloud container orchestration system by far, so it was only a matter of time until its first major security hole was discovered. And the bug, CVE-2018-1002105, a...

Petri's Brad Sams writes: For more than a year, we have been hearing about Windows Core OS and how it is a modern version of Windows. As Microsoft continues to build out the platform, it's time to tak...

The National Republican Congressional Committee was hacked this election cycle, it admitted Tuesday afternoon. From a report: "The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an un...

Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's iWork, you're still following the Microsoft ...

Andrew Martonik, writing for AndroidCentral: YouTube Music as a service has been around for about three years now, though it really only existed in earnest once the revamped version of the YouTube Mus...

According to a new study conducted by Google competitor DuckDuckGo, it does not seem possible to avoid personalization when using Google search, even by logging out of your Google account and using th...

AmiMoJo writes: Later this week, China plans to launch its Chang'e-4 spacecraft to the far side of the lunar surface. The aim is to land a rover on the dark side of the moon for the first time. Blocke...

The 30/70 revenue-sharing split that turned into something of an industry standard is on the ropes. From a report: Epic Games, the developer responsible for the Fortnite phenomenon, is launching its o...

The 30/70 revenue-sharing split that turned into something of an industry standard is on the ropes. From a report: Epic Games, the developer responsible for the Fortnite phenomenon, is launching its o...

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Ed...

Ammalgam writes from a report via Business Insider: A credible business school professor who correctly predicted that Amazon would buy Whole Foods now says an AWS spinoff is inevitable. Marketing guru...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Last Friday, Marriott sent out millions of emails warning of a massive data breach -- some 500 million guest reservations had been stolen from its ...

Google's DeepMind is using an AI program, called AlphaFold, to predict the 3D shapes of proteins, the fundamental molecules of life. "DeepMind set its sights on protein folding after its AlphaGo progr...

UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing ...

Nvidia is using artificial intelligence to draw new worlds without using traditional modeling techniques or graphics rendering engines. "This new technology uses an AI deep neural network to analyze e...

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium, news blog Windows Central reported Monday. From the report: Microsoft's Ed...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last Friday, Madrid's tough new vehicle emissions controls went into effect, resulting in a drop in traffic by nearly 32 percent in some parts of th...

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: Two apps that were posing as fitness-tracking tools were actually using Apple's Touch ID feature to loot money from unassuming iOS victims. The two impacted...

Over the weekend, Elon Musk alluded to impending software updates that would make Teslas even safer than they already are. In response to a story about a DUI where a Tesla autopilot may have been invo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The telecom giant has announced the end of its prorated credits for some subscribers who cancel a service in the middle of a billing period. AT&T ...

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Monday that the United States wants to end subsidies for electric cars and other items including renewable energy sources. "Asked about actions planne...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The world's largest retailer is rolling out 360 autonomous floor-scrubbing robots in some of its stores in the U.S. by the end of the January, it sa...

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, offers a variety of useful features such as instant answers and bangs. The latter are particularly useful for people who want to use DuckDuckGo to search d...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Six former Facebook employees who left the company within the last two years told CNBC they've experienced a rise in contact from current company employees to inqu...

Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success. From a report: Three p...

Tumblr, the underground social media site known for its pornographic content and tight-knit community, will be instituting a major change to its guidelines in a couple of weeks. The company said in a ...

SpaceX notched its 19th launch of the year Monday, lofting 64 small spacecraft from 34 organizations into low Earth orbit. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's c...

Skype is getting real-time captions and subtitles, and PowerPoint will have these features, too, next year. From a report: Ostensibly an accessibility feature (and launched on United Nations Internati...

Even as a furious debate broke out in China over gene-edited babies, some scientists in the US are also hoping to improve tomorrow's children. From a report: [...] Amid the condemnation, though, it wa...

An anonymous reader shares a report: "We've launched our last satellite," John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, said in a meeting with analysts on Nov. 29. The AT&T executive effectively d...

Trailrunner7 writes: Like real estate, we're not making any more IPv4 addresses. But instead of trying to colonize Mars or build cities under the sea, the Internet's architects developed a separate ad...

Apple plans to hold off until at least 2020 before offering an iPhone that can connect to the next generation of high-speed phone services coming next year, Bloomberg reported Monday. From the report:...

Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses? And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money? A slew of recent government and think-tank reports aim to tack...

The first clinical trial is underway to test a new male contraceptive that could be a game changer for preventing pregnancy. From a report: "(It's) a combination of two horomones: Progestin, which is ...

Valve officially announced this week the arrival of Steam China in Shanghai. But Chinese gamers are telling the PC gaming platform to "get lost!" From a report: One of the most upvoted comments wrote,...

