Articles by Slashdot from January 2020

The Electronic Software Association is introducing tighter security measures around press registration for E3, following an incident last year in which sensitive personal information belonging to thou...

The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) said it won a $1.1 billion jury verdict in a patent case against Apple and Broadcom. Reuters reports: In a case filed in federal court in Los Angeles i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On the night of December 30, Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado was on patrol when the calls sta...

Nintendo says the Switch has hit 52.5 million sales in its lifetime, already surpassing that of the SNES. From a report: In becoming the company's fifth best-selling console of all-time, the Switch ha...

As it struggles to get content from encrypted messenger apps and smartphones, the U.S. government is getting creative in how it tracks down criminal WhatsApp users, according to a search warrant uncov...

The World Health Organization on Thursday declared an international public health emergency over the deadly new coronavirus that has hit China hard. From a report: The announcement comes as nearly a h...

Apple'sredesigned Maps app has arrived. From a report: The company on Thursday said its revamped app is now available for US users and will arrive in Europe "in the coming months." Apple Maps' redesig...

Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to the public on Wednesday: Facebook is fine doing things that are unpopular, as long as people understand why. From a report: Facebook has come under scrutiny over its ...

SpiceJet, one of India's largest privately owned airlines, suffered a data breach involving the details of more than a million of its passengers, a security researcher told TechCrunch. From the report...

Google has released a neural-network-powered chatbot called Meena that it claims is better than any other chatbot out there. From a report: Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes of public soci...

Apple engineers have put forward a proposal today to standardize the format of the SMS messages containing one-time passcodes (OTP) that users receive during the two-factor authentication (2FA) login ...

Over the course of a year, Apple took down 805 apps in mainland China by its own account. From a report: In Apple's latest transparency report accounting for the first half of 2019, the iPhone maker s...

The plan to ban private cars from Market Street -- one of the city's busiest and most dangerous downtown thoroughfares -- enjoys a remarkable level of local support. From a report: In a city known for...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pinterest is ramping up its efforts to crack down on political misinformation ahead of the 2020 election -- a sign that the platform best known for lighthearted fa...

Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished. From a report: The...

Antivirus software giant Avast has announced that it will wind down one of its subsidiary businesses just days after leaked documents revealed the extent to which the Czech company was selling users' ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Colorado Sun: Outdoor businesses need people to get outside, but almost half of Americans don't venture outdoors to play. The steady decline in participati...

Strudelkugel shares a report from Wired: American car insurance rates are going up up up. In the past decade, they climbed 29.6 percent, to an average of $1,548 in 2019 from $1,194 in 2011. The surge,...

davidwr writes: Remember the aurora-that-wasn't called STEVE from last April? Well, amateur stargazers in Finland are at it again. This time it's for a new kind of aurora dubbed "the dunes." These new...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: On Monday, researchers from Japan's Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant. Rather than rep...

Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois, "giving priva...

Iwastheone shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution image of the sun. Taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, it gives us an unp...

Delivery giant UPS has ordered 10,000 electrical trucks from Arrival, a technology company based in the UK. The two companies hope to deploy the trucks across Europe and North America over the next fo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As influential as Warcraft III was in the real-time strategy genre, the game's most enduring legacy might be as the basis for genre-defining, fan...

After several weather delays, SpaceX successfully launched its fourth batch of Starlink satellites into orbit and nailed a rocket landing today. Space.com reports: A sooty Falcon 9 rocket -- which mad...

Google is temporarily shutting down all of its China offices due to the coronavirus outbreak, as well as offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Verge reports: Currently, the offices are closed for the e...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of the Interior has confirmed it has grounded its fleet of non-emergency drones amid concerns over cybersecurity. In a brief st...

Matt Warman, the minister for digital and broadband in the UK, writes: From washing machines and children's toys to personal assistants, we are increasingly seeing more of our daily lives connected to...

harrymcc writes: New legislation in Russia -- known as the 'law against Apple' -- mandates that smartphone makers must preinstall government apps that will give authorities access to an array of infor...

Long-time reader schwit1 shares a report: Paris Musees, a group of 14 public museums in Paris, has made a splash by releasing high-res digital images for over 100,000 artworks through a new online por...

Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns the defunct MoviePass cinema-subscription service, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. From a report: The company disclosed the move in an SEC fili...

Sophisticated hackers infiltrated U.N. offices in Geneva and Vienna last year in an apparent espionage operation, and their identity and the extent of the data they obtained is unknown. From a report:...

Google is working on an initiative to streamline its suite of mobile and browser-based apps for businesses into a singular experience, according to The Information. From a report: The app would combin...

An anonymous reader writes: The Google security team has indefinitely suspended the publishing or updating of any commercial Chrome extensions on the official Chrome Web Store following a spike in the...

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Wednesday, research firm Canalys reported that Apple shipped close to 925,000 iPhone units in India in Q4 2019, up over 200% annually, in what is the company's ...

From a report: The workers of Mechanical Turk, Amazon's on-demand micro-task platform, say they have encountered mutilated bodies, graphic videos of botched surgeries, and what appeared to be child po...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has paid out over $21 million since launching its bug bounty program in November 2010. In the past year alone, the company distributed $6.5 million to 461 d...

The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it was moving its Thunderbird email client to a new subsidiary named the MZLA Technologies Corporation. From a report: Mozilla said that Thunderbird will co...

The German government is in possession of evidence that Huawei, the leading maker of telecoms network equipment, has collaborated with Chinese intelligence, the Handelsblatt daily reported on Wednesda...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. government on Tuesday sued five U.S. companies and three individuals, alleging they were behind hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls ...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Using a robot dropped through a 700-meter hole in the ice, scientists stationed on Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier have captured the first video of th...

Two defunct satellites traveling at 32,800 mph will narrowly miss colliding with one another over Pittsburgh on Wednesday evening. "If the two satellites were to collide, the debris could endanger spa...

chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger is reporting that more than 50 Emergency Alert System (EAS) devices made by Monroe Electronics (now Digital Alert Systems) are un-patched and accessible from th...

pgmrdlm quotes a report from ABC News: The current model the U.S. and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste may not be as safe as previously thought. The materials used to stor...

The White House has told airline executives it's considering suspending flights from China to the U.S. amid an escalating outbreak of a new coronavirus that has infected thousands of people across the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims to have amassed a database of more than 3 billion photos scraped from Facebook, YouTube...

Some U.S. colleges are now apparently requiring students to install a location tracking app to track attendance. Sean Hollister writes for The Verge: The Kansas City Star reported that at the Universi...

Apple reported revenue and profit significantly higher than what Wall Street analysts expected. According to CNBC, "Apple's revenue was up 9% to $91.8 billion," thanks in large part to iPhone revenue,...

At a press event in San Francisco today, Google announced a feature that'll let people use their phones to both transcribe and translate a conversation in real time into a language that isn't being sp...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security: In late December 2019, fuel and convenience store chain Wawa said a nine-month-long breach of its payment card processing systems may have l...

Parents cave in to kids' relentless begging for Apple's wireless white earbuds; schools ban the. From a report: AirPods, once just an adult status symbol, are turning up on the playground. Kids' persi...

Practice Fusion, a medical records startup that attracted more than $150 million from VCs, including at Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Artis Ventures, has received its share of negative press sin...

For the first time a hole has been hot-water drilled through Thwaites Glacier to access the sea water below. Where is the water from and why is it melting the glacier so vigorously? From a report: The...

A security flaw in LabCorp's website exposed thousands of medical documents, like test results containing sensitive health data. From a report: It's the second incident in the past year after LabCorp ...

Facebook has been determined to give people privacy controls while they're on the social network, but on Tuesday, it rolled out a long-promised tool that hopes to give people control from the social n...

Just when you thought nostaliga-mining had already reached its peak: Atari is in talks to build a series of gaming hotels across the country. From a report: The hotels, which will be created in conjun...

The organizers of the DEF CON cyber-security conference have announced today that they are putting this year's China edition "on hold" due to the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. From a...

United Nations scientists have warned that most countries are on track to totally botch the climate goals needed to curb catastrophic global warming. But there's at least one bright spot. From a repor...

An anonymous reader shares a report: On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly ...

The launch of the iPad ten years ago was a big surprise to everyone in the industry -- including to Microsoft executives. Steven Sinofsky, the former President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, sh...

Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers. An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be p...

Britain will allow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to play a limited role in its next generation 5G mobile networks. From a report: The U.K. government said that Huawei will be restricted from...

John Gruber: Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on stage at the Yerba Buena theater in San Francisco. [...] Ten years later, though, I don't think the iPad has come close to living up...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency, is coming under increasing pressure to recommend the federal governme...

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: An interdisciplinary team from the University of Basel in Switzerland has succeeded in creating a direct path for artificial nanocontainers to enter into the...

Longtime Slashdot reader SpaceGhost writes: Per Engadget, Ms. Eilish and her older brother (Finneas O'Connell) produced her massively popular album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? with minima...

CaptainDork shares a report from CNET: The Twitter accounts of several NFL teams were hacked on Monday ahead of this weekend's Super Bowl game. Around 15 teams, including the Green Bay Packers, Chicag...

schwit1 shares a report from the Smithsonian: Capable of following fishing boats into remote regions out of reach of monitoring machines like ships, aircraft and even certain satellites, these feather...

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discover...

A proposed law introduced in Maryland's state senate last week would criminalize the possession of ransomware and other criminal activities with a computer. However, CEO of Luta Security Katie Moussou...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: For the third time in less than a year, Intel has disclosed a new set of vulnerabilities related to the speculative functionality of its processors. ...

Apple applied for a patent for an ambitious design for a new all-in-one computer which integrates both its keyboard and screen into a single curved sheet of glass. The Verge reports: The patent applic...

Malicious cryptocurrency miners took control of Bitcoin Gold's blockchain recently to double-spend $72,000 worth of BTG. The Next Web reports: Bad actors assumed a majority of the network's processing...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: General Motors confirmed Monday it will invest $2.2 billion to convert an aging Detroit assembly plant into the manufacturing heart of its "all-elect...

'Podfasters' listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. But how fast is too fast? From a report: Bumping the speed up to 1.5x was initially jarring. People were talking so quickly that I ha...

The Metropolitan Police has announced it will use live facial recognition cameras operationally for the first time on London streets. From a report: The cameras will be in use for five to six hours at...

Last week, Motorola's Razr handset went on sale for $1499. Alongside the pre-order launch, Motorola has posted a series of videos on its YouTube channel that are somewhere between brief ads and how-to...

Sweeping cyberattacks targeting governments and other organizations in Europe and the Middle East are believed to be the work of hackers acting in the interests of the Turkish government, Reuters repo...

Google Drive and its suite of services -- including Google Doc and Sheet -- are facing issue, many users said Monday. DownDetector, a popular third-party service, reports it has received over 23,000 o...

