Articles by Slashdot from December 2019

The Indian government has allowed Chinese telecom company Huawei Technologies to participate in trials for 5G networks, a company spokesman said on Monday. From a report: India's nod to Huawei comes a...

The Chinese scientist who created the world's first genetically altered babies has been sentenced to three years in prison and a lifelong ban from working in reproductive technology, state media repor...

Brazil's Ministry of Justice said on Monday it has fined U.S. tech giant Facebook 6.6 million reais ($1.6 million) for improperly sharing user data. From a report: The ministry's department of consume...

France's government can pursue plans to trawl social media to detect tax avoidance, its Constitutional Court ruled last week, although it introduced limitations on what information can be collected fo...

The discounts and freebies many tech startups have used to lure customers-- free lunch delivery, $3 beauty products and bargain taxi rides -- have fallen out of favor with investors who are losing pat...

The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one ...

Dozens of bedding venders such as Casper and Tuft & Needle offer generous return policies. Life hackers are taking advantage. From a report: Over the course of 15 months, Mr. Bir slept on five dif...

"The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions, NASA scientists said Friday as they unve...

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: CNBC Explores released a 14-minute documentary this month called "The Rise Of Open-Source Software." It's already racked up 558,802 views on YouTube, arguing that op...

McGruber quotes the Associated Press:The rector of Notre Dame Cathedral says the Paris landmark is still so fragile that there's a "50% chance" the structure might not be saved, because scaffolding in...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A Microsoft blog post notes the company has lined up K-12 educators to sing the praises of Minecraft Education Edition at the Future of Education Technology Co...

"It was the year of 'OK boomer,' and the generations were at each other's throats," argues the national features writer for The Washington Post, starting with a quote from New York University's Michae...

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:What if you could pay for your groceries using your veins? Amazon filed a patent for technology that could identify you by scanning the wrinkles in the palm of you...

Space News reports on Boeing's Saturday update about the "Starliner" spacecraft which cut short a test flight last week:Boeing emphasized the good condition of the spacecraft, which showed "little sco...

"A new intercontinental weapon that can fly 27 times the speed of sound became operational Friday, Russia's defense minister reported to President Vladimir Putin," according to the Associated Press:Pu...

An anonymous reader quotes CNET:Security camera startup Wyze has confirmed it suffered a data leak earlier this month that left the personal information for millions of its customers exposed on the in...

Forty million Californians "will soon have sweeping digital-privacy rights stronger than any seen before in the U.S.," reports the Associated Press, saying the new law taking effect Wednesday "might e...

"After opening 20 percent behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi last weekend, Skywalker has almost caught up with its predecessor as it heads for the $1 billion mark in a fitting end to Disney's unprecedent...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:CNN reports that government shutdowns of the internet are becoming the new normal:An ongoing internet blackout in Indian-controlled Kashmir is now the longest ever in a ...

Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020."- Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Insp...

USA Today wondered how this decade's new construction would look from space. "With the help of Maxar, a provider of advanced, space-based technology solutions, Google and NASA, we've taken many more s...

schwit1 quotes CNET's report on their newly-released "2019 Data Breach Hall of Shame."The biggest recurrent motif among the major data breaches of 2019 wasn't the black-hooded hacker in a dark room, d...

An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle:Once the most highly coveted game developer -- a hit-maker with the Midas touch -- he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the "worst" video game in...

Hundreds of thousands of American students are being tracked by their colleges to monitor attendance, analyze behavior and assess their mental health, the Washington Post reported this week. That arti...

As this decade winds to a close, Vox looks back 10 years to when ebooks "appeared poised to disrupt the publishing industry on a fundamental level."Analysts confidently predicted that millennials woul...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Clint Eastwood's new movie Richard Jewell recounts the incredible tale of the security guard. Jewell was later [erroneously] considered a suspect after being h...

Prorammer Rick Brewster has worked at both Microsoft and Facebook. But this Christmas on Twitter he shared the story of his long-lost videogame creation "that somehow -- like some kind of lost, drunke...

Long-time Slashdot reader twocows writes: Hyperbola GNU/Linux, a FSF-approved distribution of GNU/Linux, has declared their intent to fork OpenBSD and become HyperbolaBSD..." The news came earlier thi...

"The Financial Times is reporting that Los Angeles may now force Uber and Lyft to use electric cars," reports Electrek:Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said, "We have the power to regulate car share. W...

More than 1,000 celebrities, government employees and politicians recognized in the U.K.'s traditional New Year's Honours list this year "have had their home and work addresses posted on a government ...

"A Michigan woman got the Secret Santa gift of a lifetime this Christmas -- an 81-pound package from Bill Gates," reports CNN: The gifts included an original manuscript of "The Great Gatsby," signed b...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:A North Carolina couple was watching a movie in their bedroom when they suddenly heard loud noises coming from downstairs. Worried that it was an intruder, the two calle...

In October the Register reported that 20 Stack Exchange moderators had distanced themselves from the geeky Q&A site to protest policy changes and the removal of moderator Monica Cellio "over alleg...

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters' reports on some more bad news for the Geneva-based Libra Association:Facebook's Libra project has failed in its current form and needs reworking to be approved, sai...

DevNull127 writes: The Debian Project has announced the results of its vote on how much to support non-systemd init systems. The eight options voted on included "Focus on systemd" and "Support for mul...

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: There was only one job that robots could not do when Fast Retailing, the owner of Uniqlo, replaced 90% of its workers with robots at its fla...

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: The U.S. military thought it had cleared the decks when, on 9 July 1962, it heaved a 1.4-megaton nuclear bomb some 400 kilometers into space: Orbiti...

schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: China's biggest rocket, the Long March 5, returned to flight for the first time since a 2017 failure Friday (Dec. 27) in a dazzling nighttime launch for the Chi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to...

The White House is rumored to be working on an executive order that would require all scientific papers that are based on federally funded research to be made available online free of charge as soon a...

After a longstanding campaign by Consumer Reports, The Television Viewer Protection Act of 2019 passed the House and the Senate last week buried inside a giant appropriations bill that now awaits Pres...

Alabama resident John Orange has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Amazon and Ring of failing to do enough to secure their security systems against hacks, including Orange's. Engadget reports: He ...

Rog Srigley, writer who teaches at Humber College and Laurentian University, offered his students extra credit if they would give him their phones for nine days and write about living without them. "W...

Mac developer Michael Tsai reports that Apple News no longer supports RSS. The news comes from user David A. Desrosiers, who writes: Apple News on iOS and macOS no longer supports adding RSS or ATOM f...

Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO of $48 billion e-commerce cloud-software company Shopify, took to Twitter to remind us all that we don't need to work 80 hours a week to be successful. Business Insider...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicl...

An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft...

From a report: Calculate Linux 20, a Gentoo-based operating system, is ready to be installed on your computer. Calculate Linux 20 is based on Gentoo 17.1 and comes with several desktop environment cho...

A single wild tree on a New Zealand island could soon get some neighbors -- and that's a good thing. From a report: After seven decades of cuttings, failures, plant enzymes, a little coaxing, and a Ma...

If you want to sign up for Facebook Messenger, you can no longer escape Big Blue -- you'll need an account from now on. From a report: The company has stopped allowing new users to join using a phone ...

Packages leave a trail of pollution, and some end up in landfills. From a report: The biggest flood of returns will come on January 2nd as people head back to work after the holidays, when UPS expects...

China said Friday its Beidou Navigation Satellite System that emulates the U.S. Global Positioning System will be competed with the launch of its final two satellites in the first half of next year. F...

Italy soon will join France in applying a new tax on large tech companies, a move that could deepen trans-Atlantic trade tensions and snarl up already-faltering negotiations over how best to tax compa...

Chinese companies have made every submission to UN on standards in past three years, Financial Times reports [the link may be paywalled]. From the report: Chinese companies have made every submission ...

Rumbling quakes on the red planet have been traced back to Cerberus Fossae, suggesting this geologically young region is still alive and cracking. From a report: Millions of miles away, a robot geolog...

Michael Irving, writing for New Atlas: Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time...

Researchers aim to recreate intense emotional experience astronauts reported on seeing Earth from space for the first time. From a report: The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that operates Wikipedia and a number of other projects, has urged the Indian government to rethink the proposed changes t...

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that operates Wikipedia and a number of other projects, has urged the Indian government to rethink the proposed changes t...

Iwastheone shares a report from Stuff.co.nz: Christchurch electrician Tim Fensom has been awarded $23,200 after he was fired for refusing to use a face scanning system. Fensom worked for construction ...

Google has decided to remove hundreds of bitcoin and cryptocurrency videos from YouTube in what's being called a "crypto-purge" -- leaving many who make bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related videos feeli...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to introduce [a $21 million plug-in station] in Red Hoo...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has vetoed a bill that would have made electric scooters and bikes legal in the state, citing the lack of a mandatory helmet requirement and other safety concerns. The v...

Mazda says "incorrect programming" in its Smart Braking System (SBS) can make fourth-generation Mazda 3 vehicles falsely detect on object in their path while driving and automatically apply the brakes...

Baidu, China's closest equivalent to Google, has achieved the highest score at the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) AI competition. What's notable about Baidu's achievement is that it ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The speed and convenience of Amazon's own delivery network has regularly come at the price of safety, as detailed in an extensive report by BuzzFeed News and ProPu...

Tesla is closing the year by filing a patent on a new chemistry for better, longer-lasting and cheaper batteries. The new patent is related to the new battery cell that Tesla's battery research partne...

According to TV metrics company Nielsen, a whopping 88% of Americans stare at screens while staring at other screens. Nate Anderson from Ars Technica discovered the stat while combing through Mary Mee...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For those following Huawei's substantial rise over the past several years, it'll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an importan...

A Google Brain and Imperial College London team have built a system -- Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive SUmmarization Sequence-to-sequence, or Pegasus -- that leverages Google...

Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. From a report: Games -- particularly video games -- provide challenging environments against which to benchm...

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: Optical character recognition (OCR), or the conversion of images of handwritten or printed text into machine-readable text, is a science that dates back to the e...

In a rare bipartisan achievement, Congress has moved to combat the scourge of robocalls inundating Americans. Just don't expect the phone to stop ringing any time soon. From a report: Lawmakers, indus...

U.S. consumers spent more online this holiday season than they ever have before, according to a new report from Mastercard. From a report: Digging into the report, Reuters found e-commerce sales contr...

The Federal Aviation Administration put forward a rule Thursday that would empower the government to track most drones in the U.S. From a report: The rule will require drones to implement a remote ID ...

At least two tech review sites are discussing whether to rescind their positive recommendations of Ring's home surveillance cameras, a leading digital-rights organization announced this week. From a r...

Sony is working around the clock to manufacture its in-demand image sensors, but even a 24-hour operation hasn't been enough. From a report: For the second straight year, the Japanese company will run...

