Articles by Slashdot from March 2019

"Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content," according to the BBC, calling for new laws governing harmful content, election integri...

Wednesday CMU announced the open sourcing of its adaptive-learning software platform -- plus analytics and dozens of other related tools for improving college teaching -- as part of a national push "i...

"Burnout is everywhere," reports the Washington Post. "Caused in part by social media, the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure to check work email outside of office hours, it could hit you, too -- es...

"if you must goof off at work, then at the very least manage your notification settings so that your alerts are muted, and aren't broadcast on the big screen when you screen share in the boardroom," w...

Friday CNN reported on "what you can do right now to stop robocalls." "Short of throwing your phone in the garbage, there's no way to avoid them altogether. But wireless providers and smartphone devel...

schwit1 quotes CNBC:In the first test of its kind, the Pentagon on Monday carried out a "salvo" intercept of an unarmed missile soaring over the Pacific, using two interceptor missiles launched from u...

Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: The project to actually construct Babbage's Analytical Engine, the first design for a general purpose computing machine, continues with the documentation phase of th...

IEEE Spectrum is publishing a six-part series exploring the human history of AI. the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer...

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:People who find security vulnerabilities commonly run into difficulties when reporting them to the responsible company. But it's less common for such situations...

On Friday the Ocean Cleanup project posted a status update after their giant U-shaped plastic trap lost a 60-foot section in January and had to be towed back to land:During the first four months that ...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:Gov. Andrew Cuomo and fellow Democrats who control the Legislature have reached a deal to make New York the third state with a ban on single-use plastic...

"The U.S. is recommending a 12.5 year prison sentence for Paul Hansmeier, one of the lead attorneys of the controversial law firm Prenda," reports TorrentFreak:Last summer, Hansmeier admitted that he ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Florida Power & Light has joined the race to build the world's largest solar battery storage system, announcing plans for its massive Manatee Ene...

sciencehabit shares an excerpt from Science Magazine: Talk about getting something for nothing. Physicists predict that just by shooting charged particles through an electromagnetic field, it should b...

After partnering with HTC to launch the Vive in 2016, Valve has moved ahead with plans to launch its own headset, called the Valve Index, in May 2019. Ars Technica reports: The news came on Friday in ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Doctors have identified a new mutation in a woman who is barely able to feel pain or stress after a surgeon who was baffled by her recovery from ...

Tesla vehicles sent to the junk yard after a crash carry much more data than you'd think. According to CNBC, citing two security researchers, "Computers on Tesla vehicles keep everything that drivers ...

itwbennett writes: The popular e-commerce platform Magento has released 37 security issues affecting both the commercial and open-source versions, four of which are critical. "Of those, one SQL inject...

slipped_bit writes: Tyler R. Barriss, 26, who pleaded guilty to multiple counts of "swatting" attempts, including the case that caused an innocent man to be killed by police in 2017, has been sentence...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Huawei's revenue grew 19.5 percent in 2018, surpassing $100 billion for the first time, despite continuing political headwinds from around the world. Sal...

After tearing apart Apple's new second-generation AirPods, the repair guide site found that there is no practical way to service or repair them even at a professional shop. They labeled them as "disap...

The company behind "Fortnite" wants to become the next Facebook or Google, said Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. The idea isn't much of a stretch. From a report: While "Fortnite" began life as a relatively...

Intel has reportedly laid off a number of information technology workers at sites across the company this week. Sources say the layoffs are numbered in the hundreds, but Intel has declined to specify ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The personal information of roughly 3.1 million Toyota customers may have been leaked following a security breach of multiple Toyota and Lexu...

itwbennett writes: The popular e-commerce platform Magento has released 37 security issues affecting both the commercial and open-source versions, four of which are critical. 'Of those, one SQL inject...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Academic and scientific research needs to be accessible to all. The world's most pressing problems like clean water or food security deserve to have as many people...

One and a half years after announcing a wireless charging mat for iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods called AirPower, Apple has unexpectedly cancelled the accessory. From a report: It notably missed ...

Speaking of the state of Android apps' security, Google today published its annual Android Security & Privacy Year in Review, a comprehensive report that details the company's ongoing efforts to k...

McGruber writes: SAP, Oracle America, PayPal, Instacart, Thin Film Electronics and other technology companies will cut about 1,200 jobs in the Bay Area between now and Memorial Day. According to WARN ...

New submitter _observer writes: Hundreds of users are unable to read their Gmail in Apple's Mail client since the upgrade to macOS 10.14.4, with few workaround available. This is impacting business an...

At the Black Hat Asia 2019 security conference, security researchers from Positive Technologies disclosed the existence of a previously unknown and undocumented feature in Intel chipsets. From a repor...

We're now very close to the next semi-annual update for Windows 10, but Microsoft has just announced today that the version 1809 released last Fall is now the recommended version for all users. From a...

Facebook recently explored building bird-size drones loaded with data to help improve people's internet connections. From a report: The Menlo Park, California-headquartered technology giant worked on ...

Security researchers have found a new kind of government malware that was hiding in plain sight within apps on Android's Play Store. And they appear to have uncovered a case of lawful intercept gone w...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, Canonical's Ubuntu reaches a major milestone. You see, Ubuntu 19.04, which is named "Disco Dingo," has achieved Beta status. And yes, you can download it im...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: One of the central puzzles in particle physics is discovering what particle (or particles!) makes up dark matter — the form of matter that is respo...

"On Thursday, 41 scientists published the first worldwide analysis of a fungal outbreak that's been wiping out frogs for decades," The New York Times reports. The outbreak has caused more than 500 spe...

A new study suggests that Mars once had giant rivers larger than anything on Earth after the planet lost most of its atmosphere to space. "That great thinning, which was driven by air-stripping solar ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has removed a trio of references to Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, from the game's opening menu screen. Random messa...

Radioactive contamination from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant hit by a tsunami in 2011 has drifted as far north as waters off a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait, scientists sai...

24-year-old security researcher Zammis Clark pleaded guilty today to hacking into Microsoft and Nintendo servers and stealing confidential information. Clark, known online as Slipstream or Raylee, "wa...

Russian authorities have ordered ten major VPN providers to begin blocking sites on the country's blacklist. "NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish and HideMyAss are among those affected," reports TorrentFrea...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Moolah Mobile is teaming up with SurgePhone Wireless to offer people a new way to pay their cell phone bills -- by putting ads on their homescreens...

Google executives are conducting a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China. "A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a 'performance review' ...

New submitter pecosdave writes: I need suggestions for commercially-made ARM systems that will work in temperature ranges from -35F to 140F (-37C to 60C) for an engineering project. These things are g...

An anonymous reader shares a report: What better way to replace New York City's thousands of aging pay phones than with 9.5-foot-tall kiosks outfitted with 55-inch HD displays, gigabit internet, and A...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A group of academics from South Korea have identified 36 new vulnerabilities in the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard used by thousands of mobile netwo...

Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos explained how Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is able to consistently make decisions that only make sense with the benefit of hindsight. From a report: "Mark Zuckerber...

Modern Labor promises to teach you to code in five months and help find you a job when you graduate -- but you're on the hook for the next two years. From a report: Most coding bootcamps almost sound ...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is suing social media giant Facebook for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act. From a report: HUD says Facebook does so by "encouraging, enabling an...

An anonymous reader shares a report: A French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades. Since the 1980s, t...

A leaked internal document outlines a program that looks almost exactly like the requirements of right to repair legislation that has been proposed in 20 states. From a report: As Apple continues to f...

The European Union has decided to ban plastic consumer items including plates, cutlery and straws as of 2021 to help clean up oceans. The prohibition on single-use plastics approved by the European Pa...

Gilles Dubuc, writing for the Wikimedia Foundation: We're excited to announce that we've become a member of the W3C, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded by Ti...

The U.K. government warned on Thursday Huawei's telecommunications equipment raises "significant" security issues, posing a possible setback to the Chinese tech firm as it looks to build out 5G networ...

Joseph Tsidulko, writing for CRN: Oracle asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to not review an appellate court's decision finding Google violated Oracle's copyright of the Java platform when buil...

Office Depot and Support.com have coughed up $35 million after they were accused of lying to people that their PCs were infected with malware in order to charge them cleanup fees. From a report: Late ...

Apple News Plus, the company's new magazine (and news) subscription service, is the latest offender because of how easy Apple makes it to subscribe. From a report: Just tap that "Try it Free" button, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Last week, a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known startup Endel had become the "first-ever algorithm to sig...

prpplague writes: Despite Linus Torvald's recent claims ARM won't win in the server space, there are very specific use cases where ARM is making advances into the datacenter. One of those is for use w...

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Speed limiting technology looks set to become mandatory for all vehicles sold in Europe from 2022, after new rules were provisionally agreed by the EU. Road safet...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: French authorities have arrested five men who stole over 120,000 liters (26,400 gallons) of fuel from gas stations around Paris by unlocking gas pumps u...

Xiaomi is teasing a new 100W quick-charging solution for mobile phones that can fully charge a large 4,000mAh battery in just 17 minutes. Ars Technica reports: The video shows a charging race between ...

Microsoft is urging lawmakers in Washington to increase the tax burden on itself and Amazon (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to help pay for a new higher education fund. "The bil...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report this week saying that in 2018, "global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.7 percent to 33 Gigatonnes." That's the most growth in emissions t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Court documents unsealed today revealed that Microsoft has been waging a secret battle against a group of Iranian government-sponsored hackers. The OS m...

hcs_$reboot shares a report from CNBC: Boeing previewed its software fix, cockpit alerts and additional pilot training for its 737 Max planes on Wednesday, saying the changes improve the safety of the...

In January, California Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) introduced a law barring retailers from printing paper receipts unless a customer requests one. Otherwise they'd be required to provide p...

Last year, a Belgian court ruled that Facebook would have to stop tracking Belgian internet users and delete the data it's already gathered on them, or face fines of about $280,000 a day. "Belgium's d...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Four senior senators have called on the largest U.S. voting machine makers to explain why they continue to sell devices with "known vulnerabilities...

GITAI is a robotics startup with offices in Japan and the United States that's developing tech to put humanoid telepresence robots in space to take over for astronauts. IEEE: This week, GITAI is annou...

A group of ex-employees filed a lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of failing to comply with a law requiring companies to disclose the ages of people over 40 who have been laid off. The suit also all...

Four companies that made billions of illegal robocalls have been caught and fined. From a report: The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday said the agency reached settlements with four operations respo...

Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has become the highest profile politician to support right to repair legislation in the United States. From a report: On Wedn...

Airbnb says it's cracking down on hosts who record guests. But is it doing enough? From a report: Airbnb's rules allow cameras outdoors and in living rooms and common areas, but never in bathrooms or ...

BitTorrent, which has been looking for ways to expand since it was acquired by blockchain startup Tron last year, today announced it is reviving one of its most ambitious services. From a report: The ...

Facebook will begin banning posts, photos and other content that reference white nationalism and white separatism, revising its rules in response to criticism that a loophole had allowed racism to thr...

Everyone hates April Fools' Day, and Microsoft is taking a stand against its own corporate pranks. From a report: Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Capossela has warned all employees to not participat...

