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11:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot AMD Cites 'Factual Errors', 'Omissions' in Critical Report on Its China Venture
Thursday the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about AMD's joint venture with Chinese holding coming THATIC -- titled "How a Big U.S. Chip Maker Gave China the 'Keys to the Kingdom'." The article argu...
10:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Inside the Race To (finally) Bring Pinball Into the Internet Age
harrymcc writes: Jay Adelson, the cofounder of Digg, has a new, deeply personal startup: Scorbit. It aims to connect existing pinball machines to the internet, giving them networked leaderboards, comp...
08:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot 'Retro Games' Announces A New Commodore 64
Long-time Slashdot reader cshamis tipped us off to this story in HotHardware:It is official, folks -- Retro Games is releasing a full-size retro reboot of the original Commodore 64, called TheC64, on ...
07:41 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Claims Unauthorized Repairing of Its Devices Would Be a Security Risk
In comments submitted to America's Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft says repairing its devices could jeopardize protections from the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security chip. "Don't believe them...
07:04 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot German Scientists Say Spinach Should Be Banned In Sports
Thelasko quotes a surprising CNN story about spinach: A study released by Freie Universitat Berlin suggests that ecdysterone, a chemical found in the leafy green vegetable, has a similar effect to ste...
06:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Performance-Enhancing Bacteria Has a Symbiotic Relationship With Athletes
Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath shares some big bacteria news from Harvard Medical School:Researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center determined Veillonella metabolizes lactic acid produced by exercise ...
05:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Trump Relaxes US Ban On Selling To Huawei In Surprise G20 Concession
hackingbear tipped us off to a breaking news story. CNN reports:US President Donald Trump has appeared to soften his tone on Chinese communications giant Huawei, suggesting that he would allow the com...
04:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Boeing Falsified Records of a New 787 That Leaked Fuel
Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes the CBC: Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015. In a statement ...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Tech Press Rushes To Cover New Linus Torvalds' Mailing List Outburst
"Linux frontman Linus Torvalds thinks he's 'more self-aware' these days and is 'trying to be less forceful' after his brief absence from directing Linux kernel developers because of his abusive langua...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Tech Press Rushes To Cover New Linus Torvalds Mailing List Outburst
"Linux frontman Linus Torvalds thinks he's 'more self-aware' these days and is 'trying to be less forceful' after his brief absence from directing Linux kernel developers because of his abusive langua...
02:34 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot The Slashdot Interview with FreeDOS founder Jim Hall
In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's intervi...
01:00 pm - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes To Stand Trial In 2020
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the now-defunct biotech unicorn Theranos, will face trial in federal court next summer with penalties of up to 20 ...
10:00 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot New Mac Malware Abuses Recently Disclosed Gatekeeper Zero-Day
puddingebola writes: In May, security researcher Filippo Cavallarin made public a vulnerability in macOS's Gatekeeper. The vulnerability can allow an attacker to use a symlink and an NFS server to byp...
07:00 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot ISS Is Home To Molds That Can Withstand Radiation Doses That Would Kill a Human, Researchers Find
Mold spores commonly found aboard the International Space Station (ISS) turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being. Based on experiments...
03:30 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced To Lower-Paid Engineers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing's 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes ...
02:02 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Italy Stings Facebook With $1.1 Million Fine For Cambridge Analytica Data Misuse
Italy's data protection watchdog has slapped Facebook with a $1.1 million fine for violations of local privacy law attached to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. TechCrunch reports: Last yea...
01:25 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot New Property of Light Discovered
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light -- self-torque. Their findings have been published in t...
12:45 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot House Votes To Block Ajit Pai's Plan To Kill San Francisco Broadband Law
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to block Ajit Pai's attempt to kill a San Francisco ordinance designed to promote broadband competiti...
12:03 am - Sat, June 29, 2019
Slashdot Iran Seizes 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Machines Using Subsidized Power
Iranian authorities have seized about 1,000 bitcoin mining machines in two abandoned factories, after warnings that the activity had led to a spike in consumption of government-subsidized electricity....
11:20 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot 2015 15" MacBook Pro Recall Applies To About 432,000 Units, Apple Received 26 Reports of Batteries Overheating
Last week, Apple launched a voluntary recall and replacement program for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Displaying, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat and "may pos...
10:40 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot NSA Improperly Collected US Phone Call Data After Saying Problem Was Fixed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: The National Security Agency improperly collected phone call records of Americans last fall, months after a previous breach that compelled the agenc...
10:00 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Firefox To Get a Random Password Generator, Like Chrome and Safari
Mozilla is adding a random password generator to Firefox. From a report: The Firefox random password generator is expected to become publicly available for all Firefox users with the release of Firefo...
09:40 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Apple Moves Mac Pro Production To China
Apple is manufacturing its new Mac Pro computer in China (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the U.S. The Wa...
09:21 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Technology is Eroding the Ability To Move Around the Physical World Anonymously
Hal Hodson, a correspondent for Economist writes in a Twitter thread: Something really massive is happening, and I feel like society is barely grasping the tendrils of the implications. Technology is ...
08:40 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Meal-Delivery Company GrubHub is Buying Thousands of Restaurant Web Addresses, Preventing Mom and Pop From Owning Their Slice of Internet
H. Claire Brown, reporting for The New Food Economy: GrubHub's commission fees had been inching upward over the years she'd [anecdote in the story] been working with the platform. There was the flat t...
08:01 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot FBI Urges Universities To Monitor Some Chinese Students And Scholars In the US
U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S...
07:21 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Seeks To Join the Official Linux-Distros Mailing List
Microsoft's transformation into a fully paid-up member of the Linux love-train continued this week as the Windows giant sought to join the exclusive club that is the official linux-distros mailing lis...
06:40 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Andrew Yang Explains How His Plan For Universal Basic Income Would Work; Complains His Microphone Was 'Not On' at Times During Democratic Debate
Andrew Yang, who says he's running "the nerdiest campaign in presidential history," made an almost immediate splash when he arrived without a tie on the second night of the first presidential Democrat...
06:01 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot One Year After Trump's Foxconn Groundbreaking, There is Almost Nothing To Show For It
Josh Dzieza, reporting for The Verge: It's been exactly one year since President Trump pushed a golden shovel into a field in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, breaking ground on a planned Foxconn factory he...
05:21 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Google Announces New Subsea Cable 'Equiano', Connecting Africa and Europe
Alphabet's Google on Friday announced a new subsea cable dubbed "Equiano" that will connect Africa with Europe, as it boosts its cloud computing infrastructure. From a report: Equiano, fully funded by...
04:41 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot FDA Warns About Insulin Pump Cybersecurity
Something new for diabetes patients to worry about: Someone nearby could potentially connect wirelessly to your Medtronic MiniMed insulin pump, the FDA warned yesterday. From a report: While the agenc...
04:00 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot 'Apple is Not in Trouble Because Jony Ive is Leaving, It Is in Trouble Because He's Not Being Replaced'
Apple's chief design officer announced on Thursday that he is leaving the company after nearly 30 years at the firm. John Gruber of DaringFireball making sense of things and what it means for the comp...
03:21 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Germany and the Netherlands To Build the First Ever Joint Military Internet
Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. From a report: The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels,...
02:41 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Germany's Temperature Record Smashed as Europe's Heat Wave Intensifies
Reader Iwastheone shares a report: Germany recorded its highest-ever June temperature on Wednesday, as much of continental Europe contends with a major heat wave. The German Weather Service said the m...
02:02 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Creator of DeepNude, App That Undresses Photos of Women, Takes It Offline
The creator of DeepNude, an app that used a machine learning algorithm to "undress" images of clothed women, announced Thursday that he's killing the software after viral backlash for the way it objec...
01:00 pm - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot A Second US City Has Banned Facial Recognition
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Somerville, Massachusetts just became the second U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition in public space. The "Face Surveillance Full Ban O...
10:00 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Brings Tracking Prevention To Its Edge Browser
Microsoft is testing features that block companies from tracking you across different websites in its Chromium-based Edge browser. Engadget reports: Insider beta testers with the latest Canary release...
07:00 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission To Explore Titan
NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Dragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landi...
03:30 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Airplane Contrails Will Do Triple the Damage They Do Today By 2050, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: The contrails left by airplanes last only hours. But they are now so widespread that their warming effect is greater than that of all the carbon...
02:02 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Trump White House Reportedly Debating Encryption Policy Behind Closed Doors
According to a report in Politico, the Trump administration held a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday that weighed the challenges and benefits of encryption. "One of Politico's sources sai...
01:25 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Excel Power Query Feature Can Be Abused For Malware Distribution
Security researchers have devised a method to abuse a legitimate Microsoft Excel technology named Power Query to run malicious code on users' systems with minimal interaction. ZDNet reports: Power Que...
12:45 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot Google Maps Can Now Predict How Crowded Your Bus Or Trail Will Be
Google Maps is getting a pair of updates that will offer live traffic delays for busses in the cities where it didn't already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your...
12:03 am - Fri, June 28, 2019
Slashdot The Pentagon Has a Laser That Can Identify People From a Distance By Their Heartbeat
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A new device, developed for the Pentagon after U.S. Special Forces requested it, can identify people without seeing their face: instead ...
11:20 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: Which iPhone Is Your Favorite?
Apple iOS developer David Smith noticed something that really jumped out at him when he was reviewing his iPhone's device analytics. "People really, really like the 4.7-inch iPhone," he writes. "When ...
11:00 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Nearly 100 Drivers Followed a Google Maps Detour, Ended Up Stuck In An Empty Field
A crash on Pena Boulevard, a road leading to Denver International Airport, prompted Google Maps to take about 100 drivers on a detour on Sunday. "The alternate route took drivers down a dirt road that...
10:40 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Google's New ReCAPTCHA Has a Dark Side
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: We've all tried to log into a website or submit a form only to be stuck clicking boxes of traffic lights or storefronts or bridges in a desperate...
10:00 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Intel Launches Blockbuster Auction For Its Mobile Portfolio
In what looks set to become one of the highest profile patent sales in years, Intel has put its IP relating to cellular wireless connectivity on the auction block. The company is seeking to divest aro...
09:25 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Jony Ive, iPhone Designer, Leaving Apple To Form Independent Company
Apple's chief designer Jony Ive is leaving after decades at the iPhone maker to form an independent company -- with Apple as one of its primary clients. Ive was at Apple for more than two decades in w...
09:20 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot When You Listen, They Watch: Pre-Saving Albums Can Allow Labels To Track Users on Spotify
Pre-saving albums on Spotify can give music labels access to personal user data like emails addresses and playlists, according to a Billboard report. From a report: To pre-save music, which adds a rel...
08:41 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft is Notifying Users If Their Devices Aren't Ready For Windows 10 1903
Reader Iwastheone shares a report: There have been some bugs and issues with Microsoft's Windows 10 May Update/1903 feature update since Microsoft kicked off its rollout in late May. But the 1903 comp...
08:01 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Here's Why Some Users Are Getting More LinkedIn Notifications
LinkedIn this week announced algorithm changes made over the past 12-18 months to favor conversations in its Feed that cater to niche professional interests, as opposed to elevating viral content. Fro...
07:24 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Western Intelligence Hacked Russia's Yandex To Spy On Accounts
Hackers working for Western intelligence agencies broke into Russian internet search company Yandex in late 2018 deploying a rare type of malware in an attempt to spy on user accounts, Reuters reporte...
06:42 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Indie Developers Suggest Steam Summer Sale Confusion is Hurting Their Games
An anonymous reader shares a report: As part of this year's annual Steam Summer Sale, Valve is hosting a new "Grand Prix" promotion that gives participants a chance at free games if they complete cert...
06:00 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Facebook: Our Terms of Service Are Less Confusing Now.
Facebook says it wants to give people "clear, simple explanations" about how its business works and how it uses your personal information. From a report: In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook outlined ...
05:20 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Mozilla Launches GeckoView-Powered Firefox Preview For Android
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced Firefox Preview, a pilot of its new Android browser. Firefox Preview, which is powered by Mozilla's own GeckoView engine, will ultimately replace th...
04:45 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Twitter Says it Will Label Tweets From Trump and Other Leaders That Break Its Rules
Twitter plans to place a disclaimer on future tweets from world leaders that break its rules but which Twitter decides are in the "public interest," the company said in a blog post Thursday. From a re...
03:22 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Personnel Worked With China's Military on Research Projects
Several Huawei employees have collaborated on research projects with Chinese armed forces personnel, indicating closer ties to the country's military than previously acknowledged by the smartphone and...
02:41 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot India Reportedly Wants To Build Its Own WhatsApp For Government Communications
India may have plans to follow France's footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications. From a report: The New Delhi government is said to be...
02:02 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot EU Should Ban AI-Powered Citizen Scoring and Mass Surveillance, Say Experts
A group of policy experts assembled by the EU has recommended that it ban the use of AI for mass surveillance and mass "scoring of individuals"; a practice that potentially involves collecting varied ...
01:00 pm - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot A DIY Internet Network In NYC Now Covers Large Parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A community-run operation named NYC Mesh is on a mission: to deliver better, cheaper broadband service to New York City. The locally-run nonprofit...
10:00 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Ericsson To Build 'Fully-Automated' 5G Factory In the US By Early 2020
Ericsson announced its plans to build a 5G factory in the U.S. sometime early next year. "The factory will be the Swedish telco equipment maker's first fully-automated factory, the company said, and w...
07:00 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Early Soyuz Spacecraft Had a Peculiar User Interface, Says Developer Charles Simonyi
Tekla Perry writes: When WYSIWIG pioneer Charles Simonyi went to space, he couldn't but help notice the awkward user interface on the rocket's control panel. It was a case of legacy systems, not wanti...
03:30 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Risk For Dementia May Increase With Long-Term Use of Anticholinergics, Study Suggests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A new study suggests that people who take a class of common medicines called anticholinergic drugs for several years may be more likely to ...
02:02 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Researchers Demonstrate How US Emergency Alert System Can Be Hijacked and Weaponized
After an emergency alert was accidentally sent to Hawaii residents last year, warning of an impending nuclear ballistic missile attack, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder were prompted ...
01:25 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot FCC Says Verizon Can SIM Lock Phones Again
The FCC has granted Verizon a partial waiver to start SIM locking new handsets to its network for 60 days. "This news out of the FCC is the response to Verizon requesting back in February that it be a...
12:45 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Swapping Spark Plugs For Nanopulses Could Boost Engine Efficiency By 20 Percent
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Transient Plasma Systems has its roots in pulsed power technology developed for the Department of Defense at the University of Southern Californi...
12:03 am - Thu, June 27, 2019
Slashdot Reddit Quarantines Pro-Trump Forum Because of Threats
The r/The_Donald subreddit has been "quarantined" by Reddit administrators after a series of threats against police were posted there. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an excerpt from The Daily Beast: "...
11:20 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Apple Hires Key Chip Designer From ARM As Own Efforts Ramp Up
Apple has hired one of ARM's top chip engineers as the iPhone maker looks to expand its own chip development to more powerful devices, including the Mac, and new categories like a headset. Bloomberg r...
10:40 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Second Florida City Pays Giant Ransom To Ransomware Gang In a Week
Less than a week after a first Florida city agreed to pay a whopping $600,000 to get their data back from hackers, now, a second city's administration has taken the same path. On Monday, in an emergen...
10:00 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot New Flaw Discovered On Boeing 737 Max
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A new flaw has been discovered in the computer system for the Boeing 737 Max that could push the plane downward, according to two sources familiar with th...
09:21 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony Ask Trump To Skip Tariffs on Gaming Consoles
President Donald Trump's plan to increase tariffs on goods produced in China would affect a wide range of consumer goods. One gadget that could see a price increase because of a trade war is the video...
08:42 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Google Warns of Microsoft SwiftKey Losing Access To Gmail on July 15
Speaking of Google, the company is sending out warnings to Microsoft SwiftKey users that the keyboard will no longer be able to access the data in Google Accounts, including Gmail content, starting on...
08:02 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Firefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History To Fool Advertisers
Security through obscurity is out, security through tomfoolery is in. From a report: That's the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, "a new kind of incognito" browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs...
07:21 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Lets Users Override Recommendations After Criticism
YouTube said it will let users override automated recommendations after criticism over how the online video service suggests and filters toxic clips. From a report: "Although we try our best to sugges...
06:42 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot In a World First, Facebook To Give Data on Hate Speech Suspects To French Courts
Facebook said it has agreed to give the names of French users who are suspected of using hate speech on its platform to the local courts when requested. The deal is believed to be the first of its kin...
06:00 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Google Now Allows Users To Auto-Delete Their Location History
Google today began rolling out location history deletion tools to Android and iOS, giving users a relatively simple way to limit the scope of Google's location tracking. Users can only choose between ...
05:21 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot TV is Still the Most Common Way For Americans To Get Local News, But Fewer People Are Watching
Local TV is trusted and is still the preferred method of getting news (thanks mostly to people 50 and up). But viewership for local TV news continues to decline, according to research released by Pew ...
04:41 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot VESA Publishes DisplayPort 2.0 Video Standard, Offers Support For Beyond-8K Resolutions and Higher Refresh Rates For 4K/HDR
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) today announced that it has released version 2.0 of the DisplayPort (DP) audio/video standard. DP 2.0 is the "first major update to the DisplayPort s...
04:01 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Intel, Arm To Help Create New IoT Standard For Device Onboarding
Intel is working with rival Arm to create a new industry standard for an important issue in the Internet of Things market: making sure that devices are properly configured and connected to the cloud. ...
03:20 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Eight of the World's Biggest Technology Service Providers Were Hacked by Chinese Cyber Spies in an Elaborate and Years-Long Invasion
The invasion exploited weaknesses in those companies, their customers, and the Western system of technological defense, Reuters reported on Wednesday. From the report: Hacked by suspected Chinese cybe...
02:42 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot How To Evaluate Computers That Don't Quite Exist
sciencehabit writes: To gauge the performance of a supercomputer, computer scientists turn to a standard tool: a set of algorithms called LINPACK that tests how fast the machine solves problems with h...