Over 20,000 developers have shared what are their favorite JavaScript features, front-end frameworks and back-end frameworks in a new annual survey. The figures come from the fourth State of JavaScrip...

Thousands of skywatchers gathered across parts of the Middle East and Asia on Thursday to glimpse the sun forming a ring of fire around the moon in a rare annular solar eclipse. From a report: An annu...

The Constitutional Court in Ankara ruled that the nationwide access ban on Wikipedia constitutes a violation of free speech, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Thursday. From a report: The 10-to-6 m...

The Constitutional Court in Ankara ruled that the nationwide access ban on Wikipedia constitutes a violation of free speech, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Thursday. From a report: The 10-to-6 m...

The US government has for the first time authorized funding to research geoengineering, the idea that we could counteract climate change by reflecting more of the sun's heat away from the planet. An a...

Matt Burgess, writing for Wired UK: Last year London's 8,000 or so buses traveled 279 million miles and completed 2.23 billion journeys -- more than half of all bus trips completed in England. But the...

The network's furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month: Monday's split-s...

The Pentagon is urging US telecoms equipment makers to join forces on 5G technology in a drive to offer a homegrown alternative to China's Huawei. From a report: Lisa Porter, who oversees research and...

Iran's authorities have restricted mobile internet access in several provinces, an Iranian news agency reported on Wednesday, a day before new protests were expected to kick off following calls for de...

Colleges are tracking students' location to enforce attendance, analyze their behavior and assess their mental health. One company calculates a student's "risk score" based on factors such as whether ...

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Emperor Palpatine is back with a fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, the masses are scare...

Technology giants are increasingly designing their own semiconductors to optimize everything from artificial intelligence tasks to server performance and mobile battery life. Google has the Tensor Pro...

theodp writes: Over at Polygon, games journalist Colin Campbell remembers the late Silas Warner in The Man Who Made Wolfenstein. Before Doom, there was Warner's Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Ca...

Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo has managed to automate 90 percent of its flagship Tokyo warehouse, the Financial Times reports, adding that the facility includes a two-armed robot that can fold and ...

In the age of social media, the snail-mail holiday photo card is taking on more significance. Permanent, physical photos stand out, and families are realizing they can be used to convey important life...

For decades France has had one of the most well-organized anti-advertising movements in the world, ranging from guerrilla protests with spray-cans to high-profile court cases. But now the boom in what...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apps from Chinese developers have been gaining popularity on Indian app stores for sometime. Last year, as many as 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were dev...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Christmas season is in full swing, and if the newly-formed Christmas Tree Promotion Board is doing its job right, you'll want to buy a real tree. You'll crave the ...

The Russian government says it has successfully tested a country-wide alternative to the global internet. Details of what the test involved were vague but, according to the Ministry of Communications,...

doug141 writes: At least 17 big drones, likely over the FAA limit of 55 pounds, are flying a grid search pattern over NE Colorado (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), nightly between 7 and...

Pocket Casts, one of the most widely used podcast apps, has shared a list of podcasts that were most subscribed by its user base this year. Top 10 podcasts this year were: 1. The Joe Rogan Experience....

dryriver writes: Santa -- flying over Australia right now -- is flying across the globe and dropping gifts along the way. Using NORAD's Santa Tracker, we can watch him flying over a Google Earth-style...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A new set of SQLite vulnerabilities can allow attackers to remotely run malicious code inside Google Chrome, the world's most popular web browser. The v...

Computer engineer George Hilliard says he has built an electronic business card running Linux. From his blog post: It is a complete, minimal ARM computer running my customized Linux firmware built wit...

As a way to help his 2020 presidential bid, presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unknown digital business called Hawkfish -- which Bloomberg himself fou...

Researchers from MIT have revealed the very first images of a human generated through a novel laser ultrasound imaging technique. Unlike conventional ultrasound, the new technique does not require any...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country's annual carbon dioxide emissions...

Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for a state net neutrality law as part of his 2020 legislative agenda, joining states like California in proposing a law to ensure his state's internet...

Security researcher Ibrahim Balic said he has matched 17 million phone numbers to Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in Twitter's Android app. TechCrunch reports: Ibrahim Balic found that it w...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick will step down from the board, effective Dec. 31, and a spokesperson said Tuesday he has sold all of his stock in the rid...

A new method for preserving genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials is reported. From a report: The future of digital memory may be inside a small plastic bunny that contains 3-D ...

Chinese criminals have been exploiting the country's African swine fever crisis by intentionally spreading the disease to force farmers to sell their pigs for a low price before smuggling the meat and...

dryriver writes: We've all seen the DeepFake videos on Youtube, where a different actor's face from the original is digitally inserted into a film scene. Some of these DeepFakes are actually quite con...

dryriver writes: We've all seen the DeepFake videos on Youtube, where a different actor's face from the original is digitally inserted into a film scene. Some of these DeepFakes are actually quite con...

In November 2019, Tim Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation launched the Contract for the Web, a set of rules designed to address the challenges facing digital communication and participation -- from thr...

In November 2019, Tim Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation launched the Contract for the Web, a set of rules designed to address the challenges facing digital communication and participation -- from thr...

Answering this question requires that we rethink our views of exercise. From a report: People often consider walking and running to be activities that the body is able to perform on autopilot. But res...

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Friday he now supports a pilot program to fly three private surveillance planes over the city, reviving a controversial effort that had been shelved...

Answering this question requires that we rethink our views of exercise. From a report: People often consider walking and running to be activities that the body is able to perform on autopilot. But res...

As smartphones balloon in price, some pushing past $1,000, there is a debate between case haves and case have-nots. One side says it makes absolutely no sense to ferry such expensive gadgets unprotect...

A Chinese malware broker who was sentenced in the United States this year for dealing in malicious software linked to major hacks is back at his old workplace: teaching high-school computer courses, i...

Over the past decade, Netflix and its rivals have come to rely heavily on the power of algorithms, those top-secret computer programs designed to connect audiences with the programming they're most li...

Randy Suess, a computer hobbyist who helped build the first online bulletin board, anticipating the rise of the internet, messaging apps and social media, died on Dec. 10 in Chicago. He was 74. From a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A 22-year-old boss backed by a gangster cabal of "internet buddies" has been thwarted and convicted in their attempt to blackmail Apple, the UK's Nati...

Uber is joining forces with California-based aerospace company Joby Aviation to launch urban air-taxi services in select locations by 2023. The Verge reports: Joby is the brainchild of inventor JoeBen...

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with a new concept for capturing CO2 from truck exhausts which could reduce emissions by up to 90 percent. Engadget reports: ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide...

schwit1 writes: [ProPublica] outlines in detail the causes behind the crash in 2017 of the USS McCain and an oil-tanker that killed ten sailors and injured many others. It is a horror story of a bankr...

A New York judge ruled on Monday that a state law designed to control how much time ride-hailing drivers can spend looking for passengers was "arbitrary and capricious." Engadget reports: Had the law ...

Twitter is banning animated PNG image files (APNGs) from its platform, after an attack on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter account sent out similar animated images that could potentially cause seizur...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal regulators that want to let T-Mobile complete its acquisition of rival wireless carrier Sprint are pushing back on a collective effort by...

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Elon Musk tweeted he had secured funding to take Tesla private at a share price of $420 right in the middle of a trading day in August 2018, without any prior approval from ...

McGruber writes: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Boeing Corporation fired its Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) as the company str...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: California has said it will now allow companies to test light-duty autonomous delivery vehicles on the state's public roads. The State of California's D...

A former Jet2 IT contractor with a grudge has been jailed for a cyber-attack on the company. From a report: Scott Burns, 27, of Queen Street in Morley, Leeds, was jailed for 10 months for his actions,...

FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades,...

Zack Whittaker, writing for TechCrunch: Last week, Spotify sent a number of USB drives to reporters with a note: "Play me." It's not uncommon for reporters to receive USB drives in the post. Companies...

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission intended to achieve all this will require three launches from Earth over the course of a decade, and five separate machines. From a report: The organisations invol...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gamin...

Americans searching for last-minute Christmas gifts on Amazon.com will get lots of results that include "Amazon's Choice" products. Many shoppers will assume that is a dependable stamp of approval. It...

Security researchers say they found evidence that a Chinese government-linked hacking group has been bypassing two-factor authentication (2FA) in a recent wave of attacks. From a report: The attacks h...

Russia has temporarily shut off many of its citizens' access to the global internet today in a test of its controversial RuNet program, according to an internal government document. From a report: RuN...

When StarCraft first came on the scene in 1998, the real-time science fiction strategy game wasn't just a hit -- it was an awakening. Out of 11 million copies sold worldwide, 4.5 million were in South...

In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko." As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a prob...

A popular messaging app billed as a secure way to chat with friends and family is actually a spying tool used by the United Arab Emirates to track the activities of those who download it, The New York...

Ethiopia launched its first observatory satellite into space on Friday (Dec. 20), according to local reports. From a report: The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, cl...

In Japan, more and more children are refusing to go to school, a phenomenon called "futoko." As the numbers keep rising, people are asking if it's a reflection of the school system, rather than a prob...

Ethiopia launched its first observatory satellite into space on Friday (Dec. 20), according to local reports. From a report: The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, cl...

After 42 years the final installment in the 9-movie Star Wars franchise arrived this weekend during a "moment of transition for the movie business," reports Variety:Its $176 million debut, though mass...

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:"The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we," Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos No...

"Present laptop dying, battery of course," writes long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills.It uses proprietary pouch Lithium cells. Wouldn't it be great to just swap in a new set of 18650s? Okay, it may n...

Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes:If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the wo...

Though its poster promises "the most joyful event of the holiday season," the new movie Cats scored just 18% with professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and the $100 million adaptaton of the Broadwa...

theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had ...

An anonymous reader quotes the Detroit Free Press:The mysterious, greenish-yellow liquid that ran onto a Michigan highway on Friday came from a closed electroplating business whose owner is serving a ...

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:For over a century, the "solar sail" has been a concept in theoretical spaceflight, in science fiction, and in the last few years, actual spaceflight. Recen...

"Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton's McMaster University has created the smallest gingerbread house ever built," writes long-time Slash...

Long-time Slashdot reader pvjr writes that "The Inquirer is giving up the ghost and going dark in March, 2020." An announcement on the site from the site's editor explains that the change is "due to a...

orange (Slashdot user #12,033) writes:In a series of articles, a security researcher along with an investigative journalist have laid bare shenanigans involving millions of dollars of scarce IPv4 addr...

Kubernetes (originally designed by Google) is a prominent open-source container-orchestration system for cloud computing with over 4.3 million lines of Go source code. Over 700,000 lines of that code ...

"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek. schw...

A fake press release posted at vinci.group (mimicking vinci.com) led to a multi-million dollar fine -- for the news outlet that fell for it. AFP reports:France's financial markets watchdog on Monday (...