Joanna Stern, writing for the Wall Street Journal [the link may be paywalled]: Why is the breaking of my MacBook Air keyboard so insanely maddening? Let's take a trip down Memory Lane. April 2015: App...

BitTorrent, which has been looking for ways to expand since it was acquired by blockchain startup Tron last year, today announced it is reviving one of its most ambitious services. From a report: The ...

India shot down one of its satellites in space with an anti-satellite missile on Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, hailing the country's first test of such technology as a major breakthrou...

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2004, Geoffrey Hinton doubled down on his pursuit of a technological idea called a neural network. It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recog...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Huawei officially announced the Huawei P30 Pro smartphone today. While it has a new Huawei-made SoC, an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, and...

Bank of America tech and operations chief Cathy Bessant said she is bearish on blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies. "I will be curious to see what the actual volume of usage is on...

Today at the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration is committed to sending humans back to the Moon by 2024, four years earlier than NASA'...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last month, Democrats introduced a simple three page bill that would do one thing: restore FCC net neutrality rules and the agency's authority ove...

The first all-female spacewalk scheduled for Friday has been cancelled by NASA (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) because they don't have two spacesuits that fit the female astrona...

Engineers at the University of Michigan have built the first millimeter-scale stand-alone device that meets Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) specifications. "Consuming just 0.6 milliwatts during transmissio...

According to ZDNet, researchers at Microsoft have discovered a buggy Huawei utility that could have given attackers a cheap way to undermine the security of the Windows kernel. From the report: Micros...

Two variants of the Pixel Slate, a tablet-laptop hybrid that Google unveiled last year, have been "out of stock" for months now, leading many to believe that Google may have quietly gotten rid of them...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service...

UPS has partnered with autonomous drone company Matternet and hospital WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to test a new drone delivery service for transporting medical samples to nearby facilities. T...

The concept of the hyperlink was first outlined over 70 years ago and eventually became a central part of the web. But 30 years since the invention of the world wide web, Google, Apple, Facebook, and ...

Iwastheone shares a report from Engadget: ASUS may have inadvertently pushed malware to some of its computers through its update tool, but it at least it has a fix ready to go. The PC maker has releas...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The latest chapter in the ongoing and messy Apple versus Qualcomm legal battle might mean a U.S. import ban on some iPhone models. A U.S. trade judg...

Google announced today that it has formed an external advisory group -- dubbed the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) -- that is tasked with "considering some of the most complex ch...

An anonymous reader shares a report: If it's been a few years since you shopped for a lightbulb, you might find yourself confused. Those controversial curly-cue ones that were cutting edge not that lo...

Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. From a report: AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other majo...

Dream Market, today's top dark web marketplace, today announced plans to shut down on April 30. From a report: The announcement came on the same day Europol, FBI, and DEA officials announced tens of a...

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, shares his thoughts on the recently unveiled Oculus Rift S: Rift S is very cool! It takes concepts that have been around for years ...

A computer system that airlines use for check-in kiosks, booking and more was experiencing issues on Tuesday, apparently affecting multiple air carriers. From a report: There were widespread reports o...

If you're a Firefox true believer, or even just a Firefox user, your password struggles just got a little easier with the release of Firefox Lockbox for Android devices. From a report: The password ma...

Ted Kremenek, a manager of the Languages and Runtimes team at Apple, writes: Swift 5 is now officially released! Swift 5 is a major milestone in the evolution of the language. Thanks to ABI stability,...

The European Parliament on Tuesday voted with a large majority to end daylight savings time in the EU by 2021. From a report: Under the proposals, each member state would decide whether to continue wi...

EU lawmakers today endorsed an overhaul of the bloc's two-decade old copyright rules, which will force Google and Facebook to pay publishers for use of news snippets and make them filter out protected...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Following the livestreamed New Zealand mosque shooting that left 50 dead in Christchurch, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is looking to crack do...

HTC has debuted their new virtual-reality headset called the Vive Focus Plus. Starting at $799, the headset functions similarly to the Oculus Quest, which starts shipping this spring at half the cost,...

kenh shares a report from NBC News: A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: About 1.5 million workers in Britain are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation, according to government estimates, with women and those...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mention McDonald's to someone today, and they're more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced mac...

A new study suggests that instead of the traditional four sleep stages we generally understand the brain moves through, there are in fact at least 19 different identifiable brain patterns transitioned...

Almost all of Gmail's IFTTT routines and actions will stop working at the end of the month as Google alters the Gmail API to make it more secure. The only functionality of IFTTT-Gmail integration will...

The music industry is suing Charter Communications, claiming that the cable Internet provider profits from music piracy by failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of new neurons -- called neurogenesis -- was possible in an area of the brain that ...

Google has patched a Chrome bug that was being abused in the wild by tech support scammers to create artificial mouse cursors and lock users inside browser pages by preventing them from closing and le...

Researchers behind a large-scale independent study of pre-installed Android apps "unearthed a complex ecosystem of players with a primary focus on advertising and 'data-driven services' -- which they ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Philly: Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Flyers, is to announce Monday morning that it will construct the first arena for gaming fans in the U.S. for the Comc...

Apple has unveiled a few different subscription services today at its "show time" event, including a new Apple Arcade game subscription service for titles that can be installed from the App Store. The...

Alongside its new news and payment services, Apple today also unveiled Apple TV+, a place for its new slate of original shows. The new service, billed as a place for the "highest-quality storytelling,...

A new study points toward lifelong neuron formation in the human brain's hippocampus, with implications for memory and disease. From a report: For decades, scientists have debated whether the birth of...

Apple today unveiled a news subscription service called Apple News+ at its services event in Cupertino, Calif. The $9.99 service gives paying subscribers access to over 300 magazines as well as select...

An anonymous reader shares a report: iPhone users are already using Apple's Wallet app, Apple Pay, and Apple Pay Cash -- wouldn't they like an Apple credit card, too? The Cupertino company and bank pa...

Instant messaging service Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. From a report: The ...

The founder and CEO of NSO Group, the notorious Israeli hacking company with customers around the world, appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday night to defend the use of his company's tools in hacking a...

Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation. F...

Norway is helping lead the charge toward complete electrification, and it will soon have a whole network of wireless chargers for its capital city's fleet of taxis. From a report: The city of Oslo, in...

A cloned dog, believed to be the first of the kind in China, has started training in Yunnan Province in a program to reduce the cost and time needed for training police dogs. From a report: Kunxun, a ...

ASUS is believed to have pushed malware to hundreds of thousands of customers through its trusted automatic software update tool after attackers compromised the company's server and used it to push th...

Long-time Slashdot reader colinwb writes: A team of researchers has published a letter in Nature (2019) estimating the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud" to a precision of one per cent; Arxiv (20...

"In a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, the U.S. government put in motion an experiment aimed at proving to the world that radioactive waste could be safely disposed of deep underground..." reports...

A new report from the open source security company WhiteSource asks the question, "Is one programming language more secure than the rest?" An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic:To answer this questi...

A new report from the open source security company WhiteSource asks the question, "Is one programming language more secure than the rest?" An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic:To answer this questi...

"Machines will need to make ethical decisions, and we will be responsible for those decisions," argues Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Media's vice president of content strategy:We are surrounded by systems t...

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is facing a "ferocious" backlash in India, Bloomberg reports:Nowhere has resistance to the game been quite like India. Multiple cities have banned PUBG, as it's known, a...

MoviePass's original founder and CEO is launching a new company, reports IndieWire, "to score viewers movie tickets for the low, low price of sitting through 15 to 20 minutes of advertisements."Before...

"My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications," brags New York Times technology writer Mike Isaac. "When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls....

eatmorekix quotes Vice: It only took around ten seconds. On Wednesday, I created a fresh Instagram account, and followed 'Beware the Needle', a user with 34,000 followers which posts a steady stream o...

America's recently-appointed Attorney General William Barr has submitted to Congress his summary of the main conclusions from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, CNN reports. "While this r...

An anonymous reader quotes SlashGear:Crowdfunding platform GoFundMe has banned campaigns that seek funds for spreading misinformation related to vaccines, the company has revealed. The platform has be...

schwit1 quotes UPI:Astronomers have discovered a pulsar traveling at unprecedented speeds. Observations by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope suggest the star is moving through space at 2.5 millio...

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:As most of the world condemned last week's mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleg...

An anonymous reader quotes the Detroit Metro Times:Tech billionaire Elon Musk surprised students at an assembly at Flint's Doyle-Ryder Elementary School on Friday, announcing the creation of a new STE...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: After seeing to it that UK Prime Minister David Cameron, US President Barack Obama, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau all received (widely-publicized)...

Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,797) quotes Live Science: Can two versions of reality exist at the same time? Physicists say they can -- at the quantum level, that is. Researchers recently conducted experi...

Long-time Slashdot reader beckman101 writes:This week Electric Dollar Store opened its doors, selling interchangeable postage-stamp sized I2C-based modules for prices between $1.00 and $1.80. The modu...

An airline passenger "passed a security checkpoint with a loaded gun magazine," reports the Associated Press, citing information from an airport duty manager:Bob Rotiski said the passenger who apparen...

Citing new warnings from several analysts, Fortune reports that Facebook's business model now faces threats from "a growing array of bi-partisan criticism and fresh regulatory issues."Analysts are now...

Some of the same podcasters who first extolled AirPods are now complaining about them, reports the Atlantic:The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Appl...

Court documents unsealed Tuesday showed just how much information America's FBI was able to gather on Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen -- from both Google and Apple products. An anonymous reader qu...

A research duo who hacked a Tesla were the big winners at the annual Pwn2Own white hat security contest, reports ZDNet. "The duo earned $375,000 in prize money, of the total of $545,000 awarded during...

In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues "I can't say that we're going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019... We sim...

Long-time Slashdot reader memnock quotes Nature:In the next month or so, orange trees across Florida will erupt in white blossoms, signalling the start of another citrus season. But this year, somethi...

Google's Play Store made a bad mistake on Tuesday, long-time Slashdot reader sombragris writes: KDE Connect, a project designed to enable seamless communcation and control between a desktop computer a...

This weekend's annual LibrePlanet conference, hosted by the Free Software Foundation, prompted a new essay about "install fests" from Richard Stallman:Install fests invite users to bring their compute...

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185) shared this story from Hewlett Packard's Enterprise blog:Storage is a staple of both science and science fiction, and forms the basis, or a crucial component...

Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -...

New York magazine's Intelligencer remembers last month's crash of a Boeing 767 carrying cargo for Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service -- and shares a new theory that its cause wasn't a suicidal pilot o...

"The fight against robocalls can even bring telecom rivals together," reports USA Today:AT&T and Comcast said Wednesday that they can authenticate calls made between the two different phone provid...

"More than 3 million people have signed a petition to cancel Brexit on the U.K. government's official petitions website -- so many that the website crashed multiple times," reports Time:The petition h...

Oracle "swung the layoff axe" Thursday, reports IEEE Spectrum, saying that the move "clear-cut teams of engineers."The exact numbers of employees cut and their specific roles have not been reported by...