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Some Windows 7 users who installed the KB4534310 update found that their desktops turned black. With the operating system having now reached end of life, th...

Google will shut down its low-code development platform, App Maker, early next year. From a report: Google today announced it is killing off yet another service: App Maker, G Suite's low-code environm...

Over the past two weeks, Mozilla's add-on review team has banned 197 Firefox add-ons that were caught executing malicious code, stealing user data, or using obfuscation to hide their source code. From...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call. A cu...

An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboar...

The US film industry may have generated revenues somewhere in the region of $40 billion last year, but it seems Hollywood still has plenty of work to do if it wants to compete with that most hallowed ...

jrepin writes: Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 5.5 release, codenamed as Kleptomaniac Octopus.The latest version of the open source operating system kernel brings RAID1 with 3- and 4- copies to btr...

TripAdvisor is cutting hundreds of jobs underscoring the company's need to reduce costs as competition from Google intensifies. From a report: The online travel information provider is eliminating abo...

"Cut back on email if you want to fight global warming," read the headline on a recent article at Bloomberg:[A]ll those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry's focus ...

ProtonVPN open sourced its code this week, ZDNet reports:On Tuesday, the virtual private network (VPN) provider, also known for the ProtonMail secure email service, said that the code backing ProtonVP...

357 Amazon employees have now "violated the e-commerce giant's communications policy Sunday in an unprecedented public display of support for colleagues who were warned that they could be fired for sp...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:Attorneys general in 20 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging a federal regulation that could allow blueprints for ma...

McGruber quotes the Mercury News: In her regular attendance at the San Jose federal courthouse for hearings in her high-stakes criminal fraud case, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has been flanked b...

Long-time Slashdot reader Motor writes:Rocket League — a very popular multiplayer game — will no longer "be patched" for Linux and the Mac after March — say the publisher, Psyonix......

Long-time Slashdot reader Drakster writes: The Doomsday Clock, run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has moved forward to only 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been since its l...

secwatcher writes:When it comes to the release of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits, more security experts agree that the positives outweigh the negatives, according to a recent and informal Threatpost ...

"Cisco is urging customers to update its Firepower Management Center software," ZDNet reported Thursday, "after users informed it of a critical bug that attackers could exploit over the internet."Like...

mbadolato (Slashdot reader #105,588) shares this post from Belgium-based programmer Brent Roose:It's no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn't have the best reputation. De...

"No, the luxurious Borgata Hotel, Casino and Spa isn't located in a central New Jersey wildlife preserve," reports a local news team in New York. But an ad for the casino in Waze was apparently tagged...

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: NASA will launch a new rover to Mars this July — and 28,000 American schoolchildren wrote essays with suggestions for what NASA should name it. NASA has now se...

A former chair of America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission is working with Accenture to explore what Computerworld calls "a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency" -- a cash-backed stablecoin, issue...

Long-time Slashdot reader gabebear writes: The FCC hasn't officially cleared 6 GHz for WiFi, but chipsets that support 6 GHz are starting to be released. 6 GHz opens up a several times more bandwidth ...

From a report:JetBrains has added further destinations to the IntelliJ-based roadmap it sketched out last year, promising more localization, machine learning and Git integration amongst a range of oth...

"How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), wh...

Slashdot reader PrimeGoat has used Linux for 20 years, "10 of which were during my career as a Linux sysadmin..." "However, there's more to being a sysadmin than just knowing how to use Linux."There a...

The director of astrobiology at Columbia University saw something this week that he just had to respond to: Elon Musk "talking about sending 1 million people to Mars by 2050, using no less than three ...

Today Boeing's new 777X aircraft completed its maiden flight, reports CNBC:The plane is the largest twin-engine jet ever built and has a wingspan so wide — more than 235 feet — it features...

Slashdot reader JoeyRox shares a disturbing story about a Boeing 737 NG flight carrying 128 passengers that crashed in 2009, killings its three pilots, another crew member and five passengers. But "th...

Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings writes: While Microsoft Edge is right on track to replace Internet Explorer, it seems that the last one is a bigger security liability then you may think. In a newly r...

The New York Times reports on "Ring Neighbors," a local social networking service launched by Amazon in 2018 where users "share videos of delivery people carelessly throwing packages, or failing to wa...

schwit1 quotes CNN's report on a software engineer who who really loves Star Wars costumes:"I kind of incorporated all of the things that I've learned in 3-D printing and DIY into this project," said ...

Electronic component distributor Digi-Key will be producing a small manufacturing run of the "open hardware" ereader from the Open Book Project, reports Gizmodo:The raw hardware isn't as sleek or pret...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity "lost its orientation...partway through its last set of activities," reported a planetary geologist on the rover's team Monday. Curiosity had lost track of its position in ...

Slashdot reader McGruber shares the news that several of Alan Turing's historic personal effects have been recovered nearly 36 years after they were stolen. From a report:In filings in the U.S. Distri...

Id software has released a new trailer for their upcoming Doom sequel set on a demon-infested planet Earth in the year 2151. And GameSpot has uploaded a 10-minute clip of gameplay while Collider relea...

The maintainer of the popular Rust web framework Actix has quit the project -- though he's backed off threats to make its code private and delete its repository, instead appointing a new maintainer. "...

On Friday America's commander-in-chief revealed the logo for the newest branch of its military, Space Force. CNBC immediately reported that the logo "has boldly gone where Star Trek has gone before."T...

Bruce Perens (Slashdot reader #3872) co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. (And then left it this January 2nd.) But in 2017 Perens was also sued partly over comments made in...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The first person diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus in the United States is being treated by a few medical workers and a robot. The robot, equipped with...

Clayton Christensen, the business scholar who coined the term "disruptive innovation," died of cancer treatment complications on Thursday at age 67. The Verge reports: You may not immediately recogniz...

Motoko Kakubayashi, from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, writes via Phys.org: Physicists have been looking for laws that explain both the microscopic world of elem...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, de...

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Count GE in on the "screw your customers" bandwagon. Twitter user @ShaneMorris tweeted: "My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, which means the generic water filter ...

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging Microsoft to open source Windows 7, which is no longer supported by the company. The Register reports: On the face of it, the logic seems pretty simple. On...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hollywood Reporter: Ahead of the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) -- which is dedicated to the art and science of making video games and set to take place...

If a report from The Wall Street Journal is correct, Apple's TV Plus service that launched late last year has 10 million more subscribers than Disney Plus, which launched at a similar time but with ac...

According to The Verge, content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From the report: "I u...

Julian Lewis MP responds to criticism over his refusal to use email for constituency correspondence, and says letters, phone calls and surgery appointments are "perfectly adequate." He writes: There i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has for several years been working to weaken federal vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. To justify these changes, regula...

Boston Dynamics' creation is starting to sniff out its role in the workforce: as a helpful canine that still sometimes needs you to hold its paw. From a report: This autumn, after years of dropping vi...

Two New York state senators proposed two bills last week to ban local municipalities and other government entities from using taxpayer money for paying ransomware demands. From a report: The first bil...

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it's undeniably hard to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making the problem ha...

Just days after EA announced that its mobile Tetris games will shut down on April 21st, new Tetris developer N3twork released an officially licensed version of the popular puzzle game for both Android...

Shift from radar to GPS should make tracking faster and more accurate, allowing more planes in the air. From a report: Since World War II, air-traffic controllers have used radar to keep track of airc...

Google's latest design change to its search results received blowback from some who said it blurred the lines between search ads and regular search results. On Friday, Google responded, saying it will...

Credit-scoring company Fair Isaac is making changes that will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source...

Brian Krebs: If you're running a business online, few things can be as disruptive or destructive to your brand as someone stealing your company's domain name and doing whatever they wish with it. Even...

couchslug writes: Potential hardware damage alert. As reported by Notebookcheck and later posted to a Lenovo support page, the USB-C firmware issue affects more than a dozen ThinkPad models including ...

The Commerce Department's efforts to tighten the noose on Huawei Technologies Co. is facing a formidable obstacle: the Pentagon. From a report:Commerce officials have withdrawn proposed regulations ma...

Speaking of tax evasions, Kiel, in a separate story at ProPublica this week: In March 2008, as Facebook was speeding toward 100 million users and emerging as the next big tech company, it announced an...

Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone this week: The English version of the world's largest online encyclopedia now has more than six million articles. From a report: The feat, which comes rough...

theodp writes: ProPublica's Paul KIel has the remarkable tale of the IRS' 12-years-and-counting audit of Microsoft for a 2005 deal involving a Puerto Rico subsidiary (and related "Legal Entities") tha...

Longtime Slashdot reader vm writes: You don't have to wait until next Halloween to get creeped out. Using 3D printing, medical scanners, and an electronic larynx, researchers have recreated the voice ...

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of bakin...

Iwastheone writes: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Intuit's Mint personal-finance service wants me to know it's sorry. Again. "We're sorry!" its investments page bleats when I try to view my mutua...

DesScorp writes: In an effort to better understand the latest threats to IT systems, antivirus and security company Trend Micro created a fake tech company, complete with AI-generated photos of fake e...

Science fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: My novella "Unauthorized Bread" -- originally published last year in Radicalized from Tor Book...

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Corvallis Gazette-Times: A petition to limit each grocery store to two self-checkout kiosks can move forward to signature gathering for a state ballot measure. On Fr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On New Year's Eve, while the rest of the world was preparing to ring in a new decade, employees of the German energy company EnBW were getting ready to ...

On Tuesday, Sonos announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. Naturally, this frustrated many longtime customers, prompting Sonos CEO Patrick ...

Attorneys for a former Apple executive will try to convince a skeptical judge that employees can plan a competing venture while still in a job. Reuters reports: Apple filed the lawsuit in Santa Clara ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission has unfairly shut New York state out of a planned $20.4 billion broadband-funding program, US Senate Minori...

Atlassian today announced an update to Jira Software, its popular project and issue-tracking tool, that brings a number of major updates to the roadmapping feature it first introduced back in 2018. Fr...

Apple on Thursday pushed back against EU lawmakers' call for a common charger, warning the move could hamper innovation, create a mountain of electronic waste and irk consumers. From a report: Apple's...

Security researchers from CyberMDX, a cyber-security company specialized in healthcare security, have disclosed today technical details about six vulnerabilities they are collectively referring to as ...

Streaming service touts its large collection of titles, but a majority are uploads -- and questionable films are in the mix [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't imme...

India's largest and the world's highest gamma-ray telescope is set to go live later this year, aiming to provide a new window into distant stars and galaxies in the universe. From a report: The Major ...

Memphis Meats, a Berkeley, Calif.-based startup, says it's one step closer to bringing cell-based meat to consumers' mouths. From a report: The company plans to build a pilot production facility with ...