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:The nation's oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its ...

"Retired Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast says fantastic technology exists that could transport a human anywhere on earth within an hour," reports The Drive, in an article shared by schwit1:As has been common...

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:Advanced driver assistance systems are becoming on the norm even on midlevel cars. For safety advocates that seems like good news: Systems designed to prevent crashes ...

Harper's profiles sys-admin Chris Monteiro, who moonlights as a white-hat hacker monitoring dark web sites claiming to offer murder-for-hire services. For example, he tipped off one local police depar...

Slashdot reader ne0phyte73 writes:I got my first computer (a Commodore 64) when I was 13. My daughter got hers (One Laptop Per Child) when she was 5. What are the current trends? I see new AI-powered ...

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes:DNS over HTTPS has been hailed as part of a "poor mans VPN". Its use of HTTPS to send DNS queries makes it much more difficult to detect and block the use ...

"We're at a turning point for driving surveillance," reports the Washington Post (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader davidwr ). "In the 2020 model year, most new cars sold in the United...

"Ring lacks basic security features, making it easy for hackers to turn the company's cameras against its customers," reports Motherboard: Ring is not offering basic security precautions, such as doub...

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:Earlier this week the United States Navy banned the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the popular short video app represented a "...

Since 2003 Vox Media has been covering California's sports on its SB Nation blogs largely with independent contractors.But they're making big changes to comply with a new California law targetting com...

"An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys on YouTube has been named by Forbes as the platform's highest earner in 2019," reports CNN:Ryan Kaji, whose channel Ryan's World has 22.9 million subscribers, e...

b-dayyy shared this article from Linux Security:The United States government's respect for and acceptance of open-source development has steadily grown stronger over the past decade, and the U.S. gove...

"India has been aggressively pivoting away from coal-fired power plants and towards electricity generated by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power," writes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Lasric...

pgmrdlm tipped us off to an unprecedented scientific phenomenon. Forbes writes:Earth's magnetic north pole has been moving East at an unusually fast pace, heading from the Canadian Arctic toward Russi...

jmcbain writes: In a blog post last week, Dan Amman, the CEO of Cruise Automation (General Motors' electric self-driving car division), laments the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of ca...

The BBC reports:President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space -- the U.S. Space Force. The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls unde...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a vaccine for the prevention of the deadly Ebola virus disease. The agency anno...

harrymcc writes: Atari's first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn't ship until late in the year -- so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has m...

Twitter announced Friday that has removed nearly 6,000 accounts for being part of a state-backed information operation originating in Saudi Arabia. Reuters reports: In a public blog post, Twitter said...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [S]cientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining. The problems with...

The town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the fifth municipality in the nation to ban its government agencies from using face surveillance. The passage of Article 25 comes as a new study from the N...

Wawa, a convenience store and gas station chain, notified customers Thursday of a data breach (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) that collected debit and credit card information at...

Motorola is slightly delaying its reimagined foldable Razr flip phone, citing an unexpectedly high demand. Android Police reports: Pre-orders were originally slated to begin on December 26th, ahead of...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A health-surveillance system put in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 has been used to pinpoint the cause of the vaping-related lung inj...

Socguy shares a report from Electrek: Germany's Manager Magazine reports today that Volkswagen is struggling with software problems for its ID3 all-electric car. According to the report, the ID3 will ...

On Friday, Facebook and Twitter shut down a network of fake accounts that pushed pro-Trump messages all while "masquerading" as Americans with AI-generated faces as profile photos. The Verge reports: ...

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an Ars Technica article: In November, people started polishing a Nobel prize for a group of physicists who seemed to have found new boson. [...] This result ...

Companies are trying to capitalize on the threat of space junk with new technology to clean it up, but it's not clear who will pay for the service. From a report: Today, thousands of pieces of space j...

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: AI and machine learning algorithms are quite skilled at generating works of art -- and highly realistic images of apartments, people, and pets to boot. But relat...

At its developer conference in June this year, Apple introduced Project Catalyst that aims to help developers swiftly bring their iOS apps to Macs. Developers have had more than half a year to play wi...

More than 267 million Facebook users allegedly had their user IDs, phone numbers and names exposed online, according to a report from Comparitech and security researcher Bob Diachenko. From a report: ...

How an overlooked feature of deep learning networks can turn into a major breakthrough for AI. From a report: Traditionally, deep learning algorithms such as deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained in...

The venture capital firm First Round Capital conducts an annual "State of Startups" survey that gets passed around widely in Silicon Valley. Its 2019 findings, published this week, are grim. From a re...

The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner -- despite it being a fictional country. From a report: A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by...

Over the past few years, record labels have been suing ISPs for not removing music pirates from their services, and this week, the record labels may have hit a tremendous victory. From a report: A US ...

pgmrdlm shares a report: Boeing's new Starliner capsule went off course after launch Friday and won't dock with the International Space Station during its first test flight. It was supposed to be a cr...

Laura June, reporting for Input: Two days after Input reported that there were hundreds of unofficial -- often disturbing -- knock-off Disney and Nickelodeon gaming apps aimed at children in Apple's A...

Apple has formally opened its bug bounty program today to all security researchers, after announcing the move earlier this year in August at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. From a repo...

Apple has a secret team working on satellites and related wireless technology, striving to find new ways to beam data such as internet connectivity directly to its devices, Bloomberg reported Friday, ...

Pocket Casts, one of the most widely used podcast apps, has shared a list of podcasts that were most subscribed by its user base this year. Top 10 podcasts this year were: 1. The Joe Rogan Experience....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many IT workers worry their positions will become obsolete as changes in hardware, software, and computing tasks outstrip their skills. A former ...

dryriver writes: 27 years ago, the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" show broadcasted this little gem of a program [currently available on YouTube]. After showing old Red-Cyan Anaglyph movies, Victorian Stereo...

A new study has determined that a gas well blowout in Belmont County, Ohio last year was one of the most significant ever to occur in the country. Newsweek reports: In a study published in the Proceed...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Multiple state attorneys general, including Josh Stein of North Carolina, have opened investigations of TurboTax maker Intuit, following ProPublica...

Europe's highest court on Thursday ruled that the exhaustion of copyright does not apply to e-books. "The court says that offering 'second-hand' e-books for sale qualifies as an unauthorized 'communic...

Last year, Finland launched a free online crash course in artificial intelligence with the aim of educating its citizens about the new technology. Now, as a Christmas present to the world, the Europea...

Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When Amazon confirmed it was planning to launch 3,236 broadband internet-beaming satellites into low-Earth orbit, much of the media reported it as...

The log-in credentials for 3,672 Ring camera owners were compromised this week, exposing log-in emails, passwords, time zones, and the names people give to specific Ring cameras, which are often the s...

After months of negotiations, Congress approved a landmark bill on Thursday to stop the flood of illegal robocalls. The president is expected to sign it into law within the next few days. The Verge re...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Severed fibre optic cables disrupted internet access in parts of eastern Europe, Iran and Turkey on Thursday. The issue, which lasted for about two ho...

Facebook won't use the phone numbers some users give it for two-factor authentication for its "people you may know" feature. From a report: The social network says the move is "part of a wide-ranging ...

Because some internet websites unfairly block browsers from accessing their services, starting with Vivaldi 2.10, released today, the Vivaldi browser plans to disguise itself as Chrome to allow users ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's not an easy time to be an American farmer. The number of farms in the US is declining, according to the Department of Agriculture, as consolidation makes big ...

Apps promising to "advance" a user's wages say they aren't payday lenders. So what are they? From a report: Earnin does not call its service a loan. Rather, it's an "advance": Users are borrowing from...

orange shares a report: The organization responsible for allocating internet addresses across Africa has yet again become embroiled in scandal, this time over long-standing claims of corruption. A fou...

Facebook doesn't want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. From a report: That's why Facebook has tasked a co-author of M...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, researchers installed the world's highest weather station on the upper reaches of Mount Everest. The roughly 50-kilogram station, taller than a ...

There are real concerns about the way 5G is being deployed in the US, including security issues, the potential to interfere with weather forecasting systems, and the FCC steamrolling local regulators ...

Schools are increasingly adopting a "one-to-one" policy of giving each child a digital device -- often an iPad -- and most students in the U.S. now use digital learning tools in school. There's near-u...

Airbnb will be breathing a sigh of relief today: Europe's top court has judged it to be an online platform which merely connects people looking for short term accommodation, rather than a full-blown e...

Airbnb will be breathing a sigh of relief today: Europe's top court has judged it to be an online platform which merely connects people looking for short term accommodation, rather than a full-blown e...

Xperi and TiVo said Thursday that they have entered a definitive agreement to combine in an all-stock entertainment technology deal with an enterprise value of approximately $3 billion. From a report:...

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies -- largely unregulated, little scrutinized -- are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and st...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution...

theodp writes: In Teaching Academic Honesty in CS50, a new paper scheduled to be presented at SIGCSE 2020, educators behind Harvard's fabled CS50 introductory computer science course report on an unex...

Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In 2017, a former Uber employee wrote a public essay describing how the ride-hailing company had permitted sexual harassment to fester at t...

The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, marking the third time in the nation's history the House voted to impeach a sitting president. NBC News reports: T...

House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee listed the Save the Internet Act, a bill that would restore net neutrality rules, among their accomplishments in 2019. The Daily Dot reports: Energ...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Prehistoric children may have been cherished by their parents -- but until recently, they've been neglected by many archaeologists, who assumed that...

Tesla is rolling out a new software update to its Model S and Model X vehicles in Europe that will reduce the capacity of its Autopilot features in order to comply with regulations. Electrek reports: ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Facebook and Instagram will no longer allow influencers to promote vaping, tobacco products or weapons on its platforms using "branded content." Instagra...

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that whistleblower Edward Snowden will not be allowed to profit from sales of his memoir Permanent Record. The reason? He didn't receive approval from the CIA...

Lawmakers aren't convinced that Facebook needs to track users' locations at all times -- even when their tracking services are turned off. CNBC reports: Facebook was responding to an inquiry from Sen....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samsung Chairman Lee Sang-hoon yesterday was sentenced to 18 months in prison, following a South Korean court ruling that he violated labor laws ...

The UK government will create a technology regulator next year to police companies such as Facebook and Google after Brexit, Financial Times reported Wednesday [may be paywalled], citing several peopl...

A non-standard and somewhat weird password reset operation is currently underway at a German university, where more than 38,000 students and staff were asked this week to stand in line with their ID c...

Speaking of Russia, whose agents have been accused of worldwide hacking operations, but someone at the Kremlin has apparently forgotten to inform Vladimir Putin of the importance of cyber-security. Fr...

Russia has launched an effort to build a working quantum computer, in a bid to catch up to other countries in the race for practical quantum technologies. From a report: The government will inject aro...