A new study finds that states with bans on texting while driving saw an average 4% reduction in emergency department visits after motor vehicle crashes, an equivalent of 1,632 traffic-related emergenc...

Freshly Exhumed writes: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has revealed that senior White House advisor Jared Kushner's lawyer admitted in December that his cl...

Earlier this month, Microsoft made the source code for its Windows calculator available on GitHub. This has spurred developers to add new features to the app, like a new graphing mode that will make i...

dmoberhaus writes: In a major breakthrough for DNA computing, researchers from UC Davis, Caltech and Maynooth University developed a technique for creating molecular algorithms that can be reprogramme...

schwit1 writes: Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian citizen, concocted a brazen scheme that allowed him to bilk Facebook and Google out of more than $100 million. The crime defrauded Google of $23 milli...

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to a new study 91 percent of IT and security professionals feel vulnerable to insider threats, and 75 percent believe the biggest risks lie in cloud appl...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) unlawfully shared the private information of 2.3 million hurricane and wildfire survivors with a federal contractor that was helping them find temporary ...

The dream of the '90s was alive in Microsoft Teams this week when Microsoft's old office assistant, Clippy, showed up. From a report: If you used Microsoft Office between 1997 and 2001, you likely rem...

More than 100 police officers were deployed to break up a mass brawl reportedly organized by two rival YouTube stars in Berlin. The BBC reports: The fight broke out on Thursday evening on Alexanderpla...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams and other activists warned on Thursday that fully autonomous weapons could be deployed in just 3-4 years and ...

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The afternoon commute of Reddit user Beastpilot takes him past a stretch of Seattle-area freeway with a carpool lane exit on the left. Last year, in early Ap...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new report calling for a "fiber for all" plan to combat the broadband access crisis in the United States. Government data and independent analysis sh...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: MIT researchers have reportedly developed an algorithm that can accelerate [neural networks] by up to 200x. The NAS (Neural Architecture Search, i...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is expected to launch an ambitious new entertainment and paid digital news service on Monday, as the iPhone maker pushes back against streaming video leader ...

Devin Nunes, R-Calif., escalated the feud between conservatives and Twitter earlier this week with a lawsuit accusing the company of defamation and negligence -- two different allegations, one of whic...

A group of researchers claims to have built a prototype for an "online polygraph" that uses machine learning to detect deception from text alone. But as a few machine learning academics point out, wha...

Intel will not develop new Compute Cards, the company said this week. From a report: Compute Cards were Intel's vision of modular computing that would allow customers to continually update point of sa...

Microsoft's programming language TypeScript has become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. Wired: TypeSc...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox. The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you'd see onstage at TechCrunch Disru...

An anonymous reader writes: Deciding which streaming outlet you want to subscribe to can be just as hard as finding a show itself. With options from big players like Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, Showtime, ...

AT&T's "5G Evolution" cellular service isn't just controversial and arguably misleading, it's also slower than the 4G speeds offered by rivals T-Mobile and Verizon, according to a new report today...

A scan of billions of files from 13 percent of all GitHub public repositories over a period of six months has revealed that over 100,000 repos have leaked API tokens and cryptographic keys, with thous...

Up to 95% of all reported trading in bitcoin is artificially created by unregulated exchanges, according to a new study [PDF], raising fresh doubts about the nascent market following a steep decline i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook employees were aware of concerns about "improper data-gathering practices" by Cambridge Analytica months before the Guardian first repor...

Google's Stadio cloud-gaming service may be intercepted by a similar service from Walmart. According to a report from US Gamer, the American retail giant is looking into launching its own cloud gaming...

The recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes involving an Ethiopian Airlines flight and a Lion Air flight may have been a result of two missing safety features that Boeing charged airlines extra for (Warning: so...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: After years of circling the TV business, Apple is finally ready to make its big splash: On Monday it will unveil its new video strategy, along with som...

the_newsbeagle writes: An FDA advisory committee met today to consider approving the NeuroAD device, which is supposed to help with the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. The device uses a com...

The Homeland Security Department has issued an alert Thursday describing two types of computer-hacking vulnerabilities in 16 different models of Medtronic implantable defibrillators sold around the wo...

Since 2016, Microsoft has been working with the University of Washington to develop the first device to automatically encode digital information into DNA and back to bits again. "So far, DNA storage h...

Los Angeles is pumping the brakes on scooter companies that won't tell it what part of the city you're wheeling around. From a report: Last September, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation said...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the U.S. government's terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journa...

Tesla is suing a former engineer at the company, claiming he copied the source code for its Autopilot technology before joining a Chinese self-driving car startup in January. Reuters reports: The engi...

chicksdaddy writes: The grandson of Theo Brown, a legendary engineer and inventor for John Deere who patented, among other things, the manure spreader is calling out the company his grandfather served...

The U.S. is likely to see "historic, widespread flooding" through May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's spring outlook. From a report: "This is shaping up to be a potent...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cable lobbyists don't want to be called cable lobbyists anymore. The nation's top two cable industry lobby groups have both dropped the word "cab...

The battle between PewDiePie, currently the most subscribed channel on YouTube, and T-Series, an Indian music label, continues to have strange repercussions. In recent months, as T-Series closes in on...

Comcast announced a $5-a-month streaming video service Thursday called Xfinity Flex, an offering that aggregates on-demand video from your subscriptions like Netflix Amazon Prime Video and HBO, as wel...

HMD Global, the Finnish company that sublicensed the Nokia smartphone brand from Microsoft, is under investigation in Finland for collecting and sending some phone owners' information to a server loca...

US companies are going to keep hiring foreign tech workers, even as the Trump administration makes doing so more difficult. For a number of US companies that means expanding their operations in Canada...

Microsoft is bringing its Windows Defender anti-malware application to macOS -- and more platforms in the future -- as it expands the reach of its Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) platform. F...

Amazon.com has been beta testing its in-house made ads on Apple's iOS platform for several months, Bloomberg reported Thursday, in a move that is described as ecommerce giant's growing efforts to grab...

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees -- in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity reported ...

AmiMoJo writes: All 24 movies from the iTunes exclusive 4K "James Bond Collection" have leaked online. This is further evidence to suggest that pirates have found a way to decrypt 4K source files from...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The domestic box office rebounded in 2018 in a recovery fueled by blockbusters such as "Black Panther" and "Incredibles 2." Ticket sales in the U.S. climbed 7% to ...

For software engineers, lack of friction is an aesthetic joy, an emotional high, the ideal existential state. It's what drives them, and what shapes our world. An excerpt from an upcoming book on codi...

More than 850 scientists and statisticians told the authors of a Nature commentary that they are endorsing an idea to ban "statistical significance." Critics say that declaring a result to be statisti...

A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field. "We have not as a species lost the magnetic sensory system that our an...

dryriver shares a report from CNN: About 1,600 people have been secretly filmed in hotel rooms in South Korea, with the footage live-streamed online for paying customers to watch, police said Wednesda...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Officials in San Francisco have proposed a new law to ban e-cigarette sales until their health effects are evaluated by the U.S. government. The law a...

Slashdot reader grasshoppa writes: Kyle Bennett, long-time owner/operator of one of the last independent review sites, HardOCP, announced that effective April 1st he will be leaving it behind to start...

At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absol...

Back in 2009, the EU's European Commission said Microsoft was harming competition by bundling its browser -- Internet Explorer -- with Windows. Eventually Microsoft and the European Commission settled...

Volvo is installing cameras and sensors in its cars from the early 2020s, monitoring drivers for signs of being drunk or distracted and intervening to prevent accidents. These new safety features come...

Sherwin Siy and Jan Gerlach, writing for the Wikimedia Foundation: Volunteer editor communities in four language Wikipedias -- German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak -- have decided to black out the sites ...

Microsoft announced its Xcloud game-streaming service last August, with the ambition of streaming console-quality games to gamers wherever they are. Yesterday, Google made its foray into the space wit...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A new survey on Europeans' attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial inte...

China's fleet of electric buses appear to be denting oil demand more than electric cars. "By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by elect...

Oculus VR unveiled the Oculus Rift S, a higher-resolution pair of virtual reality goggles that remove the need for external cameras by incorporating built-in tracking. The company partnered with Lenov...

Services like Google's Stadia seem convenient, but they could completely change the past and future of video games, writes Rich Whitehouse, a video game preservationist and veteran programmer in the v...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares in Germany's Bayer's fell more than 12 percent on Wednesday after a second U.S. jury ruled its Roundup weed killer caused cancer. Tuesday's una...

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service relating to the company's App Store distribution policy. From a report: Ka...

Google has banned ads for virtual private network (VPN) products targeting Chinese users, ZDNet reported on Wednesday. From a report: The company cited "local legal restrictions" as the cause of the V...

Google has banned ads for virtual private network (VPN) products targeting Chinese users, ZDNet reported on Wednesday. From a report: The company cited "local legal restrictions" as the cause of the V...

To the casual observer, Britain -- an island nation that's no stranger to rain -- could not get much wetter. From a report: But, as it turns out, that's a fallacy. And if preventive steps are not take...

Opera has added a free VPN service to its Android browser. The Norwegian browser maker, which went public last year, also addressed concerns about potential hidden costs of using its free VPN offering...

As the Lion Air crew fought to control their diving Boeing 737 Max 8, they got help from an unexpected source: an off-duty pilot who happened to be riding in the cockpit. Bloomberg reports: That extra...

After being delayed for the better part of one month, LLVM 8.0 officially is finally available. From a report: LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the release a few minutes ago and summed up ...

A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices bac...

European regulators on Wednesday slapped Google with a roughly $1.7 billion fine on charges that its advertising practices violated local antitrust laws, marking the third time in as many years that t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AI is going to be huge for artists, and the latest demonstration comes from Nvidia, which has built prototype software that turns doodles into reali...

European regulators on Wednesday slapped Google with a roughly $1.7 billion fine on charges that its advertising practices violated local antitrust laws, marking the third time in as many years that t...

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers at the University of Southern Carolina (USC) claim to have created the first AI-controlled robotic limb that can learn how to walk without being ...

Opera has added a free VPN service to its Android browser. The Norwegian browser maker, which went public last year, also addressed concerns about potential hidden costs of using its free VPN offering...

"Ancient hunter-gathererers often had front teeth that met together, unlike today's more common alignment where the upper front teeth 'overbite' the lower front teeth," writes Slashdot reader omfglear...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: California State Assembly member Susan Talamantes Eggman on Monday announced the introduction of Assembly Bill 1163, which will require manufact...

Bill Gates said he talked to Google researchers about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in healthcare. "While Microsoft and Google are arch-competitors in many areas, including clo...

The subscription plan that made MoviePass explode in popularity is coming back. If you're willing to pay for a full year (via ACH payment), "MoviePass Uncapped" will cost the same as the original unli...

dryriver writes: Crytek has published a video showing an ordinary AMD Vega 56 GPU -- which has no raytracing specific circuitry and only costs around $450 -- real-time ray tracing a complex 3D city en...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Last summer, the Trump administration started a campaign to convince its European allies to bar China's Huawei from their telecom networks. Bolstere...