DirecTV is racing to move its Spaceway-1 satellite out of the geostationary arc after the 15-year-old satellite suffered a crippling battery malfunction that the company fears could cause it to explod...

Facebook, Amazon and Apple spent record amounts on lobbying in 2019, with Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company leading the so-called FAANG companies in outlays aimed at influencing Washington, accor...

Amazon has asked a U.S. federal court to stop Microsoft from working with the Pentagon to implement a $10 billion cloud-computing contract, arguing that the project should stall until the courts work ...

Huawei has postponed its upcoming HDC.Cloud developer conference as Chinese authorities try to control the spread of the deadly coronavirus detected in the southeastern city of Wuhan. From a report: T...

Users of Google search on desktops may have noticed a slight change over the last week and that change is affecting what they perceive as an ad. This represents a further blurring of the lines between...

The contamination of U.S. drinking water with man-made "forever chemicals" is far worse than previously estimated. with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists say they may have discovered why stress makes hair turn white, and a potential way of stopping it happening without reaching for the dye. R...

Microsoft has published a blog post detailing exactly how it imagines dual-screen apps will run on devices like the Surface Duo and Surface Neo -- two foldable devices unveiled back on October that ru...

A team at Facebook AI has created a reinforcement learning algorithm that lets a robot find its way in an unfamiliar environment without using a map. MIT Technology Review reports: Using just a depth-...

An anonymous reader shares a summary from Howard Hughes Medical Institute: In a darkened room in Ashburn, Virginia, rows of scientists sit at computer screens displaying vivid 3-D shapes. With a click...

Kashmir Hill reporting for The New York Times: A mysterious company that has licensed its powerful facial recognition technology to hundreds of law enforcement agencies is facing attacks from Capitol ...

A European court has sided with Nintendo's ongoing practice to not let users cancel digital preorders. The Verge reports: According to Norwegian gaming site PressFire, the consumer authorities of Norw...

A district encompassing Greater Seattle is set to become the first in which every voter can cast a ballot using a smartphone. NPR reports: The King Conservation District, a state environmental agency ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit arm of the company known for its privacy-friendly web browser Firefox, released a guide today for helping s...

"During its Q4 earnings call, Netflix shot down the idea of an ad-supported option for its service," writes Slashdot reader saccade.com. TechCrunch reports: "Google and Facebook and Amazon are tremend...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Microsoft disclosed today a security breach that took place last month in December 2019. In a blog post today, the OS maker said that an internal custom...

Mogster shares a report from the BBC: Monty Python stars have led the tributes to their co-star Terry Jones, who has died at the age of 77. The Welsh actor and writer played a variety of characters in...

Google researchers have exposed details of multiple security flaws in its rival Apple's Safari web browser that allowed users' browsing behavior to be tracked [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled...

A deep dive into an archive will never be the same. From an essay: Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Mi...

We make decisions by weighing pros and cons. Artificial intelligence has the potential to help us with that by sifting through ever-increasing mounds of data. But to be truly useful, it needs to reaso...

Running an outdated operating system will cost Germany some additional fee. The German federal government stands to pay at least $886,000 this year to Microsoft, according to local media. ZDNet: The s...

Quincy Larson, founder of freeCodeCamp, a non-profit organization that runs an open-source community for learning to code, writes in a blog post: I tucked my son under my arm and jogged to my desk. I'...

The future of the next 46 billion devices. From a report: "What do you think is the biggest hardware business at Microsoft?" asked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week during a private media event. "...

Microsoft has announced that it will install a new Google Chrome extension for some Office 365 ProPlus customers that will force the browser to use Bing as the default search engine "to access relevan...

A report investigating the potential hack of Jeff Bezos' iPhone indicates that forensic investigators found a suspicious file but no evidence of any malware on the phone. Motherboard: It also says tha...

Many police departments across the United States already have the ability to crack mobile devices, including the iPhone. From a report: Over the past three months, OneZero sent Freedom of Information ...

One of China's top science research institutes has suspended an academic after finding that his "fully independently developed" programming language was based on a widely-used precursor, Python [Edito...

Tesla's market value has climbed above Volkswagen AG's for the first time to more than $100 billion. From a report: The electric-car maker's shares jumped as much as 4.6% shortly after the open of reg...

The UN has called for an immediate investigation into the "possible involvement" of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' iPhone in 2018, UN experts said in a...

New Delhi is inching closer to recommending regulations that would require social media companies and instant messaging app providers to help law enforcement agencies identify users who have posted co...

After almost seven years, Nintendo has won a patent case that involved the original Wii. On Tuesday, the company announced that a federal court in Dallas ruled in its favor against iLife Technologies,...

China's Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) -- the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope -- is now operational. The telescope was completed in 2016 -- 20 years after it...

With Half-Life: Alyx launching in March 2020, Valve is offering gamers the opportunity to play every Half-Life game on Steam for free. "This is basically a two-month-long trial; you won't get to keep ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today's example of smart stuff going dumb comes courtesy of Under Armour, which is effectively rendering its fitness hardware line very expensive...

Amazon is planning to give more data on counterfeit goods to law enforcement in a further crackdown on fakes listed on its e-commerce sites. Reuters reports: In the past, the world's largest online re...

Boeing confirmed that it has stopped building 737 Max airplanes in Renton, Washington, as it waits to get permission for the plane to fly again following two deadly crashes that killed 346 people. CNN...

MojoKid writes: Today AMD launched its latest midrange graphics card based on the company's all new Navi architecture. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT slots in under $300 ($279 MSRP) and is based on the sam...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Wine 5.0 has been released today and contains over 7,400 bug fixes and numerous audio and graphics improvements that will increase performanc...

According to the Guardian, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his phone "hacked" in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. From the report: The e...

The first case of an infection with a new coronavirus has been discovered in the United States. NPR reports: A man from Washington state returned home after a trip to Wuhan, China, on Jan. 15, sought ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Internet routers running the Tomato alternative firmware are under active attack by a self-propagating exploit that searches for devices using de...

Apple chief executive Tim Cook believes augmented reality, or technology that overlays virtual objects onto the real world, is "the next big thing" that is poised to "pervade our entire lives." From a...

A large number of Android mobile apps listed on the official Google Play Store contain self-contradictory language in their privacy policies in regards to data collection practices. From a report: In ...

The U.S. government's longest shutdown to date ended a year ago, but the memory may have kept lingering in the minds of federal workers looking for greener pastures in the technology world. From a rep...

Sonos has announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. From a report: That's fair enough, especially considering some of the devices were intro...

Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Tuesday charged the American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarn...

BetaNews: Over the years Microsoft has taken numerous controversial decisions with Windows 10, including installing sponsored apps, using the Start menu to advertise apps it thinks you might be intere...

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday he had a "great discussion" with U.S. President Donald Trump over a digital tax planned by Paris and said the two countries would work together to avoid...

Uber is testing a new feature that gives some drivers in California the ability to set their fares, the latest in a series of moves to give them more autonomy in response to the state's new gig-econom...

Apple dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company's iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, Reuters reported on Tue...

An anonymous reader quotes a report: Uber said on late Tuesday that it has sold its food delivery business, Uber Eats, in India to local rival Zomato as the American ride-hailing giant races to shed l...

LastPass has been suffering from a major outage as users are reporting being unable to log into their accounts and autofill passwords. What's odd is the company insists that everything is working prop...

New research from the University of Rochester provides evidence that the magnetic field that first formed around Earth was even stronger than scientists previously believed. The research, published in...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Cardiff University team discovered a method of killing prostate, breast, lung and other cancers in lab tests. The findings, published in Nature Im...

Claire Murdoch, mental health director of England's National Health Service (NHS), has reignited the loot box controversy with a report claiming they push young people into "under the radar" gambling....

After developing the world's fastest camera a little over a year ago, Caltech's Lihong Wang decided that wasn't good enough and started working on an even faster device. A new paper published in the j...

A PS5 leak posted on 4Chan, which was later reposted on Reddit, spills a bunch of information on the PlayStation 5 reveal event which is expected to take place in February. According to the leak, the ...

Instagram is removing the annoying orange IGTV button from its homepage because hardly anyone was using it. "As we've continued to work on making it easier for people to create and discover IGTV conte...

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from PC Magazine: The FBI has shut down a website that offered hackers easy access to 12 billion records stolen in thousands of data breaches. On Thursday, the Justic...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Hospitals have granted Microsoft, IBM and Amazon the ability to access identifiable patient information under deals to crunch millions...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week. The telco "is asking creditors to hel...

The outbreak of a new virus that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan last month appears to be far from over. Today, Chinese health authorities reported that over 130 new pneumonia cases caused by the v...

Might it be possible that someday in the near future, an official might get you to dance around a bit, in order to confirm that you're really you? Perhaps not, but nonetheless, a recent study has dete...

China, one of the world's biggest producers of plastic waste, is set to introduce a ban on all non-degradable plastic bags and single-use straws in major cities. From a report: As part of a plan to dr...

You can buy an official Kubuntu laptop. Called "Focus". It is an absolutely powerhouse with top specs. From a report: Here's the specs list:CPU: Core i7-9750H 6c/12t 4.5GHz TurboGPU: 6GB GTX-2060RAM: ...

Amazon wants to make your hand your credit card. From a report: The tech giant is creating checkout terminals that could be placed in bricks-and-mortar stores and allow shoppers to link their card inf...

Bruce Schneier, writing at New York Times: Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial recognition; the n...

The iconic animated features of Japan's Studio Ghibli will be available in territories outside the U.S., Canada and Japan on Netflix starting in February. From a report: The move is a further change o...

Dutch navigation and digital mapping company TomTom said on Friday it had closed a deal with China's Huawei Technologies for the use of its maps and services in smartphone apps. From a report: The dea...

Alphabet and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, is the latest tech giant kingpin to make a public call for AI to be regulated while simultaneously encouraging lawmakers towards a dilute enabling framework tha...

A Twitter user's complaint last week in which he produces photo evidence of HP warning him that his ink cartridges would be disabled until he starts paying for HP Instant Ink monthly subscription serv...

Everyone knows that the global corporate tax system needs to be overhauled, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Monday, backing changes to global rules that are currently under consideration. From ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Craig Wright's lawyer confirmed to Decrypt late last week that Wright does not possess -- nor even claim to possess -- the private keys that can be used to spend $...

The Verge argues that the browser wars "are back, but it's different this time."The mobile web is broken and unfettered tracking and data sharing have made visiting websites feel toxic, but since the ...

"When British police used facial recognition cameras to monitor crowds arriving for a soccer match in Wales, some fans protested by covering their faces," reports the Associated Press. "In a sign of t...

"It's no secret that Opera isn't doing so well in the era of Chrome dominance," reports Android Police. "According to a report published by Hindenburg Research, the company's losses in browser revenue...