Veteran tech columnist, who retired two years ago, returns with one story to cap the end of the decade: Apple hasn't said how many Watches and AirPods it's sold, but they're widely believed to be the ...

The decade is almost over -- and one incredibly volatile investment stood out from all the rest as the best of the 2010s. Want to guess what it was? Bitcoin. From a report: According to a recent repor...

Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik, a Russian chess grandmaster, writing at Chess.com: The increasing strength of chess engines, the millions of computer games and the volumes of opening theory available to ...

Facebook's growth at any cost mentality has birthed innumerable scandals over the past decade -- election meddling, political discord, privacy invasion. Yet today, after repeated apologies and promise...

Google, Amazon, Apple, and other technology companies have teamed up to develop a smart home connectivity standard that makes it easier for software and devices to play ball across the smart home ecos...

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism reports: An increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the ...

Meet Red Carpet Entertainment, the opposite of Netflix in the fast-changing home-video world. From a report: Unlike the famous streaming service, which serves up thousands of films and TV shows to mil...

Pocket Casts, one of the most widely used podcast apps, has shared a list of podcasts that were most subscribed by its user base this year. Top 10 podcasts this year were: 1. The Joe Rogan Experience....

Australia has experienced its hottest day on record with the national average temperature reaching a high of 40.9C (105.6F). The Bureau of Meteorology (Bom) said "extensive" heat on Tuesday exceeded t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober is at it again with the Glitter Bomb 2.0 designed to give porch pirates some stinky karmic justice. Afte...

Starting today, you can now stream more than 100 local PBS stations on YouTube TV by way of dedicated live channels for both PBS and PBS Kids, as well though on-demand programming. More stations are e...

CaptainDork shares a report from NewsBTC: Bitcoin lost billions of dollars worth of valuation within a 30-minutes timeframe as a Chinese cryptocurrency scammer allegedly liquidated its steal via over-...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is giving $87.1 million in rural-broadband funding to satellite operator Viasat to help the company lower p...

New submitter RG-man writes: DNA obtained from birch pitch used as a type of ancient chewing gum has revealed significant insights into the life of a young girl who lived 5,700 years ago. CNN reports:...

Guillaume Lample and Francois Charton, at Facebook AI Research in Paris, say they have developed an algorithm that can calculate integrals and solve differential equations. MIT Technology Review repor...

As spotted by MSPoweruser, Microsoft has started showing non-removable banner ads in the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps. From the report: We last saw these ads in November last year, when Microsoft...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Another former employee has accused Google of violating federal labor law by firing her for activities related to labor organizing. In a Tuesday ...

davidwr writes: If you were going to buy a desktop or laptop computer, how important is it to be able to upgrade memory and storage after your purchase? Is not being able to upgrade an "automatic no-b...

According to a new study published in Current Biology, the "night mode" on your phone could actually be worse for your sleep pattern. Scientists say the blue light, which is significantly reduced when...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LogMeIn announced this morning that it has agreed to be sold for $4.3 billion to affiliates of Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corpo...

In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from...

Mozilla has announced that NextDNS would be joining Cloudflare as the second DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) provider inside Firefox. From a report: The browser maker says NextDNS passed the conditions imposed b...

Dumpster divers say it's easy to list discarded toys, electronics and books on Amazon. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that's an accurate assertion. From a report: Just about anyone ...

The UK's communications regulator is proposing a rule to ban carriers from selling phones that are tied to their networks. From a report: O2, Sky, Three, Virgin Mobile and some smaller carriers alread...

The inevitable day when machines learn to design our apps. From a report: When AR wearables hit the market, our apps will start tracking both our conscious and subconscious behavior. By measuring our ...

The Google and Yahoo vet shares a few cryptic details about her new foray into the productivity space with Lumi Labs. From a report: Mayer remains cryptic about the specific types of apps Lumi has und...

Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge browser is now open to developers to submit extensions. The updated version of Edge is set to launch on January 15. From a report: Microsoft says that if a develope...

Microsoft quietly released some new documentation recently, detailing how the company plans to launch its new Chrome-based Microsoft Edge browser. From a report: The company has been working on this n...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ever since ransomware became a top threat in the mid-2010s, people have been arguing about the proper way of dealing with a ransomware attack and the merits of pay...

History may not look kindly upon it, but the 2010s really was the decade of Facebook. From a report: A new report from analytics firm App Annie revealed the top 10 most downloaded mobile apps of the d...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A landmark legal case has been launched against the world's largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or ma...

Rewound, the basic music player app released last week that you could skin to make your iPhone look remarkably like an iPod Classic, has been pulled from the App Store, according to Rewound blog post ...

Europe is launching a space telescope on Tuesday to further study distant planets that have already been discovered. The BBC reports: The telescope will ride to orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Fr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: Waters off the California coast are acidifying twice as fast as the global average, scientists found, threatening major fisheries and soundi...

The debate over what to call cell-cultured meat remains unresolved -- and it could soon develop into a headache for the global lab-grown meat technology startups working to bring clean meat to consume...

Visa has issued a statement warning consumers that cybercriminals are actively exploiting a weakness in gas station point-of-sale (POS) networks to steal credit card data. Engadget reports: The compan...

New Jersey's largest hospital system said that it has paid hackers a ransom after a ransomware attack disrupted its services earlier this month. Threatpost reports: Hackensack Meridian Health, a $6 bi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A nuclear fusion start-up backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos raised more than $100 million to help design and build a demonstration power plant. The c...

Tablizer writes: Microsoft still dominates cubicle-land. Google is making a push into that domain, but it's unclear how far or how fast they can go. Most "serious" applications still run on only Windo...

schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com is blocking its third-party sellers from using FedEx's ground delivery network for Prime shipments, citing a decline in performance hea...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ICANN is reviewing the pending sale of the .org domain manager from a nonprofit to a private equity firm and says it could try to block the trans...

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:Boeing Co. is considering either suspending or cutting back production of the 737 MAX amid growing uncertainty over the troubled plane's return to se...

A group of researchers are working to find a bigger, better way to predict how the world's deadliest blazes will behave. One mathematical model provides the spine for almost every computer program use...

The U.S. has enjoyed its longest economic expansion on record without triggering inflation as interest rates remain historically low [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: [...] So...

Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is selling one of his sports-technology investments to the owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers. From a report: Atrium Sports, a technology company backed by...

Russia's third-largest internet company is suing streaming service Twitch for 180bn roubles ($2.8bn) over pirate broadcasts of English Premier League games. From a report: Rambler Group alleges its ex...

Google has told its Turkish business partners it will not be able to work with them on new Android phones to be released in Turkey, after the Turkish competition board ruled that changes Google made t...

For most of Alexa's five years in existence, Amazon has focused on making its voice assistant as ubiquitous as possible, putting it in everything from microwaves to wearable rings to its growing famil...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Whatever Foxconn is building in Wisconsin, it's not the $10 billion, 22 million-square-foot Generation 10.5 LCD factory that President Trump once promised would be...

Apple says it goes out of its way to protect the safety and security of its young users. The App Store of 2019 tells a different story. Laura June, writing for InputMag: One of the most insidious form...

How is the boom in online shopping influencing how much good product just goes to waste? Adria Vasil, an environmental journalist and managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine, answers: It's prett...

In a clear signal of its ambitions for the estimated $91.18 billion AI chip market, Intel this morning announced that it has acquired Habana Labs, an Israel-based developer of programmable AI and mach...

In a clear signal of its ambitions for the estimated $91.18 billion AI chip market, Intel this morning announced that it has acquired Habana Labs, an Israel-based developer of programmable AI and mach...

The team behind npm, the biggest package manager for JavaScript libraries, issued a security alert yesterday, advising all users to update to the latest version (6.13.4) to prevent "binary planting" a...

It is no longer safe to have two standard drinks a day, Australian health officials have warned. From a report: Released just in time for Christmas, the National Health and Medical Research Council on...

The team behind npm, the biggest package manager for JavaScript libraries, issued a security alert yesterday, advising all users to update to the latest version (6.13.4) to prevent "binary planting" a...

It is no longer safe to have two standard drinks a day, Australian health officials have warned. From a report: Released just in time for Christmas, the National Health and Medical Research Council on...

Business Insider ran a disturbing opinion column by their senior finance correspondent:The detention camps where the Chinese government has interned more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs serves a dual pu...

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:Boeing Co. is considering either suspending or cutting back production of the 737 MAX amid growing uncertainty over the troubled plane's return to se...

66-year-old Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy reveals what they'll do after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Kennedy says that streaming "is a really important transition... What we've been focuse...

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal o...

California now has one million solar roofs, representing about 14% of all renewable power generated in the state. But solar advocates "said the milestone has come despite escalating efforts by utiliti...

"ICANN has delayed its approval of the sale of .Org to private equity company Ethos Capital by requesting more information," reports Domain Name Wire:According to its contract with Public Interest Reg...

America's Air Force is seeking proposals for technologies "for operations far beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit, near the moon's orbit," reports SpaceNews:Specific items the Air Force wants: payloads ...

McGruber quotes IEEE Spectrum: Greg Mills, co-owner of Southwest Engineering Concepts, is suing the state of Arizona's technical registration board to protest being fined for working without an engine...

Android Authority argues that the new Microsoft Chromium Edge browser "is full of neat tricks" and "packs more features than Firefox":The final major feature is called Apps. Essentially, Apps allows y...

An anonymous reader quotes Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column:WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine and this week, the World Wide Web Consortium (...

Chrome 79 is creating an issue with WebView (the Android component that allows apps to display content from the web), reports 9to5Google:On Friday morning, Android developers reliant on WebView and lo...

Slashdot reader alaskana98 writes:In the February 2001 issue of Maximum PC, technical editor Will Smith described in his column what he would like to see in the "perfect set-top box". At a time when a...

"The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to push a plan forward that would take away several channels of airwaves from automakers and local governments that have been planning...

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:If you don't watch YouTube, then more power to you, but if you do watch it, then I bet you have noticed more and more intrusive and noisy and much longer ads al...

The creators of Vim have released a game called "Killersheep" to show off two new features in Vim 8.2. "Before I did the keynote at VimConf 2018 I asked plugin developers what they wanted from Vim," r...

harrymcc writes:In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundr...

"A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years," writes Wired, addingi that "They're comparatively tiny -- and may be key to hitting our climate goals."For the last 20 ...

DevNull127 writes: A video report from NBC News profiles "Springboard to Opportunities," an advocacy group for affordable housing residents that's now also testing $1,000-a-month payments (privately-f...

"If you're systematically stealing money from a bank vault, it may not be a good idea to post the evidence on your social media pages," reports CNN:A bank employee in Charlotte, North Carolina, allege...

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna brings news of a triumph for a Tesla power project in South Australia: about 900 residential rooftop solar panels, coupled with storage batteries, "all lin...