Evan Polman, writing for HBR: In my research with Yi Liu and Yongfang Liu of East China Normal University in China and Jiangli Jiao of Xinjiang Normal University in China, we looked at how people make...

Fake news is being spread on WhatsApp in some of Africa's most populous countries, according to two new reports, raising concerns over coming elections in Nigeria. From a report: Photoshopped images a...

Italian bioengineer Giuseppe Scionti from Spanish startup Novameat has invented the "world's first" 3D-printed meat-free steak made from vegetable proteins, which mimics the texture of beef. From a re...

Hundreds of military service members reportedly got caught up in a sextortion scam run by prison inmates using cellphones, according to a release issued by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NC...

An anonymous reader writes: A Twitter user using the pseudonym of @TheHackerGiraffe has hacked over 50,000 printers to print out flyers telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie's YouTube channel. The ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Celebrity physicians often catapult to fame via their mastery of traditional media, like television or radio or books or magazines, and we're used to seeing medica...

Online giant tries to overcome challenges caused by retail spaces with higher ceilings, more products. From a report: Amazon.com is testing its cashierless checkout technology for bigger stores [alter...

Online giant tries to overcome challenges caused by retail spaces with higher ceilings, more products. From a report: Amazon.com is testing its cashierless checkout technology for bigger stores [alter...

Federal regulators have proposed loosening real-estate appraisal requirements to enable a majority of U.S. homes to be bought and sold without being evaluated by a licensed human appraiser [the link m...

Independent security researcher Fabio Castro found data belonging to 32 million customers of SKY Brasil exposed online. "Using the advanced features of the Shodan search engine, he was able to discove...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: As global connectivity grows, allowing more data to be generated and collected, a growing portion of that data will be real-time information, according ...

Major dark web drug suppliers have started to voluntarily ban the synthetic opioid fentanyl because it is too dangerous. "They are 'delisting' the high-strength painkiller, effectively classifying it ...

Intel has filed a lawsuit last week against one of their former hardware engineers, alleging they tried to steal confidential chip blueprints to potentially pass on to Micron. "The lawsuit [...] is th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Far fewer [monarch butterflies] were heading south this year, and those that have arrived did so a month late, according to Xeres, a non-profit conserv...

In 2010, Max Ray Butler received a 13-year prison sentence for "hacking" -- at the time, the longest one ever -- after stealing nearly 2 million credit cards and running up fraudulent charges over $86...

Will Moore's law really come to an end by 2025? Maybe not... An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum:[R]esearchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, believe a metal-based field emission air...

MojoKid writes: Intel has been uncharacteristically vocal about its most recent plans to enter the discrete GPU market. Over the last year or so, the company has disclosed a few morsels of information...

Would you pay $200,000 for a ride into space? I ask beause billionaire Richard Branson "really, really wants you to believe he's going to send people to space -- and soon," reports Gizmodo. "In a new ...

An anonymous reader writes:Saturday the Perl Advent Calendar entered its 19th year by describing how the Wise Old Elf used a Calendar::List module from CPAN to update his Elven Perl Monger website wit...

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed Saturday to keep their trade war from escalating with a promise to temporarily halt the imposition of new tariffs [the link may be p...

"When a pair of California Highway Patrol officers pulled alongside a car cruising down Highway 101 in Redwood City before dawn Friday, they reported a shocking sight: a man fast asleep behind the whe...

Seeking compliance with Linux's new Code of Conduct, Intel software engineer Jarkko Sakkinen recently requested comments on a set of changes to kernel code comments which Neowin described as "replacin...

"[O]n Nov. 26 it was publicly revealed that a widely deployed open-source Node.js programming language module known as event-stream had been injected with malicious code that looked to steal cryptocur...

"2019 just might be the Year of Linux -- the year in which Linux is fully recognized as the powerhouse it has become," writes Network World's "Unix dweeb."The fact is that most people today are using ...

AmiMoJo writes:Japanese broadcaster NHK is launching the world's first 8K TV channel with a special edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey. NHK asked Warner Bros. to scan the original negatives at 8K specia...

Leonovo will add $7.3 million into a $1M fund settling a class action lawsuit over their undisclosed pre-installation of Superfish's targeting adware on 28 different laptop models in 2014. Within one ...

Chris Reeve writes: Wired Magazine is reporting that astronomers have since 2014 witnessed up to 100 possible instances of quasars transforming into galaxies over very short timespans, but the article...

"The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announced yesterday a joint collaboration project to promote open source development and commercial adoption of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA...