In January 2019, iFixit revealed a design flaw where the ribbon cable that connects the body of some MacBook Pros to their display wears down too quickly, causing uneven backlighting at the bottom of ...

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed that his company won't be playing a role in Apple's upcoming video streaming service. From a report: "We want to have people watch our content on our service," he s...

Earlier today, Google launched its long-awaited "Stadia" cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Unlike services from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, Stadia is powere...

Facebook will overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement. From a report: For the social network, that's one major l...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The staff of Kickstarter announced plans to unionize today. If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representati...

It's been debated for years: Are eggs good or bad for you? People who eat an added three or four eggs a week or 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day, have a higher risk of both heart disease ...

Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country [Editor's note: the link ma...

To prevent its own Cambridge Analytica moment and make sure it's getting paid for its data, Twitter said today it will audit developers that use its APIs. From a report: Starting June 19th, Twitter wi...

Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights ru...

Google today launched its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. From a report: Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be ac...

In this week's episode of which popular service will reduce its offerings to the non-paying users, Trello said it will have a go. From a report: Trello, a Kanban-inspired project management app organi...

Norsk Hydro, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, said today it has "became victim of an extensive cyber-attack" that has crippled some of its infrastructure and forced it to switch to manua...

EU governments are allowing more than 100 advertising companies, including Google and Facebook, to surreptitiously track citizens across sensitive public sector websites, in apparent violation of thei...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release includes autoplaying content (audio and video) blocked by default, smoother scrolling, b...

Today, Apple will finally begin taking orders for newly refreshed 21- and 27-inch iMacs. The new versions don't change the basic design or add major new features, but they offer substantially faster c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A hacker set off the tornado emergency sirens in the middle of the night last week across two North Texas towns. Following the unauthorized intrusion, c...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed two censorship bills into law Monday. One bans "fake news" while the other makes it illegal to insult public officials. Ars Technica reports on the details:...

pgmrdlm writes: Defense officials want to test a neutral particle-beam in orbit in fiscal 2023 as part of a ramped-up effort to explore various types of space-based weaponry. They've asked for $304 mi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of co...

NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from ...

Google is trying to boost price comparison rivals such as Kelkoo in an effort to appease European Union antitrust regulators and ward off fresh fines following a $2.7 billion penalty nearly two years ...

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that the House will hold a vote next month on the Democrats' bill to reinstate the Obama-era net neutrality rules. "Hoyer said in a letter to colleagues tha...

Uber used a secret spyware program, codenamed Surfcam, to steal drivers from an Australian competitor with the aim of putting that company out of business. The startup was backed by high-profile inves...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Security researchers have spotted a new variant of the Mirai IoT malware in the wild targeting two new classes of devices -- smart signage TVs and wirel...

The world's largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. "The impacted users include people from universities and edu...

Sophisticated AI generally isn't an option for homebrew devices when the mini computers can rarely handle much more than the basics. NVIDIA thinks it can do better -- it's unveiling an entry-level AI ...

Google researcher James Forshaw discovered a new class of vulnerability in Windows before any bug had actually been exploited. The involved parts of the flaw "showed that there were all the basic elem...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Department of Energy disclosed details on Monday of one of the most expensive computers being built: a $500 million machine based on In...

When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. Tekla Perry shares a report: That's the conclu...

IBM is taking its banking clients a step closer to cryptocurrency. From a report: Announced Monday, six international banks have signed letters of intent to issue stablecoins, or tokens backed by fiat...

Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alte...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The explosion of Amazon's private-label products -- batteries, baby wipes, jeans, tortilla chips, sofas -- has prompted concern that the world's biggest online ret...

In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration during the 737 Max's certification process, the Seattle Times reports that the U...

Ahead of a planned event next week, Apple today unveiled two new iPads. From a report: The new, larger, 10.5-inch iPad Air will arrive with a 70 percent performance boost compared to its predecessor, ...

A meteor explosion over the Bering Sea late last year unleashed 10 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, scientists have revealed. From a report: The fireball tore across t...

Business communications and collaboration service Slack said today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in...

Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with startups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. From a report: The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rat...

MySpace may have lost your digital memories in a server migration. From a report: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago...

"A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars," reports CNET:The Japanese te...

Wells Fargo has been hit with a lawsuit from a 63-year-old pastor at the United Methodist Church of Parsippany. Wells Fargo sent his ATM photos to the police, which he says led to false arrest, malici...

In "Hated and hunted," a BBC reporter describes visiting a ransomware expert "who has devoted himself, at huge personal cost, to helping victims of ransomware around the world."They hate him so much t...

An anonymous reader quotes the Harvard School of Public Health:Drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea, salmonella, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and many other disease-causing agents are flourishing around ...

NBC News reports on how microbiologist Gerry Quinn "followed up on some folklore his family had passed on to him."Old timers insisted that the dirt in the vicinity of a nearly 1,500-year-old church in...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:Most states ban texting behind the wheel, but a legislative proposal could make Nevada one of the first states to allow police to use a contentious tech...

Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid t...

"When your phone rings, there's about a 50 percent chance it's a spam robo-call," reports the Washington Post. Now a computer science professor who's researched robo-call technologies reveals the econ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services: The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes...

In Texas the local car dealer lobby has blocked Tesla from selling its cars directly to customers. They're using old laws meant to prevent car manufacturers from competing with their own local dealers...

To avoid copyright claims, "YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have been performing terrible a capella covers of popular songs," reports the Verge:React videos are a huge part of YouTube's current ...

The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing E...

"In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," repo...

"Scientists are hoping to unlock some of the universe's mysteries through 50-year-old moon rocks," reports the New York Daily News -- specifically, three samples that spent that half century sealed in...

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:Researchers from Stanford University's School of Medicine presented results from a giant study sponsored by Apple Inc. that showed the Apple Watch can sometimes spo...

Long-time Slashdot reader skdffff quotes ZDnet:F5 Networks on Monday announced that it will acquire NGINX, which provides popular open-source software of the same name, for $670 million. The deal adva...

Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers:In the last twelve to ei...

CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity."The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is o...

Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,759), shares Reuters' report about Michael Sharpe, a medical researcher studying chronic fatigue syndrome, "a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness a...

Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been:Thi...

Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed t...

"Last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that's easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors," wr...

Munky101 tipped us off to some interesting comments from New York's activist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TechCrunch reports:It's impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation w...

What caused a devastating five-day blackout in Venezuela? Two engineers with expertise in geospatial technologies believe the answer lies in images from a NASA weather satellite showing thermal activi...

schwit1 shared an article from Reason's "Volokh Conspiracy" blog:Nature's Little Recyclers is a father-son business that does composting on empty residential lots, transforming organic waste into nutr...

An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer:Not too long into a 168-hour VR marathon session, Jak Wilmot admits the monotony got to him. Wilmot, who is the co-founder of Disrupt VR, also says this experiment ...

The Boring Company's tunnel project in Chicago is "in doubt" (according to the Chicago Tribune), while a project connecting Washington to Baltimore "is waylaid in the environmental-review process." Bu...

Long-time Slashdot reader jasenj1 and Striek both shared news of a growing open source controversy. "Amazon Web Services on Monday announced that it's partnering with Netflix and Expedia to champion a...

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions ...

"The Linux Foundation is launching a new platform designed to sustain open-source communities," reports SD Times:CommunityBridge was announced at this week's Open Source Leadership Summit. The Linux F...

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mercury News: Amid a worldwide race for supremacy in artificial intelligence, Stanford University on Monday will unveil a new institute dedicated to using AI t...

An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp is working on a major new feature to tackle the spread of misinformation on its service. The Facebook-owned chat app is internally testing a new option th...

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, or KU Leuven, says it has developed a solar panel that converts sunlight directly into hydrogen using moisture in ...

A new study from researchers at Columbia University in New York suggests future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the universe. The study "envisions firing laser beam...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Leading scientists have called for a global moratorium on the use of powerful DNA editing tools to make genetically modified children. The move i...

Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has introduced legislation that would allocate millions of dollars for local government to create dedicated teams that could "update and reb...

Police in Australia have arrested a man who allegedly made AU $300,000 (US $211,000) running a website which sold the account passwords of popular online subscription services including Netflix, Spoti...

The state of Vermont has agreed to suspend enforcement of its net neutrality law pending the outcome of a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission. In October 2018, five industry groups r...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Coal is the primary fuel source for Midwest electric utilities. Michigan Technological University researchers found that increasing renewable and dis...

Researchers from Checkpoint Software have identified a massive adware campaign that invaded the Google Play Store with more than 200 highly aggressive apps that were collectively downloaded almost 150...

Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company's brand new electric SUV, the Model Y. The car is only slightly larger than the Model 3 and shares 75% of its parts, leaving many people wanting mo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden's massive trove of leaked National Secur...

Apple violated three Qualcomm patents and should pay the chipmaker $31 million for infringing on its technology, a jury decided Thursday, giving Qualcomm momentum as it heads into another legal skirmi...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientists in India observed the highest-voltage thunderstorm ever documented with the help of a subatomic particle you might not hear much about: the muon. The re...

Bolstering privacy is one of the primary focuses for Google in Android Q, the latest version of its mobile operating system, and that may spell trouble for some of your favorite apps. From a report: I...

An anonymous reader shares a report: With help from outside researchers, Amazon's economists are working on a way to measure inflation using thousands of transactions across its own platform. Automati...

If you thought the European Commission was done hitting Google with massive fines, think again. From a report: Having already whacked the U.S. company with a $2.7 billion fine in 2017 (for disadvantag...

California was declared totally drought free for the first time in more than seven years this week, following unusually abundant winter rains and snowfall statewide, according to the government's week...

One thing you might not know about Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president is that while a teenager, O'Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview to Reut...

WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web, according to W3Techs. From a blog post: Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% jus...

It started 29 weeks ago when 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest climate change by standing outside of her nation's parliament building. Today, kids from more ...

Facebook said on Friday it would use AI to combat the spread of intimate photos shared without people's permission, sometimes called "revenge porn," on its social networks. From a report: The new tech...

Apple has responded to Spotify's European Commission (EC) complaint. In a press release, the company said that Spotify "seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem ... without making any...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: How to fund ethical journalism in the Facebook era is the multi-billion dollar question of the hour, and a technology-focused consumer group by th...

Huawei has built its own operating system for phones, tablets and computers in case tensions between Huawei and the U.S. escalate even further than they already are. "The OS has been rumored for years...

Google is shutting down its Spotlight Stories immersive entertainment unit, according to an email sent out by Spotlight Stories executive producer Karen Dufilho Wednesday evening. "Google Spotlight St...

Valve is expanding its Steam Link game-streaming feature in a big way with Steam Link Anywhere, a new service that will allow you to stream your Steam games from your computer to anywhere in the world...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A push to launch a high-level study of potentially risky technological fixes to curb climate change was abandoned on Thursday at a U.N. environmental ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Robotic hands have a tough time getting a grip on pliable objects, but it's not for lack of trying -- most make do with rigid pincers that aren't designed for prec...

