Articles by Slashdot from March 2020

New submitter NoMoreACs shares a report from Gizmodo: Tech pioneer Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the modern internet, has tested positive for covid-19, according to a tweet Cerf sent out Monday...

LG is ditching the "G" series branding on future smartphones. The company released the LG Optimus G1 Pro in 2013 and went on to release a new "G" series flagship smartphone every year since, with the ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to announce its final rule to roll back Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, rel...

sandbagger writes: Researchers from North Carolina State University and the Army Research Office have demonstrated a new model of how competing pieces of information spread in online social networks a...

Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, N.Y., and Instacart's grocery delivery workers nationwide plan to walk off their jobs on Monday. From the report: They are demanding stepped-up protection an...

The Global Wind Energy Council, an industry trade organization, released its review of the market in 2019. During the past year, wind power saw its second-largest amount of new installed capacity ever...

On Monday, General Electric factory workers walked off the job and demanded that the company convert its jet engine factories to make ventilators. From a report: Workers protested at GE's Lynn, Massac...

The Super Mario series is turning 35 this year, and Nintendo has big plans for the plumber's birthday. From a report: That includes updating and bringing back most of his games for Nintendo Switch, ac...

Donald Trump has extended America's national shutdown for a month, bowing to public health experts, and scientific reality, and warning that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is yet to come. From ...

SoftBank has decided to let satellite internet provider OneWeb file for bankruptcy rather than pump billions of dollars into the start-up to save it. From a report: SoftBank, which has already investe...

A hacker has hijacked all of Microsoft's official YouTube accounts and is broadcasting a cryptocurrency Ponzi scam to all of the company's subscribers, ZDNet reported Monday. From the report: The hija...

Microsoft unveiled a consumer subscription service with added Office programs and tools to protect children and older adults, part of an effort to shift more customers to ongoing payment plans that pr...

The Internet Archive will suspend its waiting lists for digital copies of books, as part of its National Emergency Library, the organization said. From a report: "Users will be able to borrow books fr...

Microsoft today announced upcoming features for its Edge browser based on Google's Chromium open source project, the same browser Google's Chrome is based on. Consumer features like Vertical Tabs, Sma...

The Internet Archive will suspend its waiting lists for digital copies of books, as part of its National Emergency Library, the organization said. From a report: "Users will be able to borrow books fr...

Scott Kelly, writing for The New York Times: Being stuck at home can be challenging. When I lived on the International Space Station for nearly a year, it wasn't easy. When I went to sleep, I was at w...

"A federal court in D.C. has ruled in a lawsuit against Attorney General William Barr that studies aimed at detecting discrimination in online algorithms don't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act...

Earlier this month Slashdot covered the Imperial College in London forecast of "what happens if the U.S. does absolutely nothing to combat COVID-19," which predicted 2.2 million deaths just in the U.S...

The pandemic has "proven conclusively that the internet should be a public utility," argues Quartz. "It's a basic necessity in the 21st century, like running water, gas, and electricity. Indeed, the U...

A Portuguese historian argues that Magellan's famous trip around the world in 1522 was much harder than sending humans to Mars:Tens of guys died making this crossing; of 250 crew, only 18 returned, He...

USA Today reports:Ohio Governor Mike DeWine Sunday afternoon said federal officials have promised to ease restrictions on a technology to clean and reuse the masks deemed the safest for healthcare wor...

"When you point a telescope at a black hole, it turns out you don't just see the swirling sizzling doughnut of doom formed by matter falling in," reports the New York Times. "You can also see the whol...

In the journal Science Robotics, an international group of robotic experts wrote an editorial arguing COVID-19 "may drive further research in robotics to address risks of infectious diseases," and urg...

An anonymous reader quotes Rock, Paper, Shotgun:For as long as there's been Minecraft, there's been people who want to re-create the world in Minecraft. For one modder, though, it's not enough to have...

An anonymous reader quotes Space News:The space surveillance radar site known as the Space Fence is ready for use after five years in construction, the U.S. Space Force announced March 27. The $1.5 bi...

Mars was once covered by oceans, but lost its atmosphere over time, according to Gina DiBraccio, a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere a...

"Gisele Huff is convinced universal basic income is finally having its moment," reports the Bay Area newsgroup, describing the 84-year-old president of a nonprofit promoting universal basic incomes to...

Friday's first-ever remote meeting for the Los Angeles City Council had to shut down for 20 minutes because of pranksters posting "pornographic videos". The Los Angeles Daily News has the story:Counci...