McGruber writes: In a reply to a Twitter post, Raspberry Pi Foundation's CEO Eben Upton announced that they have sold their thirty-millionth Raspberry Pi. "We don't get sales returns from our licensee...

PC Magazine's "tech nerd" Whitson Gordon writes that "Once you start using a smart speaker to set reminders, play the news, or turn the lights on, it's hard to go back." But if you want the convenienc...

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes Defense News:The U.S. Air Force's top civilian and a key member of Congress agreed Saturday on the need to declassify a large amount of information about Am...

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes Live Science:When you touch a hot surface, you're feeling movement. If you press your hand against a mug of tea, warmth spreads through your fingers. That'...

Last weekend saw the death of Rene Auberjonois at age 79, writes Variety. schwit1 quotes their report: Auberjonois was a prolific television actor, appearing as Paul Lewiston in 71 episodes of 'Boston...

"Facebook said Thursday it will commit $130 million to support the efforts of its independent oversight board," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup -- though the group won't be in place (or its members ann...

Anticipating next week's release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, 20 fans are already camping out in front of Hollywood's TCL Chinese Theatre, reports Cinema Blend:The tight-knit group of fans hav...

In 30 minutes an exclusive clip from the yet-to-be-released Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will premier in the videogame Fortnite. An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:We've known about the clip pre...

Sloane Ryan is a 37-year-old woman who runs the Special Projects Team at Bark, a child-safety tech company selling a $9-a-month software that monitors text messages for bullying, threats of violence, ...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In what has become a holiday tradition of sorts, Google is again rewarding teachers who steer kids to Google Hour of Code lessons with $100 gift codes. "When t...

"YouTube channels posing as American news outlets racked up millions of views on false and inflammatory videos over several months this year," reports CNN. "All with the help of YouTube's recommendati...

Public facial recognition terminals in China can be fooled with just a mask, as some recent experiments have shown. The Verge reports: An AI company, Kneron, shared a video with The Verge of tests it ...

In an exclusive interview with Gamespot, Partner Director of Program Management for Team Xbox Jason Ronald revealed a new feature of the Xbox Series X: the ability to suspend and resume multiple games...

Iwastheone shares a report from Astronomy.com: Astronomers have discovered 19 more galaxies missing their dark matter. Instead of dark matter, these strange galaxies are mainly filled with regular mat...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A leading research centre has called for new laws to restrict the use of emotion-detecting tech. The AI Now Institute says the field is "built on mark...

Prominent figures from Jacob Gottlieb to Betsy DeVos got help from a reputation management firm that can bury image-sensitive Google results by placing flattering content on websites that masquerade a...

Cade Metz from The New York Times pays tribute to Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world's first commercial computer. Brooker died o...

Billboard has announced that video and audio data from YouTube, along with visual plays from several music streaming services, will soon be factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart. In addition to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: India maintained a shutdown of the internet in the states of Assam and Meghalaya on Friday, now into 36 hours, to control protests over a controver...

mschaffer writes: Apparently Facebook had a recent privacy problem of a different kind. A thief broke into an employee's car and stole equipment -- including hard drives that contained unencrypted per...

New submitter tubajock writes: According to NOLA.com, New Orleans City Hall workers were told by a PA system broadcast to immediately unplug all computer systems from the network [following a cyberatt...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T doesn't want its home Internet speeds to be measured by the Federal Communications Commission anymore, and it already convinced the FCC ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 30 million people use a Roku device to navigate the constellation of streaming TV services. The company's portfolio includes the "stick" ($49.99), which ...

In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat, Google AI chief Jeff Dean has discussed the company's early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google's BE...

A drone with a machine gun attached can hit targets with high precision, according to its makers. Turkey is set to become the first country to have the drone, when it gets a delivery this month. From ...

As we approach the weekend -- but more importantly, the end of the year -- it's good time as any to ask about the movies, TV shows, and documentaries from this year that you enjoyed the most or found ...

If Google were to have a mascot, it might be the Street View car, with its towering camera rig and corporate logo exterior. From a report: There's good reason for that. In the 12 years since the searc...

Scientists have mapped out Mars's upper atmosphere wind patterns for the first time. The findings, published Thursday in Science, reinforce our understanding of the Martian climate as equal parts stab...

With 47m global users Strava has the potential to generate big data for public development [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: When the UK capital built a "cycle superhighway" i...

There has been a massive rise in the number of bilateral agreements between central banks that allow two countries to swap currencies directly, a large number involving China. Meanwhile, a number of c...

We've known Windows 10 Mobile has been a dead platform for years now. Even Microsoft themselves have been telling people they need to switch to Android or iOS. But yesterday, we saw the final blow to ...

Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades. From a report: It's a siren song, they s...

Mozilla announced this week that all developers of Firefox add-ons must enable a two-factor authentication (2FA) solution for their account. From a report: "Starting in early 2020, extension developer...

Mozilla announced this week that all developers of Firefox add-ons must enable a two-factor authentication (2FA) solution for their account. From a report: "Starting in early 2020, extension developer...

Bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a massive pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere since August that is equivalent to almost half of Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions, Guard...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Cigna plans to expand a system that uses artificial intelligence to identify gaps in treatment of chronic diseases, such as patients s...

schwit1 shares a report from People: Doctors in New Zealand are currently awaiting nearly 1,300 square feet of skin from the United States in order to treat the dozens of victims who suffered severe b...

In a piece for the BBC, Chris Baraniuk writes about how the intelligence of New Caledonian crows may be far more advanced than we ever thought possible. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the ...

At the 2019 Game Awards today, Microsoft revealed the name and console design of its next-generation gaming console: Xbox Series X. The Verge reports: The console itself looks far more like a PC than ...

CenturyLink has agreed to pay a $6.1 million penalty after Washington state regulators found that the company failed to disclose fees that raised actual prices well above the advertised rates. Century...

According to a new report from research firm NPD, less than 10% of Americans are actually spending $1,000 or more on a smartphone. 9to5Google reports: The report was produced by research firm NPD and ...

The San Francisco workforce of Spin, the e-scooter company owned by Ford, have unionized, in a first for the industry. Mashable reports: Having voted to unionize on Dec. 5, the workers were authorized...

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco on Wednesday outlined new details behind its strategy to build next-generation internet technology. As a set up for what it dubs its 'Internet for the Future' strateg...

Ammalgam shares a report from The Redmond Cloud: Microsoft is refreshing its Windows logo and the icons for many of the operating system's apps. While Microsoft already announced new icons for the Off...

According to Forbes, Google has sent 1,494 device identifiers to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to help them investigate arsons carried out across Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, Samsung Electronic's President Young Sohn revealed the company has sold 1 million foldable Galaxy Fold smartphones. Estimates f...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to designate 988 as the short dialing code for the United States' suicide-prevention hotline. Much li...

Facebook's stock took a dive on Thursday following a report that federal regulators may seek to prevent the company from more tightly integrating its social media products. From a report: The Federal ...

In the NulledCast podcast hackers livestream the harassment of Ring camera owners after accessing their devices. Hundreds of people can listen. From a report: A blaring siren suddenly rips through the...

Businesses often send one-time passwords, account alerts and appointment confirmations via text. But if you've ever received one of those, you know they tend to come from a random number, and bad acto...

sciencehabit writes: There's a running joke in academia about Reviewer 2. That's the reviewer that doesn't bother to read the manuscript a journal has sent out for evaluation for possible publication,...

Anil Dash: We don't even notice it anymore -- "link in bio." It's a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user'...

Russian police have raided today the Moscow offices of NGINX, Inc., a subsidiary of F5 Networks and the company behind the internet's most popular web server technology. From a report: Equipment was s...

The AI world is booming in a range of metrics covering research, education, and technical achievements, according to AI Index report -- an annual rundown of machine learning data points now in its thi...

At least one major provider of hardware-level BIOS drivers is actively deleting old stuff it no longer supports, while old FTP sites where vintage drivers are often found are soon going to be harder t...

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: In January during the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Google debuted interpreter mode, a real-time translation feature for Google Home speakers and ...

The details of millions of Iranian bank cards were published online after antigovernment protests last month. Experts suspect a state-sponsored cyberattack. From a report: After demonstrators in Iran ...

The two biggest OS (operating system) makers in China announced plans last week to unite and jointly build a new "domestic operating system." From a report: The two companies are China Standard Softwa...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google co-founder Larry Page is funneling money from his charitable foundation to a private flu-fighting initiative run as a for-profit company, Tec...

Verizon is laying off 150 U.S. staffers this week across multiple teams in the organization. CNN reports: Verizon Media employs around 10,500 people [across media brands that include Yahoo, AOL, TechC...

The Bad Astronomer writes: Last week, scientists announced the discovery of a stellar-mass black hole with 70 times the Sun's mass, far heftier than theory predicts they can get. Within days, though, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SlashGear: A new treatment shows promise for revolutionizing prostate cancer treatment, offering a minimally-invasive and relatively low-risk alternative to tr...

MikeChino shares a report from Dwell: In Tabasco, Mexico, a family living below the poverty line recently visited their future home: a 3D-printed, 500-square foot structure with two bedrooms, one bath...

"The crime scene DNA sequencing company Verogen announced yesterday that they've acquired the genomics database and website GEDmatch," reports The Verge. "GEDmatch was primarily used by genealogists u...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Big tech companies like Facebook and Alphabet's Google, long seen as some of the world's most desirable workplaces offering countless perks and empl...

dryriver writes: The sheer extent of the data privacy catastrophe happening -- everything software/hardware potentially spies on us, and we don't get to see what is in the source code or circuit diagr...

A court on Tuesday issued an injunction barring Netflix from poaching employees from Fox and confirming the validity of fixed-term employment agreements. Variety reports: The ruling marks a hard-fough...

"Facebook will now use information about your Oculus activity, like which apps you use, to help provide [...] more relevant content, including ads" -- assuming you've connected your Oculus ID to your ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An email sent by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to all Florida county commissioners indicated that the ransomware that struck the city...

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Having already started to notify Windows 7 hangers on that support is due to come to an end, Microsoft is now ready to get a little more aggressive. If you ...

Glassdoor, a service that enables current and former employees to anonymously review companies, is out with its annual "best companies to work for" list, and a number of tech names have seen their ran...

Security researchers are accusing Apple of abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to take down a viral tweet and several Reddit posts that discuss techniques and tools to hack iPhones. Lo...

The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes. From a report: "This proves that com...

After months of promising to reexamine how it handles harassment on its platform, YouTube has unveiled an update to its policy. From a report: On Wednesday, the Google-owned video platform said it wou...

U.S. regulators decided to allow Boeing's 737 MAX jet to keep flying after its first fatal crash last fall even after their own analysis indicated it could become one of the most accident-prone airlin...

U.S. regulators decided to allow Boeing's 737 MAX jet to keep flying after its first fatal crash last fall even after their own analysis indicated it could become one of the most accident-prone airlin...