Ben Jervey from DeSmogBlog writes about how Toyota is "using questionable logic" to claim hybrid vehicles are superior than electric vehicles, when in reality it's only saying that because it decided ...

A new report out of the University of Cambridge studied the experiences of a total of 2,700 primary and secondary students in the UK and Italy and found that primary and secondary school girls had hig...

China has led the world in adoption of smartphone-based mobile payments to the point where the central bank had to remind merchants not to discriminate against cash. The next phase of development may ...

According to a report from Yonhap News Agency, Samsung's vice president of its display R&D group, Yang Byung-duk, said the company is working on making the entire front of its phones a screen, wit...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Now, for Pi Day (March 14), music software programmer Canton Becker has crafted a million-hour song based on Pi that unfolds generatively on a vir...

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA took the wraps off yet another lower cost Turing-based graphics card today, dubbed the GeForce GTX 1660. For a $219 MSRP, the card offers a cut-down NVIDIA TU116 GPU comprised o...

Microsoft is bringing its Xbox Live network to iOS and Android devices. "The software giant is launching a new cross-platform mobile software development kit (SDK) for game developers to bring Xbox Li...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on March 13, citing new data that showed a po...

An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pilots now spend more time learning automated systems than practicing hands-on flying, so newer pilots are less comfortable with taking manual control when the com...

samleecole writes: For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candid...

That's the finding presented by a team of scientists who have published their results this week in an article in the magazine Physics Today. From a report: They explain that our methods of calculating...

Facebook is sorry: The social media giant apologized for the technical errors that left many users globally unable to access apps for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp starting Wednesday and...

physburn writes: The Register has spoken to some experts to get a better understanding of the risk quantum computers present to the existing encryption systems we have today. Richard Evers, cryptograp...

Tumblr's ban on pornography and adult content has led to an estimated fifth of its users deserting the platform. From a report: Tumblr's ban on pornography and adult content has led to a fifth of its ...

Dropbox has quietly removed unlimited device linking for free accounts, meaning that unless you upgrade to one of its paid plans, which start at $8.25 per month, you will be restricted to three device...

Pi just got bigger. Google's Compute Engine has calculated the most digits of pi ever, setting a new world record. From a report: Emma Haruka Iwao, who works in high performance computing and programm...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology com...

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: After a seemingly endless run of rumors, the news Halo fans have been waiting for is here: the series is finally coming back to PC, and in pretty big fas...

pgmrdlm shares a report from CNN: Last May, Opportunity took a look around Perseverance Valley on the inner slope of Endurance Crater's western rim. The valley is about the length of two football fiel...

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: I've had one desire since I was born; to see my body ripped and torn. The lyrics of death metal band Bloodbath's cannibalism-themed track, Eaten, do n...

New Mexico's state House of Representatives passed the "Energy Transition Act" on Tuesday, where it's expected to be signed quickly by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. The bill "commits the state to g...

President Trump announced an emergency order from the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounding Boeing 737 Max jets in the wake of an Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday and a Lion Air accide...

Amazon lobbied more government entities last year than any other public U.S. company, covering issues like healthcare, transportation, defense, and labor regulation. "Across 2018, Amazon contacted 40 ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Austrian antivirus-testing lab AV-Comparatives tested 250 antivirus apps in Google Play against 2,000 malware samples. They found that only 80 of ...

Smart TV manufacturer Vizio has formed a partnership with nine media and advertising companies to develop an industry standard that will allow smart TVs to target advertisements to specific households...

Researchers at Google, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California Santa Barbara has solved one of the biggest limitations with quantum computing: all the control and ...

eatmorekix shares a report from Motherboard: Glocom, a front company for the government of North Korea that sells sanctioned equipment, isn't giving up. In 2017, before YouTube quietly removed Glocom'...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A report from Business Insider claims that Google has axed "dozens" of employees from its laptop and tablet division. BI's sources describe the m...

Verizon said on Tuesday that it will charge an additional $10 a month per smartphone for subscribers who want to add 5G speeds to their devices, the first major U.S. carrier to disclose pricing for th...

IBM and some other firms are using at least a million of images they have gleaned from Flickr to help train a facial recognition system. Although the photos in question were shared under a Creative Co...

Google said today it is rolling out the first beta version of Android Q, the newest version of its mobile operating system. The company will roll out a stable version of Android Q later this year. Fro...

Twitter is teasing some of the biggest changes to its social media service since it first launched in 2006, aiming to make good on the company's promise to promote "healthy conversation." From a repor...

A new front has opened in the battle between the U.S. and China over control of global networks that deliver the internet. This one is beneath the ocean. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syn...

Facebook, the world's largest social networking website, is down for many, users say. Third-party web monitoring tool DownDetector corroborates the claim, adding that more than 11,000 people have repo...

On the occasion of the web's 30th anniversary, its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, has given some interviews and shared his thoughts on some challenges that the web faces today. He spoke with Medianama, an ...

The US Product and Safety Commission just announced HP's "battery safety" recall of about 78,500 laptops for what the UPSC calls "fire and burn hazards." From a report: HP initiated the recall in Janu...

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google's popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it o...

Microsoft is now letting Xbox One owners stream their PC games to the console and use a controller to play them. From a report: A newly updated app, Wireless Display app, from Microsoft enables the su...

Spotify today filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators against Apple, saying the iPhone maker unfairly limits rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek writes in a b...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Alphabet offshoot Jigsaw is launching a Chrome extension designed to help moderate toxic comments on social media. The new open-source tool, dubbed "...

Spotify today filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators against Apple, saying the iPhone maker unfairly limits rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek writes in a b...

Cells from a woolly mammoth that died more than 28,000 years ago have been partially reactivated inside of mouse egg cells, according to a study published Monday in Scientific Reports. "The achievemen...

Traces of an enormous solar storm that battered the atmosphere and showered Earth in radioactive particles more than 2,500 years ago have been discovered under the Greenland ice sheet. The Guardian re...

nj_peeps shares an excerpt from a report via Wired: [Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says the company is working on a new game.] Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woo...

Scientists have developed an "acoustic meta-material" that can catch certain frequencies passing through the air and reflect them back toward their source. When a loudspeaker was placed into one end o...

Google's latest speech recognition works entirely offline, eliminating the delay that many other voice assistants have to return your query. "The delay occurs because your voice, or some data derived ...

Microsoft has announced a form of DirectX 12 that will support Windows 7. "Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft; and indeed it's not slated to be a gene...

Microsoft has announced a form of DirectX 12 that will support Windows 7. "Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft; and indeed it's not slated to be a gene...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 73 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The release includes support for hardware media keys, PWAs and dark mode on Mac, and ...

Barclays internet analyst Ross Sandler says the new cryptocurrency that Facebook is working on could be part of a multibillion-dollar revenue opportunity. "Sandler forecasted as much as $19 billion in...

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new functionality that will automatically remove botched updates from Windows 10 to fix startup issues and other bugs preventing the PC from booting. "The support ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Fearing unknown health risks, members of the City Council in Portland, Oregon, will vote Wednesday to oppose the rollout of 5G wireless networks. In a...

An international group of researchers who have been examining the source code for an internet voting system that Switzerland plans to roll out this year have found a critical flaw in the code that wou...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chicken companies spent decades breeding birds to grow rapidly and develop large breast muscles. Now the industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to de...

Shortages of Intel's CPUs are expected to worsen in the second quarter compared to the first as demand for Chromebooks, which are mostly equipped with Intel's entry-level processors, enters the high p...

Boeing is making an extensive change to the flight-control system in the 737 MAX aircraft implicated in October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia, going beyond what many industry officials familiar with t...

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribe...

Amazon's Echo-branded smart speakers have attracted millions of fans with their ability to play music and respond to queries spoken from across the room. But almost four years after inviting outside d...

Mark Wilson writes: Anyone who is still using Windows 7 doesn't have much longer until the operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft. Come January 14, 2020 only those enterprise customers w...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Frustrated by web pages that never seem to load properly? Well, Google hopes to make them a thing of the past. Today, the company announced that Chrome on Android'...

The Linux Foundation today unveiled several major collaborative partnerships as it looks to cement the development of various open source projects that power much of the web. From a report: First off,...

Microsoft showed off the ability to mirror applications running on an Android phone to a Windows 10 PC last fall. Windows Insiders could begin testing this feature as soon as this week. From a report:...

In 2017, Mozilla experimented with a service that let you transfer 1GB files by sharing a web address with the recipient. Firefox Send is now out of testing and boasts a magnified 2.5GB file-size limi...

The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Microsoft has started to display notifications in the Windows 10 Action Center asking users to have a phone call with Microsoft developers a...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the United States has told Germany to drop Huawei from its future plans or risk losing access to some U.S. intelligence. The U.S. says the Chinese company's e...

jbmartin6 shares a report from Scientific American: In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a group of scientists has theorized that sound waves possess mass, meaning sounds would be directly...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company's chief has confirmed. The block was...

Members of the US Senate and House of Representatives introduced the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act on Monday, hoping to bring legislative action to the emerging technology. From a r...

geoskd writes: QuadrigaCX, the Canadian crypto exchange that made news recently with the passing of its CEO, Gerald Cotten, has been alleged to have been buying cryptocurrency from traders on its plat...

President Trump on Monday threw his support behind efforts to keep the United States permanently on daylight saving time, which took effect Sunday morning. "Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O....

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 10 or 15 years, Dr. Brown, who is head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K., anticipates the amount of computerized data worldwide will ...

British bank Natwest is trialing the use of a new NFC payment card with a built-in fingerprint scanner. "The trial, which will include 200 customers when it begins in mid-April, will allow its partici...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Boeing 737 MAX, the type of plane involved in a deadly crash in Ethiopia over the weekend, is still airworthy and the Federal Aviation Administration...

Facebook is suing Andrew Gorbachov and Gleb Sluchevsky, of Ukraine, who worked for a company called Web Sun Group that developed "data-grabbing" quizzes for its social media site. The malicious quiz a...

Apple is holding an event on March 25th where it's expected to announce its long-rumored TV streaming and Apple News subscription services. The invitation shows an animated countdown GIF with the capt...

Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, the US Department of Defense said today. From a report: The statement comes as plans emerge for gun platforms that can cho...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his o...

Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it aut...

Reader simpz writes: The Register is reporting that the EU is looking to block users from tinkering the firmware/software of their RF devices. This seems to have been very under reported, with a fairl...

LA Times reports: Charles Dahan knows from firsthand experience how badly people get ripped off when buying eyeglasses. He was once one of the leading suppliers of frames to LensCrafters, before the c...

In an update to its genetic test, 23andMe is trying to make it easier for people to combat type 2 diabetes. From a report: When customers now purchase the company's $199 Health & Ancestry Service ...

CSS, or the language that styles and arranges how page elements appear on a website, will soon get support for trigonometry functions such as sine, cosine, tangent, and others, ZDNet is reporting. Fro...

Experts have proven once again that facial recognition on modern devices remains hilariously insecure and can be bypassed using simple tricks such as showing an image or a video in front of a device's...

Microsoft today introduced the AI Business School, a series of case studies and free instructional videos made to help business executives design and successfully implement an AI strategy within their...