Will Larson has been an engineering leader at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and last May published the book An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Recently he wrote a thoughtful essay asking,...

71-year-old science fiction author William Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. 36 years later he's back with an even more dystopian future in his new novel Agency. But i...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:The U.S. government's auto safety agency is looking into allegations that all three of Tesla's electric vehicle models can suddenly accelerate on their ...

Facebook "will no longer push through with its plans to sell ads on WhatsApp," writes Engadget, citing a report in the Wall Street Journal which says WhatsApp still "plans at some point to introduce a...

"European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust," reports Gizmodo:"Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon ...

Engadget reports on a new tech-industry-in-space comedy premiering tonight on HBO:If you thought that HBO was done mocking technology companies now that Silicon Valley is done, think again. Avenue 5 i...

ZDNet is reporting on a security breach leaking "a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) 'smart' devices."The list, which was pub...

"[A]t the very time that it's become increasingly difficult for anyone to conduct their day to day lives without using the Net, some categories of people are increasingly being treated badly by many s...

Two months ago the Washington Post reported that Google "has partnered with health-care provider Ascension to collect and store personal data for millions of patients, including full names, dates of b...

"Last month, astronomers noticed Betelgeuse had faded much more than usual," writes the Steamboat Pilot & Today. "This is the faintest it has been in over a century of observations. "What's up wit...

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: JetBrains (which makes IDEs and other tools for developers and project managers) just open sourced a new "typeface for developers." JetBrains Mono offers ...

"SpaceX is setting out to prove a critical safety system will be able to save astronaut lives in the event of a launch emergency during ascent," reports CNET:The Crew Dragon in-flight abort test...is ...

Ars Technica recently ran a rebuttal by author, podcaster, coder, and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter to some comments Linus Torvalds made last week about ZFS. While its reasonable for Torvalds to opp...

Slashdot reader northar writes:Subtitling project Amara closes its repository as focus is shifting... Amara was AGPL up until going private. While future improvements to the code base from the Partici...

Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Google vs. Oracle" case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted. "That simple, yet powerful principle h...

An anonymous reader quotes Slate: Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replac...

"The release of the Windows Terminal preview v0.8 has arrived!" announces a post on Microsoft's Command Line blog:Search functionality has been added to the Terminal! The default key binding to invoke...

ThreatPost reported on some big research last week:A proof-of-concept attack has been pioneered that "fully and practically" breaks the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) code-signing encryption, used by...

One police detective bragged that photos "could be covertly taken with a telephoto lens" then input into Clearview AI's database of more than three billion scraped images to immediately identify suspe...

Slashdot reader JoshuaZ writes: In a major breakthrough in quantum computing it was shown that MIP* equals RE. MIP* is the set of problems that can be efficiently demonstrated to a classical computer ...

Tuxedo Computers "has teamed up with Manjaro to tease not one, not two, but several" Linux laptops, Forbes reports:The Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook Pro 15...can be loaded with up to 64GB of RAM, a 10...

"I've grown quite fond of the docker container runtime. It's easy to install and use, and many of the technologies I write about depend upon this software," writes TechRepublic/Linux.com contributor J...

schwit1 shared this report from the defense news site Task & Purpose: The computer-based logistics system of the F-35 stealth fighter jet made by Lockheed Martin, which has been plagued by delays,...

As part of Microsoft's effort to reduce more atmospheric carbon than it emits, the company has announced a $1 billion "Climate Innovation Fund," reports GeekWire:Microsoft said the new fund will lever...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Boeing's troubled 737 Max has run into a new glitch. During a recent technical review involving the Max, Boeing observed an issue with the plane's flight ...

"SpaceX is setting out to prove a critical safety system will be able to save astronaut lives in the event of a launch emergency during ascent," reports CNET:The Crew Dragon in-flight abort test is sc...

"SpaceX is setting out to prove a critical safety system will be able to save astronaut lives in the event of a launch emergency during ascent," reports CNET:The Crew Dragon in-flight abort test...is ...

schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Nearly 150 years ago, [German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich] analyzed a million temperatures from 25,000 patients and concluded that n...

Comcast's NBCUniversal is launching a new streaming service in April called Peacock. With three pricing tiers from free to $10 per month, Comcast wants Peacock "to be an ad delivery system to destroy ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In a paper published in Nature today, DeepMind, Alphabet's AI subsidiary, has once again used lessons from reinforcement learning to pro...

At a House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee on competition in the digital economy, PopSockets CEO and inventor David Barnett described how Amazon used shady tactics to pressure their smartphone access...

Google parent-company Alphabet has hit $1 trillion in market capitalization, making it the fourth U.S. company to hit the milestone. CNBC reports: Apple was the first to hit the market cap milestone i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Serious vulnerabilities have recently come to light in three WordPress plugins that have been installed on a combined 400,000 websites, researche...

Kim Lyons, writing for The Verge: Google added tiny favicon icons to its search results this week for some reason, creating more clutter in what used to be a clean interface, and seemingly without act...

The board of Best Buy is investigating allegations that CEO Corie Barry had an inappropriate romantic relationship with a fellow executive (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), who has sinc...

Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean announced a round of layoffs, with potentially between 30 and 50 people affected. TechCrunch reports: DigitalOcean has confirmed the news with the following ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: In a move at once unsurprising and highly symbolic, the Walt Disney Company is dropping the "Fox" brand from the 21st Century Fox assets it acquired l...

Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone company that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market s...

We've known since the 1980s that you don't need mega-constellations comprising thousands of satellites to provide global internet coverage to the world. Continuous worldwide coverage is possible with ...

With a phone, anywhere else is always just a tap away. From a column: Those old enough to remember video-rental stores will recall the crippling indecision that would overtake you while browsing their...

The NPD group has rounded up sales stats for the last month, but with the flip from 2019 to 2020 it is also listing some of the best sellers over the last ten years. From a report: Grand Theft Auto V ...

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Attacks on Citrix appliances have intensified this week, and multiple threat actors have now joined in and are launching attacks in the hopes of compromising a high...

The university underemployed more than 1,000 students -- primarily undergraduates in computer science and engineering -- in order to avoid paying union benefits, UAW Local 2865 says. From a report: Th...

Alan Buis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writes: There's an old saying that "the proof is in the pudding," meaning that you can only truly gauge the quality of something once it's been put to a ...

It's a tantalizing prospect for traders whose success often hinges on microseconds: a desktop PC algorithm that crunches market data faster than today's most advanced supercomputers. Japan's Toshiba s...

Nation-state hackers breached the networks of two US municipalities last year, the FBI said in a security alert sent to private industry partners last week. An anonymous reader writes: The hacks took ...

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wants to get rid of the legal protection that has shielded social media companies including Facebook from liability for users' posts. From a report: The for...

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses. From a report: The plan by the EU's exe...

As wildfires tear through Australia, a specialized team of firefighters has managed to save hidden groves of the Wollemi pine -- a rare prehistoric tree that outlived the dinosaurs. The trees are so r...

An anonymous reader shares a report: When an ad runs on a YouTube video, the video creator generally keeps 55 percent of the ad revenue, with YouTube getting the other 45 percent. This system's design...

"Not sure if this is good news (Oracle is very busy patching their stuff) or bad news (Oracle is very busy patching their stuff) but this quarterly cycle they tied their all-time high number of vulner...

theodp writes: Major League Baseball Regulations "prohibit the use of electronic equipment during games and state that no such equipment may be used for the purpose of stealing signs or conveying info...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Researchers have now created a form of concrete that not only comes from living creatures but -- given the right inputs -- can turn one brick into t...

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: Some hospitals are ditching the ritual of covering reproductive organs and fetuses during imaging exams after prominent medical and scientific groups have said i...

According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, Elon Musk's Boring Company is now about 50% complete with its underground tunnel. It's about six football fields in length. Teslarati repo...

Tekla Perry writes: Startup Mojo Vision announced a microdisplay mid-2019, with not a lot of talk about applications. Turns out, they had one very specific application in mind -- an AR contact lens. L...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: BlackVue is a dashcam company with its own social network. With a small, internet-connected dashcam installed inside their vehicle, BlackVue users...

A group of U.S. states suing to block T-Mobile from merging with Sprint on Wednesday told a federal judge that the deal would violate antitrust laws and raise wireless prices for consumers. Reuters re...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has agreed to issue refunds to 15,600 customers and cancel the debts of another 16,000 people to settle allegations that the cable compan...

Pine64 will finally start shipping the pre-order units of PinePhone Braveheart Edition on January 17, 2020. Fossbytes reports: A year ago, PinePhone was made available only to developers and hackers. ...

Google said today that it's on track to bring more than 120 games to its cloud gaming service Stadia in 2020 and is planning to offer more than 10 Stadia-exclusive games for the first half of the year...

In December, scientists sent 40 very muscular mice to live temporarily at the International Space Station. The resulting research, they hope, could lead to new treatments for kids with muscular dystro...

Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien who was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father's work, has died aged 95. The Tolkien Society released a short st...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation will notify state officials when local election systems are believed to have been breached by hackers [the link may be paywalled], a pivot in policy that comes afte...

Microsoft has announced an aggressive plan to rectify its role in the climate crisis. From a report: In a blog post published on Thursday, the company pledged to "reduce and ultimately remove" its car...

Google said this week that it will begin to phase out traditional Chrome apps starting in June, and winding down slowly over two years' time. Chrome extensions, though, will live on. From a report: Go...

A new living substance can transform from a wet sand mixture into a solid brick, and even help to reproduce copies of itself. From a report: Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, used ...

An anonymous reader writes: It's been some 18 months since VentureBeat's last browser benchmark battle. What better time to get the latest results than the start of a new year? Over the past year and ...

India's trade minister isn't impressed with Amazon's new $1 billion investment in the country. From a report: A day after Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos announced that his company is pumping in an ...

Bruce Schneier comments on the issues surrounding 5G security: [...] Keeping untrusted companies like Huawei out of Western infrastructure isn't enough to secure 5G. Neither is banning Chinese microch...

Security researchers have published proof-of-concept (PoC) code for exploiting a recently-patched vulnerability in the Windows operating system, a vulnerability that has been reported to Microsoft by ...

The FBI is pressing Apple to help it break into a terrorist's iPhones, but the government can hack into the devices without the technology giant, according to experts in cybersecurity and digital fore...

The two companies, along with Sonos and Basecamp, are set to testify at an antitrust hearing Friday that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google threaten their businesses. From a report: David Barnett is a...

Climate-change-related threats such as extreme weather, large-scale biodiversity losses and a failure of political leaders to slow planetary heating are now the top long-term risks facing the globe, b...