A "safe" alternative to opioid painkillers turns out to be not so safe. From a report: Gabapentin was supposed to be the answer. Chronic pain afflicts about a fifth of American adults, and for years, ...

A "safe" alternative to opioid painkillers turns out to be not so safe. From a report: Gabapentin was supposed to be the answer. Chronic pain afflicts about a fifth of American adults, and for years, ...

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday demanding that two US Homeland Security agencies -- Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- release detail...

India has proposed groundbreaking rules, akin to Europe's GDPR, that would require technology companies to garner consent from citizens before collecting and processing their personal data. But at the...

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday demanding that two US Homeland Security agencies -- Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- release detail...

India has proposed groundbreaking rules, akin to Europe's GDPR, that would require technology companies to garner consent from citizens before collecting and processing their personal data. But at the...

Twitter is funding a small team of researchers to build an "open and decentralized standard for social media," with the goal of making Twitter a client for that standard. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the...

An anonymous reader shares a paper: The event was running over, the car was waiting, but the keynote speaker did not seem to mind. He was enjoying fielding questions from a large auditorium packed to ...

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle has a huge commitment to the Bay Area. The software giant is based in Redwood Shores, a short drive south from San Francisco. It remains one of the largest employers...

Apple started selling its new Mac Pro desktop computer on Tuesday, complete with eye-watering pricing options that can push the cost north of $50,000. From a report: The new machine, built in Austin, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: George Laurer, the U.S. engineer who helped develop the barcode, has died at the age of 94. Barcodes, which are made up of black stripes of varying th...

The Pirate Bay may be about to fully launch a brand new feature that will let you stream videos in your browser. TorrentFreak reports: As the image below shows, in addition to the familiar magnet and ...

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed calculations showing hollow spherical bubbles filled with a gas of positronium atoms are stable in liquid helium. The calculations...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Greenland's ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing som...

Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational r...

Sony has announced plans to launch PlayStation games on "additional console platforms beyond PlayStation platforms as early as 2021." The first announced series for the change is Sony's long-running b...

According to iFixit, Nikon is ending its authorized repair program next year, "likely leaving more than a dozen repair shops without access to official parts and tools, and cutting the number of place...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The billionaire behind six-month-old Vietnamese auto startup VinFast plans a feat even Toyota and Hyundai couldn't pull off during their early days:...

Google is rolling out Chrome 79, and it includes a number of password protection improvements. The Verge reports: The biggest addition is that Chrome will now warn you when your password has been stol...

BuzzFeed News has found that a Facebook contractor was paid thousands of dollars in bribes by a shady affiliate marketer to reactivate ad accounts that had been banned due to policy violations. From t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Academics from three universities across Europe have disclosed today a new attack that impacts the integrity of data stored inside Intel SGX, a highly-s...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today launched Microsoft Teams for Linux in public preview. No, that's not a typo -- Microsoft Teams is indeed the first Office app that the company has ported to...

Game worlds can be blueprints for the real world, liberating spaces where rules can be reinvented and the invisible made visible. From a report: For architects, the sheer scope of this artificiality m...

An anonymous reader shares a report: In November, Iran's government announced a price hike on oil, leading to mass protests in Tehran. To quell the spreading unrest, the Iranian government effectively...

Google today released Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS users. This release comes with security and bug fixes, but also with new features such as built-in support for the ...

Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn't just make money from protecting its 400 million users' information. It also profits in part because of sales of users' Web browsing habit...

Greeks will be hit with a hefty fine if they do not spend almost a third of their income electronically in an unprecedented bid by the new government to stamp out rampant tax evasion. From a report: T...

Over the last decade, tickets have transitioned out of the physical realm and, like so many other aspects of our lives, gone digital. Most are now purchased on and delivered to a mobile device, then s...

Google today announced that Android 10 is arriving on Android TV, and it's about as bland of an update as they come. From a report: Primarily, it's just the performance and security benefits of Androi...

Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. ...

An investigation by Gizmodo has revealed that it's possible to obtain the locations of Ring doorbell cameras from post on Amazon's Neighbors app. An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has continuously de...

A social media influencer was sentenced to 14 years in prison for plotting to hijack a website at gunpoint during a home invasion. From a report: Rossi Lorathio Adams II, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, re...

Apple is suing the former chief architect of its iPhone and iPad microprocessors, who in February quit to co-found a data-center chip design biz. From a report: In a complaint filed in the Santa Clara...

Away, an online seller of luggage that investors valued at $1.4 billion earlier this year, said late Monday its chief executive Steph Korey is stepping down. Korey will become executive chairman of th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Just five metropolitan areas -- Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif. -- accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-...

For the first time in nearly three decades, Apple is officially returning to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next year. The company is planning to discuss its stance on consumer privacy, "r...

Disney has become the first studio in history to surpass $10 billion at the worldwide box office in a single calendar year. Variety reports: Through Sunday, the studio has generated $3.28 billion in N...

Researchers have found a new way to attack some of the bacteria behind treatment-resistant infections. An anonymous reader shares a report from Wired: In 2004, a 64-year-old woman in Indiana had a cat...

Two years ago, Apple launched an aggressive battle against ads that track users across the web. Today executives in the online publishing and advertising industries say that effort has been stunningly...

The city of Pensacola, Florida, has been dealing with a cyberattack since late Friday when a Saudi Air Force trainee killed three sailors at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Officials for the city are uns...

WireGuard has now been committed to the mainline Linux kernel. "While there are still tests to be made and hoops to be jumped through, it should be released in the next major Linux kernel release, 5.6...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New manufacturing jobs that require more advanced skills are driving up the education level of factory workers who in past generations...

Electric scooter start-up Unicorn is shutting down after spending too much money on Facebook ads. The BBC reports: Customers received an email from founder Nick Evans, saying he was "very sorry" and w...

The Oculus Quest VR headset is about to receive an update that adds support for native hand tracking. "VR users will be able to put down their controllers and use their fingers to manipulate VR worlds...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. National Labor Relations Board has started a new investigation into Google's labor practices. An agency spokesperson confirmed to CNBC Monday th...

Amazon has been given free access to healthcare information collected by the NHS as part of a contract with the government. The material, which excludes patient data, could allow the multinational tec...

Would you pay $1 million and fly to South America for a chance to live longer? From a report: Libella Gene Therapeutics, a Kansas-based company that says it is developing a gene therapy that can rever...

The e-waste industry is booming in Southeast Asia, frightening residents worried for their health. Despite a ban on imports, Thailand is a center of the business. From a report: Crouched on the ground...

Over two and a half years after Microsoft said it'd one day kill to-do service Wunderlist in favor of its own To Do app, it has revealed when it'll drop the ax: May 6th. From a report: After that time...

After a bone marrow transplant, a man with leukemia found that his donor's DNA traveled to unexpected parts of his body. A crime lab is now studying the case. From a report: Three months after his bon...

Over two and a half years after Microsoft said it'd one day kill to-do service Wunderlist in favor of its own To Do app, it has revealed when it'll drop the ax: May 6th. From a report: After that time...

The first thing that visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg see is a wall of identity cards-- the pieces of paper that determined where people could live and work and whom they could love. F...

There's a lot of enthusiasm for intermittent fasting -- a term that can encompass everything from skipping a meal each day to fasting a few days a week. Or, how about this approach: Simply limit your ...

Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player for the last decade, is on the brink of reaching the top in another game -- fantasy football. From a report: The grandmaster is enjoying his best season e...

Intel chief executive Bob Swan says he's willing to let go the company's traditional dominance of the market for CPUs in order to meet the rising demand for newer, more specialized silicon chips for a...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in...

China has ordered that all foreign computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports. hackingbear writes: The g...

Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with "dead zones" proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and inten...

An anonymous reader shares a remarkable story from Fortune's Data Sheet newsletter:The story begins on Dec. 3, when an artist going by @Hannahdouken on Twitter posted an image of hand-drawn text readi...

An anonymous reader writes:The Free Software Foundation is holding its annual fundraiser, with a goal of attracting 600 new members by the end of December. (New members so far: 112.) "We are still fig...

A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software.The civil complaint...

"The Walt Disney Co. is asking exhibitors worldwide to warn moviegoers that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker may pose a seizure risk to audience members with photosensitive epilepsy," reports Deadline...

"A 911 call Thursday led to a precautionary evacuation of an entire street in a Northwest Side neighborhood in Columbus over concerns about a possible small nuclear reactor and alpha waves reported by...

"Astronomers have found the biggest black hole ever measured -- it's 40 billion times the sun's mass, or roughly two-thirds the mass of all stars in the Milky Way," writes Astronomy.com. Iwastheone sh...

The Global Times is a daily tabloid newspaper published "under the auspices" of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Daily, according to Wikipedia. And this week Slashdot reader Tulsa_Time noticed t...

"It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart," reports Phoronix, noting that the Debian developer community has now begun a 20-day ranked-choice vote on...

"Linux users can now stream shows and movies from the Disney+ streaming service after Disney lowered the level of their DRM requirements," reports Bleeping Computer:When Disney+ was first launched, Li...

"At least 20 web hosting providers have hastily notified customers today, Saturday, December 7, that they plan to shut down on Monday, giving their clients two days to download data from their account...

The nonprofit Open Source Technology Improvement Fund connects open-source security projects with funding and logistical support. (Launched in 2015, the Illinois-based group includes on its advisory c...

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:Robots have replaced thousands of routine jobs on Wall Street. Now, they're coming for higher-ups. That's the contention of Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Cornell Univer...

In 1962, 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming -- and 57 years later, he's still working on it.But he's finally released The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fas...

Tesla "may be keen on replacing the humble windshield wiper with lasers," reports CNET.In a patent application filed this past May and published with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on N...

"Uber's stock market value fell by $1.4 billion Friday, on the heels of the company's release of a safety report revealing that 3,000 incidents of sexual assaults took place during its U.S. rides in 2...

"One of the more unique future uses for blockhain may be thwarting fake news," writes Computerworld's senior reporter, citing a recent report from Gartner:By 2023, up to 30% of world news and video co...

"The prospect of Russian interference in Britain's election flared anew Saturday after the social media platform Reddit concluded that people from Russia leaked confidential British government documen...

"Users of an old version of the popular Python language face a reckoning at the end of the year," reports Wired, calling it a programmer's "own version of update hell."The developers who maintain Pyth...

UPI reports:Roughly half of all deaths worldwide are caused by inflammation-related diseases. Now, a team of international researchers is calling on physicians to focus greater attention on the diagno...

An anonymous reader quotes Utility Dive:Average market prices for battery packs have plunged from $1,100 per kilowatt hour in 2010 to $156 per kilowatt hour in 2019, an 87% fall in real terms, accordi...

ProPublica has determined that dozens of state and local agencies have purchased "SCAN" training from a company called LSI for reviewing a suspect's written statements -- even though there's no scient...