02:03 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Telecom Gear Much More Vulnerable To Hackers Than Rivals' Equipment, Report Says
Telecommunications gear made by China's Huawei is far more likely to contain flaws that could be leveraged by hackers for malicious use than equipment from rival companies, according to new research b...
01:00 pm - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot After Republican Protest, Oregon's Climate Plan Dies
Oregon's climate change bill that would cap carbon emissions and make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas production is dead, Senate President Peter Courtney, a Democrat, announced on the state Sen...
10:00 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Mars Colonization Possible Through Sperm Bank In Space, Study Suggests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: All-female astronaut crews could reproduce in space without the help of accompanying men, new research suggests. The study found that frozen samp...
07:00 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Robots To Take 20 Million Jobs, Worsening Inequality, Study Finds
A new study by Oxford Economics, a private British-based research and consulting firm, says robots are expected to take over some 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide by 2030, extending a trend of ...
03:30 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot US Tech Companies Sidestep a Trump Ban, To Keep Selling To Huawei
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A number of the United States' biggest chip makers have sold millions of dollars of products to Huawei despite a Trump administration ban (...
02:02 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Smartphones and Fitness Trackers Are Being Used To Gauge Employee Performance
A new system to assess the performance of employees is claimed to be more objective and thus more accurate by utilizing smartphones and fitness trackers. New Atlas reports: The passive system incorpor...
01:25 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Lightyear One Debuts As the First Long-Range Solar-Powered Electric Car
The new Lightyear One is a prototype electric car from a Netherlands startup that gets all it needs to run from the sun. It features a sleek, driver-friendly design and also boasts a range of 450 mile...
12:45 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Looks To Demonetization As Punishments For Major Creators, But It Doesn't Work
YouTube is looking to send a message to content creators who step out of line by disabling ads on videos that infringe on the site's policies. The punishment is meant to revoke a key source of income,...
12:02 am - Wed, June 26, 2019
Slashdot Two-Thirds of American Employees Regret Their College Degrees
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of emplo...
11:20 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Spotify Wants a Refund On Overpaid Royalties To US Songwriters, Report Says
Spotify is reportedly seeking a refund for overpayments made to songwriters and publishers last year, according to a report from Music Business Worldwide. CNET reports: Last year, a royalty rate-setti...
10:40 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot San Francisco Becomes First US City To Ban Sale of E-Cigarettes
San Francisco voted to ban e-cigarettes in the first legislation of its kind in the United States. The Guardian reports: Supervisors approved a measure banning the sale and distribution of e-cigarette...
10:03 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Ex-Chair of FCC Broadband Committee Gets Five Years In Prison For Fraud
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The former head of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) was sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding in...
09:23 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot US Government Announces Nationwide Crackdown on Robocallers
The US government announced a nationwide crackdown on illegal robocalls on Tuesday, targeting companies and individuals who have collectively placed over 1 billion unwanted calls for financial schemes...
08:43 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot New Silex Malware is Bricking IoT Devices, Has Scary Plans
A new strain of malware is wiping the firmware of IoT devices in attacks reminiscent of the old BrickerBot malware that destroyed millions of devices back in 2017. From a report: Named Silex, this mal...
08:03 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Toys 'R' Us, Back From the Dead, Will Open US Stores in 2019
Maybe American kids will only have to live through one Christmas without Toys "R" Us. About a year after shuttering U.S. operations, the remnant of the defunct toy chain is set to return this holiday ...
07:21 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Oracle Dyn DNS Services Shutting Down in 2020
Oracle has sent the following email to customers of DYN service: Since Oracle acquired Dyn in 2016 (and subsequently acquired Zenedge), the engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate ...
06:43 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World
An anonymous reader shares a report: The most astonishing thing about cement is how much air pollution it produces. Manufacturing the stone-like building material is responsible for 7% of global carbo...
06:02 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot 'Climate Apartheid': UN Expert Says Human Rights May Not Survive
The world is increasingly at risk of "climate apartheid," where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN h...
05:23 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Boeing Has So Many Grounded 737 Max Planes Waiting To Be Fixed They're Parking Them in the Employee Parking Lot
An anonymous reader shares a report: You may recall that, thanks to an issue with faulty sensors in the Boeing 737 Max flight control systems, those planes have been grounded after multiple crashes we...
04:45 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Announces OneDrive Personal Vault For Sensitive Files
Microsoft today announced OneDrive Personal Vault, a new security layer for protecting sensitive and important files. The feature is rolling out "soon" to the web, Android, iOS, and Windows 10 in Aust...
04:05 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot China's Biggest Startups Ditch Oracle and IBM for Home-Made Tech
For years, companies like Oracle and IBM invested heavily to build new markets in China for their industry-leading databases. Now, boosted in part by escalating U.S. tensions, one Chinese upstart is s...
03:22 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot US Bill To Force Tech Giants To Tell Users How Much Their Data is Worth
Two US senators have proposed a bill in Congress to force tech companies to disclose what data they collect about their users and how it is being leveraged by the platform for profit. From a report: N...
02:44 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Hackers Steal Data From Telcos in Espionage Campaign
Hackers broke into the systems of more than a dozen global telecom firms and stole huge amounts of data in a seven-year spying campaign, researchers from a cyber security company said, identifying lin...
02:00 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot New York City's Public Libraries to End Film Streaming Through Kanopy
Public library cardholders in New York City will no longer have access to tens of thousands of movies through Kanopy as of July 1, when the New York, Brooklyn and Queens public libraries end their par...
01:30 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Bernie Sanders Proposes Forgiving the Student Debt of 45 Million Americans
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan on Monday to erase the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan tab, intensifying the higher education policy debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential pr...
01:00 pm - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot FedEx Sues US Government Over 'Impossible' Task of Policing Exports To China
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. parcel delivery firm FedEx Corp on Monday sued the U.S. government, saying it should not be held liable if it inadvertently shipped products that...
10:00 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Apple's Seattle Workforce Will Quintuple By 2024
Apple is planning on bringing 2,000 jobs to Seattle by 2024 -- twice the number it initially planned. Engadget reports: The new roles would focus on software and hardware and effectively multiply Appl...
07:05 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon Heavy Rocket With Two Flight-Proven Booster Cores
SpaceX succeeded in launching its third mission with the Falcon Heavy high-capacity rocket it first launched successfully last year. "The rocket's STP-2 mission took off from Kennedy Space Center in F...
04:30 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Bernie Sanders Proposes Forgiving the Student Debt of 45 Million Americans
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan on Monday to erase the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan tab, intensifying the higher education policy debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential pr...
03:30 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot US Senators Want Social Media Firms To Tell Users How Much Their Data Is Worth
An anonymous reader shares a report from CNBC: A bipartisan team of senators introduced a bill Monday to require social media companies to disclose more information about the data they collect and mon...
02:02 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Google's New Media Literacy Program Teaches Kids How To Spot Disinformation, Fake News
Google announced this morning it's expanding its two-year-old digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, "Be Internet Awesome," to now include media literacy -- specifically, the ability ...
01:45 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Apple Cites Irrelevant Spotify Subscription Stats In New Antitrust Defense
In response to Spotify's antitrust complaint, Apple claims that Spotify has greatly exaggerated how much money is being taken by the App Store. "Apple says that it's currently taking a 15 percent cut ...
01:25 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Small Slug Blamed For Power Failure On Japan's High-Speed Rail Network
Last month, Japan's high-speed rail network suffered a massive power outage that cancelled a total of 26 trains and delayed an estimated 12,000 passengers. The cause of the outage? A single, small slu...
12:45 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Scientists Discover a New Way To Provide Plants the Nutrients They Need To Thrive
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a new method for delivering key nutrients to plant roots -- without having to ensure they...
12:03 am - Tue, June 25, 2019
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: What Do You Do With Your Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer that's exploded in popularity over the years thanks to its wide array of uses. While it was originally designed to promote the teaching of basic compu...
11:20 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot German Regulator Says It Discovered New Illegal Software On Daimler Diesels
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the weekend, Germany's auto regulator told Daimler that it would have to recall 42,000 Mercedes-Benz diesel vehicles after the group discove...
10:41 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot When Myspace Was King, Employees Abused a Tool Called 'Overlord' To Spy on Users
During the social network's heyday, multiple Myspace employees abused an internal company tool to spy on users, in some cases including ex-partners, Motherboard reported on Monday. From the report: Na...
10:01 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot US Launches Cyber-Attack Aimed At Iranian Rocket and Missile Systems
The US has responded to a recent rise in Iranian cyber-activity and the shooting of an unarmed drone last week by launching cyber-attacks against Iran's military IT systems. From a report: The cyber-a...
09:25 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline Today
Cloudflare issued a blog post explaining how Verizon sent a large chunk of the internet offline this morning after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania. The ...
09:06 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft's New Windows Terminal Is Now Available
You can now download a preview version of the new Windows Terminal app from the Store on Windows 10. From a report: Microsoft released this application on the evening of June 21 after a listing showed...
08:41 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs Unveils Its High-Tech 'City-Within-a-City' Plan for Toronto
Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's smart city subsidiary, released its massive plan Monday to transform a slice of Toronto's waterfront into a high-tech utopia. From a report: Eighteen months in the making and...
08:01 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot A Group of Microsoft Employees Is Fighting the Company's Political Action Committee
A group of more than 30 Microsoft employees is lobbying coworkers to stop donating to the company's political action committee in an effort to starve the PAC of funds, multiple Microsoft workers with ...
07:20 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Apple Releases First Public Betas of macOS Catalina, iOS 13 and iPadOS
Apple today seeded the first beta versions of upcoming macOS Catalina update, iOS 13 update, and iPadOS update to its public beta testing group, giving non-developers a chance to try out the software ...
06:40 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Ubuntu Reverses Decision, Says It Will Continue To Support 32-bit Packages
Canonical has issued a statement on Ubuntu's 32-bit future, saying it will continue to build and maintain a 32-bit archive going forward. From a report: Of course, there was some negativity surroundin...
06:00 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number
A major telephone outage hit the Netherlands on Monday, taking down the country's emergency number and leaving many businesses and municipalities unreachable by phone. From a report: Police sent offic...
05:20 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Bernie Sanders Proposes Forgiving the Student Debt of 45 Million Americans
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan on Monday to erase the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan tab, intensifying the higher education policy debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential pr...
05:00 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Bernie Sanders Proposes Forgiving the Student Debt of 45 Million Americans
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a plan on Monday to erase the country's $1.6 trillion outstanding student loan tab, intensifying the higher education policy debate in the 2020 Democratic presidential pr...
04:43 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot US Considers Requiring 5G Equipment For Domestic Use Be Made Outside China
The Trump administration is examining whether to require that next-generation 5G cellular equipment used in the U.S. be designed and manufactured outside China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalle...
04:04 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life
The Curiosity mission's scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. From a report: Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that co...
03:20 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot How One VC Firm Amassed a 24% Stake in Slack Worth $4.6 Billion
An anonymous reader shares a report: Stewart Butterfield loved the game, but not enough people agreed with him. He spent two years and raised roughly $11 million to build an online adventure game call...
02:42 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot USB Inventor Regrets Making Them So Difficult To Plug in Correctly
An anonymous reader shares a report: While plugging plug a mouse, a phone, or a thumb drive into your computer, you try to stick the USB into its slot, only to find it stopping prematurely. You flip i...
02:01 pm - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Raspberry Pi 4 Featuring Faster CPU, Up To 4GB of RAM Launched
Raspberry Pi today introduced a new version of its popular line of single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever, with the company promising "desktop performance c...
10:34 am - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Does Monopoly's Cash-Free AI Banker Teach the Wrong Lessons?
"An updated version of the classic board game Monopoly has done away with cash entirely and now uses a voice-activated AI banker instead," reports MarketWatch, asking whether this teaches game-players...
07:34 am - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Cop Awarded $585K After 'Dozens' Of Police Officers Accessed Their DMV Data 500 Times
Slashdot reader Iwastheone shares a story from Ars Technica about what happened after Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources sent a privacy notification to a police officer in 2013:An employee ha...
04:04 am - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft's Mistakes: What Not To Do When The Government Investigates Your Monopoly
As America's antitrust investigators eye Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon for possible government intervention, Bloomberg offers nine "lessons learned" from the way Microsoft handled its own antitr...
12:50 am - Mon, June 24, 2019
Slashdot Delta Airlines Begins Using Facial Recognition Scanners To Replace Boarding Passes
"Delta Air Lines announced it will give passengers who fly out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport the option to use facial recognition to board their flight instead of a standard boarding p...
11:55 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Remembering The Retiree Who Became America's Worst Counterfeiter
The Hustle tells the story of a mysterious legend who "produced thousands of the ugliest counterfeit $1 bills ever made...so poorly done that the Secret Service thought the perpetrator was intentional...
09:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Amazonians Visit High Schools To Inspect the Amazon Future Engineer Troops
theodp writes: Amazon Future Engineer students across the country are graduating from high school," reports the Amazon Day One blog, "and to celebrate, Amazonians visited select classrooms to meet som...
08:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot The Threat Actor You Can't Detect: Cognitive Bias
Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy shares news of a recent report from cybersecurity company Forcepoint's X-Lab, examining how cybersecurity decision-making is affected by six common biases:For ins...
07:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Remembering The ENIAC Programmers
On Princeton's "Freedom to Tinker" site, the founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project summarizes 20 years of its research, remembering the "incredible acts of computing innovation during and just afte...
06:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Are Universal Basic Income Proponents Making the Wrong Arguments?
An assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University criticizes the argument that technology "is quickly displacing a large number of workers, and the pace will only increase as automation and ...
05:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Bill Gates Shares His 'Greatest Mistake Ever'
Bill Gates "clearly hasn't got over his biggest mistake," writes Inc. columnist Chris Matyszczyk. Speaking at a recent VC firm event, Gates told the audience:The greatest mistake ever is... whatever m...
04:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot America's NSA Challenges Students With A Codebreaking Competition, Then Recruits Them
This year America's National Security Agency (NSA) is once again "developing a cyber challenge and daring more than 330 schools and 2,600 students to solve it," writes Federal News Network. Slashdot r...
03:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot The Flying Saddle: Would You Give It a Try?
schwit1 quotes SFGate: Airlines are squeezing as many passengers as they can onto their jets, but one seat manufacturer believes its product can help carriers push capacity to the absolute limit. And ...
02:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Are Medical IDs 'The Enemy of Privacy, Liberty, and Health'?
83-year-old former U.S. Senatior Ron Paul has published a new editorial on Zero Hedge:Last week, the House of Representatives voted in favor of a Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education approp...
01:34 pm - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Puts Slack On Internal List of 'Prohibited and Discouraged' Software
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report:GeekWire obtained an internal Microsoft list of prohibited and discouraged technology -- software and online services that the company doesn't want its employees usi...
11:34 am - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot America's Air Quality Is Slipping After Years of Improvement
The Grim Reefer shared this report from the Associated Press:Over the last two years America had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whet...
07:34 am - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic
Technology writer Matthew MacDonald began writing QuickBASIC code back in 1988 on the DOS operating system, sharing it on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. "I still remember writing code in white text on its ch...
04:34 am - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot Should Schools Teach Computer Science Instead of Physics?
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "Other than trying to keep my kids from falling down the stairs in the Governor's mansion I don't know how much I deal with physics daily," quipped Florida gov...
01:34 am - Sun, June 23, 2019
Slashdot How OIN's Linux-Based Patent Non-Aggression Community Drove Open Source Growth
"Some businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, still spend enormous amounts of time and money on intellectual property (IP) fights," reports ZDNet. But "thanks to the Open Invention Network (OIN), the lar...
11:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Gut Bacteria-Autism Link May Just Be Misinterpreted Data From a Confusing GUI
Remember that mouse study which concluded gut bacteria may contribute to autism symptoms? Jon Brock, a cognitive scientist with 18 years research experience on neurodevelopmental conditions, including...
10:35 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Iran Steps Up Cyberattacks Against America
An anonymous reader quotes MarketWatch:Iran has increased its offensive cyberattacks against the U.S. government and critical infrastructure as tensions have grown between the two nations, cybersecuri...
09:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot China Has Almost Half of The World's Supercomputers, Explores RISC-V and ARM
Slashddot reader dcblogs quote Tech Target:Ten years ago, China had 21 systems on the Top500 list of the world's largest supercomputing systems. It now has 219, according to the biannual listing, whic...
08:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway
"In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel," writes Ars Technica. Iwastheone shares thei...
07:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Will Hot-Desking Kill Your Company?
"If you hate your company, its employees and the shareholders then go ahead and introduce the latest management fad: Hot-desking," writes Forbes contributor Simon Constable. "It's a better way to dest...
06:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Intel Developing 'Data Parallel C' As Part of OneAPI Initiative
Intel's One API project aims "to simplify application development across diverse computing architectures." Now an anonymous reader quotes Phoronix:Intel announced an interesting development in their o...
05:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot 'Vast Quantities' of Recycled Plastics Are Actually Burned Or Dumped In Landfills
"A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the country are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins. Instead, they are being landfilled, burned or stockpiled..."...
05:04 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Mattermost Raises $50 Million For Its Open Source Slack Alternative
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:Mattermost, a startup developing what it characterizes as an open source messaging alternative to Google's Hangouts Chat, Atlassian's HipChat, Slack, and Microso...
04:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Should Slack-Like Chat Clients Replace Email?
This week the New York Times' Style section asked an interesting question. "Slack wants to replace email. Is that what we want?"The company says it has 88,000 paying customers -- a sliver of a sliver ...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Bitcoin Surges Past $11K. Is It Finally Gaining Acceptance?
The price of Bitcoin surged past $11,000 today -- less than 24 hours after surging past $10,000. Ars Technica points out Bitcoin's price has tripled in less than six months, "after crashing from an al...
02:34 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Chrome 'Has Become Surveillance Software. It's Time to Switch'
"You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?" warns Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler:Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the ...