An anonymous reader shares a report: In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing its border...

China's aviation regulator today grounded nearly 100 Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by its airlines, more than a quarter of the global fleet of the jets, after a deadly crash of one of the plan...

"The Tennessee Star claims to be the 'most reliable' online local paper in the state," reports Salon. "In fact it's just a GOP front." An anonymous reader quotes their report:An investigation by the f...

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:Russian internet trolls appear to be shifting strategy in their efforts to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections, promoting politically divisive messages through phony s...

CNET reports on the massive ice wall created by an "intricate network of small metal pipes, capped off by six-foot-high metal scaffolding."It turns out, coolant is running through the pipes, freezing ...

"I haven't had a nickel, dime, quarter or penny in my pocket for two years," writes USA Today tech columnist Jefferson Graham, adding "Why bother? We're now living in what's quickly becoming a cashles...

This week The Space Review published an essay by retired aerospace engineer Gerald Black, who worked in the aerospace industry for over 40 years and tested various rocket engines, including the ascent...

Ten days ago 66-year-old tech pundit Robert Cringely revealed the first of what may be his final set of annual predictions for the technology industry -- but he's not done yet. Thursday Cringely predi...

Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point." Today he released a 2,255-w...

When The Division 2 launches on March 15th, PlayStation 4 owners will also need to download a day one update -- that's 90 gigabytes. Eurogamer reports:That's according to a new official support page (...

"The next success for the company behind Angry Birds could be twofold: convincing the U.S. public they should buy a 5G mobile phone from Sprint Corp., and developing the world's biggest video game str...

"In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves," writes CoinBase. An anonymous...

"With a $302 million international gross, Captain Marvel has earned $455 million overall to date, the largest ever global opening for a March release and the sixth highest of all-time," reports the Wr...

"The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year." Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Ind...

Dr. Travis Bradberry has a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology, and argues that "The eight-hour workday is an outdated and ineffective approach to work."A study recently conducted by the Draug...

AmiMoJo quotes Computerworld: Microsoft plans to start selling its Windows 7 add-on support beginning April 1. Labeled "Extended Security Updates" (ESU), the post-retirement support will give enterpri...

What if a robot came to your house to retrieve library books? An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:Residents in downtown Mountain View have gotten their first peek at the future with the ...

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:Despite being championed as a decentralized form of money that puts individuals firmly in control of their own wealth, cryptocurrencies mostly remain the preserv...

schwit1 shared this article from the Guardian:In response to public pressure and increasing scrutiny over the pay of its warehouse workers, Amazon enacted a $15 minimum wage for all its employees on 1...

Saturday the Associated Press analyzed Mark Zuckerberg's new vision for Facebook as an encrypted "privacy-focused communications platform."[C]ritics say the announcement obscures Facebook's deeper mot...

In the state of Washington, the House has voted 89 to 7 to "ditch the switch, bring the light, and defeat the dark night," says one representative. KOMO reports:Changing the clocks twice a year impact...

dryriver quotes the BBC: A doctor in California told a patient he was going to die using a robot with a video-link screen. Ernest Quintana, 78, was at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont when ...

Two associate professors of marketing recently shared research in the Harvard Business Review about how customer service is structured at at tech, travel, and finance companies:[O]ur research suggests...

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of doll...

"Two popular smart alarm systems for cars had major security flaws that allowed potential hackers to track the vehicles, unlock their doors and, in some cases, cut off the engine," reports CNET:The vu...

"Japanese police have brought in, questioned, and charged a 13-year-old female student from the city of Kariya for sharing [links to] browser exploit code online," writes ZDNet. An anonymous reader sh...

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:Amazon appears to be helping fund anti-vaccine not-for-profit organizations through its charity arm, the AmazonSmile Foundation. The AmazonSmile fundraising pro...

America now has 206 confirmed cases of measles, its highest year-to-date number in over 25 years . Now USA Today reports on how Facebook is responding:In mid-February, Facebook told USA TODAY it had "...

A VPN researcher found that many Android VPN apps request access to sensitive permissions that they don't need, according to an article shared by WaitingForSupport. ZDNet reports:The study, carried ou...

"Baseball's potential future will be showcased in the independent Atlantic League this year, and it includes robot umpires..." reports ESPN, calling it part of "a wide variety of experiments that the ...

Apple is already running on 100% green energy, according to Fast Company. But Apple is still "keen to show it's a good corporate citizen," reports the Australian Financial Review:Apple's annual suppli...

"For over a decade, VMware has been accused of illegally using Linux code in its VMware ESX bare-metal virtual machine hypervisor," reports ZDNet, adding that "A German court has dismissed the case, b...

PolygamousRanchKid quotes the BBC: Will Marshall's "Planet" company operates the world's largest satellite imaging network, with 150 spacecraft able to fully picture Earth on a daily basis. He warns E...

The Guardian reports on what may happen next to British businesses and individuals who own .EU domains:There are about 340,000 registered British holders of these web addresses, and the government has...

With Google+ being shutdown in just a few weeks, the official Android Beta community announced that it will be leaving the dying social media site in exchange for Reddit. The group on Google+ was home...

By April 2020, a total of 11 public pools in Singapore will feature a state-of-the-art computer vision drowning detection system (CVDDS). The CVDDS uses a network of overhead infrared cameras to detec...

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors: This week on the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), John Siracusa floated the concept of a MacBook Hierarchy of Needs, a priority list of features for the next time Ap...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pai's claim was questionable from the beginning, as we detailed last month. The Federal Communications Commission data cited by Chairman Pai mere...

North Korea has used cyberattacks and blockchain technology to circumvent economic sanctions and obtain foreign currency, according to a panel of experts reporting to the U.N. Security Council. From a...

As NASA looks into developing planes that can fly faster than sound without creating "sonic booms," the space agency has captured unprecedented photos of the interaction of shockwaves from two superso...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is examining the rise of injuries related to shareable electric scooters. From a report: "We want to identify the risk factors for those who get in...

Researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang Univeristy in China have found that hard disk drives can be turned into listening devices, using malicious firmware and signal processing calcu...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite all her alleged crimes, Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of the biotech company Theranos, can rest assured she still has someone who'll go to bat for her. ...

MGM, one of the largest global casino companies in the world, is considering replacing some workers with robots. The company's 2020 plan calls for reducing its workforce by about 2,100 people to save ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Fearing that China could be spying on them using power cords and plugs, several U.S. technology companies have asked their Taiwanese suppliers to shift p...

Citrix disclosed today a security breach during which hackers accessed the company's internal network. In a short statement posted on its blog, Citrix Chief Security Information Officer Stan Black sai...

Georgia high school teacher Donelan Andrews won a $10,000 reward after she closely read the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she purchased for a trip to England. Squaremou...

The Associated Press is reporting that Chelsea Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, "has been sentenced to jail for re...

You asked, he answered! Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of social networking site Minds.com, has answered more than a dozen questions that Slashdot readers sent his way. Ottman has addressed a wide-range...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Disney is rapidly preparing to launch its own streaming service, dubbed Disney+, later this year. While the debut date is still unknown, we now k...

Google said this week that a Chrome zero-day the company patched last week was actually used together with a second one, a zero-day impacting the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. From a report: T...

Researchers at Ohio State University, the security company FireEye, and research firm Leidos last week published a paper [PDF] describing a new system that reads millions of tweets for mentions of sof...

SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule returned safely to Earth early Friday, wrapping up its inaugural mission to the International Space Station and signaling that the U.S. may soon be able to ferry astronaut...

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is proposing to break up technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and Facebook, calling them anti-competitive behemoths that are crowding o...

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety ...

Microsoft this week revamped Skype's browser-based client with a slew of new features. From a report: The Seattle company this week announced the rollout of a major Skype for Web update, which introdu...

Security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected MongoDB database containing 150GB of detailed, plaintext marketing data -- including hundreds of millions of unique email a...

AmiMoJo writes: Tesla has been selling "full self-driving" capability since 2016, promising that "you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere," and that "once it picks you up, you ...

Version 6.50 of the PlayStation 4's firmware now allows you to remotely play your PS4 games from an iPhone or iPad. "To access it, you'll need to download the Remote Play app for your iOS device, and ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook has removed a network of more than 100 accounts and pages for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its social networks -- the first tim...

Longtime Slashdot reader Alok writes: High contamination in recycled garbage, such as plastic bags mixed in with the recyclable plastic waste, are causing major problems for sustainability efforts in ...

hackingbear writes: A suit filed by Huawei in Texas, where an American subsidy is located, this week is the latest maneuver in the Chinese telecommunications giant's global offensive against American ...

Amazon is closing all 87 of its U.S. pop-up kiosks, which let customers try and buy gadgets such as smart speakers and tablets in malls, Kohl's department stores and Whole Foods groceries. It's the la...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Members of Amnesty International say that Egyptian authorities are behind a recent wave of spear-phishing attacks that have targeted prominent local hum...

Google's bug-hunting researchers known as Project Zero have revealed a fresh zero-day vulnerability in macOS called "BuggyCow." "The attack takes advantage of an obscure oversight in Apple's protectio...

Instagrammers love the colorful homes in Paris's Rue Cremieux. But residents of Rue Cremieux have now had enough and are calling on the city council to restrict access at certain times. From a report:...

Yesterday, Tesla launched the next generation Supercharger V3 with higher charging capacity, better efficiency, and more. The biggest new feature is the ability to deliver a new 250 kW of peak power t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, Philadelphia's mayor signed a bill that would ban cashless retail stores, according to The Morning Call. The move makes Philadelphia t...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI models have a propensity for learning complex data distributions, which is why they're great at producing human-like speech and convincing images of ...

Microsoft's Windows 10 is getting bigger. The operating system for desktop PCs, internet-connected devices and other systems is now running on more than 800 million devices. From a report: The total i...

Java has a problem -- the language and platform is evolving faster than ever, but many developers are stuck on the five-year-old Java 8. From a report: So why have developers not upgraded? Simply, Jav...

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu generated some headlines in January after it unveiled Zero, a $1300 smartphone that doesn't have a headphone jack, or a charging port, or a physical SIM card slot, or an...

Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats, and the use of audiobooks is rising, Pew Research said in a report published on Thursday. From the report: About three-quarters (...

An anonymous reader shares a report: All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United St...

MojoKid writes: Gaming enthusiasts and pro-gamers have believed for a long time that playing on high refresh rates displays with high frame rates offers a competitive edge in fast-action games like PU...

Research firm IDC projects: The smartphone market continues to be challenged and 2019 is projected to experience its third consecutive year of declining shipments. Worldwide smartphone volumes are for...

Google is expanding its Duplex reservation system to a total of 43 US states. It will work on Pixel phones in those 43 states, but it should be expanding to more Android phones and iPhones "in the com...

Over at Quartz, Ephrat Livni reports that a 60 Minutes story about gender equality accidentally proved the persistence of patriarchy. Reader theodp shares the report: Good intentions are nice, but the...

Bruce Schneier, a well-known security guru, this week called on technologists to become lawmakers and policy makers so countries can deal with issues such as the governance of artificial intelligence ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Following news of a man in the UK who has been free of HIV since his cancer treatment, a similar case has been reported by researchers who treat...