Apple's recent purchase of Seattle-based AI company Xnor.ai is leaving Wyze's affordable cameras without the people detection feature. The Verge reports: Cameras from fellow Seattle-based company Wyze...

fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC: Scientists analyzing a meteorite have discovered the oldest material known to exist on Earth. They found dust grains within the space rock -- which fell to Ea...

According to contracts posted on a federal spending database, the U.S. military is working to develop facial recognition technology that reads the pattern of heat being emitted by faces in order to id...

According to physicist Jason Steffen, letting slower passengers board airplanes first actually results in a more efficient process and less time before takeoff. An anonymous reader shares a report fro...

On Monday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) discussed the idea of introducing "binding measures" that would require chargers that fit all mobile phones and portable electronic devices. The co...

Gary Starkweather, engineer and inventor of the first laser printer, died on December 26 at the age of 81. The New York Times reports: Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices ...

Bose plans to close its entire retail store footprint in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. The company announced the decision earlier today and pointed to the fact that its headphones, spea...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers -- some of whom spammed ASCII ...

According to TechCrunch, Mozilla has laid off about 70 employees today. From the report: In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout o...

After months of back and forth, Audible has settled in a copyright lawsuit with major publishers over its plan to introduce captions to their recordings, a proposal that the publishing houses argued w...

Most modern iPhones running iOS 13 can now be used as a built-in phone security key for Google apps. 9to5Google reports: A built-in phone security key differs from the Google Prompt, though both essen...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. government has criminally charged a Virginia man for helping to organize dozens of "swatting" attacks and bomb threats made against a va...

Toyota wants to evolve from a car-maker to a mobility company. An anonymous reader shares a report: To do that, it's launching Kinto, a new brand that will provide full-service leasing, car sharing, c...

The US Navy says it has classified documents and video related to a 2004 UFO encounter and releasing those materials would threaten national security. From a report: The Pentagon has Top Secret-classi...

The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today...

An Italian court has ruled that prolonged use of mobile phones can cause head tumors despite scientists overwhelmingly agreeing there is no evidence to back this up. From a report: The Turin court of ...

In light of this week's rumor that a Pro Mode -- which will supposedly boost performance on Macs with Catalina operating system -- may be coming, long time developer and Apple commentator Marco Arment...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Call Screening service has allowed you to record screened calls for quite some time, but many people have been asking for a native solution letting them s...

Microsoft today launched its new Edge browser based on Google's Chromium open source project. You can download Chromium Edge now for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and macOS directly from microsoft...

Security researchers from Sophos say they've discovered a new set of "fleeceware" apps that appear to have been downloaded and installed by more than 600 million Android users. From a report: The term...

A team of programmers scraped a pet adoption website to cheat in a $10,000 contest that was intended to help shelter pets get adopted. From a report: Kaggle, an online data science community that regu...

Since the dawn of Twitter, users have been begging and pleading for a way to edit Tweets. Sadly, despite the entreaties of those upon whose usage the service depends, Twitter head honcho Jack Dorsey s...

Glacial viruses are understudied, and climate change may keep it that way. From a report: 15,000 years ago, some water froze atop the Tibetan Plateau and became part of a glacier. While humans were bu...

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks an...

India welcomed Jeff Bezos this week with an antitrust probe. On top of that, thousands of small merchants who typically compete with one another are beginning to gather across the country to hold a pr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced it is funding a bug bounty program for Kubernetes. Security researchers who find secu...

iONiUM writes: LIGO has detected gravitational waves deep in space. The source is currently unknown. The Independent reports: "Scientists think they have detected an 'unknown or unanticipated' burst o...

Researchers from the University Hospital Zurich, ETH Zurich, Wyss Zurich and the University of Zurich have developed a machine that repairs injured human livers and keeps them alive outside the body f...

A research team at Google has developed a deep neural network that can make fast, detailed rainfall forecasts. Google says that its forecasts are more accurate than conventional weather forecasts, at ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch...

Last week, the internet went dark for Yemen and its 28 million citizens. It's still not fully back today. In fact, the entire Red Sea region has dealt with slow to nonexistent connectivity since the s...

The Norwegian Consumer Council published an analysis of how popular apps are sharing user data with the behavioral ad industry. TechCrunch reports the findings: A majority of the apps that were tested...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: It's official, Akon has his own city in Senegal. Known as "Akon City," the rapper and entrepreneur tweeted Monday that he had finalized the agreement for ...

Google is working to improve the speed and security of on-device AI through a little-known initiative called Coral. The Verge reports: "Traditionally, data from [AI] devices was sent to large compute ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amazon Web Services is expecting a decision next month from a U.S. court about whether the brakes will be slammed on the Pentagon's lucrative Joi...

Sabine Hossenfelder, research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, writes: What we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wron...

Microsoft on Tuesday patched an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows. The vulnerability was spotted and reported by the N...

Open-source intelligence proved vital in the investigation into Ukraine Airlines flight PS752. Then Iranian officials had to admit the truth. From a report: [...] In the days after the Ukraine Airline...

Amazon is telling sellers they can begin using FedEx's ground delivery after the company temporarily halted access to the service during the holiday shopping season. From a report: The company will re...

Annual global PC shipments rose for the first time in eight years, according to data released by industry tracking firms late Monday. New submitter mimil writes: International Data Group said late Mon...

Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for on...

Why do customers buy products seemingly irrelevant to their web and voice assistant searches? That's a good question -- and one a team of Amazon researchers sought to answer in a study scheduled to be...

Google has announced plans today to phase out the usage of user-agent strings in its web browser Chrome. From a report: UA strings have been developed part of the Netscape browser in the 90s, and have...

On Monday, Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to unlock the alleged phone of the Pensacola shooter -- a man who murdered three people and injured eight others on a Naval base in Florida in ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. military is spending more than $4.5 million to develop facial recognition technology that reads the pattern of heat being emitted by faces in order to ide...

IFI Claims, a company that tracks patent activity in the US, reports that 2019 saw a new high-watermark of 333,530 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. From a report: The figures are...

Indonesia's Lion Air considered putting its pilots through simulator training before flying the Boeing 737 Max but abandoned the idea after the planemaker convinced them in 2017 it was unnecessary, Bl...

Brian Krebs: Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component pr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: In a tweet, the Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company's vehicles will soon be able to talk to pedestrians if you choose, and he showed off a clip of the u...

Apple's initiatives to minimize tracking by marketers is continuing to make life harder for the advertising industry, forcing advertisers to use inefficient data sources to pinpoint users. AppleInside...

Brian Krebs: Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component pr...

Cy Guy writes: Having not learned the lessons of Jurassic Park and the Terminator, scientists from the University of Vermont and Tufts have created "reconfigurable organisms" using stem cells from fro...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Busan-based firm Jenax has spent the past few years developing J.Flex, an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ultra-thin, flexible, and recharg...

Areyoukiddingme writes: EFF has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, arguing that APIs are not copyrightable. From the press release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundat...

As Korean firms start using AI to help hire new employees, students are going to school to learn how to beat the bots. Reuters reports: From his basement office in downtown Gangnam, careers consultant...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Officials from the city of Las Vegas said they narrowly avoided a major security incident that took place on Tuesday, January 7. According to a statemen...

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from The Verge: We've already seen Samsung's new rugged smartphone with a removable battery, the Galaxy XCover Pro, because the company revealed it on its Finnish we...

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig sued the New York Times for defamation on Monday, claiming a story about Jeffrey Epstein's donations to MIT that referenced Lessig amounted to "clickbait." The Wr...

Visa announced today that it is buying financial services API startup Plaid for $5.3 billion, roughly double the price of its last private valuation. TechCrunch reports: Plaid develops financial servi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On December 16, 2019, Citrix revealed a vulnerability in the company's Application Delivery Controller and Gateway products -- commercial virtual...

Google announced last week the alternative search engines it will show to new Android users in the EU, with DuckDuckGo the most frequently offered choice and Bing tied for last place. From a report:EU...

Adobe unveiled a cloud-based system to help clients build websites, bringing one of its last legacy products to the cloud almost a decade after shifting to internet-based software. From a report: The ...

Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profil...

Through its partnerships with health care providers, Google can view tens of millions of patient records in at least three-quarters of states, the Wall Street Journal reports. From a report: Some of t...

The last decade was a big one for artificial intelligence but researchers in the field believe that the industry is about to enter a new phase . From a report: Hype surrounding AI has peaked and troug...

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning people of using online banking or accessing sensitive accounts from devices running Windows 7 from Tuesday, 14 January, when Microsoft ends su...

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of the debate over what types of medical diagnostic tests can be patented, leaving in legal limbo companies that discover ways to diagnose and treat diseases based on...

A Princeton University academic study found that five major US prepaid wireless carriers are vulnerable to SIM swapping attacks. From a report: A SIM swap is when an attacker calls a mobile provider a...

Microsoft is replacing its Edge browser with the updated, Chromium-based version on January 15. Windows 10 users will be automatically transitioned over. From a report: We already knew this was coming...

Florida lawmakers have begun an investigation into the foreign ties of researchers at the state's universities and research institution. The inquiry, the first of its kind at the state level, dovetail...

Ever-faster processors led to bloated software, but physical limits may force a return to the concise code of the past. John Naughton: Moore's law is just a statement of an empirical correlation obser...

India ordered a large-scale investigation into Flipkart and Amazon India on Monday after a retail trade group alleged that the e-commerce giants were indulging in anti-competitive practices to gain fo...

India ordered a large-scale investigation into Flipkart and Amazon India on Monday after a retail trade group alleged that the e-commerce giants were indulging in anti-competitive practices to gain fo...

VeriSign has released a "proposed agreement" with ICANN to amend their exclusive .com registry agreement to allow them to raise the price of dotcom registrations up to 28% every six years. Those new t...

This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with "some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years" in the computer progr...

A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines", which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into "a minefield" -- fo...

ZDNet's UK editor-in-chief Steve Ranger argues the end of Windows 7 "marks the end of the PC era, too."When Windows 7 launched, the iPhone and its app store were around but were still novelties, while...

Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital. The group has created their own nonpr...

"Shares of Apple gained 86.2% in 2019, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence," reports the Motley Fool:The tech stock's share price tracked relatively closely with momentum for the...

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:As it probes why Boeing's Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned doc...

"There's still time to file a claim for a share of the $425 million that Equifax agreed to cough up after hosing almost half of the country in its massive data breach a few years ago," writes a Pennys...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been focusing the company on cloud services -- and CNBC reports on the results: A Goldman Sachs survey of technology executives at large companies last month showed tha...

There's a new book called A World Without Work by economics scholar/former government policy adviser Daniel Susskind. The Guardian succinctly summarizes its prognostications for the future:It used to ...

Tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk summarizes the argument of four researchers who are warning about the perils of pure engineer thought:They write, politely: "Engineers enter the workforce with importan...