01:00 pm - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Digital Assistants May Be Able To Automatically Detect When Someone Is Having a Heart Attack, Study Finds
Zorro shares a report from The Register: Smart speakers are always listening for wake words, and recording everything they hear to improve their neural networks and target their masters with marketing...
10:00 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot India's Sixth Biggest City Is Almost Entirely Out of Water
Millions of people are running out of water in Chennai, India's sixth largest city. The Chembarambakkam reservoir and the three other reservoirs that have traditionally supplied Chennai are nearly all...
07:00 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Bezos Says Blue Origin Will One Day Refuel Its Lunar Lander With Ice From the Moon
Earlier this week, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained how its spacecraft will eventually be powered with fuel harvested from the moon. CNBC reports: "We know things about the moon now...
03:30 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Clean Electricity Overtaking Fossil Fuels In Britain
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Britain is obtaining more power from zero-carbon sources than fossil fuels. The milestone has been...
02:03 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Amazon Patents 'Surveillance As a Service' Tech For Its Delivery Drones
Amazon's delivery drones may also be used to offer "surveillance as a service." According to The Verge, "Amazon was recently granted a patent that outlines how its UAVs could keep an eye on customers'...
01:42 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot NASA Hacked Because of Unauthorized Raspberry Pi Connected To Its Network
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A report published this week by the NASA Office of Inspector General reveals that in April 2018 hackers breached the agency's network and stole approxim...
01:25 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Google Is Killing YouTube's 'Hangouts On Air' This Year
The latest Google product coming to an end is "Hangouts on Air," a fairly popular service for broadcasting a group video call live over the internet. "Notices saying the service is 'going away later t...
12:45 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot The Online Advertising Industry Is Breaking the Law, Says UK Watchdog
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The online behavioral advertising industry is illegally profiling internet users. That's the damning assessment of the U.K.'s data protection regul...
12:05 am - Sat, June 22, 2019
Slashdot Honesty is Majority Policy in Lost Wallet Experiment
If you find a wallet stuffed with bank notes, do you pocket the cash or track down the owner to return it? We can each speak for ourselves, but now a team of economists have put the unsuspecting publi...
11:42 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Emergency Presidential Alert Texts Could Be Faked, Researchers Say
Fake presidential alerts could be sent to tens of thousands of phones, according to a report out of the University of Colorado Boulder. From a report: Researchers say they found a backdoor that let th...
11:20 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Millions of Dell PCs Vulnerable To Flaw In Pre-Installed Software
secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: Millions of PCs made by Dell and other OEMs are vulnerable to a flaw stemming from a component in pre-installed SupportAssist software. The flaw could enabl...
10:40 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Desjardins Data Breach Affecting 2.9 Million Members Caused By Employee Who's Since Been Fired
Freshly Exhumed shares a report from The Georgia Straight: The Quebec-based Desjardins Group has admitted to being victimized by one of the largest data breaches in Canadian history. Laval police info...
10:02 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Prisons Are Banning Books That Teach Prisoners How To Code
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Oregon Department of Corrections has banned prisoners from reading a number of books related to technology and programming, citing concerns ab...
09:25 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Poll: Americans Want NASA To Focus More On Asteroid Impacts, Less On Getting To Mars
An anonymous reader writes: Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for ...
08:45 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot One Legacy of Carl Sagan May Take Flight Next Week -- a Working Solar Sail
As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. From a report: Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will depos...
08:05 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes Says Libra Will Empower Corporations and Weaken Developing Countries, Urges Global Regulators To Act Now
In May, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes shocked many when he expressed grave concerns about Facebook's CEO, its business and its impact on the world. He went as far as suggesting that Facebook should...
07:25 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Intel Will Cut Desktop CPU Prices By 10-15% as Ryzen 3000 Draws Near, Report Says
It's just over two weeks until AMD's full Ryzen 3000 family of processors arrive, and it appears Intel is concerned about the effect they may have on its own chip sales. From a report: As such, the co...
06:50 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot WeTransfer Shared Its Users' Files With the Wrong People
WeTransfer, a popular online service to transfer and share files, has informed some of its customers of a security incident that resulted in it sharing emails with download links to wrong recipients. ...
06:10 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot US Blacklists More Chinese Tech Companies Over National Security Concerns
The Trump administration added five Chinese entities to a United States blacklist on Friday, further restricting China's access to American technology and stoking already high tensions as President Tr...
05:30 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot How Information is Like Snacks, Money, and Drugs To Your Brain
A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain's dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food. From a report: "To...
04:50 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Adds New Limits To Address the Spread of Hate Speech in Sri Lanka and Myanmar
As Facebook grapples with the spread of hate speech on its platform, it is introducing changes that limit the spread of messages in two countries where it has come under fire in recent years: Sri Lank...
04:10 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Gmail Confidential Mode is Neither Secure Nor Private
Even though Google launched confidential mode over a year ago, people are still confused about what it does. Is it actually secure or private? Is it encrypted? From a report: When you turn it on, does...
03:23 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Horns Are Growing on Young People's Skulls. Phone Use is To Blame, Research Suggests
What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit. From a report: New ...
02:41 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Why the Age of Electric Flight is Finally Upon Us
Aerospace firms are joining forces to tackle their industry's growing contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, with electric engines seen as one solution. But will this be enough to offset the growin...
02:00 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Wine Developers Concerned With Ubuntu Dropping 32-bit Support With Ubuntu 19.10
An anonymous reader shares a report: The news that Ubuntu will drop support for the 32-bit x86 architecture was discussed recently by the Wine developers, on the Wine-devel mailing list. The Wine deve...
01:00 pm - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Millions of Business Listings On Google Maps Are Fake -- and Google Profits
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Google's ubiquitous internet platform shapes what's real and what isn't for more than two billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps is ov...
10:00 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot US Beekeepers Lost 40 Percent of Honeybee Colonies Over Past Year, Survey Finds
Beekeepers across the U.S. lost four in 10 of their honeybee colonies over the past year, as the worst winter on record for tracked bee populations raised fresh concerns over the plight of the crucial...
07:00 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot US Video Streaming App YouNow Files Cryptocurrency Offering With SEC
U.S. live video streaming company YouNow on Wednesday filed with the SEC a public offering circular to distribute its own digital currency called Props. Reuters reports: The company said it does not i...
03:30 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot In Japan, It's a Riveting TV Plot: Can a Worker Go Home On Time?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last month, as Americans tuned in to the final episode of "Game of Thrones," Japan was indulging in its own television fantasy world. In th...
02:05 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot US Tells India It's Mulling Caps On H-1B Visas For Nations That Force Foreign Companies To Store Data Locally
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Reuters: The United States has told India it is considering caps on H-1B work visas for nations that force foreign companies to store data locally, three source...
01:45 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Philips Hue Company Announces Lights That Beam Data At 250 Mbps
"Signify, the company formerly known as Philips Lighting that produces Hue-branded smart lights, has announced a new range of internet-transmitting Li-Fi lights called Truelifi," reports The Verge. Th...
01:25 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Report Finds Quadriga Founder Stole Clients' Cryptocurrency Before Death
lazarus writes: As part of the investigation being done by Ernst & Young into the mismanagement of client's cash and cryptocurrency at Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp they have found that the late...
12:45 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Bank of America CEO: 'We Want a Cashless Society'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan embraced the digital money movement on Wednesday, saying his firm has "more to gain than anybody" from the bo...
12:02 am - Fri, June 21, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Usage Has Collapsed After Privacy Scandals, Data Shows
mrspoonsi shares a report from the Guardian: Facebook usage has plummeted over the last year, according to data seen by the Guardian, though the company says usage by other measures continues to grow....
11:20 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Google Admits Bug Could Let People Spy On Nest Cameras
Google on Thursday confirmed that a bug in its Nest security cameras could have allowed users to be spied on. The Daily Dot reports: The issue was first raised by a user on Facebook who recently sold ...
10:40 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Meds Prescriptions For 78,000 Patients Left In a Database With No Password
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A MongoDB database was left open on the internet without a password, and by doing so, exposed the personal details and prescription information for more...
10:01 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Samsung Galaxy Fold is Now Ready For Launch, Company Exec Says
Samsung Electronics' first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, will launch soon, as "most" issues linked to the screen have been solved, a Samsung Display executive has revealed. From a report: "Mos...
09:22 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Apple Launches Recall Program For Some MacBook Pros
Apple on Thursday launched a voluntary recall and replacement program on Thursday for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat an...
08:41 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Bipartisan House Lawmakers Announce Compromise Anti-Robocall Bill
A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers on Thursday unveiled a compromise bill aimed at thwarting the scourge of robocalls dialing up U.S. consumers, about one month after the Senate adopted its own anti...
07:40 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Google's Officially Done Making Its Own Tablets
Google's decided to step away from its self-made tablets and focus instead on the laptop form. From a report: To be clear, Google hadn't actually announced any tablet-specific products this year; the ...
07:21 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Fintech CEO Claims Facebook 'Ripped off' His Bank Start-up's Logo For Cryptocurrency Project
The founder of online bank Current claims Facebook copied his company's logo for the social network's bid to reinvent the global financial system. From a report: Stuart Sopp, a Wall Street trader turn...
06:41 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Using CRISPR To Resurrect the Dead
One of our most powerful tools to fight biological obliteration is CRISPR, a burgeoning gene-editing technology that acts like a molecular blade, slicing DNA apart and allowing us to add and subtract ...
06:01 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Millions of Business Listings on Google Maps Are Fake -- and Google Profits
An anonymous reader shares a report: Out of habit, Nancy Carter, a retired federal employee, turned to Google for help one August evening. She ended the night wishing she hadn't. Ms. Carter had pulled...
05:21 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Slack is Now Worth More Than $20 Billion
Five years ago, Slack officially launched out of the ashes of a failed gaming project. Now the company is worth more than $20 billion. From a report: Slack, the workplace communication tool popular in...
04:41 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot The Himalayas Are in Even Worse Shape Than We Thought
New research shows just how much global warming is eating away at the glaciers on the world's highest peaks. From a report: A new study published this week in Science Advances offers one of the most c...
04:01 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Firefox Zero-Day Was Used In Attack Against Coinbase Employees, Not Its Users
An anonymous reader writes: A recent Firefox zero-day that has made headlines across the tech news world this week was actually used in attacks against Coinbase employees, and not the company's users....
03:21 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Music Industry Targets Troll Farms Distorting Streaming Revenues
A music industry hit parade including Spotify, Amazon and Universal is moving to stifle an emerging threat to the sector's business model: fake streams [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an al...
02:41 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel Oppose Proposed Tariffs on Laptops, Tablets
Dell, HP, Microsoft and Intel have opposed U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to include laptop computers and tablets among the Chinese goods targeted for tariffs. From a report: Dell, HP and Micr...
02:00 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Florida City Pays $600,000 To Ransomware Gang To Have Its Data Back
The city council for Riviera Beach, Florida, voted this week to pay more than $600,000 to a ransomware gang so city officials could recover data that has been locked and encrypted more than three week...
01:00 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Slack Is Going Public At $16 Billion Value
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In just five years, Slack has grown to have more than 10 million users and has become a verb in the process. "I'll Slack you" is shorthand for sending a m...
12:00 pm - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Calibra Wallet Won't Launch in India, Facebook's Biggest Market
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe....
10:00 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Tech Companies Are Binge-Hiring Neuroscientists
pacopico writes: There's a very weird trend going on in Silicon Valley right now where tech giants like Apple, Facebook and Twitter are raiding university neuroscience labs. They're hiring people who ...
07:00 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Norway Island Wants To Be World's First Time-Free Zone
Sommaroy, an island in northern Norway that means "Summer Island," wants to become the world's first time-free zone. CNN reports: On this island in West Tromso, north of the Arctic Circle, the sun doe...
03:30 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Brooklyn-Based Artist Jason Isolini Is Hacking Google To Create Surreal Street View Art
An anonymous reader shares a report from Motherboard: Brooklyn-based artist Jason Isolini worked as a contractor for Google Maps, capturing 360-images inside businesses and uploading them. Now, instea...
03:00 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Calibra Wallet Won't Launch in India, Facebook's Biggest Market
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe....
01:30 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Millionaire Hacker Gets 9 Years In Death of Man Building Nuclear Bunker Tunnels
A wealthy stock trader and "skilled computer hacker" was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison for the fiery death of a man who was helping him secretly dig tunnels for a nuclear bunker beneath a M...
01:10 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft's Chromium Edge Browser Now Available On Windows 7 and Windows 8
The Chromium-powered Edge browser is now available on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 for testing today. The Verge reports: The release comes two months after Chromium Edge first debuted on Windows 10, a...
12:50 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot Boeing To Use Computer Simulations Instead of Physical Certification Tests For Some Aircraft
New submitter Falconhell writes: In an ironic turn of events, Boeing wants to skip some physical certification tests and use only simulations. Given their current situation, this seems like a rather c...
12:10 am - Thu, June 20, 2019
Slashdot New York State Lawmakers Agree To Pass a Sweeping Climate Plan
New York lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan that could help the state achieve a net-zero economy in which all energy is drawn from carbon-free sources by 2050. "The bill would requi...
11:30 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot One Day of Work a Week Is Most 'Effective' Dose For Mental Health, Study Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Just one day of work per week is the most "effective dose" to give the mental health benefits of paid employment, research suggests. A study indicat...
11:10 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Twitter Will Remove Precise Location Tagging In Tweets, Citing Lack of Use
Twitter announced today that it is removing the option to tag precise locations in tweets because most people don't use this feature. It will however continue to be available for photos via Twitter's ...
10:50 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Samsung Auto-Email Signature Accidentally Reveals Scripted Government News Story
Two days ago, Egypt's former president, Mohammed Morsi, collapsed in court during a trial and died from a sudden heart attack. Even though Morsi was the first democratically elected Egyptian president...
10:10 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Oracle Issues Emergency Update To Patch Actively Exploited WebLogic Law
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oracle on Tuesday published an out-of-band update patching a critical code-execution vulnerability in its WebLogic server after researchers warne...
09:30 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Fortnite Makers Grilled By UK Politicians Over Game Safety
The makers of Fortnite, one of the most popular video games ever, have been quizzed by member of parliaments in the UK over what measures are taken to protect players of the game. From a report: Epic ...
08:50 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Content Moderators Break NDAs To Expose Shocking Working Conditions
Three former Facebook content moderators agreed to put themselves in legal jeopardy to expose the appalling working conditions they experienced while employed by a vendor for the tech giant, according...
08:14 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot How Secure Are Zip Files? Senator Wyden Asks NIST To Develop Standards For Safely Sending and Receiving Files
Federal workers and the public in general might be mistaken about the security of .zip files, Sen. Ron Wyden said on Wednesday [PDF], and he's asking the National Institute of Standards and Technology...
07:30 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot 'Avengers: Endgame' Is Returning To Theaters With New Footage
Perhaps 'Avengers: Endgame' might be able to beat Avatar's massive box office record after all. From a report: Marvel has apparently decided to just re-release the damn thing. An extended version of t...
06:50 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Under Federal Investigation Over Allegations it Violates Children's Privacy
The U.S. government is in the late stages of an investigation into YouTube for its handling of children's videos, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing four people familiar with the matter...
06:10 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Calibra Wallet Won't Launch in India, Facebook's Biggest Market
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe....
05:30 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Google's Private Join and Compute Gives Companies Data Insights While Preserving Privacy
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over 70 million records were stolen or leaked from poorly configured databases last year, making privacy a top concern. That's no doubt one motivation behind Googl...
04:50 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Apple's First Four iOS Apps For Mac Are Getting an Upgrade
Apple is counting on apps built for the iPad and the iPhone being converted to the Mac as a way to infuse new energy -- and a lot of new software -- into the granddaddy of its devices. From a report: ...
04:10 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Cloudflare Announces an Ethereum Gateway
Internet security provider Cloudflare is introducing the Ethereum Gateway to its Distributed Web Gateway toolbox enabling users to interact with the Ethereum network without installing any software. F...
03:25 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot YouTube and UMG Partner To Remaster Over 1,000 Iconic Music Videos From SD To Full-HD
YouTube and Universal Music Group have teamed up to revamp more than 1,000 videos from artists including Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Billy Idol and the Spice Girls. From a report: The goal is to "ensure cur...
02:47 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot YouTube, Under Fire, Considers Major Changes To Kids' Content
YouTube is considering far-reaching changes to its platform in the wake of a string of incidents that put the video-streaming powerhouse on the defensive. From a report: Executives at the Google unit ...
02:06 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot He Says He Invented Bitcoin and Is Suing Those Who Doubt Him
At a convention on digital currency, rarely does an audience Q&A session include a question as incendiary as, "Why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?" But that's how a discussion a...
01:00 pm - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot World's Population Is Projected To Nearly Stop Growing By the End of the Century
schwit1 writes: The world's population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of...
10:00 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Amazon Expands Air Cargo Fleet With 15 More Planes, Will Have 70 Planes By 2021
Amazon announced this morning the expansion of its own air delivery network, Amazon Air. "The retailer says it's leasing an additional 15 Boeing 737-800 cargo aircraft from partner GE Capital Aviation...
07:00 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Two Potentially Life-Friendly Planets Found Orbiting a Nearby Star
A tiny, old star just 12 light-years away might host two temperate, rocky planets, astronomers announced today. If they're confirmed, both of the newly spotted worlds are nearly identical to Earth in ...
03:30 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Ireland To Ban New Petrol, Diesel Vehicles By 2030
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Irish government plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, as part of a major strategy to protect the environment. The aim ...
02:02 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Bernie Sanders Supports Video Game Workers Unions
U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken to Twitter to announce his support for video game workers unions. "In his message, Sanders gives shout-outs to IATSE (the International...
01:25 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Secretive Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset For China
Magic Leap, a secretive U.S. startup that makes a $2,295 augmented-reality headset, filed a lawsuit Monday accusing one of its former engineers of stealing its technology to create his own AR device f...