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:Ashley Madison's tagline has taken on a new ring amid the COVID-19 pandemic — "Life's short. Have an affair." And the "married dating" site, used to conduc...

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:On Friday video-conferencing software Zoom issued an update to its iOS app which stops it sending certain pieces of data to Facebook. The move comes after a Moth...

Iwastheone quotes Science News:Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across. Beyond th...

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans dur...

theodp writes: The LA Times reports that controversies over grading are roiling universities and colleges, as the coronavirus outbreak prompted them to shift to online learning and send most students ...

The New York Times interviewed over 50 current and former U.S. health officials, senior scientists, company executives, and administration officials to investigate America's "lost month" without wides...

"For most of her life, Joy Milne had a superpower that she was totally oblivious to," reports NPR. Long-time Slashdot reader doug141 explains what happened next:Milne's husband's natural odor changed ...

Long-time technology pundit Robert Cringely writes:IT — Information Technology — grew out of something we called MIS — Management Information Systems — but both meant a kid in ...

sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal:Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadb...

It's the largest free web hosting provider for dark web services. But remember back in 2018 when its 6,500 sites all went down after attackers accessed its database and deleted all its accounts? It ha...

An anonymous reader writes:We keep seeing stories about how providers are slowing down their streaming speed to reduce bandwidth usage during this period when many are being asked to stay at home... B...

The state of New York hopes to "amplify" its response to COVID-19 by launching tech-driven products with top companies, and it's looking for professional volunteers with experience in software develop...

The former editor-in-chief of the Linux Journal just published an annotated version of Zoom's privacy policy. Searls calls it "creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adte...

While many coronavirus tests provide results within hours or days, America's Food and Drug Administration "has authorized the emergency use" of a new rapid coronavirus test from medical device manufac...

sciencehabit shared this article from Science magazine:For decades, astrophysicists have thought some sort of invisible dark matter must pervade the galaxies and hold them together, although its natur...

An anonymous reader quotes Wired:Next week, blood banks across the Netherlands are set to begin a nationwide experiment. As donations arrive — about 7,000 of them per week is the norm — th...

"Averaged over the globe, electric vehicles (EVs) already represent about a 31-percent emissions savings" writes Ars Technica, noting results from a study which also found similar savings from energy-...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A school in Norway has stopped using popular video conferencing service Whereby after a naked man apparently "guessed" the link to a video lesson. ...

Yelp has paused an effort in partnership with GoFundMe that automatically opted tens of thousands of small businesses into fundraisers after complaints from restaurant and bar owners, the company tell...

NASA has awarded SpaceX with a contract to supply Gateway, the moon-orbiting space station that the agency aims to start building in 2022, agency officials announced Friday. Space.com reports: Gateway...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: For some, the ultimate adventure is up in the stars. (See: Musk, Branson, Bezos.) For Texas businessman Victor Vescovo, the trip of a lifetime is a ...

Senior U.S. government officials have agreed to new rules to cut off Huawei from global chip suppliers, according to a Reuters report Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter. CNET reports: U...

Google won't be participating in April Fools' Day this year due to the serious threat of the coronavirus that continues to impact the entire world. The Verge reports: According to an internal email ob...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: German researchers report in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology that they have identified and characterized a strain of bacteria capable of degrad...

NPR is reporting that some Wuhan residents in China who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. It's raising concerns of a pos...

gavron writes: While most politicians are pro copyright maximalism and patent exclusivity, Elizabeth Warren's campaign just open-sourced a bunch of software and are proud of having used open source to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With so many people working remotely because of the coronavirus, surveillance software is flying off the virtual shelves. "Companies have been scram...

Apple launched its own coronavirus screening site and iOS app developed alongside the White House, CDC and FEMA. From a report: The site is pretty simple with basic information about best practices an...

At a loss to know what to do with your self-isolation time? Well, why not get on the computer and help with a giant weather digitisation effort? From a report: The UK has rainfall records dating back ...

President Trump on Friday signed into law the largest economic stimulus package in modern American history, backing a $2 trillion measure that expands on a Republican proposal issue last week called t...

Data shows that people all over the U.S. are doing the same thing. Verizon says it has seen an average of 800 million wireless calls daily on recent weekdays, nearly twice the volume of Mother's Day. ...

Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses -- until now, these viruses seemed to ca...

A record 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, according to Thursday's Labor Department report, compared with around 280,000 a week earlier. That said, it hasn't all been ...

During a Twitter discussion this week about the company's new vehicle, the all-electric Model Y SUV, CEO Elon Musk suggested the company could take its experience building the car to develop an HVAC s...