"Reuters is reporting that German public prosecutors have again raided the Wolfsburg headquarters of Volkswagen in the latest investigation into the carmaker's diesel emissions," writes Slashdot reade...

The South China Morning Post reports that the U.S. may be taking a stand against China. This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new bill that would "tighten export controls on China-bound...

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings the news that D. C. Fontana, an influential story editor and writer on the original 1960s TV series Star Trek, has died this week. People reports:The writer...

Aighearach (Slashdot reader #97,333) shared this story from Reuters:Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk emerged victorious on Friday from a closely watched defamation trial as a federal court jury swiftly reject...

"Russia's controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October," writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes. He adds that the ship "is ...

Mark Wilson quotes BetaNews: Apple has failed in an attempt to block a class action lawsuit being brought against it by a customer who claimed the company concealed the problematic nature of the butte...

"Tens of thousands of alarms shriek, beep and buzz every day in every U.S. hospital," reports Fierce Healthcare -- even though most of them aren't urgent, disturb the patients, and won't get immediate...

Slashdot reader peterthegreat321 shared an article from Medium's technology blog OneZero revealing the "cracks, loopholes, and limitations in Facebook's systems that bad actors are busily exploiting."...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage," says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at ...

theodp writes: In 2003, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously faced expulsion from Harvard after launching FaceMash, a type of "hot or not" website for Harvard students that asked visitors to review p...

Researchers have discovered that plants make airborne sounds when stressed, which they say "could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops," reports Ne...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: A new study -- citing genetic evidence from a disorder that in some ways mirrors elements of domestication -- suggests modern humans domestic...

Koreantoast writes: The Samoan government arrested a prominent local anti-vaxxer who was attempting to disrupt a mass vaccination campaign to stop an ongoing measles epidemic. Edwin Tamasese was arres...

MojoKid writes: At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii this week, Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which enable next year's flagship 5G Android phones with more performance,...

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: A lineup of female celebrities stand in front of you. Their faces move, smile, and blink as you move around them. They're fully nude, hairless, waiting for...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The report comes this week from researchers with the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence (StratCom). Through the four-month period ...

schwit1 shares a report from U.S. News & World Report: The Department of Homeland Security is dropping plans to propose a regulation requiring all travelers -- including U.S. citizens -- to have t...

The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that they had found Cambridge Analytica deceived consumers about the collection of Facebook data for voter profiling and targeting. "The [FTC] also found th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is taking delivery this month of the first batch of carbon-free aluminum produced by a Montreal-based venture, helping move the iPhone maker c...

The European Space Agency is working to tackle the issue of space debris with the technological version of a big hug. From a report: It hopes to be able to use tentacle-like mechanical arms to embrace...

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has released a new study which suggests that piracy is dropping in Europe. While the research is limited to site-based piracy, it has some inter...

Magic Leap just announced that they're in the midst of closing a Series E round of funding, but it sounds like they're going to have to clinch that investment with some pretty troubling sales numbers ...

The FBI says owners of IoT (Internet of Things) devices should isolate this equipment on a separate WiFi network, different from the one they're using for their primary devices, such as laptops, deskt...

After signing a pact with the Seattle Seahawks last week, Amazon Web Service announced a much larger deal with the NFL to use its technology to address concussions and other devastating injuries. From...

General Motors and LG Chemical plan to make battery cells for electric-powered vehicles, unveiling a joint venture that they expect to create more than 1,100 jobs in northeast Ohio. The companies say ...

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser...

On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced a new plan aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country and dismantling what he referred to as "internet and cable monopolies." From ...

From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cof...

The world's forests are being carved into pieces. In tropical regions, animals are likely to pay a heavy price. From a report: Around the world, humans are fracturing vast forests. Highways snake thro...

Scientists have discovered that a single-celled organism, a descendant of some of the earliest living creatures on Earth, is able to colonize a meteorite, growing and synthesizing nutrients. From a re...

Netflix is plowing 30 billion rupees ($420 million) this year and next to produce more local content in India, one of the biggest and most-crowded markets for the worldâ(TM)s largest paid streami...

Netflix is plowing 30 billion rupees ($420 million) this year and next to produce more local content in India, one of the biggest and most-crowded markets for the world's largest paid streaming-servic...

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest. Most of the lives cut...

sandbagger writes: BioShock: After Midnight is an original story detailing events that took place in Rapture before the protagonist of the first BioShock game arrived at the city of Rapture. It's a sp...

Japan's economy and industry ministry said Monday that it will start removing melted fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2021. The milestone step of debris removal is considered the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Michigan's second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestle's Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company's commercial water-bottling ...

At the Cascadia Rail Summit outside Seattle, a fledgling scheme to bring high-speed rail from Portland to Vancouver found an enthusiastic reception. Gregory Scruggs writes via CityLab: Only 175 miles ...

Researchers at Valimail found that only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Valimail, which...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon XR2 5G, its latest chipset platform dedicated to the needs of standalone VR and AR headsets. The new platform i...

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there will be four new OLED iPhone models in 2020, followed by a new iPhone without a Lightning port in 2021. 9to5Mac reports: In 2021, Kuo is predicting a followup to ...

pgmrdlm shares a report from Business Insider: A suspected terrorist in Syria was reportedly killed with a rare U.S. missile packed with swords, according to multiple reports. The weapon that shredded...

A group of filmmakers have sued the State Department for making visa applicants hand over details about their social media accounts. "The lawsuit argues that the requirement unconstitutionally discour...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: After more than two years since it's been used the last time, the Chinese government deployed an infamous DDoS tool named the "Great Cannon" to launch a...

The Microsoft threat research team scanned all Microsoft user accounts and found that 44 million users were employing usernames and passwords that leaked online following security breaches at other on...

A collection of 31 advocacy groups is pressing the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to dig into how digital media companies advertise to children and collect their data. From a report: The request...

The admission comes from the author of the snippet itself, Andreas Lundblad, a Java developer at Palantir, and one of the highest-ranked contributors to StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programmin...

Facebook today filed a lawsuit against a Chinese company and two Chinese nationals for abusing the Facebook ad platform to run a malware scheme. From a report: The accused are ILikeAd Media Internatio...

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found a new vulnerability allowing potential attackers to hijack VPN connections on affected *NIX devices and inject arbitrary data payloads into IPv4 ...

Shannon Bond, writing for NPR: Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in...

A shared hatred of robocalls is one issue uniting the House during a divisive impeachment inquiry. From a report: House lawmakers yesterday passed a bipartisan bill aimed to crack down on the fraudule...

A Falcon 9 rocket launched on Thursday from Florida, delivering its Dragon spacecraft into orbit. From a report: The first stage then made a safe landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocea...

As governments and companies invest more in security networks, hundreds of millions more surveillance cameras will be watching the world in 2021, mostly in China, according to a new report. From a rep...

Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, itâ(TM)s already a way of life. From a report: McKee, an Appalachian town of abo...

Socially isolated and faced with a persistently white polar landscape, a long-term crew of an Antarctic research station saw a portion of their brains shrink during their stay, a small study finds. Fr...

It was a video of a waving robot that attracted NASA to the world's most isolated city. Engineers at Woodside Petroleum Ltd. in Perth, Australia, were just "messing around" teaching a toy robot to wav...

Security researchers at Check Point say the company has uncovered evidence that Chinese hackersmanaged to hijack $1 million in seed money during a wire transfer between a Chinese venture capital firm ...

Security researchers at Check Point say the company has uncovered evidence that Chinese hackersmanaged to hijack $1 million in seed money during a wire transfer between a Chinese venture capital firm ...

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has launched a legal challenge to a decision by US regulators to classify it as a national security threat. From a report: It comes after the US Federal Communications Co...

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has launched a legal challenge to a decision by US regulators to classify it as a national security threat. From a report: It comes after the US Federal Communications Co...

A new FCC study confirms what most people already knew: when it comes to wireless coverage maps, your mobile carrier is often lying to you. From a report: If you head to any major wireless carrier web...

Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: When it comes to the extensive and invasive use of biometric data, the USA is one of the worst offenders in the world, faring only slightly better than China...

sciencehabit writes: Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn't accurately predict current warming, so the public...

In addition to the flagship Snapdragon 865 processor, Qualcomm announced details about its other new chip, the midrange Snapdragon 765. "The 765 might actually be the more interesting of the two, than...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in ...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Green energy advocates may soon be turning blue. A new membrane could unlock the potential of 'blue energy,' which uses chemical differences between...

TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is being sued after allegedly violating child privacy laws and collecting the data of young users through the video app, which was formerly called Musical.ly. The V...

Ford will soon start using coffee chaff from McDonald's to manufacture auto parts like headlamp housings and other interior and exterior components. "In addition to making Ford vehicles a little bit '...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunize them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said a...

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS ...

Google has stopped accepting political ads in Singapore months before a widely expected election. Reuters reports: In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google pu...

An anonymous reader shares an update to a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute that claimed the manufacturing of big batteries for electric vehicles generates so much emiss...

In June, Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, a new iteration of the Xbox that the company said would "set a new bar for console power, speed and performance." What Microsoft didn't say is that it is...

Google Fiber, the division of Google parent company Alphabet that provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the U.S., will no longer sell 100Mbps broadband plans to new customers. From a report: In a ...

In August of last year, NASA sent a spacecraft hurtling toward the inner Solar System, with the aim of getting some answers about the mysterious star at the center of our cosmic neighborhood. Now more...

Brian Krebs: One of the more curious behaviors of Apple's new iPhone 11 Pro is that it intermittently seeks the user's location information even when all applications and system services on the phone ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: AI models invariably encounter ambiguous situations that they struggle to respond to with instructions alone. That's problematic for autonomous agents tasked with,...

As of this week, players who owned a legitimate copy of Tron: Evolution they paid for but never played it, no longer can. From a report: Tron: Evolution, a tie-in game for the 2010 Tron: Legacy film, ...

The fastest-growing data center market segment returned to growth mode in the third quarter of 2019, with global hyperscale capex spending exceeding $31 billion, up 8 percent year over year. From a re...

Climate-fueled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade -- equivalent to one every two seconds -- according to a new report from Oxfam. From a news ...

From a report: When the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, ...

From a report: When the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, ...

Reuters reports: In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation's once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house,...

The Python security team removed two trojanized Python libraries from PyPI (Python Package Index) that were caught stealing SSH and GPG keys from the projects of infected developers. From a report: Th...

After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customer...

Media center app maker Plex officially launched its ad-supported video service with movies and TV shows from MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate and Legendary Wednesday. The service will be available in more...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a "disruptive technologist" and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise...

Roberto Escobar, brother of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has announced a foldable smartphone that is "very difficult to break" thanks to the screen's "special type of plastic." The Escobar Fold 1...