12:45 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Facebook's Calibra Is a Secret Weapon For Monetizing Its New Cryptocurrency
Earlier today, Facebook announced its cryptocurrency "Libra" and the nonprofit association that will oversee it. "But behind Facebook's ambitions to create a quasi-nation state ruled by mostly corpora...
12:02 am - Wed, June 19, 2019
Slashdot Engineers Boost Output of Solar Desalination System By 50 Percent
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers in Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) this week showed they could boost the efficiency of their solar-powered desalination system...
11:20 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot House Lawmakers Demand End To Warrantless Collection of Americans' Data
Two House lawmakers are pushing an amendment that would effectively defund a massive data collection program run by the National Security Agency unless the government promises to not intentionally col...
10:40 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Google Explains How It Licenses Song Lyrics For Search, Will Add Attribution
Over the weekend, Google Search was caught allegedly copying song lyrics from Genius.com. In response, Google published a long explanation of how lyrics in Search work and said that they will add attr...
10:03 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot YouTuber Simone Giertz Transformed a Tesla Model 3 Into a Pickup Truck
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Simone Giertz was tired of waiting for Elon Musk to unveil his new Tesla pickup truck, so she decided to make one herself. The popular YouTuber and ...
09:25 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Senator Rubio Targets Huawei Over Patents
hackingbear writes: While intellectual property violation is a major accusation against China in the on-going US-China trade war, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio filed legislation on Monday that would preven...
08:45 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Google Launches Chrome Extension For Flagging Bad URLs To the Safe Browsing Team
Google today launched a new Chrome extension that will simplify the process of reporting a malicious site to the Google Safe Browsing team so that it can be analyzed, reviewed, and blacklisted in Chro...
08:05 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Token Runs Into Instant Political Opposition in Europe
Hours after Facebook unveiled its cryptocurrency project today, European officials have called for scrutiny of the plan, raising concerns over whether the project was sufficiently regulated. From a re...
07:21 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Iceland's Data Centers Are Booming -- Here's Why That's a Problem
The southwestern tip of Iceland is a barren volcanic peninsula called Reykjanesskagi. It's home to the twin towns of Keflavik and Njardvik, around 19,000 people, and the country's main airport. On the...
06:41 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Google Pledges $1 Billion To Tackle Bay Area Housing Crisis
Google pledged $1 billion over the next 10 years to try to address an affordable housing crisis California's Bay Area. From a report: The tech giant will re-purpose $750 million of its own land for re...
06:00 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Boaty McBoatface Makes Significant Climate Change Discovery on First Mission
The British research submarine Boaty McBoatface has made an impressive debut in the scientific arena, discovering a significant link between Antarctic winds and rising sea temperatures on its maiden o...
05:20 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot City of Berlin Backs Plan To Freeze Rents For Five Years
The Berlin Senate on Tuesday approved a five-year rent freeze designed to tame soaring housing costs in the German capital, bowing to pressure from residents angry that their city has become unafforda...
04:40 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Woman Knocked Down While on Phone Wins Payout From Cyclist
A woman who was knocked unconscious by a cyclist will be awarded compensation, despite a judge finding she had stepped into the road while looking at her phone. From a report: Robert Hazeldean, a gard...
04:00 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Anti-Spam Service Truecaller Adds Free Voice Calling Feature
An anonymous reader shares a report: Truecaller, an app best known for helping users screen calls from strangers and spammers, is adding yet another feature to its service as it bolsters its super app...
03:20 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Amazon's Ring May Be Branching Out Beyond Outdoor Cameras
The Amazon panopticon may soon be getting a few new eyes. From a report: In February 2018, Amazon paid $1 billion to acquire Ring, the connected-camera doorbell company whose founder was once rejected...
02:30 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Google Calendar is Down
Multiple users are reporting this hour that they are unable to use Google Calendar service. Many attempting to visit the site say they are being welcomed with a "Error 404 and Not Found" error. The ap...
02:00 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Announces Libra Cryptocurrency
Facebook has finally revealed the details of its cryptocurrency Libra. From a blog post: Today we're sharing plans for Calibra, a newly formed Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial se...
01:00 pm - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Siemens Gamesa Unveils World First Electrothermal Energy Storage System
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Spanish renewable energy giant and offshore wind energy leader Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy last week inaugurated operations of its electroth...
10:00 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Scientists Use Sound To See Around Corners
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Spies may soon have another tool to carry out their shadowy missions: a new device that uses sound to "see" around corners. Previously, researchers ...
09:14 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Announces Libra Cryptocurrency
Facebook has finally revealed the details of its cryptocurrency Libra. From a blog post: Today we're sharing plans for Calibra, a newly formed Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial se...
07:00 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Mysterious Clouds On Mars Formed By 'Meteoric Smoke,' Study Says
Scientists have discovered that some clouds on Mars are created from the debris of meteors that burn up in the planet's atmosphere. "This 'meteoric smoke,' described in a paper published Monday in Nat...
03:30 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot China Is Harvesting Organs From Detainees, Tribunal Concludes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An independent tribunal sitting in London has concluded that the killing of detainees in China for organ transplants is continuing, and victims i...
02:03 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Google Is Finally Taking Charge of the RCS Rollout
Google is finally taking charge of the RCS rollout by allowing Android users in the UK and France to opt in to RCS Chat services provided directly by Google instead of waiting for their carrier to sup...
01:25 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot New Deepfake Algorithm Allows You To Text-Edit the Words of a Speaker In a Video
It is now possible to take a talking-head style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker's words as simply as you'd edit text in a word processor. A new deepfake algorithm can process the audio and ...
12:45 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot AT&T Cuts Another 1,800 Jobs As It Finishes Fiber-Internet Buildout
AT&T is planning to cut another 1,800 jobs from its wireline division. "Last week, AT&T declared more than 1,800 jobs nationwide as 'surplus,' meaning they are slated to be eliminated in Augus...
12:03 am - Tue, June 18, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft's Plan To Split OS From Shell Takes Shape
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The latest Windows preview from the 20H1 branch, build 18917, has some hidden components that signal a future where the Windows Shell UI parts, such as ...
11:20 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Adobe's Experimental AI Tool Can Tell If Something's Been Photoshopped
Adobe and UC Berkeley researchers are working on tool that can tell if a photo has been manipulated in Adobe Photoshop. The goal is to cut down on fake content and "to increase trust and authority in ...
10:40 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot First Amendment Constraints Don't Apply To Private Platforms, Supreme Court Affirms
In a case that could have potential implications for social media, the Supreme Court has ruled that a nonprofit running public access channels isn't bound by governmental constraints on speech. "The c...
10:03 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Nvidia Will Support ARM Hardware For High-Performance Computing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany this week, Santa Clara-based chipmaker Nvidia announced that it will su...
09:25 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot YouTube is Too Big To Fix Completely, Google CEO Says
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says YouTube is too big to completely fix the site's problems with harmful content. From a report: During a CNN interview that aired Sunday, Pichai was asked whether there wil...
08:45 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Linux PCs, Servers, Gadgets Can Be Crashed by 'Ping of Death' Network Packets
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: The Register reports that it is possible to crash network-facing Linux servers, PCs, smartphones and tablets, and gadgets, or slow down their network connections, by sending...
08:05 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Robocalls Are Overwhelming Hospitals and Patients, Threatening a New Kind of Health Crisis
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the heart of Boston, Tufts Medical Center treats scores of health conditions, from administering measles vaccines for children to pioneering next-generation too...
07:25 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot The League of Entropy Forms To Offer Acts of Public Randomness
Cloudflare, along with a group of individual and academic partners, is forming a new coalition that will provide truly random, unpredictable numbers for a variety of applications, including election s...
06:46 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft's To-Do App Comes To Mac
Microsoft has released To-Do for Mac, finally giving Apple users access to the task management tool on their desktops. The Mac app will allow users to work offline, view their upcoming tasks under "My...
06:05 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot A Quarter of Major CMSs Use Outdated MD5 as the Default Password Hashing Scheme
Over a quarter of all the major content management systems (CMSs) use the old and outdated MD5 hashing scheme as the default for securing and storing user passwords. From a report: Some of the project...
05:25 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot A 53-Year-Old Network Coloring Conjecture Is Disproved
In just three pages, a Russian mathematician has presented a better way to color certain types of networks than many experts thought possible. From a report:A paper posted online last month has dispro...
04:45 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Tech Companies Need To Take Responsibility For the 'Chaos' They Create, Tim Cook Says
Apple CEO Tim Cook said Sunday in a commencement address at Stanford University that technology companies need to take responsibility for the "chaos" they create. From a report: He did not name specif...
04:05 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot What Really Happened To Malaysia's Missing Airplane
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's disappearance in March 2014 instantly become a global news phenomenon, as multiple countries joined the search for the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew. But th...
03:30 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Says US Ban Hurting More Than Expected, To Wipe $30 Billion Off Revenue
China's Huawei has taken a harder-than-expected hit from a U.S. ban, the company's founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said, and slashed revenue expectations for the year. From a report: Ren's downbeat asses...
02:50 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Samsung Recommends Scanning QLED TVs For Viruses
Samsung has reminded owners of its smart TVs that they should be regularly scanning for malware using its built-in virus scanning software. From a report: In a tweet, Samsung US support account shared...
02:07 pm - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Yahoo Japan Is Under Fire for Its China-Like Rating System
Some users of Yahoo Japan are rising up against Japan's biggest web portal after the rollout of a new rating system that's being compared with a social-scoring initiative in China. From a report: The ...
10:34 am - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot 7,000 Developers Report Their Top Languages: Java, JavaScript, and Python
"JetBrains released its State of Developer Ecosystem 2019 report, which found while Java is still the most popular primary language and JavaScript is the most used overall, Python is gaining speed," r...
07:34 am - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: Does Anyone Still Like Godzilla?
There's now a new $175 million remake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I loved it, Msmash walked out of it, and BeauHD didn't bother to go see it. The movie performed poorly at the box office, but I...
04:34 am - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Why New York's Subway Still Uses OS/2
Every day 5.7 million people ride the subway in New York City -- and are subjected to both "the whims of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the unheard-of reliability of a marginally successful op...
02:01 am - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Upgrade Your Memory With A Surgically Implanted Brain Chip
Bloomberg reports on a five-year, $77 million project by America's Department of Defense to create an implantable brain device that restores memory-generation capacity for people with traumatic brain ...
12:01 am - Mon, June 17, 2019
Slashdot Twitch Sues Troll Streamers Who Flooded Site With Violent Videos and Pornography
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:Twitch Interactive, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon.com, has sued anonymous trolls who flooded the site last month with pornography, violent content and...
11:05 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot A New Hidden Way of Web Browser Profiling, Identification and Tracking
Researchers from Austria's Graz University of Technology "have devised an automated system for browser profiling using two new side channel attacks that can help expose information about software and ...
09:44 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Researcher Publishers 7 Million (Still Public) Venmo Transactions on GitHub
Remember the outrage last year when a researcher discovered that for Venmo's 40 million users, all transactions are "public" by default and broadcast on Venmo's API? More than a year later, computer s...
08:54 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot 'Genius' Site Said It Used Morse Code To Catch Google Stealing Song Lyrics
"Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site," reports the...
07:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Google's Login Chief: Apple's Sign-In Button Is Better Than Using Passwords
After Apple announced a single sign-on tool last week, The Verge interviewed Google product management director Mark Risher. Though Google offers its own single sign-on tool, The Verge found him "surp...
06:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Michigan Town Approves Fiber Internet Despite Intense Lobbying
Long-time Slashdot reader Proudrooster writes: Fiber Internet is coming to Traverse City, Michigan in the hopes of attracting high tech startups and helping the city become a high-tech hub. Even in th...
05:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot America Planted Malware In Russia's Power Grid, Says NYT
"The U.S. military's Cyber Command has gotten more aggressive than ever against Russia in the past year, placing 'potentially crippling malware' in systems that control the country's electrical grid,"...
04:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Why 'Ambient Computing' Is Just A Marketing Buzzword -- For Now
An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan: Ambient computing is real. It's the next megatrend in computing.... To interact in an "ambient computing" context means to not care and n...
03:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Massive Electrical Failure Cuts Power To Nearly All Of Argentina On Election Day -- and Uruguay
Iwastheone quotes the BBC:A massive electrical failure has left almost all of Argentina and Uruguay without power, according to a major Argentine electricity provider. Authorities say the cause of the...
02:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Facebook's Photorealistic Simulator For AI Runs At 10,000 FPS
malachiorion writes:Facebook just open sourced a simulator for testing and training embodied AI systems -- like virtual robots. They worked with AR/VR researchers to release the simulator along with w...
01:34 pm - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Uber's Plan To Deliver McDonald's Hamburgers By Drone
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:The company's new initiative -- a collaborative effort between its Uber Eats and Uber Elevate divisions -- began with tests in San Diego using fast food ...
11:34 am - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Do Google and Facebook Threaten Our 'Ambient Privacy'?
This week Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski (also a web developer and social critic) asked readers of his blog to consider an emerging threat to ambient privacy. He defines it as "the understanding th...
07:34 am - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot 'How Close Are We to Self-Driving Cars, Really?'
Chris Urmson helped pioneer self-driving car technology at Google before founding Aurora (which sells self-driving car software to automakers, and this week announced a new partnership with Chrysler a...
04:34 am - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Security Cameras AI = Dawn of Non-Stop Robot Surveillance
AmiMoJo shared this post from one of the ACLU's senior technology policy analysts about what happens when security cameras get AI upgrades: [I]magine that all that video were being watched -- that mil...
01:34 am - Sun, June 16, 2019
Slashdot Are Open Source Developers Being Underfunded and Exploited?
Donation-based open source programmer Andre Staltz recently collected data from GitHub, Patreon, and OpenCollective to try to calculate how much money is being donated to popular projects. The result...
11:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot News Industry Argues Google and Facebook 'Rob Journalism of Its Revenue', Seek Government Help
This week USA Today's former editor-in-chief argued that "Tech overlords Google and Facebook have used monopoly to rob journalism of its revenue," in an op-ed shared by schwit1:Over the past decade, t...
10:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot These Are the Internet of Things Devices That Are Most Targeted By Hackers
ZDNet reports:Internet-connected security cameras account for almost half of the Internet of Things devices that are compromised by hackers even as homes and businesses continue to add these and other...
09:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Target Experiences A 'Massive' Nationwide Cash Register Outage
CBS News reports:Target acknowledged nationwide "system issues" affecting its stores on Saturday that prevented its customers from checking out at registers. The outage caused long checkout lines at T...
08:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Star Trek Logo Spotted On Mars
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot brings us news about the southern hemisphere of Mars:The University of Arizona HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) has posted a photo of curious c...
07:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot How to Get XKCD Author Randall Munroe To Visit Your City
Since 2005 Randall Munroe has been the author/illustrator of the popular nerdy comic strip XKCD -- and he's now planning to publish "the world's least useful self-help book." How To: Absurd Scientific...
06:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot New Hampshire Unveils a Historical Highway Marker For The BASIC Programming Language
"It took 10 months to get it done, but the Granite State is now officially a Geeky State," writes Concord Monitor science reporter David Brooks. "The latest New Hampshire Historical Highway Marker, ce...
06:04 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot KDE Plasma 5.16 Released
Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.16, the newest iteration of the popular desktop environment. It features an improved notification system, Not only can ...
05:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Vim and Neo Editors Vulnerable To High-Severity Bug
JustAnotherOldGuy quotes Threatpost:A high-severity bug impacting two popular command-line text editing applications, Vim and Neovim, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands. Security ...
04:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot FBI Issues Search Warrant To 8chan For IP Address of Shooter, Commenters
An anonymous reader quotes the Daily Beast:The online forum where alleged Chabad of Poway shooter John Earnest shared a livestream of the shooting was served a search warrant in April for the IP and m...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Caterpillar Takes Tiny 'Cat & Cloud' Coffee Shop To Court Over Trademark
"Caterpillar Inc. is trying to stop a tiny cafe from using the word cat," reports Fast Company. Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes:Caterpillar wishes to cancels the coffee shop's trademark...
02:34 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Python Passes C on TIOBE Index, Predicted To Pass C and Java
Python reached another new all-time high on the TIOBE index, now representing 8.5% of the results for the search query +"<language> programming" on the top 25 search engines. Python overtook C++...
01:00 pm - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot One Dead After Fecal Transplant Gone Wrong, FDA Warns
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Ars Technica: One patient has died and another became seriously ill after fecal transplants inadvertently seeded their innards with a multi-drug resistant bacterial in...
10:00 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Cellebrite Says It Can Unlock Any iPhone For Cops
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Friday afternoon, the Israeli forensics firm and law enforcement contractor Cellebrite publicly announced a new version of its product known as a Uni...
07:00 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Astronomers Detected Signs of Our Milky Way Colliding With Another Galaxy
fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Antlia 2, the "ghost of a galaxy" orbiting the Milky Way, is a dark horse in more ways than one. Not only is it so faint it was only just discovered last...
03:30 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Arctic Permafrost Melting 70 Years Sooner Than Expected, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report The Weather Channel: Scientists studying climate change expected layers of permafrost in the Canadian Arctic to melt by the year 2090. Instead, it's happening now. ...
02:10 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Prenda Copyright Troll Sentenced To 14 Years
JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: For years, Paul Hansmeier terrorized internet users through his copyright trolling racket Prenda Law, evading the law through shell companies and fr...
01:30 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Texas Appeals Court Says Government Can't Be Sued For Copyright Piracy
sandbagger writes: Photographer Jim Olive's helicopter shot of Houston was used by the University of Houston on their website after they removed his watermark, a definite no-no particularly since the ...
12:50 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Should All OSs Ship With a Programming Language Built In?
dryriver writes: If anybody remembers the good old Commodore 64, one thing stood out about this once popular 8-bit computer -- as soon as you turned it on, you could type in BASIC (Beginner's All-purp...
12:10 am - Sat, June 15, 2019
Slashdot Graphene As an Open-Source Material
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The 2D wonder-material graphene could greatly benefit from the widespread experimentation of open-source use. In its current state, graphene is pri...