Former Slashdot contributor Nick Kolakowski is now a senior editor at Dice Insights, where he's just published a list of the top programming skills employers were looking for during the last 30 days.I...

"The first core stage for the Space Launch System, intended to get us back to the moon by 2024, has left Boeing's manufacturing center in New Orleans for launch readiness test," writes long-time Slash...

Charter Comunications' Spectrum cable service includes a home security service, and -- whoops. No it doesn't. "Spectrum customers who are also users of the company's home security service are about a ...

An American scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just retracted their latest paper on Monday. Professor Arnold had shared the prize with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their 2018 res...

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry found some interesting quotes in IEEE Spectrum's "View From the Valley" blog:Apple, Facebook, and Proctor & Gamble executives faced some tough questions about privacy d...

"The wildfires raging along Australia's eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," reports MIT's Technology Review, "further fueling the c...

Slashdot reader The8re still remembers the Y2K bug. Now he shares a New Scientist article explaining how it led directly to this year's Y2020 bug -- which affected more than just parking meters:WWE 2K...

"NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the pre...

"On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots?" writes Slashdot reader Lasrick. "Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civ...

In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too." Today shanen shared a similar article from Dig...

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine:Nearly 2600 years ago, a man was beheaded near modern-day York, U.K. -- for what reasons, we still don't know -- and his head was quickly buried in the clay-rich m...

b-dayyy shared this overview from the Linux Security site:Strong encryption is imperative to securing sensitive data and protecting individuals' privacy online, yet governments around the world refuse...

Long-time Slashdot reader thomst quotes Phys.org:The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae...

The social media team for a Minnesota football team playing against San Francisco's 49ers just incorporated "big tech" into its online trash talk, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate site. Th...

Ring isn't the only place where Amazon employees have been fired for accessing user data. Amazon itself also fired several employees this week "after they leaked private customer data to an undisclose...

Which programming language saw the biggest jump on TIOBE's index of language popularity over the last year? Unlike last year -- it's not Python. An anonymous reader quotes TIOBE.com:It is good old lan...

17-year-old Wolf Cukier made a big discovery on the third day of his internship at a NASA space flight center last summer. Iwastheone quotes ABC News: Wolf Cukier, 17...was tasked with going through d...

"Linux kernel head Linus Torvalds has warned engineers against adding a module for the ZFS filesystem that was designed by Sun Microsystems -- and now owned by Oracle -- due to licensing issues," repo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook Pages give public figures, businesses, and other entities a presence on Facebook that isn't tied to an individual profile. The accounts behind ...

Insecure storage systems being used by hundreds of hospitals, medical offices and imaging centers are exposing over 1 billion medical images of patients across the world. "Yet despite warnings from se...

The source code for acclaimed 2D puzzle platformer VVVVVV has been released by creator Terry Cavanagh to celebrate the title's 10th anniversary. Gamasutra reports: Breaking to news in a blog post, Cav...

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece for The New York Times, written by neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin: Short-term memory contains the contents of your thoughts right now, including what you ...

DesScorp writes: The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has handed down a ruling against CNN for firing video technicians illegally back in 2003. From the NLRB: "As part of a settlement signed toda...

Microsoft announced that the upcoming Xbox Series X won't launch with exclusive games for at least a year. Instead, any new title playable on the Series X will also be playable on older Xbox One conso...

The New York Times is reporting that Alphabet's chief legal officer, David Drummond, is leaving the internet giant amid an investigation into his relationships with women who worked at the company. Fr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Hackers are now getting telecom employees to run software that lets the hackers directly reach into the internal systems of U.S. telecom companies...

23andMe has licensed an antibody it developed from its genetic database to treat inflammatory diseases to Spanish drugmaker Almirall SA. "The deal, announced by Almirall in a filing with Spanish regul...

U.S. trade regulators said on Friday they will investigate wearable monitoring devices, including those made by Fitbit and Garmin, following allegations of patent violations by rival Koninklijke Phili...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Indian region of Kashmir has had most Internet service blacked out since August. The government of Narendra Modi says the online blackout is ...

LG is still clinging to its dying smartphone business. The company's new CEO, Kwon Bong-seok, (who was appointed just last month!) promised a return to profitability for LG's mobile division by 2021. ...

In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-...

Dan Rockmore, writing for New Yorker: There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think. Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation, thoughtfully placed and g...

A team of four Danish security researchers has disclosed this week a security flaw that impacts cable modems that use Broadcom chips. From a report: The vulnerability, codenamed Cable Haunt, is believ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: "When I put in the earpieces and goggles the first time it was crazy - it feels so believable," says Anna Taylor, 32, of her visit to a virtual reality (VR) arcade...

Uber informed its California customers this week that it would switch to providing estimates as opposed to fixed prices for its rides in response to a new law that makes it harder to qualify its drive...

A Chinese court has ruled that AI-generated works are entitled to copyright protection, in a win for tech giant Tencent. From a report: According to state media outlet China News Service (CNS), a cour...

A Chinese court has ruled that AI-generated works are entitled to copyright protection, in a win for tech giant Tencent. From a report: According to state media outlet China News Service (CNS), a cour...

Security and encryption experts from around the world are joining a number of organizations to call on India to reconsider its proposed amendments to local intermediary liability rules. From a report:...

Security and encryption experts from around the world are joining a number of organizations to call on India to reconsider its proposed amendments to local intermediary liability rules. From a report:...

In an open letter published yesterday, more than 50 organizations have asked Google to take action against Android smartphone vendors who ship devices with unremovable pre-installed apps, also known a...

In an open letter published yesterday, more than 50 organizations have asked Google to take action against Android smartphone vendors who ship devices with unremovable pre-installed apps, also known a...

Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in "targeted attacks" against user...

Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in "targeted attacks" against user...

A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures," according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands ...

What's this one for? Who knows! Electronic gadgets fade away but their cables live on forever at home. From a report: There's a box that moved with Sarah Loveless and her husband from San Diego to Cha...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: There's currently no field test equipment that detects marijuana impairment. A company in California thinks it has a solution. From San Francisco Chr...

Reddit has updated its policies to no longer allow impersonation of an individual or entity in a misleading or deceptive manner. "That means the new policies won't just affect things like misleadingly...

Astronomers have detected dark matter clumps around large- and medium-sized galaxies. Now, using Hubble and a new observing technique, astronomers have found that dark matter forms much smaller clumps...

New submitter wolff000 writes: A group of researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that cuttlefish see in 3D. They did this by making 3D glasses and then showing the cuttlefish movies of ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Verizon is changing the way it sells its internet and cable packages as customers are increasingly seeking ways to cut the costly cord. The company is eli...

clm1970 shares a report from Georgia State University: A novel nanoparticle vaccine that combines two major influenza proteins is effective in providing broad, long-lasting protection against influenz...

In an apparent swipe at PayPal's recent $4 billion acquisition of Honey, a popular browser extension that tracks prices and discount codes, Amazon labeled the service as "a security risk" for shoppers...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A surveillance vendor that works with U.S. government agencies, such as the FBI, DEA, and ICE, is marketing spying capabilities to local police de...

Samsung's "Galaxy XCover Pro" rugged smartphone includes a feature that all but disappeared from the market: a removable battery. "There are a handful of very low-end smartphones that still have remov...

Scooter company Lime is laying off about 14% of its workforce (roughly 100 employees) and shuttering operations in 12 markets as it seeks to become profitable this year, the company tells Axios. From ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When Valera Zaicev began working in Dublin as one of Facebook's moderators a couple years ago, he knew he'd be looking at some of the most graphic...

An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gai...

A Vermont lawmaker has introduced a new bill that would ban the use of cellphones by anyone under the age of 21. From a report: State Sen. John Rodgers' proposal would punish anyone under the age thre...

Walmart is testing back-of-store automated systems that can collect 800 products an hour, 10 times as many as a store worker. From a report: In the backroom of a Walmart store in Salem, N.H., is a flo...

profi writes: Chinese drone maker Ehang demonstrated its autonomous air taxi in the US for the first time. The all-electric two-seater took flight for five minutes above a test track south of Raleigh,...

Microsoft has developed an automated system to identify when sexual predators are trying to groom children within the chat features of video games and messaging apps, the company announced Wednesday. ...

Low-end smartphones sold to Americans with low-income via a government-subsidized program contain unremovable malware, security firm Malware bytes said today in a report. From a report: The smartphone...

At its CES 2020 keynote, Intel showed off its upcoming Xe discrete graphics chip and today, we're seeing exactly how that's going to be implemented. From a report: First off, Intel unveiled a standalo...

Yves Behar doesn't really need any introduction. The world-renowned Swiss designer is a frequent creative artist in the gadget realm. He's designed iconic devices like the OLPC, Jawbone Jambox, Herman...

Native to China's Yangtze River, these fish grew 23 feet in length, but haven't been spotted since 2003. From a report: The Chinese paddlefish and its close relatives have been around for at least 200...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn't competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming ser...

Although TiVo has an exciting new product at CES with the TiVo Stream 4K media player, it also has some bad news for DVR owners: The promised ability to stream live and recorded video from TiVo to oth...

Facebook said on Thursday that it would not make any major changes to its political advertising policies, which allow lies in ads, despite pressure from lawmakers who say the company is abdicating res...

The last five years on Earth have been hotter than at any time since the industrial revolution kicked off almost two centuries ago. From a report: That's the conclusion of Europe's Copernicus Climate ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: SoftBank-backed Zume is laying off 360 employees, accounting for about 50 percent of its workforce, and shuttering its robotic pizza business to focus on...

New submitter profi shares a report from Computing: Huawei has released the source code of openEuler, its distribution of Linux based on CentOS. The operating system was formally launched by Huawei in...

Warner Bros. is has made a pact with Cinelytic to use its AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. From The Hollywood Reporter: Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the sy...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Now that most smartphones don't have headphone jacks, there's no shortage of complaints about Bluetooth. This year at CES, the industry group in cha...

New submitter SysEngineer shares a report from HuffPost: A new protein made from air, water and renewable electricity could revolutionize our food system within the next decade. Developed by the Finni...

Intel announced Thunderbolt 4 this week at CES, saying it will arrive in PCs later this year with Intel's new Tiger Lake processor. But, as CNET reports, "the all-purpose port won't be any faster at t...

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a CleanTechnica report: Over the last couple of days, as Tesla continues on this monstrous run, the media seems to have been noting that Tesla is now more va...

Peter Kirstein, a British computer scientist who was widely recognized as the father of the European internet, died on Wednesday at the age of 86. According to his daughter Sara Lynn Black, the cause ...

A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation's largest labor unions -- and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California -- aims to organize video game...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April of 2019, Pulse Secure issued an urgent patch to a vulnerability in its popular corporate VPN software -- a vulnerability that not only a...