Mozilla is scheduled to add a new user anti-fingerprinting technique to Firefox with the release of version 67, scheduled for mid-May this year. "Called 'letterboxing,' this new technique adds 'gray s...

The European Commission and European Parliament are set to end daylight saving time in 2021, at least in some states. "Now that the lead committee on transport and tourism has given its blessing, by a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Millions of dollars were missing when the CEO of a crypto exchange died without sharing the passwords to his accounts. Investigators recently...

MikeChino writes: The world's first home designed, planned, and built with mainly digital processes just opened its doors in Switzerland. Developed by eight ETH Zurich professors, DFAB House is a pilo...

Samsung is working on a pair of new foldable smartphones to follow its Galaxy Fold, a smartphone with dual screens that fold in half like a notebook, and another that works just like any other. Bloomb...

"Haven" is the new name of the joint health-care venture between Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. The CEOs of the three companies last January announced they were teaming up to tackle rising ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: Could Samsung be on the cusp of a fully wireless TV? A recent patent hints that a Samsung TV without any pesky cables could be around the corner. Sp...

Last month, the U.S. Army asked private companies for ideas about how to improve its planned semi-autonomous, AI-driven targeting system for tanks. "In its request, the Army asked for help enabling th...

According to a new paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology, autonomous cars could disproportionately endanger pedestrians with darker skin, a troubling sign of how AI can inadvertently reproduc...

Hackers and security researchers use rare "dev-fused" iPhones created for internal use at Apple to bypass Apple's protections and security features to uncover iPhone vulnerabilities and other sensitiv...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki took a Wednesday opportunity to review one game maker's financial reports: CyberAgent Inc, maker o...

As expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House and Senate Democrats on Wednesday introduced the Save the Internet Act, which aims to restore open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. From a r...

Facebook will increasingly shift its focus away from public posts to encrypted, ephemeral communications on its trio of messaging apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today in a significant new blog post. F...

Microsoft said today it has made the source code for its Windows calculator available on GitHub. The company said it hopes to work with contributors to improve the user experience of Windows calculato...

Google today released a learning app for primary school children in India as part of an effort to cement its grip on the world's fastest-growing internet market. From a report: The Android app, called...

An 18-year-old from Ohio who famously inoculated himself against his mother's wishes in December says heattributes his mother's anti-vaccine ideology to a single source: Facebook [Editor's note: the l...

An 18-year-old from Ohio who famously inoculated himself against his mother's wishes in December says heattributes his mother's anti-vaccine ideology to a single source: Facebook [Editor's note: the l...

A new computing tool developed by Google will let developers build AI-powered apps. The upside is it's doing so without sucking up all of your information. From a report: Google on Wednesday released ...

Jessica Roy, writing for LA Times: Thirty years ago, Maxis released "SimCity" for Mac and Amiga. It was succeeded by "SimCity 2000" in 1993, "SimCity 3000" in 1999, "SimCity 4" in 2003, a version for ...

The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine isn't associated with an increased risk of autism even among kids who are at high risk because they have a sibling with the disorder, a Danish study sugges...

An anonymous reader writes: At the RSA security conference this week, the National Security Agency released Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering tool that the agency had been using internally f...

Reader AmiMoJo writes: Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76 million in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets were sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to Wired, glass-maker Corning is "working on ultrathin, bendable glass that's 0.1 millimeters thick and can bend to a 5 millimeter radi...

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: According to new asteroid collision models designed by scientists at Johns Hopkins University, deflecting a large rock headed for Earth will be harder than previously...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have discovered that broken DNA builds up in brain cells in the daytime and repair work reverses the damage only during sleep. For an ...

Uber is not criminally liable in a March 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona, in which one of the company's self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian, prosecutors said on Tuesday. "The Yavapai County ...

Slashdot reader and Motherboard writer dmoberhaus was the final participant in the world's first brain imaging study on salvinorin A, the psychoactive chemical in salvia divinorum. He wrote about what...

Google Maps is warning drivers in Canada as they approach some photo radar camera locations. "The feature, which is currently being rolled out by Google, allows users to see speed limits, speed camera...

Slashdot reader Lije Baley writes: As the unusually long cold snap in the Pacific Northwest has both increased electric demand while decreasing snow melt and stream flows needed for hydroelectric gene...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Encryption should have limits. That's the message FBI Director Christopher Wray had for cybersecurity experts Tuesday. The technology that scrambles up i...

Last December, Microsoft announced that it has embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop, a move that shocked many. We now have some leaked screenshots of the ...

Facebook is rolling out a new "Tributes" section for memorialized accounts that will allow people to leave messages that are separate from the rest of the profile's timeline. "Depending on a memoriali...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google's AI research division today open-sourced GPipe, a library for "efficiently" training deep neural networks (layered functions modeled after...

Microsoft's next iteration of the Xbox One may not have a disc at all, and it might be coming sooner than you think. From a report: That's at least according to rumors from Windows Central, which says...

Nearly all 250 coal-fired plants in operation in the U.S. have leaked chemicals and contaminated the local groundwater supply with toxins [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; you can check the a...

A seemingly complex set of characters like "ji32k7au4a83" is a very common password among users, it turns out. From a report: This interesting bit of trivia comes from self-described hardware/software...

Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem. Phoronix: The Linux kernel has been seeing "Y2038" work for years and the effort is far from over. Thomas...

Exploit vendor Zerodium said today it would pay up to $500,000 for zero-days in popular cloud products and services such as Microsoft's Hyper-V and (Dell) VMware's vSphere. From a report: Both Hyper-V...

A bill that's progressing through Russia's legislature could grant local authorities deeper control over internet access. The so-called "Sovereign Internet" bill seeks to set up a centralized hub offi...

Speaking of Volvo, the Swedish carmaker announced today that it has partnered with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and unveiled a full-size autonomous electric bus for testing this ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Online, you'll find people who use hashtags like "#digitalhoarder" and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips...

A study into the amount people pay for mobile data has found that the UK has some of the most expensive prices in Europe. From a report: The research, from price comparison site Cable.co.uk, found tha...

Spoiler is the newest speculative attack affecting Intel's micro-architecture. From a report: Like the Spectre and Meltdown attacks revealed in January 2018, Spoiler also abuses speculative execution ...

Two-fifths of Europe's AI startups do not use any AI programs in their products, according to a report that highlights the hype around the technology. From a report: Out of 2,830 startups in Europe wh...

An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher has uncovered a ring of malicious GitHub accounts promoting over 300 backdoored Windows, Mac, and Linux applications and software libraries. The malic...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Patently Apple: Firefox browser-maker Mozilla is considering whether to block cybersecurity company DarkMatter from serving as one of its internet security gat...

Scientists have reported that an HIV-positive man in Britain has been cleared of the AIDS virus after he received a bone marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor. This is the second known adult w...

According to a senior Republican congressional aide, the National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans' domestic calls and texts. "The agency has not used the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from Heriot-Watt University have welded glass and metal together using an ultrafast laser system, in a breakthrough for the manufacturing ...

Chronicle, a security start-up owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, plans on sharing what it learned from a cyberattack against Google nearly ten years ago. The hack was conducted by the Chines...

MIT Technology reports of how Huawei's technology road map, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, is progressing more rapidly than any other business in the world. "The [Chinese] governm...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Monday that Democrats will introduce a net neutrality bill to replace the open internet rules that were rep...

Microsoft is officially killing off its Microsoft Band and Microsoft Health Dashboard apps and services on May 31st. "The software giant already discontinued its wrist-worn Band fitness tracker more t...

tedlistens writes: Vermont's newly enacted data broker law is the only law of its kind in the U.S. so far, and it's forced any company collecting data on its citizens to register with the state. Fast ...

Volvo will limit the top speed to 112mph on all its new cars from 2020 in an attempt to reduce the number of accidents. "The cap will prevent drivers from accelerating to the top speeds of up to 155mp...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Using two-factor authentication, a security mechanism that requires a second step to login into an account other than the password, is widely cons...

Netflix has addressed Steven Spielberg's concerns, after the legendary director indicated he'd throw his weight behind making Oscars harder to reach for Netflix films like "Roma". From a report: The s...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The story we're used to hearing is that women get paid less than men. In Google's case, according to its own internal pay audit, it turned out male-identified Leve...

Fish populations are declining as oceans warm, putting a key source of food and income at risk for millions of people around the world, according to research published last week. From a report: The st...

Over the weekend, a disturbed Android TV owner took to Twitter when he realized, through the Google Home app, he could access a massive list of random accounts, as well as photos they'd added to their...

Google is still pursuing its plan to launch a censored search engine for China, The Intercept reported Monday, citing unnamed employees. From the report: Late last year, bosses moved engineers away fr...

Microsoft is working on a new lightweight version of Windows to power dual-screen devices and Chromebook competitors, according to a new report. The Verge: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell...

Thousands of people could soon be receiving letters threatening to cut off vital housing benefits as they face being incorrectly targeted by a new automated fraud detector. From a report: The governme...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The median rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco has reached a new peak of $3,690, according to survey data from Zumper, a home and apartment rental ap...

Sony has officially ended production of its PS Vita games console. The handheld console has been gradually phased out over the past few years -- and this weekend Sony announced it would be discontinui...

Hundreds of millions of private chat logs from Chinese users have been left exposed on the internet, a researcher has found, in another worrying case of weak data protection in China. Financial Times ...

At a Taipei event earlier today, Intel revealed that USB 4 will once again utilize dual channels to achieve 40Gbps speeds, even on existing 40Gbps-certified USB-C cables. A report adds: Better yet, th...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today declared that the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) is now an official web standard. From a report: First announced by the W3C and the FIDO Alliance in Februa...

An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.0 in kicking off the kernel's 28th year of development. Linux 5.0 features include AMD FreeSync support, open-source NVIDIA Turing GPU s...

"The 'mole' aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander has encountered stiff resistance on its first subsurface sojourn beneath the surface of the Red Planet," reports Space.com:In a major mission milestone, I...

For 22 years technology writer Robert X. Cringely has been making predictions for the year to come -- but this year may be his last. So at age 66, he's promising his 2019 predictions will also "take a...

France's Finance Minister has drafted a new law to tax internet giants, reports Reuters:A three percent tax on the French revenue of large internet companies could yield 500 million euros [$568 millio...

"For anyone who thought that there was too much Tesla news this weekend, I've got some bad news for you," writes long-time Slashdot reader Rei, sharing new information gleaned from a series of tweets....

Bruce Perens writes: The Open Source Initiative is holding an election for 6 board seats. We shouldn't have an election without a policy debate! Even if you aren't an OSI member, you can (and should) ...

An anonymous reader quotes BGR:Sales from individual song downloads have unsurprisingly been falling with no end in sight, thanks to the convenience of streaming options like Spotify and Apple Music. ...

"The attention economy is dying, and it's not pretty," argues the Verge, adding "there is only so much time in the day to pay attention to things, and we as a society have reached the limit..." "The b...