"Bitcoin miners hit hard by the cryptocurrency's crash may be throwing in the towel," reports Bloomberg:The Bitcoin network's hash rate, one way of gauging the computing power dedicated to mining the ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: More than 40 percent of the world's coal plants are operating at a loss due to high fuel costs and that proportion could to rise to nearly 75 percent ...

Astronomers have measured all the light from all the stars that have ever existed. "In total, the astronomers estimate, stars have radiated 4x1084 photons (a photon being the smallest unit of light),"...

Researchers in the Australian state of Tasmania are using a "virtual fence" system, consisting of alarm units mounted on posts along the side of a three-mile stretch of road, to reduce the number anim...

George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, has passed away tonight at the age of 94. As The Washington Post reports, he was "the last veteran of World War II to serve as president, he ...

A logistics division of DHL announced today that it will invest $300 million to modernize 60 percent of its warehouses in North America with more IoT sensors and robots. Robotic process automation and...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It's no secret that humans -- noisy, messy creatures that we are -- are vastly altering Earth's environments. But it's one thing to know this in t...

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: We all know: The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. But the mitochondria is much more than a simple power plant. It's also a unique source of D...

According to a new report from The Associated Press, a number of China's government officials and entities have had access to the location data of "new energy vehicles" from many different manufacture...

Airbnb is reportedly planning to distribute prototype buildings next year. Yesterday, Samara, a futures division of Airbnb meant to develop new products and services for the company, announced a new i...

Prosecutors in South Korea say that Samsung's latest bendable screen technology has been stolen and sold to two Chinese companies. "The prosecutors allege that a Samsung supplier leaked blueprints of ...

According to 9to5Google, Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020. The news shouldn't come as too much of a surprise since Google essentially stopped development on the app...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Facebook executives in recent years appeared to discuss giving access to their valuable user data to some companies that bought advertisin...

An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning. From a ...

President Donald Trump's immigration authorities are moving to enact broad changes to a visa that allows American companies to bring international workers to the country. From a report: On Friday, U.S...

An anonymous reader shares an article: I don't use the phrase "Will do!" much in daily conversation, but lately it has been creeping into more and more of my e-mails. An editor asks me to get a draft ...

dmoberhaus writes: Researchers at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed an atomic clock that is so precise that our models of Earth's gravity aren't accurate enough...

EU antitrust regulators have asked Google's rivals if the internet search giant unfairly demotes local search competitors, according to a questionnaire seen by Reuters, a move which could lead to a fo...

Facebook is still reeling from the revelation that it hired an opposition research firm with close ties to the Republican party, but its relationship with Definers Public Affairs isn't the company's o...

Businesses using fingerprint scanners to monitor their workforce can legally sack employees who refuse to hand over biometric information on privacy grounds, the Fair Work Commission has ruled. From a...

After months of back and forth, Apple has permitted Indian telecom regulator TRAI to release its anti-spam app on the App Store. The app, called TRAI DND - Do Not Disturb, went live on the iPhone app ...

Apple has reportedly removed 718 apps from the Chinese App Store in the last few days. From a report: The iPhone maker swept out the apps because their developers pushed updates without its permission...

If New York City Council Member Ritchie J. Torres has his way, the growing trend of cashless restaurants -- establishments that accept payment only in plastic and digital forms -- will be snuffed out....

Intel has published its first Modern Windows Driver for several of its modern integrated GPUs, representing a new way for graphics drivers to be pushed to your PC -- and something to keep an eye on un...

An anonymous reader writes: Starwood Hotels has confirmed its hotel guest database of about 500 million customers has been stolen in a data breach. The hotel and resorts giant said in a statement file...

schwit1 shares a report: More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit positi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: New Delhi police have arrested 63 suspects in the last two months working and operating 26 call centers that were engaging in tech support scams, posing...

With Shikoku Electric Power Company's 890 megawatt (MW) Ikata-3 reactor, Japan has restarted a total of five nuclear reactors in 2018. "Japan had suspended its nuclear fleet in 2013 for mandatory safe...

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Thursday that nine U.S. companies will compete to deliver experiments to the lunar surface. The space agency will buy the service and let private industry ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept about Google's secretive plans to build a censor version of its search engine for China: The objective, code-named Dragonfly, was to build a sear...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday released data that shows life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), pu...

The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging DJ Khaled and professional boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr for failing to disclose that they were paid promotional fees to tout fraudulent initial coin off...

Household bandwidth consumption is soaring thanks to video streaming, new data suggests, and American consumers are about to run face-first into broadband usage limits and overage fees that critics sa...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A group of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday saying that the company's previous explanations to Congress about ...