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announcing in a blog post: As the coronavirus outbreak continues to worsen around the world, it's taking a devastating toll on lives and communities. To help...

For weeks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a defiant holdout among Western leaders in refusing to lock down his country against the spread of the coronavirus. On Friday, he became the first of those ...

Most 5G phones offer big batteries owing to the increased power consumption of early 5G modems and connectivity. But just how much more power does a 5G phone need over a 4G device? From a report: Redm...

China's film regulators have slammed the breaks on their plans to gradually reopen the country's cinemas. From a report: Over 600 movie theaters across China were given the green light to reopen their...

The New York Times has made one of the most comprehensive datasets of coronavirus cases in the United States publicly available in response to requests from researchers, scientists, government officia...

Sony has announced that it would be spinning off its entire "Electronics Products & Solutions" (EP&S) segment -- including its imaging and mobile businesses -- into an intermediate holding com...

Countless Uber drivers are now being pushed to the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, transporting humans, food, supplies, and maybe soon Covid-19 testing kits as shelter-in-place rules cause de...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Virginia has become the first among the Southern US states to take on a goal for 100 percent carbon-free electricity. State governor Ralph Northam, an Army veteran...

People staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic appear to be listening to more radio rather than music apps, figures suggest. The BBC reports: Global, which owns Capital FM and talk station LBC...

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The first official mission for the new U.S. Space Force lifted off from Florida at 4:18 p.m. EDT on Thursday into a virtually cloudless sky with a military communicat...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The impacts of telecommuting, shelter-in-place laws and home quarantines resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak are starting to impact broadband spee...

Amber Jamieson writes via BuzzFeed News: Spectrum technicians connecting cable and internet for customers during the coronavirus outbreak will receive a $25 gift card for a local restaurant as a "toke...

Engineers from Stanford University developed a motorized exoskeleton rig that attaches around the ankle and foot and found that it made running 15 percent easier. "They explained that when the exoskel...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A currently unpatched security vulnerability affecting iOS 13.3.1 or later prevents virtual private network (VPNs) from encrypting all traff...

pgmrdlm shares a report from NBC News: A growing group of cybersecurity professionals is volunteering their expertise to help hospitals fight off hackers while doctors and nurses fight the coronavirus...

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Elon Musk announced that the Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, making solar roof tiles and battery packs for home energy storage is switching to making ventilators in collab...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on T...

A new consortium of top scientists will be able to use some of the world's most advanced supercomputers to look for solutions. From a report: Advanced computers have defeated chess masters and learned...

pgmrdlm writes: A growing group of cybersecurity professionals is volunteering their expertise to help hospitals fight off hackers while doctors and nurses fight the coronavirus. Calling themselves th...

According to Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 510,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 22,000 people have died from the new coronavirus. While China still has the most...

As people work and socialize from home, video conferencing software Zoom has exploded in popularity. What the company and its privacy policy don't make clear is that the iOS version of the Zoom app is...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google paused Chrome updates last week when it canceled the Chrome 81 release in order to avoid causing severe disruptions to web developers, system administrators...

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard who has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the U.S.: Chotiner: ...

The main U.S. derivatives regulator is taking a significant step in defining the sometimes blurry line between cryptocurrency futures and trading in the spot market. From a report: The Commodity Futur...

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect people all over the globe, Airbnb is stepping up with a plan to offer free or subsidized housing to people working on the disease's front lines, namely ...

Thirty-four state attorneys general are calling on companies like Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, eBay and Walmart to take a harder stance of price gouging in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. From...

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading of Zoom Technologies on Thursday, partly because investors are confusing it with Zoom Video, which has seen a surge share price due to COVID-19...

A US hospitality provider has recently been the target of an incredibly rare BadUSB attack, ZDNet has learned from cyber-security firm Trustwave. From a report: The attack happened after the company r...

Epic Games: The engine maker, the game maker, the storefront handler... and now the games publisher. DarkRookie2 shares a report: Epic Games Publishing came into formal existence on Wednesday by annou...

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've been meaning to check out "Star Trek: Picard" or "The Good Fight," but already perhaps have one streaming subscription too many, you can check out CBS Al...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of curr...

"As governments around the world have pushed their citizens away from populated places to slow the spread of Covid-19, they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseas...

Scientists have revealed an important mechanism in the repair of DNA double-strand breaks, according to new research published today in eLife. Phys.Org reports: One of the main DNA repair processes is...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's wind power capacity grew by almost a fifth in 2019 after a year of record growth for offshore windfarms and a boom in onshore project...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The $2 trillion stimulus package that the U.S. Senate is working to approve today is aimed at helping the country cope with the massive impact of th...