"Deep, non-REM sleep helps people's brains to wash away toxic proteins and waste, a new study found, reinforcing the link between sleep deprivation, aging and Alzheimer's disease," reports U.S. News &...

This week the Washington Post shared the story of 20-year-old Sam Haberern, who was playing Call of Duty on his Xbox when the other players "started asking him whether he had ever testified in court o...

AmiMoJo quotes the health and science editor of Slashgear: A new study has found that listening to music may have a negative impact on creativity. This is contrary to the popular idea that music and c...

Help Net Security shared an interesting statistic from the 2019 Webroot Threat Report.40 percent of malicious URLs were found on good domains. Legitimate websites are frequently compromised to host ma...

"The BBC, the UK's national broadcaster, and ITV, the biggest private player in the UK market, are in the 'concluding phase of talks' to create a rival to Netflix," writes Slashdot reader AmiMoJo.The ...

An anonymous reader quotes the San Francisco Chronicle:Tristan O'Tierney, a co-founder of San Francisco payments company Square, died Feb. 23 in Ocala, Fla., of causes related to addiction, his family...

"Facebook threatened to pull investment projects from Europe and Canada if lobbying demands from COO Sheryl Sandberg were not met," reports Business Insider, adding "Canada buckled immediately." And t...

"Scientists have managed to turn CO2 from a gas back into solid 'coal'," reports The Independent, "in a breakthrough which could potentially help remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere."Long-ti...

Long-time Slashdot reader retroworks shared this EFF article:Although relatively little news gets out of Xinjiang to the rest of the world, we've known for over a year that China has been testing faci...

Tesla's now taking orders for Model 3's with a "full self-driving capability" -- meaning "automatic driving on city streets." CNN reports that experts on self-driving technology "say CEO Elon Musk is ...

"Technology hasn't fallen short of its promise. Tech companies have," argues Evan Selinger, a philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, reporting on a new "collaborative video respons...

"Amazon has apparently started removing anti-vaccine documentaries from its Amazon Prime Video streaming service," reports CNN:The move came days after a CNN Business report highlighted the anti-vacci...

Long-time Slashdot reader dryriver sees it like this:Lets say that I follow a person named John D. around for days without permission, make note of what John D. does and where he buys with timestamps ...

AppleHoshi writes: The BBC is reporting that an accidental fire at Tesla's Gatwick Service Centre in the U.K. has damaged "at least half" of the facility. Initial reports are that the fire did not beg...

"A foreign power with possible unbridled access to Europe's data is causing alarm in the region. No, it's not China. It's the U.S.," writes Bloomberg (in an article shared by hackingbear). "As the U.S...

On Thursday, Google began officially selling their new .dev domains to anyone, Engadget reports:To claim a .dev, all you need to do is sign up with your registrar of choice (Google, naturally, is an o...

Remember when dozens of Americans said their names were used for fake comments sent to America's FCC opposing net neutrality? Now Gizmodo's taken a hard look at their past interviews with Dan Germain,...

rfengineer tipped us off to this story. The Atlantic reports:Your office is a den of thieves. Don't take my word for it: When a forensic-accounting firm surveyed workers in 2013, 52 percent admitted t...

Slate's senior technology writer reports that his hunt for a reliable ISP "led me on a convoluted journey through accusations and counteraccusations, companies with shadowy leadership and those with c...

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shares this update from Nature: The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals -- guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, comm...

Winnipeg's police department used encrypted radios to stop the public from listening in to their conversations with police scanners. But did they pirate their software keys? Long-time Slashdot reader ...

Big cloud companies are "strip-mining open-source technologies and companies," complains Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. At their developer conference, Howard accused "big cloud" of "really abusing th...

"SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, its first spacecraft designed to carry humans, took flight for the first time Saturday," reports CNN. Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar calls it "a perfect launch," noting t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook and its Instagram unit sued four companies and three people based in China for promoting the sale of fake accounts, likes and followers tha...

the_newsbeagle writes: In newborn intensive care units (NICUs) today, tiny fragile babies lie in incubators, wired to a variety of monitors that track their vital signs. This mess of wires makes it co...

The Economist tells the story of how French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier came to publish the first putatively comprehensive list of chemical elements -- substances incapable of being broken do...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: This week, the Russian government has published a document outlining new rules that limit foreign communications satellite operators inside the country....

itwbennett writes: Security researchers at Varonis have uncovered a new attack using a new version of the venerable Qbot malware that "creates scheduled tasks and adds entries to the system registry t...

Facebook, Twitter, and Google still aren't doing enough to battle disinformation on their platforms, European Union officials said in a statement released this week. "As part of a plan to fight disinf...

One of the prototypes Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs is working on for its planned neighborhood on Toronto's waterfront is a hexagonal paving system. "The slabs are porous and heated, which may keep snow an...

Speaking to investors on Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he has "never been more optimistic" about where the company is today and where it's heading. He said the company is "planting seeds" and "rolli...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bad security decision by Comcast on the company's mobile phone service made it easier for attackers to port victims' cell phone numbers to diff...

Microsoft has built a "Clinical Trials Bot" that does just as the name implies: suggests links to trials that best match the patients' needs. The bot "lets patients and doctors search for studies rela...

The Canadian government has allowed for the extradition proceedings against the CFO of Huawei to proceed. "Today, department of Justice Canada officials issued an authority to proceed, formally commen...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon is planning to open dozens of grocery stores in several major U.S. cities (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source...

Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch: Facebook has changed its story after initially trying to downplay how it targeted teens with its Research program that a TechCrunch investigation revealed was pa...

Microsoft has rolled out a new feature to Excel's Android app that makes it easy to capture data. From a report: Excel now lets you take pictures of a document/paper in real life, crop the picture, an...

The long wait is over for sci-fi and horror film buffs: the 1979 classic "Alien" will be released in 4K and HDR for the film's 40th anniversary. The remaster will be available on an UltraHD Blu-ray di...

Biting your tongue at yet another questionable article shared in your message group? Add artificial-intelligence fact-checker Meiyu, she will jump in with 'False.' From a report: The artificial-intell...

As Australia welcomes the first day of autumn with a sigh of relief, the summer statistics have arrived from the Bureau of Meteorology confirming suspicions that the country just sweated through it's ...

China blocked 23 million "discredited" travelers from buying plane or train tickets last year as part of the country's controversial "social credit" system aimed at improving the behavior of citizens....

Ebay may be paving the way to auction off some of its businesses. The e-commerce company said Friday that it is initiating a strategic review of its assets, including ticket sales site StubHub and the...

Amazon's physical Dash buttons are no more. The e-commerce giant has stopped selling its tap-to-order Dash buttons as of February 28th. From a report: If you still proudly use a Dash button (or a few ...

An anonymous reader shares a column: Everything about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is big. The latest open-world western, released in October by Rockstar Games, constantly reminds you of this. It takes rou...

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: T...

Alison Griswold, writes on her newsletter Oversharing: I took a look at data on scooter rides in Louisville, Kentucky, shared online as part of the city's open data policy. The latest data is availabl...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter today confirmed it's developing a new "Hide Tweet" feature, which it says will give users another option to protect their conversations. Th...

A new patent application from Apple, titled "Electronic Devices with Flexible Displays," describes how the company could prevent foldable smartphone displays from getting damaged in extreme temperatur...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Humans and other mammals are limited to seeing a range of wavelengths of light called visible light, which includes the wavelengths of the rainbo...

The New York Times reported Thursday that an open letter will be published in the Times on Friday that asks Amazon to reconsider its decision to walk away from its plan to build a 25,000-employee camp...

dryriver writes: BBC Future reports on a geoengineering technique called "marine cloud brightening" that makes marine Stratocumulus clouds -- which currently reflect almost 30% of total Solar radiatio...

itwbennett writes: If you're running Elasticsearch 1.4.2 and lower, you should make sure your patches are up to date. That's because researchers from Cisco's Talos group have "detected an increase in ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Some of the world's biggest internet messaging companies are hoping to succeed where cryptocurrency start-ups have failed by introducing ma...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a call with reporters Thursday that the company will only sell its vehicles online. As a result, the electric carmaker will close most of its stores over the "next few mont...

In a call with reporters Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is finally launching the long-promised standard Model 3 with a base price of $35,000. "The automaker is now making several new v...

The Polestar 2 is the first all-electric car from Volvo, and the first car to feature Google's new native version of Android Auto. Billed as a competitor to Tesla's Model 3, "the Polestar 2 should be ...

Mozilla wants to make it easier for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. From a report: Toward that end, it's today releasing the latest version of ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Windows 10 Insider Preview Slow Ring -- the beta track that's meant to receive only those builds that are free from any known serious problem...

U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their ...

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration have issued new rules designed to protect air passengers from the potential dangers of lithium ion batteries. From a repor...

YouTube said today it will disable the ability for viewers to leave comments on most videos featuring minors, as it tries to contain the damage from a scandal involving child predators leaving coded s...

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, ratifying President Trump's choice of a former advocate for business interests to lead the ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Every once in a while, we see Netflix test new plans in certain markets, and most of them involve price hikes. The same goes for the latest test that was spotted o...

Even San Francisco's tech chops can't save it from relying on computers that belong in a museum. From a report: The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it's the 1980s is the cit...

Thailand's military-appointed parliament on Thursday passed a controversial cybersecurity law that gives sweeping powers to state cyber agencies, despite concerns from businesses and activists over ju...

The results of a new study suggest that listening to music can significantly impair your ability to perform creative tasks. Whilst music was found to disrupt creative processes, ambient "library noise...

Ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft are planning to give some drivers money to buy stock in their initial public offerings, WSJ reported Thursday [The link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From...

Samsung is adding bloatware to its 2019 TVs because McAfee is paying them to do so. From a report: There is arguably no reason at all for Samsung to offer a third-party antivirus software for an opera...

Samsung is adding bloatware to its 2019 TVs because McAfee is paying them to do so. From a report: There is arguably no reason at all for Samsung to offer a third-party antivirus software for an opera...

An office that's responsible for enforcing European data privacy laws against many of the biggest U.S. tech firms is spending much of its time on one company: Facebook. From a report: The Ireland Data...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As many as 1 in 5 people today are mooching off of someone else's account when streaming video from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, according to a n...

BlackBerry has set its sights on Twitter in a new patent infringement lawsuit, accusing the social media company of illegally using technology in its mobile messaging apps that had been developed by t...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Chemists have stumbled across a new way to separate reflected light into the colors of the rainbow -- a phenomenon known as iridescence. The surpris...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Police, social services, and health workers in Canada are using shared databases to track the behavior of vulnerable people -- including minors an...

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNN: A team of 12 geologists and archaeologists from across the United Kingdom unveiled research this month that traces some of the prehistoric monument's ...

Renewable energy use and reduced energy use overall have helped carbon emissions remain flat or below average as the global economy continued to grow over the years. But, as new research has found, go...

The company behind TikTok, the popular short-form video app that incorporated Musical.ly last year, has agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it illegally coll...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Reddit is experimenting with tipping users, starting with the shittymorph subreddit, a group dedicated to the man who has memorably bamboozled many a rea...