A NASA satellite has found India's Vikram lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The Guardian reports: Nasa released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that sho...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Huawei's latest phone, which it unveiled in September -- the Mate 30 with a curved display and wide-angle cameras that competes with A...

Amazon-owned home surveillance company Ring gave law enforcement a heat map that let police see all devices installed in an area, allowing them to view users down to the street level. CNET first repor...

According to Motherboard, the FBI applied for a search warrant in October compelling Sony to provide data on a PlayStation 4 user who was allegedly part of a cocaine distribution network. The applicat...

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system that could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts. TechCrunch reports: The bug a...

An anonymous reader writes: "Dutch prosecutors have asked a judge for a three-year prison sentence for a local politician who doubled as a hacker and breached the personal iCloud accounts of more than...

The FBI warned in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday that it considers mobile applications developed in Russia, including the popular photo-aging app "FaceApp," to be "po...

"On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation, The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers," writes Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket. From the report: Dozens of PlayStation...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services has developed a more powerful version of its own chips to power services for cloud-computing customers, as well as some of AWS's...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is adding another responsibility to his job: Pichai will also be the CEO of parent holding company Alphabet going forward, taking the helm from co-founder and longtime CEO Lar...

Amazon is leveraging machine learning to fight fraud, audit code, transcribe calls, and index enterprise data. From a report: Today during a keynote at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 con...

Qualcomm uncorked this year's version of its Snapdragon Technology Summit by announcing the names of its two new upcoming Snapdragon chips, the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765/765G. Not surprisi...

The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to dr...

Russia is to set up a new online site for its national encyclopedia after President Vladimir Putin said Wikipedia was unreliable and should be replaced. From a report: The move will ensure people can ...

Some Facebook employees recently told their managers that they were concerned about answering difficult questions about their workplace from friends and family over the holidays. What if Mom or Dad ac...

Google is rolling out a way to directly message photos and chat with another user or users within the Google Photos app. From a report: The addition will allow users to quickly and easily share those ...

At its peak, one meltwater lake drained the equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool every three seconds. From a report: A cerulean lake consisting of glacial meltwater on the surface of the Greenl...

Den Automation, the once-promising UK smart home startup that raised nearly $5.8 million via equity crowdfunding and boasted former Amstrad chief Bob Watkins as CEO, has agreed to go into liquidation,...

Mozilla today removed four Firefox extensions made by Avast and its subsidiary AVG after receiving credible reports that the extensions were harvesting user data and browsing histories. From a report:...

An anonymous reader shares a report: elementary OS has long been viewed by many as the future of Linux on the PC thanks to its beautiful desktop environment and overall polished experience. Developmen...

Mozilla today released Firefox 71 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Firefox 71 includes Lockwise password manager improvements, Enhanced Tracking Protection tweaks, and Picture-in-Picture vid...

Do you feel you have been receiving more spam calls of late? You are probably not wrong -- or alone. From a report: The volume of spam calls has grown by 18% globally this year, according to Truecalle...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The rise in curbside cardboard waste coming from packaging is "the Amazon effect," says David Biderman, the executive director of the Solid Waste As...

The Department of Homeland Security wants to expand facial recognition scans in the airport to also include citizens, which had previously been exempt from the mandatory checks. TechCrunch reports: In...

Under Project Verona, Microsoft is working to make Windows 10 more secure by integrating Mozilla-developed Rust for low-level Windows components. "'Memory safety' is the term for coding frameworks tha...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A vulnerability in millions of fully patched Android phones is being actively exploited by malware that's designed to drain the bank accounts of ...

AmiMoJo quotes a report from The Guardian: The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time U.S. companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed legislation requiring all smartphones, computers and smart TV sets sold in the country to come pre-installed with Russian software. Reuters reports: T...

European officials have launched a "preliminary" investigation into Facebook and Google in order to determine how people's information is used for ad purposes. The Mercury News reports: The European C...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. government may be in the process of formally withdrawing from the term of the Paris Agreement, an international accord on targets to fight...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping to bring quantum computing to the cloud, with the company lifting the lid off three initiatives at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. ZDNet reports: The first is Amazon B...

Some doctors say that medical students and residents are turning to YouTube to fill in gaps in their training. The video-sharing platform hosts tens of thousands of surgery-related videos, and the num...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Customers in China who buy SIM cards or register new mobile-phone services must have their faces scanned under a new law that came into ...

The media ecosystem is undergoing a massive change as streaming video looks to extend its recent dominance over traditional distribution, according to research firm MoffettNathanson, which wrote that ...

Giant tortoises can learn and remember tasks, and master lessons much faster when trained in groups. From a report: Tamar Gutnick and Michael Kuba at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and An...

Consumers may think they're avoiding the crush this holiday season by shopping online, unaware that as they're trying to get through the digital doors, so too are hordes of bots. And they're throwing ...

harrymcc writes: As the federal government plods along on developing privacy laws, some cities are taking matters into their own hands -- with facial recognition technology at the top of the list. Now...

A new project aims to make LibGen, which hosts 33 terabytes of scientific papers and books, much more stable. From a report: It's hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The l...

T-Mobile's nationwide 5G network launches on Friday, the company announced Monday morning. But don't fall for the marketing hype. From a report: It's still too early to buy a 5G phone, even though T-M...

Security researcher Ivan Rodriguez has proposed a new security standard for iOS apps, which he named Security.plist. From a report: The idea is simple. App makers would create a property list file (pl...

Amazon's next big step in health care is with voice transcription technology that's designed to allow doctors to spend more time with patients and less time at the computer. At Amazon Web Services' re...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lacking any of the necessary willpower to go back to my work, I spiraled further into a procrastination hole and clicked on the link. "Working on something hard? D...

Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. From a report: The m...

Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. From a report: The m...

A society dedicated to preserving the "much-abused" apostrophe is to be shut down as its chairman said "ignorance and laziness" had won. From a report: John Richards, who worked in journalism for much...

If you just bought a smart TV on Black Friday or plan to buy one for Cyber Monday tomorrow, the FBI wants you to know a few things. From a report: Smart TVs are like regular television sets but with a...

"American tech companies are getting the go-ahead to resume business with Chinese smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co., but it may be too late," reports the Wall Street Journal. Huawei is just bui...

"A massive database storing tens of millions of SMS text messages, most of which were sent by businesses to potential customers, has been found online," reports TechCrunch. The database belongs to a c...

The way Google is indexing JavaScript content is "still a massive issue," reports Search Engine Journal:As much as 60% of the JavaScript content is indexed within the first 24 hours after indexing HTM...

An anonymous reader quotes SiliconValley.com:Twitter said Wednesday it is putting the brakes, for now, on a plan to start deleting inactive accounts that was set to begin next month. Twitter said it w...

Dropbox's Work in Progress blog shared a 2000-word "conversation with the creator of the world's most popular programming language," noting that many computer science schools are switching over from J...

It's the first day of December, which means the return of an annual geek tradition: the computer programming advent calendars! An anonymous reader delivers this update:It's the very first year for the...

The San Diego Public Library system just wiped out overdue fines for 130,000 people. It's part of a growing trend, reports NPR:The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of ...

"The desperate search for ways to help the world's coral reefs rebound from the devastating effects of climate change has given rise to some radical solutions," reports the Washington Post. There's co...

"1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities and at various price-points," remembers the vintage computing site Paleotronic, looking back at the historic tech battle bet...

"Kali Linux 2019.4 was released last week and with it comes an 'Undercover' mode that can be used to quickly make the Kali desktop look like Windows 10," reports Bleeping Computer:Kali is a Linux dist...

Lasrick writes:You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studie...

Long-time Slashdot reader sosume quotes the Register: Redox OS, written in Rust and currently under development, is only "a few months of work away" from self-hosting, meaning that the Rustc compiler ...

"A new photo shows the solar system's second confirmed interstellar visitor in an impressive new light," writes Space.com. elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) quotes their report:A team of astronomers ...

Software developer nickwinlund77 writes: A new study following Nick Lane, et al.'s protocell study mentioned on Slashdot offers an explanation for how ''protocells'' could have emerged on early Earth,...

"DC Comics has yanked a poster for a new Batman title from its social media accounts after the image drew criticism from Chinese commenters who said it appeared to support the ongoing pro-democracy pr...

An anonymous reader writes:The New York Times just profiled 15-year-old "businessman" Rowan Winch, who made up to $10,000 a month from his Instagram feed. ("He planned to purchase a Tesla next year, w...

An anonymous reader quotes the BBC:Facebook has added a correction notice to a post that Singapore's government said contained false information. It is the first time Facebook has issued such a notice...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Apple's 2019 holiday ad The Surprise (YouTube, 11.8M views), the reveal at the end is that two young girls thought to have been frittering away time on thei...

SomeoneFromBelgium writes:Yesterday I spoke to a friend of mine who works for a company developing mostly integrated network solutions which are purely Linux-based. He complained that he was unable to...

Two associate professors of communication at Clemson spent two years studying online propaganda and state-affiliated disinformation campaigns on social media. This week in Rolling Stone they explain h...

"Synthetic biologists have performed a biochemical switcheroo," reports Science magazine:They've re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by ...

"We all want to be rich by having a computer just generate piles of money for us," writes long-time Slashdot reader TekBoy. "Here's one man's attempt at using AI to predict the market. From the articl...

"FedEx delivery robots invade New York City streets," read one newspaper's headline, describing the six-wheeled "SameDay" bots that the company is testing in four cities. But this week New York City t...

Long-time Slashdot reader clawsoon writes:Among Sunday's releases from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on leaked Chinese documents about the detention of Xinjiang Uighurs &md...

Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil (Denis "Jaromil" Roio) writes: A few days ago Devuan ASCII 2.1 was announced and one update has been overlooked by most media outlets: our dbus patch to re-generate m...

Jimmy Wales' new social network WT.Social started November with just 1,500 members. Four weeks later, it's skyrocketed up to 345,680 members -- and that's just the beginning. Next year Wales plans to ...

Jimmy Wales' new social network WT.Social started November with just 1,500 members. Four weeks later, it's skyrocketed up to 345,680 members -- and that's just the beginning. Next year Wales plans to ...

"The world is getting windier," reports WBUR, citing a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. And they add that this could actually be a boon to wind farm operators, "since faster w...

Netflix's reboot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 made this year's "Best Of" lists from both The New York Times and Rotten Tomatoes. Yet apparently their bosses didn't like them, and have shot them int...

In a few decades, two warring toothbrush giants have carved out a market worth billions, with the help of a little science and some clever marketing. But where does it go next? From a report: Not so l...

A mix of silkworms' proteins acts as a scaffold for 3-D-printed tissues and organs. From a report: Many research groups are testing "ink" made from silk proteins to print human tissues, implants and p...

From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way hu...

Using a bright orange electrocardiogram machine attached with suction cups to the body of a blue whale, scientists for the first time have measured the heart rate of the world's largest creature and c...