DoNotPay is ready to help you out if you need to delay your rent, credit card, or utility bill payments as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The company, known for its legal aid chatbot, is launch...

jmcbain writes: When Facebook launched its Portal hardware product line for in-home video communication in 2018, people accused the company of being tonedeaf to the privacy uproar stemming from the Ca...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the Center for Translational Atomaterials (CTAM) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a ...

iFixit tore apart the updated MacBook Air and found that Apple made a few changes making for a more repairable notebook than the last generation. All in all, the new 2020 MacBook Air got a 4/10 repair...

couchslug shares an excerpt from Ars Technica: When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in Aug...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The first internet streaming and usage figures are coming in as the coronavirus pandemic places a quarter of the world's population under lockdown. As ...

Cash usage in Britain has halved in the past few days, according to Link, which operates the UK's biggest network of ATMs. From a report: The closure of shops, a shift to contactless payments, plus co...

An anonymous reader shares a column: The United States economy is grinding to a halt as the country grapples with the novel coronavirus pandemic, and one of the first major actions President Trump has...

Microsoft announced today a new security feature for the Windows operating system. From a report: Named "Hardware-enforced Stack Protection," this feature allows applications to use the local CPU hard...

Nuclear scientists in Austria are closing in on new coronavirus testing kits that could dramatically lower the cost and time it takes to diagnose people for the disease. From a report: With Covid-19 t...

In a move to help the international community combat the coronavirus pandemic, the Singapore government will be making the software for its contact-tracing application TraceTogether, which has already...

While much of the economy grinds to a halt, Amazon is doing more business than ever. The company has announced it is hiring 100,000 workers to try to meet surging demand. In 2019, Amazon had over $280...

People are having to use videolinks to say their last goodbyes to dying relatives with Covid-19 because hospitals are curtailing visits to prevent spread of the virus. From a report: In a sad scene th...

Coronavirus RNA survived for up to 17 days aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, lasting far longer on surfaces than previous research has shown, according to new data published this week by the Ce...

An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) issued a security advisory last week warning customers about a bug in the firmware of some SAS SSDs (Serial-Attached SCSI solid-state drive...

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to waive compliance requirements and deadlines for a range of industries, including oil refiners, water utilities and sewage plants, as it seeks to help...

Starting this week, with the release of Safari 13.1 and through updates to the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) privacy feature, Apple now blocks all third-party cookies in Safari by default. Fro...

Video-game fans suddenly have their pick of a huge menu of titles thanks to a raft of new mobile subscription services from Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Nvidia. But for the more than 1 bill...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A new cyber attack is hijacking router's DNS settings so that web browsers display alerts for a fake COVID-19 information app from the World...

Venezuela's first and only state-owned communications satellite has been out of service since March 13 when a series of maneuvers left it tumbling in an unusable orbit. SpaceNews reports: The VeneSat-...

On Tuesday, the Air Force's 45th Space Wing confirmed that the timing for SpaceX's upcoming SAOCOM launch, which was set to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on March 30 using a Fa...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Bacteria form the largest biomass in the world, larger than all the animals and plants combined, and they are constantly moving, but their movement i...

Mozilla and Scroll have made an earlier-announced partnership slightly more official today with the wider release of a browser extension called "Firefox Better Web." It's part of Firefox's ongoing eff...

In response to high demand as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft has started taking action to preserve overall performance by throttling some services. ZDNet reports: On March 16...

sandbagger shares a report from PetaPixel: The Supreme Court of the United States dealt a major blow to photographers' copyright protections when it declared that states cannot be sued for copyright i...

Amazon said on Tuesday that it is temporarily discontinuing accepting orders for "lower-priority" products in India and prioritizing servicing urgent items such as household staples, health care, and ...

When customers step in for a cup of coffee at Ritual Coffee Roasters on Valencia Street, a sign informs them that cash is no longer welcome. The coffee shop wants customers to use contactless forms of...

Apple today officially released versions 13.4 of iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS to the public, alongside macOS 10.15.4 and watchOS 6.2. While many of their improvements are minor, there are a few standout feat...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A nationwide shortage of two drugs touted as possible treatments for the coronavirus is being driven in part by doctors inappropriately prescribing...

UPS' Flight Forward subsidiary focused on drone delivery is partnering with German drone-maker Wingcopter to develop the next generation of package delivery drones for a variety of use cases in the Un...