The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. From a report: Medical applications of CRISPR-Cas9 had a banner year in ...

Amazon-owned home security camera company Ring has fired employees for improperly accessing Ring users' video data, Motherboard reported Wednesday, citing a letter the company wrote to Senators. From ...

Anyone paying attention to the news coming out of CES this week has probably noticed that 8K TVs seem to be the next big thing. The science says your mortal eyes can barely tell the difference between...

AI startups are selling images of computer-generated faces that look like the real thing, offering companies a chance to create imaginary models and "increase diversity" in their ads without needing h...

At a press briefing today, executives from Twitter outlined policy changes that'll affect the social network's over 330 million users in the months to come. Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour focuse...

Breakthrough treatments for lung cancer and melanoma have driven down cancer mortality overall -- and from 2016 to 2017 spurred the largest-ever decline. schwit1 shares a report: The cancer death rate...

Apple on Wednesday said that its services business, which includes software for things like news, gaming, apps, music and video, had its best ever year in 2019. From a report: "2019 was the biggest ye...

Hackers are holding foreign exchange company Travelex to ransom after a cyber-attack forced the firm to turn off all computer systems and resort to using pen and paper. From a report: On New Year's Ev...

sciencehabit writes: Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences...

The Australia wildfires are a countrywide catastrophe, mainly caused by drought and extreme heat, but dozens of people are directly to blame for some of the problem, officials say. From a report: Poli...

With all eyes this week on the CES trade show in Las Vegas, famous for a mind-boggling array of personal gadgets, it's worth considering something counterintuitive: Venture capitalists like consumer t...

Around half of the websites that use WebAssembly, a new web technology, use it for malicious purposes, according to academic research published last year. From a report: WebAssembly is a low-level byt...

The beginning of technology was about the shift from batch computing in one place to continuous computing everywhere. That era of paradigm changes may be over, which means the real changes are only be...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The encryption debate between Apple and the F.B.I. might have found its new test case. The F.B.I. said on Tuesday that it had asked Apple f...

Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month, February 2020. ZDNet reports: According to a blog post published to...

Astronomers have discovered a gigantic, undulating wave of dust and gas where newborn stars are forged over a 50 million billion mile stretch of the Milky Way. The Guardian reports: The gaseous struct...

An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Kevin Rooke, investment specialist and co-founder of blockchain marketing agency agency0x: Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue ...

pnutjam writes: New York is proposing a statewide virtual currency aimed at helping unbanked citizens get access to day-to-day financial transactions without predatory fees. Since there are an estimat...

One day after Amazon announced that it has populated the world with over 100 million Alexa-powered devices, Google decided to take the opportunity to tout some of its numbers. At CES 2020 on Tuesday, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new U.S. law prohibits broadband and TV providers from charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers have provided themselves. A U.S. gov...

theodp writes: Dismissing questions of whether Ivanka Trump's Tuesday CES keynote appearance on The Path to the Future of Work should have gone to somebody else who's had more to do with tech in the a...

Ammalgam shares a report from Unirobotica: Last year, Facebook announced measures to protect the 2020 U.S. election from foreign influence and misleading information last year. Now, in addition to tho...

MojoKid writes: Yesterday, AMD launched its new Ryzen 4000 Series mobile processors for laptops at CES 2020, along with a monstrous 64-core/128-thread third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation d...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: New York City unveiled an ambitious plan Tuesday to bring universal internet access to its 8.5 million residents by partnering with private internet serv...

Finland's new Prime Minister has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule that would involve a four-day week and six-hour days. From a report: Sanna Marin, the youngest female head o...

Finland's new Prime Minister has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule that would involve a four-day week and six-hour days. From a report: Sanna Marin, the youngest female head o...

Sprint is officially pulling the plug on its decaying Virgin Mobile prepaid service and will transfer current customers to its Boost Mobile brand starting in February. From a report: The move doesn't ...

harrymcc writes: This week at CES, Delta is previewing a display technology called parallel reality. Created by a startup called Misapplied Sciences, it uses pixels that can aim different colors at di...

Audio company Sonos has sued Google for allegedly copying its patented speaker technology while undercutting it at market. From a report: The New York Times reports that it filed two lawsuits covering...

Microsoft's GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare have urged India to be transparent about the amendments it is making to an upcoming law that could affect swathes of companies and the way more than half a ...

Bluetooth will soon roll out some of its technology's biggest improvements in its nearly 20-year history. From a report: The new Bluetooth standard will be known as LE Audio and one of the biggest imp...

Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt: Disney has done amazing work driving new users to its Disney+ streaming service with low(ish) price point and exclusive programs like The Mandalorian. But users this w...

What's next after you've successfully imitated the look, taste and smell of real beef? For Impossible Foods, the choice is obvious: move on to pork and sausage. From a report: Like the faux burger tha...

Mozilla today launched Firefox 72 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 72 includes fingerprinting scripts blocked by default, less annoying notifications, and Picture-in-Picture video on macO...

SpaceX launched its third batch of internet-beaming satellites Monday evening, kicking off what is expected to be a remarkably busy year for the company as it readies its new broadband business. From ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: To protect its hosts, Airbnb is now using an AI-powered tool to scan the internet for clues that a guest might not be a reliable customer. According ...

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Only in the past five years has it become possible to raise thousands of healthy fish so far from the shoreline without contaminating millions of gallons of...

sciencehabit writes: Millions of years from now, advanced humans -- or perhaps visiting aliens -- may dig up the remnants of today's civilizations. What are they likely to find, and how will they inte...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: At CES 2020, Facebook plans to show off an innovative new concept for the company: privacy. It will have a booth at the tech show for giving demos on its...

YouTube said Monday it is rolling out new protections for children viewing videos on its site (source may be paywalled; alternative source), an effort to satisfy federal regulators who last year fined...

Lucas123 writes: There is a growing movement among fintech companies, banks, healthcare services, universities and others toward disintermediating the control of online user identities in favor of sup...

On January 6, 2001, Bill Gates and The Rock debuted the original Xbox, calling it "the most electrifying" games console on the market. GameRevolution reports: The surreal image of The Rock standing al...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from StarTribune: Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000 acres near Halma in the northwest corner of Minnesota, so his operation is ...

At CES on Monday, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said the Japanese auto giant will transform a 175-acre site of a former car factory into a "prototype city of the future" where it can test autonomous vehicles...

At CES 2020, Samsung debuted "The Sero" (translates to vertical in Korean) -- a 4K TV that automatically rotates on its stand so you can more easily watch vertical content that's been recorded on phon...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On the heels of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper strike on January 2, the U.S. Dep...

Some app developers are concerned that frequent iOS 13 notifications will scare users away. From a report: "'Facebook' has used your location 107 times in the background over the past 3 days. Do you w...

Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. From a report: The bat...

An anonymous reader writes: NextMind is developing a brain-computer interface that translates signals from the visual cortex into digital commands. VentureBeat tried NextMind's device, which lets you ...

Speaking of Chromebooks, David Ruddock, opines at AndroidPolice: Chrome OS' problems really became apparent to me when Android app compatibility was introduced, around five years ago. Getting Android ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook is one of the nicest pieces of laptop hardware I've touched in a very long time. Not since Google's 2017 Pixelbook has there been a C...

The once-king-of-the-hill smartphone vendor, which had a terrible 2018, continued to bleed last year, according to financial disclosures it made on Monday. From a report: HTC reported revenue of 10,01...

It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. From a report: The e-commerce titan anno...

Folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new machine learning-based tool that will tell you how fast a code can run on various chips. This will help developers tune th...

The UK's National Health System is getting £40m (about $52.3 million) to try reducing login times on its IT systems, "a move the government says could free up thousands of staffing hours a day a...

When Facebook decided it wanted to move 6,000 workers into Hudson Yards in New York, "existing tenants were told to move," reports the New York Times, as "part of a rush by the West Coast technology g...

The Verge has been investigating Samsung's "artificial human" project Neon, which seems to be about creating realistic human avatars:A tweet from the project's lead and some leaked videos pretty much ...

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:The next big thing in 3D printing just might be so-called "4D materials" which employ the same manufacturing techniques, but are designed to deform over time in...

On Wednesday Phoronix cited a blog post by C++ game developer Malte Skarupke claiming his spinlocks experiments had discovered the Linux kernel had a scheduler issue affecting developers bringing game...

"The Trump administration will make it more difficult to export artificial intelligence software as of next week, part of a bid to keep sensitive technologies out of the hands of rival powers like Chi...

"First they came for our headphone jacks. Now, they're taking our ports," writes CNET:Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has reported that the company is gearing up to remove the Lightning connector ...

Bruce Perens (Slashdot reader #3872) co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. But on Thursday Perens posted "it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically hea...

"The gigabytes of data we're using -- although invisible -- come at a significant cost to the environment," argues the CBC's senior technology reporter. "Some experts say it rivals that of the airline...

The Associated Press looks at three new fatalities involving Teslas this week, saying the crashes have "increased scrutiny of the company's Autopilot driving system just months before CEO Elon Musk ha...

"Companies are finally getting really good at selling directly to consumers, forcing them to question Amazon's value to them," writes a columnist at the Motley Fool:Rather than one single powerhouse, ...

A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica's work in 68 different countries "will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on 'an industrial...

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:If you've been following the steady march of progress from Dell's Linux-first Project Sputnik team, you're no doubt aware that the "Developer Edition" variant of the ...

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:When the Greenland ice sheet went into a record meltdown in the summer of 2019, it raised a very terrifying specter of the future. Here was a 12.5-billion-ton mass o...

"2020 may be the year where tech unionizing efforts gain some actual traction for the first time," argues GeekWire:The chances of this happening in 2020 reflect several factors in the industry and pol...

An anonymous reader quotes a long-time columnist for the Northwest Florida Daily News:In this age dominated by screens, we have become more prone to sitting in our cars, houses and workplaces and watc...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared his story about the worst tech book review he found on Amazon in 2019. Stephen Few is a respected author and speaker whose books on data visualization and analy...

The world's five regional Internet registry have an unincorporated organization called the Number Resource Organization, and they also all have representatives on a supporting organization affiliated ...

An anonymous reader quotes Space News:The SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites scheduled for January 6 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the Florida Space Coast will be first launch of 2020 and...

Phoronix reports that on New Year's Day, the Linux kernel's Git source tree showed 27,852,148 lines of code, divided among 66,492 files (including docs, Kconfig files, user-space utilities in-tree, et...

"NASA has a lot of high-tech hardware cruising around in space right now, but one of the space agency's pint-sized exoplanet hunters appears to have gone dark," reports BGR:In a post by NASA's Jet Pro...

Australia's wildfires have already burned at least 12 million acres, reports NBC News, with more than 100 blazes still active. "And the season has yet to reach its peak."The ability of animals to reco...