11:30 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot UK Porn Block Is a 'Privacy Timebomb,' New Report Warns
New age restrictions on pornography that are set to come into effect in the UK next month are a "privacy timebomb," a new report by privacy watchdog Open Rights Group has warned. They say that the dat...
10:50 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Study Finds That a GPS Outage Would Cost $1 Billion Per Day
A new comprehensive study on Global Positioning System technology has examined what effect a 30-day outage would have on the U.S. economy -- whether it's due to a severe space weather event or "nefari...
10:10 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Retail Stores Use Bluetooth Beacons To Track Customers
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, writer Michael Kwet sheds some lights on the secret bluetooth surveillance devices retailers use to track your every move and better serve ads to you. Anony...
09:50 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Citing Requests From People, FujiFilm Decides To Bring Back Its Black and White Film
AmiMoJo shares a report: Fujifilm has announced it will re-start black and white film manufacturing this year and will bring out a new version of its former Acros film. The new NEOPAN Acros 100 II wil...
09:30 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Digital Marketer Mailchimp Bans Anti-Vaccination Content
Digital marketer Mailchimp has removed several anti-vaccination "activists" from its platform and will no longer provide services to newsletters that push anti-vaccination content. From a report: The ...
08:50 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Spy Used AI-Generated Face To Connect With Targets
Raphael Satter, writing for AP: Katie Jones sure seemed plugged into Washington's political scene. The 30-something redhead boasted a job at a top think tank and a who's-who network of pundits and exp...
08:10 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot In Stores, Secret Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move
In retail stores, Bluetooth "beacons" are watching you, using hidden technology in your phone. From a report: Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, ...
07:30 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Amazon Lays Off Dozens Of Game Developers During E3
As the video game industry's attention was focused squarely on the final day of the E3 convention in Los Angeles this week, Amazon's video game division quietly laid off dozens of employees. From a re...
06:50 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Avast and AVG Are Causing Firefox Users To Lose Saved Passwords
An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox users are reporting that their saved passwords have been lost, with the problem seemingly caused by antivirus software rather than being an issue with Fire...
06:10 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot NASA Estimates It Will Need $20 Billion To $30 Billion For Moon Landing
NASA has touted its bold plan to return American astronauts to the moon by 2024 for months. Now we're starting to get an idea of how much it will cost. From a report: The space agency will need an est...
05:25 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot We Won't Be Listening To Music in a Decade According To Vinod Khosla
In the future, we won't be listening to our favorite bands or artists, we'll be listening to custom made sounds that are tailored to our mood. At least, that's what billionaire venture capitalist Vino...
04:45 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Facebook's New Cryptocurrency, Libra, Gets Big Backers
Facebook has signed up more than a dozen companies including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Uber to back a new cryptocurrency it plans to unveil next week and launch next year, according to a WSJ repor...
04:05 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot 'The New Dropbox Sucks'
Earlier this week, Dropbox introduced a new desktop application that brings a new look to the file-sharing service as well as new capabilities. With this release, Dropbox has changed the underlying st...
03:27 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Delays Foldable Phone Launch Until September To Do Extra Tests After Samsung's Troubles
Huawei said its foldable phone will launch in September, slightly later than it was reportedly set to, as it does extra tests following the debacle Samsung went through with its rival device. From a r...
02:45 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot ThinkGeek Closes Site, Moves in With GameStop
Bootsy Collins writes: ThinkGeek -- the 20-year-old 'goods for nerds' retailer I've associated with Slashdot ever since they were both part of the Andover and VA Linux mega-empires -- appears to be dr...
02:03 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Edge Might Come To Linux
The Microsoft Edge developer team held an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit this week where they revealed some of their plans on current and upcoming features. From a report: The biggest tease t...
01:00 pm - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Lab-Grown Meat Will Overtake Plant-Based Alternatives By 2040, Study Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Cultured meat could overtake plant-based alternatives like Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger as early as 2040, according to a new report. The research...
10:00 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Sleep Trackers Can Make Your Insomnia Worse
Some sleep specialists are warning that the apps and devices that are used to track your sleep may provide inaccurate data and can exacerbate symptoms of insomnia. "Fiddling with your phone in bed, af...
07:00 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Earth Nearing 'Meteor Swarm' That May Have Caused 1908 Tunguska Event
Iwastheone quotes a report from CBS News: A swarm of meteors heading towards Earth could have the potential to cause a catastrophic impact, a new study from Western Ontario University says. The so-cal...
03:30 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Study Finds Nearly 400 Medical Devices, Procedures and Practices That Are Ineffective
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A recent study has unearthed nearly 400 established treatments, devices and procedures that are no better than previous or lesser alternatives. [...
02:10 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot AMD Is Working On a Monster 64-Core Threadripper CPU, Landing As Early As Q4 2019
AMD is preparing a monstrous 64-core/128-thread Threadripper CPU for launch in Q4 2019. "AMD's largest HEDT processor right now is the W2990X which tops out at 32-cores," reports Wccftech. "This is no...
01:30 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot SwiftUI and Catalyst: Apple Executes Its Invisible Transition Strategy
Catalyst is Apple's framework that enables developers to easily bring existing iOS apps to the Mac, while SwiftUI is a new, Swift-based technology that makes it easy for developers to create one app t...
12:50 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot Credit Scores Based On AI and Your Social Media Profile Could Usher In New Way For Banks To Discriminate
Credit scores have a long history of prejudice. "Most changes in how credit scores are calculated over the years -- including the shift from human assessment to computer calculations, and most recentl...
12:10 am - Fri, June 14, 2019
Slashdot LG's 5G Phones in Doubt as Chip Deal With Qualcomm Set To Expire
Sales of LG's new 5G smartphone looked uncertain this week after the firm said it was unable to narrow differences with Qualcomm to renew a chip license deal that is due to expire this month. From a r...
11:30 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot 'Medicine Needs To Embrace Open Source'
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from ZDNet argues that "the expensive and abusive pharmaceutical industry needs to open up to improve everyone's health." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the repor...
10:50 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Started Serving Ads On Phone Lock Screens Without Asking Users' Permission
Huawei is reportedly displaying advertisements on the lock screen of its smartphones, seemingly without warning or any sort of announcement. Huawei says that it's doing no such thing. "The ads are not...
10:10 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Privacy Policies Are Essentially Impossible To Understand, Study Finds
The data market has become the engine of the internet, and privacy policies we agree to but don't fully understand help fuel it. From a report: To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analy...
09:30 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Google Made a Video Game That Lets You Build Video Games
Game Builder is a new video game from Google that allows you to create simple Minecraft-style games for yourself and others to play through. "The game lets you drag and drop characters and scenery int...
08:50 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Lawsuits Claim Amazon's Alexa Voice Assistant Illegally Records Children Without Consent
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: A lawsuit filed in Seattle alleges Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices without their consent, in violation of laws govern...
08:10 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Dark Horse Cryptocurrency Spikes 60% After Surprise Google Shout-Out
A little-known cryptocurrency spiked more than 60% after Google gave the project a surprise shout-out in an equally-unexpected blog post on how to use Ethereum and Google Cloud to build hybrid blockch...
07:31 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Lessons From 5 Years of Free Cybersecurity For At-Risk Groups
Cloudflare's Project Galileo, which offers free high-tier DDoS protection service to journalists, dissidents, civil liberties groups and other at-risk groups, turned 5 years old this week. From a repo...
06:50 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Yubico To Replace Vulnerable YubiKey FIPS Security Keys
Yubico said today it plans to replace certain hardware security keys because of a firmware flaw that reduces the randomness of cryptographic keys generated by its devices. From a report: Affected prod...
06:10 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot System76's Supercharged Linux-powered Gazelle Laptop is Finally Available
The System76 Gazelle laptop is finally available. From a report: What makes this laptop so special (besides its pre-installed Linux-based operating System), is its impressive specifications. You see, ...
05:36 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Japan Outlaws Flying Drones While Drunk
Operating a drone in Japan while drunk could lead to a year in prison thanks to new legislation. From a report: The law, passed by the country's parliament this week, seeks to rein in growing use of t...
04:50 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Asks Verizon To Pay Over $1 Billion For Over 230 Patents
hackingbear writes: Huawei has told Verizon that the U.S. carrier should pay licensing fees for more than 230 of the Chinese telecoms equipment maker's patents and in aggregate is seeking more than $1...
04:15 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot India Plans To Have Its Own Space Station
India plans to have its own space station in the future and conduct separate missions to study Sun and Venus, it said on Thursday, as the nation moves to bolster its status as a leader in space techno...
03:24 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Google Promises To Play Nice With Ad Blockers (Again)
An anonymous reader shares a report: After being ripped to shreds by angry users, Google engineers have promised this week that the upcoming changes to Chrome's extensions system won't cripple ad bloc...
02:42 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Windows 10's Linux Kernel Is Now Available
Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build this week featuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. WSL 2 includes a real Linux kernel that lets you run more Linux software on Windows and...
02:01 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Telegram Blames China For DDoS Attack Coinciding With Hong Kong Protests
The distributed denial of service attack that hit Telegram Wednesday came from China, the secure messaging app's founder said. Pavel Durov's tweet suggested that the country's government may have done...
01:00 pm - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Working On a James Bond-Style Submarine Car
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: During a Tuesday shareholder meeting, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted that the electric car company has a design for a submarine car -- and it sounds li...
10:00 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot IT Pro Screwed Out of Unused Vacation Pay, Bonus By HPE Thanks To Outdated Law
Slashdot reader Meg Whitman shares a report from The Register: A "highly skilled IT professional" has lost his fight to be paid his unused vacation days as well as a non-trivial bonus, after a judge s...
07:00 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot NASA Overcomes Military's GPS Tweaks To Peer Inside Hurricanes
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A constellation of eight microsatellites has harvested data that -- if folded into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) we...
03:30 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Researchers Use Lasers To Detect and Destroy Tumor Cells In Melanoma Patients
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Tumor cells that spread cancer via the bloodstream face a new foe: a laser beam, shined from outside the skin, that finds and kills these metast...
02:03 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Collected Device Data On 187,000 Users Using Banned Snooping
Facebook obtained personal and sensitive device data on about 187,000 users of its now-defunct Research app, which Apple banned earlier this year after the app violated its rules. TechCrunch reports: ...
01:25 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Lego Struggles To Find a Plant-Based Plastic That Clicks
Last year, it was reported that Lego was investing $120 million and hiring about 100 people to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or rec...
12:45 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot Netflix Unveils Plans To Develop Original Shows Into Video Games
At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Wednesday, Netflix shared details of its plans to develop its original shows into video games. Hollywood Reporter reports: Among the program of upcoming ga...
12:03 am - Thu, June 13, 2019
Slashdot America's Renewable Energy Capacity Is Now Greater Than Coal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The renewable energy sector had slightly more installed capacity than coal in April, according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report. That mean...
11:20 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Google Drive Will Stop Syncing With Google Photos In July
In an effort to create a "simplified experience," Google said in a blog post today that Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive in July. Digital Trends reports: The change is sure to be controversial...
10:40 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot SpaceX Successfully Launches and Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket On the California Coast
SpaceX successfully launched and deployed three RADARSAT Canadian satellites into orbit this morning. Despite heavy fog, the company also landed the Falcon 9 rocket on the California coast. The Verge ...
10:03 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot The Long-Awaited Upgrade To the US Weather Forecast Model Is Here
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the first time in about 40 years, the guts of the U.S. model got swapped out for something new today. The upgrade brings us a new "Finite-Vol...
09:25 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Team of American Hackers and Emirati Spies Discussed Attacking The Intercept
The Intercept: Operatives at a controversial cybersecurity firm working for the United Arab Emirates government discussed targeting The Intercept and breaching the computers of its employees, accordin...
08:45 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot UK Sets New Net Zero Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 2050 Target
The United Kingdom will cut net greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to zero by the middle of this century, Prime Minister Theresa May has announced, marking it out as the first G7 nation to set such a goa...
08:05 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Popular Soccer App Spied on Fans Through Phone Microphone To Catch Bars Pirating Game Streams
Spain's data protection agency has fined La Liga, the nation's top professional soccer league, 250,000 euros ($283,000 USD) for using the league's phone app to spy on its fans. From a report: With mil...
07:20 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Jordan Peterson Announces Free Speech, Anti-Censorship Platform 'Thinkspot'
Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson announced a subscription-based free speech platform called 'Thinkspot' on Wednesday that promises to provide users the best features of other social media platforms...
06:45 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot CERN Ditches Microsoft to 'Take Back Control' With Open Source Software
CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit's next major experiment will be with open-source software. From a report: The European Organiz...
06:08 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Google Expands Android's Built-in Security Key To iOS Devices
An anonymous reader shares a report: In April, Google announced a groundbreaking technology that could allow Android users to use their smartphones as hardware security keys whenever logging into Goog...
05:25 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot India Set To Launch Second Lunar Mission; Land Rover on the Moon
India said on Wednesday it will launch its second lunar mission in mid-July, as it moves to consolidate its status as a leader in space technology by achieving a controlled landing on the moon. From a...
04:44 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Worries Emails Could Show Zuckerberg Knew of Questionable Privacy Practices
Facebook uncovered emails that appear to show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar w...
04:04 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Konami Announces the Turbografx-16 Mini
An anonymous reader shares a report: Hey, if Nintendo and Sega can do it, then Konami can too. In a surprise E3 announcement, the company is releasing a miniature version of the classic 90s Turbografx...
03:25 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Telegram's Description of DDoS Attack is the Best
A distributed denial of service attack may sound like hacker talk, but there's a simple explanation behind it. Secure messaging app Telegram said it had to endure one Wednesday, and it gave an explana...
02:46 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot WhatsApp is Finally Going After Outside Firms That Are Abusing Its Platform
Tired of taking the flak for helping spread fake news, WhatsApp will start suing parties it finds flouting its rules. Till now, it was only using machine learning to flag accounts that were abusing it...
02:07 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Huawei Says It's Scrapping Laptop Launch Because of US Blacklisting
Huawei has ditched a product launch for the first time since the US placed it on a trade blacklist. From a report: Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer division, told CNBC that the firm had formally p...
01:00 pm - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Tesla Says Solar Roof Is On Its Third Iteration, Currently Installing In 8 States
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tesla is currently installing its solar roof product in eight states, according to Elon Musk, speaking at the Tesla Annual Shareholder Meeting on T...
10:00 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Apple's US iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed, Says Foxconn
A senior executive at Foxconn says they have enough capacity to make all iPhones bound for the U.S. outside of China if necessary. Bloomberg reports: China is a crucial cog in Apple's business, the or...
07:00 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Scientists Discover Previously Unidentified Mass Beneath Surface of the Moon
pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: A previously unknown deposit of an unidentified physical substance larger than the size of Hawaii has been discovered beneath the surface of the moon. Scientists...
03:30 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot US Report Finds Sky Is the Limit For Geothermal Energy Beneath Us
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Geothermal power sources come in many forms, and they're typically much more subtle than steam shooting out of the ground. In reality, geothermal...
01:40 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Scientists Train AI To Learn People's Voices, Then Generate Their Faces
JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Live Science: An neural network named "Speech2Face" was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the internet that showed over 100,000 differ...
01:00 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot Hydrogen Station Explodes, Toyota Halts Sales of Hydrogen Cars In Norway
Socguy writes: The Uno-X hydrogen station in Sandvika in Baerum exploded on Monday and resulted in two injuries in a nearby non-fuel cell vehicle. The company operating the station has suspended opera...
12:20 am - Wed, June 12, 2019
Slashdot A Deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg Is Testing Facebook's Fake Video Policies
samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram. Th...
11:40 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot A Year Later, US Government Websites Are Still Redirecting To Hardcore Porn
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dozens of U.S. government websites appear to contain a flaw enabling anyone to generate URLs with their domains that redirect users to external sites,...
11:00 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Mozilla Debuts Its New Firefox Logos
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today introduced a new Firefox family of logos, a rebranding effort it kicked off more than 18 months ago. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the com...
10:20 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Amazon To Shut Down Its Amazon Restaurants Business
According to GeekWire, Amazon is shutting down its Amazon Restaurants food delivery service in the U.S. The service, which was first launched in Seattle back in 2015, gave Prime members a way to get m...
09:40 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Proposed Law in India Would Imprison Anyone Who Uses Cryptocurrency
Holding, selling or dealing in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could soon land people in India in jail for 10 years. From a report: The "Banning of Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital C...
09:00 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot The Biggest Data Breach Archive On the Internet Is For Sale
Troy Hunt, the owner and founder of the well-known and respected data breach notification website "Have I Been Pwned," announced today that he's actively looking for a buyer. "To date, every line of c...
08:20 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Ten US States Sue To Stop Sprint-T-Mobile Deal, Saying Consumers Will Be Hurt
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Ten states led by New York and California filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to stop T-Mobile's $26 billion purchase of Sprint, warning that consumer prices w...
07:35 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot 'RAMBleed' Rowhammer Attack Can Now Steal Data, Not Just Alter It
A team of academics from the US, Austria, and Australia, has published new research today detailing yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack. From a report: The novelty in this new Rowhammer vari...
07:00 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot More than Half of the World's Population is Now Online
Mary Meeker, the general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital, delivered a 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looks forward about what t...
06:12 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot WordPress.com VIP Platform Outage Reverts Sites To Default Themes
An anonymous reader shares a report: Web blog hosting platform WordPress.com is currently facing a significant technical issue that has resulted in premium blogs going down or reverting to using defau...
05:30 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Boom in Electric Scooters Leads To More Injuries, Fatalities
As stand-up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. From a...
04:50 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Facebook's New Study App Pays Adults For Data After Teen Scandal
Facebook shut down its Research and Onavo programs after a report exposed how the company paid teenagers for root access to their phones to gain market data on competitors. Now Facebook is relaunching...
04:10 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Shazam for Android Now Recognizes Music Playing Through Headphones
Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you're listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. From a repor...