"One misstep from developers at Starbucks left exposed an API key that could be used by an attacker to access internal systems and manipulate the list of authorized users," reports Bleeping Computer:V...

"A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect's phone went dark...

During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden "suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to 'jobs of the future,'" reports Newsweek:"Anybody who can go ...

"Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it," reports Ars Technica. Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shared their report:This is one of those ideas that seems nuts b...

26-year-old Sean Samitt faked his own stabbing, and is now facing a felony charge and up to four years in prison, according to a Michigan police department -- which says it solved the case with help f...

"Iranian officials are likely considering a cyber-attack against the U.S. in the wake of an airstrike that killed one of its top military officials," reports Bloomberg:In a tweet after the airstrike o...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames. But in a lab deep in the basement...

Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Ve...

New submitter jasonbuechler writes: Related to the Xiaomi post the other day, Google has entirely disabled Google Assistant/Home integration with Xiaomi devices pending further testing. Google issued ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [T]he U.S. has traditionally paid for the upkeep of its roads via direct taxation of gasoline and diesel fuel, which means that as our fleet beco...

Iwastheone shares a report from SciTechDaily: MIT mathematicians and engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts how stable a knot is, based on several key properties, including the nu...

A U.S. judge has awarded $12.8 million to 22 unnamed women, ruling that they were tricked into appearing in widely distributed online porn videos. The BBC reports: Some of the models duped by the owne...

SpankiMonki shares a report from CNBC: Tesla said it delivered 92,550 Model 3 cars and 19,450 Model S and X vehicles during the fourth quarter. The company was expected to deliver 87,900 Model 3, 9,80...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Mil...

Many users have taken to the Lutris Forums to report that EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V. "Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for ...

New submitter grunby shares a report from Gothamist: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: "We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool," explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a...

Google has begun sunsetting its print-replica magazine service. From a report: Paid Google Magazine users have reportedly begun receiving emails announcing that the service is shutting down. The email...

Helsinki, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Singapore, and other metros have been experimenting with on-demand buses -- and not seeing a lot of success. From a report: Since September, commuters using Shanghai's...

The dogs, known as Aibos, are companion robots made by Sony -- robots that don't necessarily do much apart from providing company and comfort. From a report: Every Aibo -- Japanese for "companion" -- ...

The tagline "Your best buys are always at Fry's" once blanketed Bay Area airwaves, but that's no longer true of the computer retailer's Palo Alto store. From a report: A temple of electronics known as...

An Arkansas-based telemarketing firm sent home more than 300 employees and told them to find new jobs after IT recovery efforts didn't go according to plan following a ransomware incident that took pl...

Google Chrome will get support for error codes, similar to the ones seen on Windows blue screen of death (BSOD) crash pages. From a report: The idea is to provide Chrome users with a code they can sea...

By the end of August 2019, the entire pig population of China had dropped by about 40 percent. China accounted for more than half of the global pig population in 2018, and the epidemic there alone has...

Tens of thousands of Australians are fleeing their homes as hundreds of fires rage across the continent's southeast coast. And yes, climate change is almost certainly to blame for the extent of the di...

Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication. From a report: Each summer for the past 25 years, tens of thousands of people have flocked to Barcelona, Spain, to witness Sonar, a three-day f...

Segway's newest self-balancing vehicle won't require you to stand up. From a report: Dubbed the S-Pod, the new egg-shaped two-wheeler from Segway-Ninebot is meant to let people sit while they effortle...

Mike Masnick, writing for TechDirt: We've written a bunch about why AI generated artwork should not (and need not) have any copyright at all. The law says that copyright only applies to human creators...

A software engineer has designed a so-called USB "kill cable" that works as a dead man's switch to shut down or wipe a Linux laptop when the device is stolen off your table or from your lap in public ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cameras with artificial intelligence (AI) software that the South Korean government claims can detect the likelihood of crime will be installed in Seoul...

A computer made from strands of DNA in a test tube can calculate the square root of numbers up to 900. New Scientist reports: Chunlei Guo at the University of Rochester in New York state and colleague...

Doctor Stephan Moll, a blood-clot expert from the University of North Carolina, helped develop a treatment plan for a NASA astronaut who discovered a blood clot in the jugular vein partway through a l...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The [African swine fever disease] was first reported in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in early August 2018. By the end of August 2019, the e...

In an attempt to curb teen vaping, the FDA has officially banned most fruit- and mint-flavored, cartridge-based vaping products. Companies that manufacture, sell and distribute such products have 30 d...

Apple has signed HBO's former chief executive Richard Plepler for a five-year exclusive deal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to produce feature films, documentaries and original...

Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide. ZDNet reports: The CCPA, known as America's toughest privacy legisl...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Riding through a remote valley in Mongolia on the back of his motorbike, adventurer Jamie Clarke let the hum of the engine and the wind echo in his mi...

schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new California labor law from impacting more than 70,000 independent truckers. The law, passed late last year, makes it...

hackingbear shares a report from The Verge: TikTok released its first transparency report yesterday, showing which countries have submitted requests for content removal as well as access to user data....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A group of Amazon employees say the company has threatened to fire two workers for speaking out against the company's environmental policies. In a statem...

An anonymous reader shares a report: So-called "smart" security cameras have had some pretty dumb security problems recently, but a recent report regarding a Xiaomi Mijia camera linked to a Google Hom...

The Pacific nation of Palau has become the first country to ban sun cream that is harmful to corals and sea life. From a report: From Wednesday, sun cream that includes common ingredients, including o...

As any seasoned TV watcher will tell you, firework displays don't translate well to television. From a report: In fact, they look terrible. The colors are washed out, the concussive boom of the explos...

Dell is trying to make its laptops more attractive to iPhone users. From a report: The Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker said on Thursday it is releasing software that will let users mirror their...

Stephen Colbert: Isaac Asimov would have been 100 today. He published in every category of the Dewey Decimal system. After reading him your mind works better. Too many great quotes. Here's one: "Never...

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the centre of bustling and busy Barcelona there is unusual quiet: just the babble of children playing in a small playground and the sound of the birds. There is...

As the world warms, scientists say that abrupt shifts in weather patterns, like droughts followed by severe floods, are intensifying. From a report: From 2011 to 2016, California experienced five year...

They come in the night: Drones -- lots of them -- flying in precise formations over the Colorado and Nebraska prairie. Whose are they? Unknown. Why are they there? Unclear. From a report: "It's creepy...

A Google Chrome extension was caught injecting JavaScript code on web pages to steal passwords and private keys from cryptocurrency wallets and cryptocurrency portals. From a report: The extension is ...

Google's health research unit said it has developed an artificial-intelligence system that can match or outperform radiologists at detecting breast cancer, according to new research. But doctors still...

The space agencies of the US, Europe, Russia, and China are all launching rovers to Mars this year. From a report: The 2010s saw Mars welcome NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on the red planet in ...

The "endgame" in the decadeslong campaign to eradicate polio suffered major setbacks in 2019. From a report: While the effort lost ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which recorded 116 cases of wild ...

As freezing water thrashed their rowboat in some of the most treacherous waters in the world, six men fought for 13 days to make history, becoming the first people to traverse the infamous Drake Passa...

As Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart spend billions to make a dent in India's retail market and reel from recent regulatory hurdles, the two companies have stumbled upon a new challenge: Mukesh Ambani...

This decade began just after a historic inflection point, with 51% of the world's population living in urban areas. From a report: By the numbers: That proportion has continued to rise steadily, reach...

Basic extrapolations suggest that if there are other spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way, they could spread across the entire galaxy with surprising speed. Why, then, have we found no irrefutab...

What scientists can see and measure, in the garbage patches and on beaches, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total plastic entering the water. From a report: Every year, 8m tons of plastic ent...

India has approved its third lunar mission months after its last one failed to successfully land on the moon, its space agency said on Wednesday, the latest effort in its ambitions to become a low-cos...

India has approved its third lunar mission months after its last one failed to successfully land on the moon, its space agency said on Wednesday, the latest effort in its ambitions to become a low-cos...

mikeebbbd writes: A 1-minute power glitch on Tuesday, December 31, partially shut down Samsung chip production at its Hwaseong chip complex in South Korea for "two or three days". DRAM and NAND lines ...

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: Ever notice that underwater images tend to be be blurry and somewhat distorted? That's because phenomena like light attenuation and back-scattering adversely aff...

Chinese startup Mobike has announced that it lost more than 200,000 bikes in 2019. From a report: The company said in a blog that 205,600 "dockless" bikes were lost to theft and vandalism. In 2018, it...

Positive affectivity, or the characteristic that describes how people experience affects (e.g., sensations, emotions, and sentiments) and interact with others as a result, has been linked to increased...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from indust...

Since 2010, a slew of on-demand companies and technologies have managed to use consumer data to transform the commercial significance of urban living. From a report: Historically, one of the great eco...

Finding free online tax filing should be easier this year for millions of Americans. From a report: The IRS announced significant changes Monday to its deal with the tax prep software industry. Now co...

The fight against annoying robocalls just got another boost. This week President Trump signed the Traced Act into law, giving government agencies and law enforcement officials more weapons to go after...

Sonos has a good reputation for building quality speakers, but its latest move has disappointed some buyers, reports Engadget. From a report: Recently, the company offered a trade-up program, giving l...

Rob Barry and Dustin Volz, reporting for Wall Street Journal: The hackers seemed to be everywhere. In one of the largest-ever corporate espionage efforts, cyberattackers alleged to be working for Chin...

You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas. From a column: The breakout hit of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 was a television set. Hard to beli...

Fireworks have long been a staple of New Year's Eve celebrations in Germany, with revelers setting off their own pyrotechnics in the annual reverie of booze and exuberance known in the country as "Sil...

U.S. retailers including Walmart will add "Do Not Sell My Info" links to their websites and signage in stores starting Jan. 1, allowing California shoppers to understand for the first time what person...

Amazon is building a homeless shelter on its Seattle campus. From a report: The proposed shelter, which is being co-created by nonprofit Mary's Place, will live in Amazon's Seattle headquarters and is...

sandbagger writes: Visual artist and futurist Syd Mead, who helped shape the look of influential sci-fi films including "Blade Runner," "Tron," "Aliens" and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," died Monda...

Encrypted email provider ProtonMail has officially launched its new calendar in public beta. The move is part of the Swiss company's broader push to offer privacy-focused alternatives to Google's key ...

Huawei reported resilient revenue for 2019 on Tuesday as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth ne...

Microsoft announced today that it successfully took down 50 web domains previously used by a North Korean government-backed hacking group. From a report: The OS maker said the 50 domains were used to ...

Uber and Postmates sued the state of California, alleging that a labor rights law set to go into effect this week is unconstitutional. From a report: The lawsuit filed Monday in Los Angeles federal co...