03:30 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Opera Launches Opera GX, World's First Gaming Browser
Opera Software, the company behind the Opera browser, today launched a custom version of its browser dedicated to online gamers and streamers on Windows platform. From a report: Named Opera GX, the br...
02:55 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Radiohead Release Hours of Hacked MiniDiscs To Benefit Extinction Rebellion
Radiohead have released a vast collection of unreleased tracks made during the sessions for 1997 album OK Computer, after a MiniDisc archive owned by frontman Thom Yorke was hacked last week by an unn...
02:00 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Apple's US iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed
Apple has a backup plan if the U.S.-China trade war gets out of hand. From a report: The Cupertino, Calif.-based company's primary manufacturing partner has enough capacity to make all iPhones bound f...
01:00 pm - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Canada Plans To Ban 'Harmful' Single-Use Plastics By 2021
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that Canada will ban many single-use plastic items by 2021, including bags, straws, cutlery and stirring sticks, to cut harmful waste damaging the cou...
10:00 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot NASA 'Snoopy' Lunar Module Likely Found 50 Years After Being Jettisoned Into Space
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NASA's trip to the Moon's surface in July 1969 was preceded by a lot of preparatory missions -- including Apollo 10, which involved a mock mission ...
07:00 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Raytheon, United Technologies Merger Will Create a New Aerospace Giant
The Raytheon Co. and United Technologies Corp. are merging in an all-stock deal that the two companies say is a merger of equals. The new company's name will be Raytheon Technologies Corp. -- and it's...
03:30 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Type A Blood Converted To Universal Donor Blood With Help From Bacterial Enzyme
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: For a transfusion to be successful, the patient and donor blood types must be compatible. Now, researchers analyzing bacteria in the human gu...
02:10 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot AMD Unveils Zen 2 CPU Architecture, Navi GPU Architecture and a Slew of Products
MojoKid writes: AMD let loose today with a number of high profile launches at the E3 2019 Expo in Los Angeles, CA. The company disclosed its full Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series microarchitecture, which AMD c...
01:30 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Steven Spielberg Is Writing a Horror Series That You Can Only Watch At Night
Spielberg's After Dark horror series will only be able to be streamed when it's dark outside. It'll be available exclusively on Quibi (short for "Quick Bites"), a new streaming platform dedicated to s...
12:50 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Turned Off Search Features Used To Catch War Criminals, Child Predators, And Other Bad Actors
The human rights and war crimes community is up in arms over Facebook's decision to turn off a set of advanced features in its graph search product, which is "a way to receive an answer to a specific ...
12:10 am - Tue, June 11, 2019
Slashdot Kim Dotcom In Final Bid To Halt Extradition
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Controversial internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has begun a final appeal to halt his extradition from New Zealand to the U.S. on copyright-related char...
11:30 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Google Maps Will Tell You If Your Taxi Driver Is Veering Off Course To Rack Up a Higher Fare
Google Maps is rolling out a new feature that will tell you if your taxi driver goes off-route in an attempt to rack up a higher fare. Sure, you could always use Google Maps to pick the shortest route...
10:50 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Supreme Court To Consider Racial Discrimination Case Against Comcast
The Supreme Court will consider whether a black television producer can pursue racial discrimination claims against Comcast for declining to carry his programming channels on its cable system (Warning...
10:10 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot US Customs and Border Protection Says Traveler Photos and License Plate Images Stolen In Data Breach
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed a data breach has exposed the photos of travelers and vehicles traveling in and out of the United ...
09:30 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Huawei is Reportedly Asking App Developers To Publish on its AppGallery
Huawei is reportedly inviting Google Play Store developers to publish apps for the Huawei EMUI AppGallery, a month after it was reported that future Android handsets from the Chinese group won't suppo...
08:50 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot World's Largest Plant Survey Reveals Alarming Extinction Rate
The world's seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of nearly 3 species a year since 1900 -- which is up to 500 times higher than would be expected as a result of natural forces alone, ac...
08:10 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Audi Recalls Its First Electric Car for Battery Fire Risk
Volkswagen AG luxury brand Audi is recalling its first all-electric vehicle due to the risk of a battery fire. From a report: The company issued a voluntary recall of approximately 540 E-Tron SUV mode...
07:30 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot NASA is Sending an Atomic Clock Into Deep Space
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Saturday, June 22, SpaceX plans to launch its Falcon Heavy Rocket out of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The reusable craft is coming off t...
06:50 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Some Big Tech Firms Cut Employees' Access To Huawei, Muddying 5G Rollout
Some of the world's biggest tech companies have told their employees to stop talking about technology and technical standards with counterparts at Huawei in response to the recent U.S. blacklisting of...
06:10 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Scottish Power To Build Vast Battery To Improve Wind Energy Supply
Scottish Power is to undertake the most ambitious battery power project in Europe in an attempt to unlock the potential of the UK's wind and solar farms. From a report: The company will connect an ind...
05:30 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Top Voting Machine Maker Reverses Position on Election Security, Promises Paper Ballots
Election Systems & Software has championed electronic voting machines in the US. Now it has had a change of heart about the need for paper records of votes. From a report: TechCrunch understands t...
04:52 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Opera, Brave, Vivaldi To Ignore Chrome's Anti-Ad-Blocker Changes, Despite Shared Codebase
Despite sharing a common Chromium codebase, browser makers like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi don't have plans on crippling support for ad blocker extensions in their products -- as Google is currently pl...
04:10 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot G20 Agrees To Push Ahead With Digital Tax
Group of 20 finance ministers agreed over the weekend to compile common rules to close loopholes used by global tech giants such as Facebook to reduce their corporate taxes, a copy of the bloc's draft...
03:32 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Salesforce Bets on Big Data With $15.3 Billion Tableau Buy
Salesforce on Monday decided to buy big data firm Tableau Software for $15.3 billion, marking the biggest acquisition in the company's history as it looks to offer more data insights to its clients. F...
02:40 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Disney's Video Streaming Service Hotstar Halts Support for Safari Browser
Hotstar, India's largest video streaming service with more than 300 million users, disabled support for Apple's Safari web browser last week to mitigate a security flaw that allowed unauthorized usage...
02:00 pm - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Project Scarlett is the Next Xbox Console, Launching in Holiday 2020
Project Scarlett is the next Microsoft video game console. Phil Spencer, executive vice president of gaming at the company, announced the hardware during Microsoft's E3 2019 press briefing. From a rep...
10:24 am - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Interviews: For the 25th Birthday of FreeDOS, Ask Its Founder A Question
FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft's announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to Computerworld's 2016 inter...
07:04 am - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot A 'Premium' Firefox Is Coming This Fall
An anonymous reader quotes I Programmer:In an interview by Jan Vollmer for the German online magazine site t3n, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has confirmed plans to launch Firefox Premium later this year. A...
03:44 am - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Boeing Wanted To Wait Three Years To Fix Safety Alert on 737 Max
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:Boeing Co. planned to wait three years to fix a non-working safety alert on its 737 Max aircraft and sped up the process only after the first of two dea...
01:44 am - Mon, June 10, 2019
Slashdot Police Use of DNA Leads To Backlash, Policy Change For GEDmatch
Police investigators have used popular online DNA databases to solve at least 50 open murder and rape cases, reports the Associated Press. But now, "complaints about invasion of privacy have produced ...
11:59 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot 'Swift Finally Matches Objective-C in One Major Way'
The editor of Dice's "Insights" blog argues that Apple's Swift language "has begun to eclipse Objective-C in a key way."Apple was never shy about prioritizing Swift. As one developer on Twitter pointe...
11:16 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot New Game Based On 'The Blair Witch Project' Demoed at Microsoft Xbox Event
"So that Blair Witch reboot wasn't very good. But maybe a video game could change things up?" writes Engadget. Mashable has more details:Remember The Blair Witch Project, that viral horror sensation t...
10:38 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot 'Cyberpunk 2077' Game Starring Keanu Reeves Demoed at Microsoft Xbox Event
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:CD Projekt Red showed off a new demo of Cyberpunk 2077 at Microsoft's Xbox press event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the big game trade show in Los Angel...
09:40 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot A Wave of SIM Swapping Attacks Targets Cryptocurrency Users
"Numerous members of the cryptocurrency community have been hit by SIM swapping attacks over the past week," ZDNet reported Monday, "in what appears to be a coordinated wave of attacks." SIM swapping,...
08:43 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Why Some Businesses Really Hate Yelp
An anonymous reader quotes Slate:The overall argument of Billion Dollar Bully, the new documentary about Yelp released on Amazon and iTunes in May, is that Yelp extorts small business owners for adver...
07:41 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Are Amazon's 'Ring' Doorbells Creating A Massive Police Surveillance Network?
"Police departments are piggybacking on Ring's network to build out their surveillance networks..." reports CNET, adding that Ring "helps police avoid roadblocks for surveillance technology, whether a...
06:36 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Bizarre New Theories Emerge About Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto
"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?" This prompted a strong rebuke from CC...
05:44 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Why Pfizer Ignored Data Suggesting Their Drug Could Affect Alzheimer's
In a controversial pharmaceutical story, this week the Washington Post reported "that Pfizer had evidence that [their drug] Enbrel could be useful in Alzheimer's disease, and didn't do anything with i...
04:34 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot 'Java Web Start Is Dead. Long Live Java Web Start!'
An anonymous reader reminded us about the open source reimplementation of Java Web Start, a framework originally developed by Sun Microsystems that allowed users to more easily run Java applications i...
03:34 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Next Month Uber Will Start Offering Helicopter Rides in New York City
An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:Uber Technologies Inc. is testing a helicopter service in New York City, according to documents outlining the program obtained by Bloomberg. Passengers will be able ...
02:34 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot The Lost History of Sodium Wiring
Long-time Slashddot reader Rei writes: On the face of it, sodium seems like about the worst thing you could make a wire out of — it oxidizes rapidly in air, releases hot hydrogen gas in water, m...
01:34 pm - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Why Doesn't the U.S. Build More Earthquake-Proof Buildings?
schwit1 shares a report from the New York Times flagging America's surprising low usage of an engineering technique protecting buildings from earthquakes:Chile, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Turkey and ...
11:04 am - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot The Case Against Breaking Up Big Tech Companies
This week The Street ran a new article arguing that "Breaking Up Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook Is Not the Solution":The Microsoft anti-trust case twenty years ago showed that judges are reluctant...
07:34 am - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Will Car-Sharing Apps Revolutionize Transportation?
We're now living in a wrold where customers "can download smartphone apps and rent privately owned cars, usually parked a short walk away in urban areas or residential neighborhoods," reports the Orla...
03:34 am - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft 'Wins Over Skeptics, Open-Source Great Satan No More', Declares Bloomberg
Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie says the company wasn't ready to acquire GitHub in 2014. "We would have screwed it up," he tells Bloomberg. But as he sees it, there was also another problem. "The ...
01:34 am - Sun, June 9, 2019
Slashdot 'Apple Wants To Kill the Ad Industry. It's Forcing Developers To Help.'
"As a consumer, the idea of Apple sign-in is genuinely an exciting one..." writes developer/tech journalist Owen Williams at Char.gd. "As a person in digital marketing, as well as a coder and startup ...
11:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Eric S. Raymond Survives New Medical Problems
For decades Eric S. Raymond has been one of the open source movement's staunchest supporters. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative, and was the author of the influential book The Cathedral and the...
10:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Powerless Facebook Investors Voted Overwhelmingly To Oust Zuckerberg As Chairman
"The Facebook shareholder revolt just got bloody," reports Business Insider:It's now clear that independent Facebook investors voted overwhelmingly in support of proposals last week to fire Mark Zucke...
09:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Bezos HQ2: Amazon CEO Pays $80 Million For Three NYC Apartments
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Architectural Digest on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' $80 million New York City bachelor pad: "Jeff Bezos is not only taking over the internet but is also ruling the ...
08:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot How npm Stopped a Malicious Upstream Code Update From Stealing Cryptocurrency
"If you're a cryptocurrency startup, would you face a huge backlash by hacking your own customers to keep their funds safe if you know that a hacker is about to launch an attack and steal their funds?...
07:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Cringely Predicts The End Of Broadcast TV Within A Decade
In a new essay Friday, technology pundit Robert Cringely remembers the day he got his first home fax machine in 1986, arguing that broadcast television is like a fax machine -- in that "they are both ...
06:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Large 'GoldBrute' RDP Botnet Hunts For Exposed Servers With Weak Passwords
The Internet Storm Center reports:RDP, the remote desktop protocol, made the news recently after Microsoft patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708). While the reporting a...
05:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Should the UK Re-Open An Old, Cracked Nuclear Reactor?
"Nuclear experts have warned against re-opening a 43-year-old Scottish nuclear reactor riddled with cracks over fears of a meltdown," writes the Daily Mirror. An anonymous reader quotes their report: ...
04:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Maker Faire and Make Magazine Have Laid Off All Staff and Paused All Operations
McGruber quotes TechCrunch: Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees" founder and CEO Dale Dougherty told TechCrunch. "I started this 1...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot YouTube's Crackdown on Violent Extremism Mistakenly Whacks Channels Fighting Violent Extremism
AmiMoJo shares an article by Cory Doctorow:Wednesday, Youtube announced that it would shut down, demonetize and otherwise punish channels that promoted violent extremism, "supremacy" and other forms o...
02:34 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Is Our Reliance on GPS Shrinking Our Brains?
"Neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions," says science writer M.R. O'Connor, citing a study of personal GPS devices co-authored by Kent-bas...
01:00 pm - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Better Broadband Lowers Unemployment Rates, Study Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University this week released a new study again tying better broadb...
10:00 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot EU Laws Requiring Audible Warning Sounds For Electric Cars Take Effect July 1
Starting July 1st, electric vehicles with four or more wheels must be fitted with an "Acoustic Vehicle Alert System" (AVAS) if they want to be able to legally drive in the European Union. With AVAS, v...
07:00 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Puncture-Proof Tires Revealed By GM and Michelin
At an event in Montreal earlier this week, Michelin and General Motors unveiled a new airless wheel prototype called the Uptis Prototype, which stands for "Unique Puncture-proof Tire System." The prot...
03:30 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Americans May Be Ingesting Thousands of Microplastics Every Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: A new study is shining troubling light on the quantity of microplastics Americans are consuming each year -- as many as 121,000 particles, per a c...
02:10 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Bloomberg To Put $500 Million Into Closing All Remaining Coal Plants By 2030
In what marks the largest ever philanthropic effort to combat climate change, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pledging $500 million to close all of the nation's remaining coal plants b...
01:30 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Malware Spotted Injecting Bing Results Into Google Searches
A new strain of malware intercepts and tampers with internet traffic on infected Apple Macs to inject Bing results into users' Google search results. The Register reports: A report out this month by s...
12:50 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Maine Governor Signs Bill Banning ISPs From Selling Consumer Data Without Consent
Maine Governor Janet Mills has signed a law banning internet service providers from using, selling, or distributing consumer data without their content. The Hill reports: The Act to Protect the Privac...
12:10 am - Sat, June 8, 2019
Slashdot Comcast Broke Law 445,000 Times In Scheme To Inflate Bills, Judge Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast yesterday was ordered to refund nearly 50,000 customers and pay a $9.1 million fine when a judge ruled that it violated Washington state ...
11:30 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Russia Says It Will Soon Begin Blocking Major VPNs
Russian telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor will start blocking major VPNs including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish and HideMyAss, following through with its threat back in March. At the time, ten major VPN...
10:50 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Google Must Face Lawsuit Alleging Hiring Bias Against Conservatives, Judge Rules
Google will have to face a California lawsuit accusing the company of bias against conservative job candidates as part of a legal challenge first brought against the company by James Damore, author of...
10:10 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot For Two Hours, European Mobile Traffic Was Rerouted Through China
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For more than two hours on Thursday, June 6, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through the infrastructure of China Telecom, China's ...
09:30 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Sony Scraps Japanese-style Egalitarian Salaries in Battle For AI Expertise
Sony will increase salaries by up to 20% for new recruits with high-tech skills in fields such as artificial intelligence, moving away from the traditional Japanese emphasis on seniority to better com...
08:50 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Piracy is Ethically Acceptable For Many Harvard Lawyers, Research Finds
Most people know all too well that it's against the law to share a pirated copy of a movie or TV-show. Law and ethics are not always in sync. Not even among those who are schooled as lawyers. From a r...
08:10 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Congress To Investigate Deepfakes
The House Intelligence Committee will next week examine the risks posed by deepfakes, artificial intelligence technology that can create realistic-looking fake videos, House Intelligence Chairman Adam...
07:30 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot FedEx Reduces Amazon Ties as Retailer Flexes Delivery Muscles
FedEx said it wouldn't renew its U.S. air-delivery contract with Amazon.com, paring a key customer relationship as the largest online retailer deepens its foray into freight transportation. From a rep...
06:50 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Want Someone's Personal Data? Give Them a Free Donut
Technology services provider Probrand has carried out a study at a cyber expo attended by UK security professionals, where attendees voluntarily shared sensitive data including their name, date of bir...
06:10 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Book Subtitles Are Getting Ridiculously Long. Blame it on SEO.
How many words can you fit in a subtitle? For a slew of modern books, the answer seems to be as many as possible. From a report: Just look at Julie Holland's "Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs ...
05:30 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Smartphone Shipment Forecast Cut To 1.35 Billion For 2019 as Uncertainty Prevails
Research firm Canalys: Canalys released its updated global smartphone forecasts on 28 May 2019. The latest numbers show that smartphone shipments will reach 1.35 billion units in 2019, a year-on-year ...
04:51 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Walmart Will Stock Your Fridge With Groceries While You're Not Home
A new service from Walmart will bring groceries straight from the store to your refrigerator. All that's needed is trust. From a report: As part of Walmart's new InHome Delivery service, the retailer'...
04:09 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot NASA To Open International Space Station To Tourists
NASA is to allow tourists to visit the International Space Station from 2020, priced at $35,000 per night. From a report: The US space agency said it would open the orbiting station to tourism and oth...
03:27 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Suspends App Pre-installs on Huawei Phones
Facebook is no longer allowing pre-installation of its apps on Huawei phones, the latest blow for the Chinese tech giant as it struggles to keep its business afloat in the face of a U.S. ban on its pu...
02:40 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Google Warns of US National Security Risks From Huawei Ban
Google has warned the Trump administration it risks compromising US national security if it pushes ahead with sweeping export restrictions on Huawei [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternat...
02:00 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot EverQuest's Long, Strange 20-Year Trip Still Has No End in Sight
The world has immensely changed since 1999, when a company in Southern California launched an online game called EverQuest that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the ma...
01:00 pm - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Model Aircraft Pilots Angry Over Drone Laws
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: People who fly model aircraft are angry that proposed drone rules could damage their much-loved hobby. They argue they should not be classed as drone ...
10:00 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Researchers Propose Solar Methanol Island Using Ocean CO2
A PNAS paper published this week outlines a plan to establish 70 islands of solar panels, each 328 feet in diameter, that sends electricity to a hard-hulled ship that acts as an oceanic factory. "This...
07:00 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot NASA's Mars Helicopter Passes Another Flight Test
The autonomous rotorcraft NASA is planning to integrate with the agency's Mars 2020 rover mission has successfully passed another round of important tests. The Verge reports: Earlier this year, JPL co...
03:30 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Congress Scraps Provision To Restrict IRS From Competing With TurboTax
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Congressional leaders are planning to scrap a provision of an IRS reform bill making permanent the Free File deal between the government and privat...
02:02 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Training a Single AI Model Can Emit As Much Carbon As Five Cars In Their Lifetimes
In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 6...
01:25 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Google's Co-Founder Is Building a Gargantuan $150 Million Blimp
We first earned that Google co-founder Sergey Brin was secretly building a "massive airship" inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center back in 2017, but few details on the project have emerg...
12:45 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot The Man Whose Bizarre Tank Designs Made the D-Day Victory Possible
dryriver writes: In 1942, Allied troops tried to invade a French port at Dieppe. The troop landing was a disaster -- within 10 hours, 60% of the 6,000 allied troops that landed were dead, and all 28 t...
12:03 am - Fri, June 7, 2019
Slashdot Apple Is Still Trying To Sue the Owner of an Independent iPhone Repair Shop
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Despite initially losing the case last year, Apple is continuing its legal pursuit against the owner of a small, independent iPhone repair shop in...
11:20 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Alan Turing Receives a (Late) Obituary From the NYT
"In recent years, The New York Times has been publishing obituaries of people long dead but who nevertheless would have been deserving of one when they died," writes Slashdot reader necro81. "They cal...
10:40 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Google To 'Stop Supporting' Google Trips For Android
The Google Trips app is headed into the sunset as functionality is integrated into Google's other services. 9to5Google reports: Our APK Insight of Google Trips for Android today reveals an upcoming "g...
10:03 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple's 'Find My' Feature
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Wired's . Andy Greenberg: In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple d...
09:25 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Google To Buy Data Analytics Company For $2.6 Billion Despite New Antitrust Scrutiny
Just as government officials step up their antitrust scrutiny of the American tech giants, Google had a surprising announcement on Thursday: It is buying another company. From a report: Google said it...
08:45 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Germany: Backdoor Found in Four Smartphone Models; 20,000 Users Infected
An anonymous reader shares a report: The German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI) has issued security alerts today warning abo...
08:05 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Amazon's Home Surveillance Company Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in its Advertisements
Amazon's home surveillance company Ring is using video captured by its doorbell cameras in Facebook advertisements that ask users to identify and call the cops on a woman whom local police say is a su...
07:25 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Drug Company To Pay Just $15.4 Million Over Doctor Bribery Scandal Involving Medicine That Brings in $1 Billion a Year
Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals announced this week that the company expects to pay $15.4 million in a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department after allegations that Questcor Pharmaceuticals, which M...
06:45 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Is Ditching VLC for GNOME MPV
GNOME MPV (now known as Celluloid) will be the default media player in Ubuntu MATE 19.10. From a report: The app supplants the versatile VLC meda player, which the MATE desktop-toting distro has shipp...
06:05 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot WarnerMedia Scraps Plan For a Three-Tiered Streaming Service, To Package HBO, Cinemax and its Library Into One Offering For $16 to $17 a Month
AT&T's WarnerMedia has abandoned its plan for a three-tiered streaming service and instead will likely package HBO, sister channel Cinemax and the vast library of Warner Bros TV shows and movies i...
05:55 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot WarnerMedia Scraps Plan For a Three-Tiered Streaming Service, To Package HBO, Cinemax and its Library Into One Offering For $16 to $17 a Month
AT&T's WarnerMedia has abandoned its plan for a three-tiered streaming service and instead will likely package HBO, sister channel Cinemax and the vast library of Warner Bros TV shows and movies i...
05:27 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Robocalls Can Now Get Blocked By Your Carrier By Default
The FCC voted unanimously today to allow carriers to block robocalls by default, setting the stage for the major carriers to take action against the surge of unwanted automated calls that basically ev...
04:50 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Google Stadia Requires $130 Upfront, $10 Per Month at November Launch
Players will have to pay $129.99 up front and $9.99 a month, on top of individual game purchase costs, when Google's previously announced Stadia game-streaming service launches in November. From a rep...
04:05 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Quietly Deletes Largest Public Face Recognition Data Set
Microsoft has quietly pulled from the internet its database of 10 million faces [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], which has been used to train facial recognition systems ...
03:25 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot India Orders Uber and Rival Ola To Electrify 40% of Fleets By 2026
India is doubling down on its push to replace gasoline and diesel vehicles on its streets with environmentally friendly electric cars. From a report: The government plans to order ride-hailing firms s...
02:47 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Bowing To Pressure, YouTube Will Reconsider Its Harassment Policies
YouTube will reconsider its harassment policies and may update them, the company said in a new blog post. The statement was apparently prompted by public pressure on the company after a conflict betwe...
02:00 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Set To Reveal Own Cryptocurrency Later This Month, Report Says
Social media giant Facebook is said to reveal its own cryptocurrency later this month. From a report: According to a report from The Information this week, Facebook is poised to unveil its cryptocurre...
01:00 pm - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot New RCE Vulnerability Impacts Nearly Half of the Internet's Email Servers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A critical remote command execution (RCE) security flaw impacts over half of the Internet's email servers, security researchers from Qualys have reveale...
10:00 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot The Ambitious Plan To Reinvent How Websites Get Their Names
When you type in a URL to your browser and press "enter," your browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers...
07:00 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Boston Dynamics Prepares To Launch Its First Commercial Robot: Spot
Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments...
03:30 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Bees Can Link Symbols To Numbers, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers have trained honeybees to match a character to a specific quantity, revealing they are able to learn that a symbol represents a numerical...
02:03 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Exotic Particles Called Pentaquarks May Be Less Weird Than Previously Thought
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: Four years ago, when experimenters spotted pentaquarks -- exotic, short-lived particles made of five quarks -- some physicists thought they had ...
01:25 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft and Oracle Link Up Their Clouds
Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data ...
12:45 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot The Days of Getting a Cheaper Cable Bill By Threatening To Leave May Be Over
With internet service growing faster and more profitable, subscribers are becoming expendable, meaning pay-TV companies no longer need to entice customers who are threatening to quit with discounts an...
12:03 am - Thu, June 6, 2019
Slashdot Google Offers New Treasure Trove of Air Quality Data To Researchers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google has employed its network of street-view vehicles to also measure street-level air quality in recent years, through an initiative it calls "P...
11:20 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Mouse Support In iOS 13 and iPadOS Includes USB and Bluetooth Devices
TheFakeTimCook writes: According to an article on Apple Insider, both iOS and iPadOS 13 will contain mouse support for USB-C and Bluetooth pointing-devices, as part of the "Assistive Technology" featu...
10:40 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Fact-Checking Website Snopes Is Locked In a Nasty Legal Dispute
jader3rd shares a report from The Seattle Times: After more than two decades battling internet hoaxes, retouched photos, and other fake news, David Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes, faces a much larger...
10:00 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Google Launches Android Q Beta 4 With Final APIs and Official SDK
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched the fourth Android Q beta with final Android Q APIs and the official SDK. If you're a developer, this is your fourth Android...
09:21 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Apple Asks Developers To Place Its Login Button Above Google and Facebook
Apple will ask developers to position a new "Sign in with Apple" button in iPhone and iPad apps above rival buttons from Alphabet's Google and Facebook, according to design guidelines released this we...
08:41 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Software Vendor May Have Opened a Gap For Hackers in 2016 Swing State
A Florida election software company targeted by Russians in 2016 inadvertently opened a potential pathway for hackers to tamper with voter records in North Carolina on the eve of the presidential elec...
08:01 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot HBO's 'Chernobyl' is Now the Top-Ranked TV Show of All Time
"Chernobyl," HBO's gritty and horrifying retelling of the worst nuclear disaster in human history, has jumped to the No. 1 spot on IMDb's all-time TV rankings just days after the limited series conclu...
07:20 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot BlueStacks Inside Turns Mobile Games Into 'Native PC' Games on Steam
PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside ha...
06:40 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Amazon Shows Off New All-Electric Prime Air Drone That Will Start Delivering Packages 'Within Months'
Amazon's drone ambitions took another step forward on Wednesday as the tech giant revealed its latest delivery drone design. From a report: At Amazon's re:MARS Conference, Amazon executive Jeff Wilke ...
06:02 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot 'Pumping Heart Patch' Ready For Human Use
A "pumping" patch containing millions of living, beating stem cells could help repair the damage caused by a heart attack, according to researchers. Reader dryriver shares a report: Sewn on to the hea...
05:22 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot 'Pumping Heart Patch' Ready For Human Use
A "pumping" patch containing millions of living, beating stem cells could help repair the damage caused by a heart attack, according to researchers. Reader dryriver shares a report: Sewn on to the hea...
05:21 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot New Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming To an End' Starting in 2050
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. F...
04:40 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot YouTube To Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
YouTube said on Wednesday that it plans to remove thousands of videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies in an attempt to clean up extremism and ha...
04:03 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Up To 25 Cups of Coffee a Day Still Safe For Heart Health, New Study Says
Coffee lovers might be able to breathe a sigh of relief -- a new study found that drinking even large amounts of the caffeinated beverage won't stiffen arteries and harm your heart. From a report: Afi...
03:24 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot The EU's Embassy In Russia Was Hacked But The EU Kept It A Secret
The European Union's embassy in Moscow was hacked and had information stolen from its network, according to a leaked internal document seen by BuzzFeed News. From the report: An ongoing "sophisticated...
02:41 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Google Appeals $1.7B EU AdSense Antitrust Fine
Google has filed a legal appeal against the $1.7 billion antitrust penalty the European Commission laid against on its search ad brokering business three months ago. Antitrust officials found that, in...
02:00 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Chrome 75 Released With Web Share API File Support, Numeric Separators and Secret Reader Mode
An anonymous reader writes: Google this week released Chrome 75 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes hint for low latency canvas contexts, files supported in the Web Share A...
01:00 pm - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Retired Georgia Tech Professor Is Suing Uber, Lyft For Patent Infringement
McGruber shares a report from American City Business Journals: A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the wa...
10:00 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Researchers Solve Mystery of the Galaxy With No Dark Matter
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has clarified a 2018 mystery in the field of extragalactic astrophysics: T...
07:00 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Ikea Is Introducing Robotic Furniture For People Who Live In Small Spaces
Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit t...
03:30 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Nation's Most Ambitious Project To Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Waste Has Stalled At Hanford
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: The Energy Department's most environmentally important and technically ambitious project to clean up Cold War nuclear weapons waste has stal...
02:10 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot The Geometry of An Electron Determined For the First Time
Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel have now developed a method by which they can spatially determine the geometry of electrons in quantum dots. Space Daily report...
01:30 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Apple Will Permanently Remove Dashboard In macOS Catalina
"Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors. "The Dashboard first launched seven years ago wit...
12:50 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot GM and Fiat Chrysler Unmasked As Tesla's Secret Source of Cash
For years, Tesla has hauled in revenue by selling credits to other carmakers that needed to offset sales of polluting vehicles to U.S. consumers. While these transactions have largely been shrouded in...
12:10 am - Wed, June 5, 2019
Slashdot Firefox Starts Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today announced a slew of privacy improvements. The company has turned on Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies from third-pa...
11:30 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot KLM Airlines To Fund Development of Fuel-Efficient Flying-V Plane
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced that it will help fund the development of a V-shaped, fuel-efficient airplane design known as the Flying-V. CNN reports: Intended to improve the sustainability of ai...
10:50 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot New Law Could Make Verizon Pay a Decade's Worth of Taxes It Avoided
Verizon has avoided paying local taxes on telecom equipment in many New Jersey municipalities over the past decade, but a proposed state law would force the company to pay back taxes for all the payme...
10:10 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Shifting Strategy, Microsoft Closed All Its Specialty Stores and Kiosks in the US
Microsoft is on the cusp of finally opening its flagship retail store in the UK next month, but all of the smaller Microsoft Specialty Stores have evidently been shuttered with many reportedly closing...
09:30 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Is Now the Privacy-As-A-Service Company
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple's truly transforming into a privacy-as-a-service company, which shows in the way that it's implementing both the new single sign-on account s...
08:54 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot House Committee Votes To Continue Research Ban On Genetically Modified Babies
A congressional committee voted this week to continue a federal ban on creating genetically modified babies in the United States. From a report: The House Appropriations Committee voted to retain the ...
08:11 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Watchdog Says FBI Has Access To About 640M Photographs
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: A government watchdog says the FBI has access to about 640 million photographs -- including from driver's licenses, passports and mugshots -- that can be searched using facia...
07:31 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple is Building a Major Defense Against Spam Calls Into iOS 13
Apple is taking a new step to combat spam calls in iOS 13. Today, you can already install third-party spam call screeners on your iPhone, but if that's not good enough (or something you don't want to ...
06:53 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot SEC Sues Kik Over $100 Million ICO
The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Kik for illegally raising $100 million through a 2017 digital-token sale, in one of its highest profile cases targeting a company for not registering an off...
06:14 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Teases Its Secret Dual-Screen Surface Device
Microsoft reportedly has shown off a dual-screen version of a Surface device, in what sounds like a smaller version of the "Twin Rivers" concept Intel showed off at Computex in late May. From a report...
05:42 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Bans Kids From Live-Streaming Video Unless Accompanied by an Adult
YouTube is taking additional steps to restrict the possibility that children will be targeted by predators on the video platform -- including banning young kids from live-streaming with adult supervis...
05:33 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Bans Kids From Live-Streaming Video Unless Accompanied by an Adult
YouTube is taking additional steps to restrict the possibility that children will be targeted by predators on the video platform -- including banning young kids from live-streaming with adult supervis...
04:50 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Russia Says Tinder Must Share User Data, Private Messages
An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government has added dating service Tinder on a government database that legally forces the company to hand over user data and private communications to the cou...
04:10 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Replaces Bash With Zsh as the Default Shell in macOS Catalina
Starting with macOS Catalina, Macs will now use zsh as the default login shell and interactive shell across the operating system. From a report: All newly created user accounts in macOS Catalina will ...
03:21 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Firefox Starts Blocking Third-Party Cookies By Default
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today announced a slew of privacy improvements. The company has turned on Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies from third-party trackers in Firefox, b...
02:41 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple's Top Spec Mac Pro and Pro Display Will Cost At Least $50,000
Apple announced this week that its new Mac Pro starts at an already pricey $6,000, but the company neglected to mention how much the top-of-the-line model will cost. From a report on The Verge: So we ...
02:03 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Square Sends Millions of Digital Receipts, Sometimes To the Wrong Person
With access to years of data on the purchase activity of hundreds of millions of unique credit and debit cards across millions of small businesses, payments app Square has a window into spending patte...
01:00 pm - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Get Ready For Under-Display Smartphone Cameras
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With in-screen fingerprint readers quickly becoming a regular feature of flagship phones, manufacturers are starting to wonder about what other t...
11:30 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Limits Tracking and Ads In Kid-Focused Apps
In addition to the "Sign in With Apple" button, Apple announced another privacy-focused measure at its WWDC on Monday: developers are no longer permitted to include third-party ads or analytics tools ...
10:00 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Unveils 6K 'Pro Display XDR' Monitor That Starts At $5,000
One of the most ridiculous announcements made at Apple's WWDC on Monday was the new Pro Display XDR monitor. It's a monitor made to pair with the new Mac Pro, complete with top-level specs and a stagg...
07:00 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death
A new report finds that the CRISPR babies created by Chinese scientist He Jiankui last year may be at risk of an early death. It finds that genetic mutations similar to those He created, to a gene cal...
03:30 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Physicists Can Predict the Jumps of Schrodinger's Cat (and Finally Save It)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Yale researchers have figured out how to catch and save Schrodinger's famous cat, the symbol of quantum superposition and unpredictability. In the pr...
02:10 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Expands tvOS Gaming With PS4, Xbox One S Controller Support
Apple CEO Tim Cook today announced that the company is expanding Apple TV controller support to include "two of the best and most popular game controllers available, Xbox One S and PlayStation DualSho...
01:30 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Apple Debuts SwiftUI and New Xcode Interactive Development Experience
Apple today announced SwiftUI, a framework that complements its open source compiled programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux, and other platforms alongside a reimagined development e...
12:50 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Quest Diagnostics, One of the Biggest Blood Testing Providers In US, Says Up To 12 Million Patients May Have Had Info Stolen
JustAnotherOldGuy writes from a report via NBC New York: Did your personal, medical, or financial data just get hacked? Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest blood testing providers in the country, wa...
12:10 am - Tue, June 4, 2019
Slashdot Bitcoin's Rally Masks Uncomfortable Fact: Almost Nobody Uses It
Bitcoin has a lingering problem that few people are talking about amid the renewed exuberance of the recent price surge. From a report: Hardly anyone is using the world's largest cryptocurrency for an...
11:30 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Blockchain Firm Planning To Build 'Smart City' Buys Slock.it
chiefcrash writes from a report via Bloomberg: Blockchains LLC, a Nevada-based startup that plans to build an Ethereum city, has acquired Slock.it, the German-based startup known for their attempt in ...
10:50 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Apple's MacOS Catalina Will Open Up To iPad Apps, Be Available In the Fall
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Apple on Monday announced the next version of MacOS. Called Catalina, the next major revision of the MacOS will replace the iTunes app with three dedicat...
10:30 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Blake's 7 Actor Paul Darrow Dies At 78
simpz writes: Actor Paul Darrow, who played the greatest antihero in Blake's 7, Kerr Avon, has passed away. Avon was one of the few (only) computer experts in sci-fi to not be portrayed as a stereotyp...
10:10 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot IEEE Is No Longer Banning Huawei Scientists From Peer-Reviewing Papers
AmiMoJo writes: After initially banning Huawei scientists from reviewing papers submitted to the IEEE, the organization contacted the U.S. Department of Commerce seeking clarification. Based on new in...
09:30 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot US Justice Department Considering Apple Probe
The U.S. Justice Department has jurisdiction for a potential probe of Apple as part of a broader review of whether technology giants are using their size to act in an anti-competitive manner, Reuters ...
08:50 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot iOS 13: Apple Brings Dark Mode To iPhones and Multitasking Overhaul To iPads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: iOS 13 will introduce Dark Mode to iPhones, iPads, and iPods for the first time. Apple brought Dark Mode to Macs via macOS Mojave last year, to m...
08:10 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Apple Finally Kills iTunes
An anonymous reader shares a report: After long anticipation, Apple finally announced today that it's killing iTunes at its developer conference WWDC held in San Jose. Instead, it will be replaced by ...
07:30 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot The iPad Finally Outgrows iOS
Onstage at WWDC, Apple announced that iPad's software will now exist inside its own vertical OS. The new iPadOS doesn't look dramatically different from iOS 12, but the name change undoubtedly makes i...
06:50 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Apple Announces All-New Redesigned Mac Pro, Starting at $5,999
The long-awaited Mac Pro is here. From a report: The new Intel Xeon processor inside the Mac Pro will have up to 28 cores, with up to 300W of power and heavy-duty cooling, "so it can run unconstrained...
06:10 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Apple Introduces Privacy-Focused 'Sign in With Apple' Button For Sites and Apps
Apple today announced a "Sign in with Apple" button -- that is similar to sign-in buttons from Twitter, Facebook or Google that allow users to quickly login to a range of services using their social m...
05:30 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot US Demands Social Media Details From Visa Applicants
Nearly all applicants for US visas will have to submit their social media details under newly adopted rules. From a report: The State Department regulations say people will have to submit social media...
04:50 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot FTC Gets Jurisdiction for Possible Facebook Antitrust Probe
The Federal Trade Commission will lead any antitrust investigation into Facebook under an arrangement that gives the Justice Department chief oversight of Alphabet's Google, as the U.S. government gea...
04:00 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Tesla Pickup Truck To Cost Less Than $50,000, 'Be Better Than F150', Says Elon Musk
Elon Musk has made some interesting new comments about the upcoming Tesla Pickup truck, including a first hint at the starting price, which he aims to keep under $50,000, and some of the functionality...
03:18 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Samsung and AMD Announce Multi-Year Strategic Graphics IP Licensing Deal For SLSI Mobile GPUs
Samsung and AMD announced today a new multi-year strategic partnership between the two companies, where Samsung SLSI will license graphics IP from AMD for use in mobile GPUs. From a report: The announ...
02:45 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Swedish Startup To Bring Pogo Sticks To San Francisco as E-Scooter Alternative
San Franciscans may soon be able to bounce their way around town, if a Swedish-based mobility company has its way. From a report: Last month, start-up company Cangoroo announced plans to deploy hundre...
02:07 pm - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Apple Still Has Problems With Stopping Synthetic Clicks
Synthetic events remain a big security hole for macOS in spite of Apple's recent efforts to prevent malicious applications from abusing this feature. From a report: Speaking at the second edition of t...
10:34 am - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot What Would Happen If All Encryption Could Be Broken?
"What would happen, or what should happen, if tomorrow a trivial method was discovered for Prime Factorization?" asks Slashdot reader medv4380:By trivial I mean an algorithm that runs in relatively co...
07:34 am - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot 'U.S. Navy Says UFOs Are Real, UFO Hunters Are Thrilled'
dryriver writes: Vice/Motherboard writes that since the U.S. Navy admitted that its pilots encounter unidentified flying objects all the time, and mainstream news outlets like the New York Times have ...
03:34 am - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot YouTube Star Who Gave Man Toothpaste-Filled Oreos Sentenced To Prison
CNET reports on the prison sentence given to "the YouTuber who reportedly filmed himself tricking a homeless man into eating Oreos filled with toothpaste."Barcelona prankster Kanghua Ren, 21, known to...
01:42 am - Mon, June 3, 2019
Slashdot Boeing Says Some 737 Max Planes Might Have Defective Parts
"Boeing on Sunday said some of its 737 planes, including many 737 Max aircraft, may have faulty parts on their wings," reports CNN.Working with the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing said it has ...
11:27 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Is Dockerization a Fad?
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino is your typical Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) developer, and writes that "in recent years Docker has been the hottest thing since sliced bread."You are expected to "...
10:25 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot To Protect Secrets, US Won't Charge Assange Over Exposing CIA Tools, Reports Politico
Some interesting news from Politico. America's Justice Department will still prosecute Julian Assange for allegedly assisting Chelsea Manning, and for 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act -- but "...
09:17 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Eric S. Raymond Calls SaaS 'Dangerous', 'Worse Than Proprietary Software'
After Salesforce warned it retailers to stop selling military-style files, a larger issue was identified by Eric S. Raymond: software as a service.If the provider decides it doesn't want your business...
08:16 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Massive Google Cloud Outage Takes Down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat In Parts of US
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord, and a number of other web services are suffering from outages in the U.S. today. The root cause appears to be problems wit...
07:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Scammers Try Elaborate Fake Job Interviews On Google Hangouts
Ars Technica documents "a new breed of digital fraudsters" using a complicated scam to prey on white-collar job-seekers. It involves setting up a fake job interview process and the promises of high-pa...
06:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Should Companies Abandon Their Password Expiration Policies?
In his TechCrunch column, software engineer/journalist Jon Evans writes that last month "marked a victory for sanity and pragmatism over irrational paranoia."I'm talking about Microsoft finally -- fin...
05:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot John Romero Finally Releases Fifth Episode of 'Doom' For Free
John Romero has finally released Sigil, his unofficial fifth episode of Doom with nine new single-player levels and nine deathmatch levels. It's available for free on Romero's web site (though you'll ...
04:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot NLNet Funds Development of a Libre RISC-V 3D CPU
The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the group has approved funding for the hybrid Libre RISC-V CPU/VPU/GPU, which will "pay for full-time en...
03:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot The Invention of USB, 'The Port That Changed Everything'
harrymcc shares a Fast Company article about "the generally gnarly process once required to hook up peripherals" in the late 1990s -- and one Intel engineer who saw the need for "one plug to rule them...
02:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot NYT 'Op Eds From the Future' Launch With Sci-Fi Writer Ted Chiang
Slashdot reader Lasrick tipped us off to the first installment in a new series at the New York Times called "Op-Eds From the Future." Science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists wr...
01:34 pm - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Six Years After Ed Snowden Went Public, How Much Has Changed?
Slashdot reader Nicola Hahn argues that at first, Edward Snowden's revelations six years ago "put mass surveillance and state sponsored hacking center stage," leading to other revelations like the ANT...
10:34 am - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Study Claims Using Twitter Erodes Your Intelligence
Researchers at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan have discovered that Twitter-based classes actually hurts academic performance, according to the Washington Post:The finding by a te...
07:34 am - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Is Facebook Already Working On An Encryption Backdoor?
Horst Seehofer, Germany's federal interior minister, wants to require encryption companies to provide the government with plain text transcripts. One security expert says Facebook is already working o...
04:34 am - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Relatives' DNA Leads To Arrest -- For a 1976 Double Murder
"You gotta be kidding me," said a Wisconsin man, when police arrested his 82-year-old next-door neighbor "old Ray" -- the guy who would occasionally come over to fix his lawnmower. An anonymous reader...
01:37 am - Sun, June 2, 2019
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: What To Do When Your Certificate Authority Suddenly Revokes Your Cert?
Long-time Slashdot reader rastos1 works for a mid-size software company that for many decades has been developing CAD-CAM software for the textile industry. But last weekend their code-signing certifi...
11:39 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot NYT: Deadly 'Misguided Assumptions' Were Built Into Boeing's 737 Max
The automated MCAS system in the Boeing 737 Max played a role in two fatal crashes. But today the New York Times reports that a year before they'd finished developing the plane, Boeing "made the syste...
10:39 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Robot Boat Wins $4 Million Ocean Floor Mapping XPRIZE
"A robotic boat and submersible have won the XPRIZE to find the best new technologies to map the seafloor," writes the BBC -- taking home the grand prize of $4 million. dryriver shares their report:Th...
09:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Google's Go Lead: the Language Belongs To the Community
Russ Cox (along with Rob Pike) is the tech lead for Google's Go team and its Go project. This week he responded on the Google group golang-nuts to a blogger who'd argued that "Go is Google's language,...
08:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Gut Bacteria May Contribute To Autism Symptoms, Mouse Study Finds
Suren Enfiajyan shared this story from Science magazine:Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits t...
07:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Google Assistant's AI Is Actually Humans In 'A White-Collar Sweatshop', Complain Workers
This week the Guardian ran an expose on Google Assistant (Google's version of Alexa or Siri) "Interpreting a spoken request isn't magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguist...
06:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Russian Trolls Fueled Anti-Vaccination Debate On Twitter, Study Finds
"Russian Twitter trolls have attempted to fuel the anti-vaccination debate in the U.S.," reports CBS News, citing a study from George Washington University. Bots are reportedly sharing opinions from b...
05:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot After 10 Years, Bing Is 'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore'
Bloomberg remembers the launch of Bing ten years ago -- "It was all a little sad". There was even a jingle-writing contest in which song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann won a $500 gift card for his song "B...
04:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Purism Introduces A New Social Network Named 'Librem Social'
Purism just published an announcement about their new social network, Librem Social, available for both iOS and Android. "Think Twitter... if Twitter respected your privacy and didn't advertise to you...
03:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot DeepMind's AI Beats Humans At Quake III Arena
"A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence company has designed automated 'agents' that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter Quake III Arena, and became so g...
02:34 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot A German Minister Wants To Ban End-to-End Chat Encryption
An anonymous reader quotes the Next Web:According to Spiegel Online, the country's Federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, wants encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram to provide c...
01:00 pm - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Russian Military Moves Closer To Replacing Windows With Astra Linux
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Russian authorities have moved closer to implementing their plan of replacing the Windows OS on military systems with a locally-developed operating syst...
10:00 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot James Webb Space Telescope Emerges Successfully From Final Thermal Vacuum Test
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has successfully cleared its final thermal vacuum test meant to ensure that its hardware will function electronically in the vacuum of space, and withstand the extrem...
06:04 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google
According to The New York Times, the Justice Department is exploring whether to open a case against Google for potential antitrust violations (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) rel...
03:30 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Use of Male Mice Skews Drug Research Against Women, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The male mind is rational and orderly while the female one is complicated and hormonal. It is a stereotype that has skewed decades of neuroscienc...
02:10 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Teen Makes His Own AirPods For $4
samleecole writes: Apple's AirPods are a tragedy. Ecologically, socially, economically -- they're a capitalist disaster. The opposite of AirPods, then, is this extremely punk pair of DIY wireless earb...
01:30 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Why Is 3D Technology Stagnating So Badly?
dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have r...
12:50 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Facebook Reportedly Thinks There's No 'Expectation of Privacy' On Social Media
Facebook wants to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal by arguing that it didn't violate users' privacy rights because there's no expectation of privacy when using social me...
12:10 am - Sat, June 1, 2019
Slashdot Google Struggles To Justify Why It's Restricting Ad Blockers In Chrome
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice News: Google has found itself under fire for plans to limit the effectiveness of popular ad blocking extensions in Chrome. While Google says the changes a...
11:30 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Microsoft Warns 1 Million Computers Are Still Vulnerable To Major Windows Security Exploit
Earlier this month, Microsoft revealed a major Windows security vulnerability that could see a widespread "wormable" attack that spreads from one vulnerable computer to the next. "While Microsoft has ...
10:50 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot iTunes Expected To Be Retired After Over 18 Years
While it was initially reported that iTunes would live on in macOS 10.15, it now looks like the app will be retired, over 18 years after it was introduced by the late Steve Jobs at Macworld on January...
10:10 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Space Firm Founded By Paul Allen Closing Operations, Report Says
Stratolaunch Systems Corporation, the space company founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is closing operations, cutting short ambitious plans to challenge traditional aerospace companies i...
09:30 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot New York Schools Will Test Facial Recognition On Students Despite Objections From State
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: A New York school district will move forward with its facial recognition pilot program next week, despite an explicit order from the New York St...
08:50 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Apple Poised To Bring Mac and iPad Closer Than Ever
It's pretty much a given that next week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference will bring new versions of MacOS and iOS. The real question is just how much convergence there will be between the 2 oper...
08:10 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot The Dark Side of Dark Mode
Apple, which has already introduced "dark mode" in macOS, is widely expected to replicate this in its mobile operating system iOS this year. The move comes as a number of technology companies introduc...
07:30 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot 'Robots' Are Not 'Coming For Your Job' -- Management Is
merbs writes: If the robots are simply "coming," if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this techno-elemental phenomenon, and littl...
06:50 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Hulu Has 82M Viewers, and Most of Them Are Seeing Ads
Hulu has broken out some new total audience figures and revealed just how many of those total viewers are watching the company's ad-supported streaming service. From a report: Peter Naylor, senior vic...
06:10 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot The North Face Used Wikipedia To Climb To the Top of Google Search Results
An anonymous reader shares a report: When you first start planning a big trip, step one will likely happen at the Google search bar. Step two might be clicking onto the images of your target destinati...
05:35 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Google Threatens To Delist Chrome Extensions Installed by Deceptive Tactics
Google is cracking down again on deceptive Chrome extension installation practices. The browser maker listed new rules yesterday that extension developers must follow, or face the possibility of havin...
05:30 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot New York Tenants Fight as Landlords Embrace Facial Recognition Cameras
Tenants in a New York City apartment complex are fighting their landlord's effort to install a facial recognition system to access parts of the buildings, calling it an affront to their privacy rights...
04:50 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Google Threatens To Delist Chrome Extensions Installed by Deceptive Tactics
Google is cracking down again on deceptive Chrome extension installation practices. The browser maker listed new rules yesterday that extension developers must follow, or face the possibility of havin...
04:10 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Fake LinkedIn Profiles Are Impossible To Detect
From a report: Don't trust everything you see on LinkedIn. We created a fake LinkedIn profile with a fake job at a real company. Our fake profile garnered the attention of a Google recruiter and gaine...
03:30 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Maine Lawmakers Pass Bill To Prevent ISPs From Selling Browsing Data Without Consent
Maine lawmakers have passed a bill that will prevent internet providers from selling consumers' private internet data to advertisers. From a report: The state's senate unanimously passed the bill 35-0...
03:06 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot BlackBerry Messenger Shuts Down For Good Today
Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. From a report: The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to a...
02:40 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot BlackBerry Messenger Shuts Down For Good Today
Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. From a report: The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to a...
02:00 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Following US Huawei Ban, China Threatens Own Blacklist For Foreign Firms
Odds of the U.S. and China cooling off their trade war further diminished on Friday after the world's most populous nation said it would create a list of "unreliable" foreign firms of its own. From a ...
01:00 pm - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot California Approves Wide Power Outages To Prevent Wildfires
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: California regulators on Thursday approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid catastro...
10:00 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot NSF Greenlights $1.1 Million Remake of Microsoft's 2016 'Code Trip' PBS Show
theodp writes: It's not just Hollywood that's running out of new story ideas. Fueled by a $1.1 million NSF award, PBS stalwart Roadtrip Nation is casting Computer Science Roadtrip (apply by June 14, k...
07:00 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Amazon Interested In Buying Boost From T-Mobile and Sprint, Says Report
Amazon is reportedly interested in buying prepaid cellphone wireless service Boost Mobile from U.S. carriers T-Mobile and Sprint. "Amazon is considering buying Boost mainly for an attached wholesale d...
03:30 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Heavily Processed Food Like Ready Meals and Ice Cream Linked To Early Death
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People who eat large amounts of heavily processed foods, from breakfast cereals and ready meals to muffins and ice-cream, have a greater risk of ...
02:10 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot The Small Macedonian Town That Runs Hundreds of Fake US Politics Websites
dryriver writes: BBC Future has the story of "Tamara" (not her real name) who used to be paid 24 euros a day to rewrite U.S. news stories for a slew of "fake news" U.S. politics websites targeted at A...
01:30 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Dell Begins Pre-Installing Linux On Range of Precision Laptops
"While Linux-preloaded laptops have been available for years from smaller companies, and have represented a fraction of their own sales with the much-admired XPS 13 developer model, Dell now offers a ...
12:50 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Advanced Linux Backdoor Found In the Wild Escaped AV Detection
Researchers have discovered an advanced piece of Linux malware that has escaped detection bypasses antivirus products and appears to be actively used in targeted attacks. Ars Technica reports: HiddenW...
12:10 am - Fri, May 31, 2019
Slashdot Chase Bank Is Quietly Adding a Forced Arbitration Clause To Some Credit Cards
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: JPMorgan Chase is quietly re-introducing a heavy-handed legal maneuver. Today, its Slate credit card customers received an email that the bank wa...