Ford announced today that it's partnering with 3M and GE to build respirators, ventilators and face shields for front-line healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients. TechCrunch reports: Its efforts inc...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has won a US Supreme Court case against Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), dealing a major blow to Allen's attempt to pr...

China's homegrown operating systems haven't made much of a dent on the global stage. Now there's a Linux-based system that's aimed at weaning the country off Windows. From a report: UOS, or Unified Op...

Online video gaming just became the latest victim of COVID-19. New submitter watha2020 shares a report: Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, the data delivery company that handles Internet traffic for ma...

Compounds once thought indestructible were successfully broken down. From a report: 2019, nearly two dozen water agencies in Southern California were found to have reportable levels of cancer-causing ...

YouTube will reduce the quality of videos around the world starting Tuesday, an effort by the world's most popular video site to ease internet traffic during the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: O...

Google and South Korean tech major LG are likely to skip the top tier Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 platform this year for their smartphones as the cost of the chipset is too high, a report claimed. From a ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday the government would impose a nationwide lockdown from midnight for 21 days to stem the spread of the coronavirus. "There will be a total ban on ven...

Communities living in warmer places appear to have a comparative advantage to slow the transmission of coronavirus infections, according to an early analysis by scientists at the Massachusetts Institu...

Firefox, the global web browser from Mozilla, is launching a new subscription product Tuesday called the "Firefox Better Web initiative," and it will feature former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile's new prod...

sciencehabit writes: Science Magazine has learned that researchers across the U.S. are euthanizing thousands of lab mice in anticipation of a shortage of workers who can care for them. Some scientists...

HP is teasing a Reverb G2 VR headset developed in tandem with Microsoft and Valve that should be "more immersive, comfortable and compatible" than previous-generation hardware. Engadget reports: The f...

The Bad Astronomer writes: A new study of very young binary stars shows that exoplanets orbiting them (circumbinary planets) will orbit in the same plane as the stars if the two stars are relatively c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Donald Trump is considering easing health directives that prevent the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to contain economic fallout....

The coronavirus has revived Facebook as a dominant news hub. According to an internal report by The New York Times, more than half of all news consumption on Facebook in America is about the virus. "O...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Facebook will lower video streaming quality on its platform and on Instagram in Latin America, replicating measures adopted in Europe, to ease network...

SpaceX has received government approval to deploy up to 1 million user terminals in the United States for its Starlink satellite-broadband constellation. Ars Technica reports: SpaceX asked the Federal...

According to Reuters, elite hackers tried to break into the World Health Organization earlier this month. While the effort was unsuccessful, the agency said there's been a more than two-fold increase ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread aroun...

As the coronavirus has forced millions of families into lockdown, demand for Amazon's delivery service has surged. To help the company deal with rising demand, Amazon has prioritized several categorie...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Speech recognition systems from five of the world's biggest tech companies -- Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft -- make far fewer errors wit...

The narration begins customarily, with the play-by-play announcer enthusiastically welcoming his audience live to a competition unfolding on the screen. But this is no ordinary competition. From a rep...

With medical supplies strained by the coronavirus outbreak, health care professionals and technologists are coming together online to crowdsource repairs and supplies of critical hospital equipment. F...

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced strict measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus. He says a "huge national effort" has been needed to halt the spread, adding: "there will come a momen...

In cities across the United States, traffic on roads and highways has fallen dramatically over the past week as the coronavirus outbreak forces people to stay at home and everyday life grinds to a hal...

It might not show much of a family resemblance but fossil hunters say a newly discovered creature, that looks like a teardrop-shaped jellybean and is about half the size of a grain of rice, is an earl...

An anonymous reader writes: If you are a cryptocurrency enthusiast living in a brutal dictatorship, and you use cryptocurrency as a way to evade the restrictions and bad economic policies of that dict...

Microsoft says attackers are exploiting a previously undisclosed security vulnerability found in all supported versions of Windows, including Windows 10. From a report: But the software giant said the...

The personal details of more than 538 million users of Chinese social network Weibo are currently available for sale online, according to ads seen by ZDNet and corroborating reports from Chinese media...

India is turning to WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country, to create awareness about the coronavirus pandemic and has urged social media services to tackle the spread of misinformation on thei...

Microsoft has announced that it is pausing the rollout of Edge v81, citing the ongoing "global circumstances" surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: New Edge releases (or any other kind ...

For many, the cancellation of major sporting events was the moment that made the coronavirus pandemic feel real for the first time. But while fans of baseball, basketball, soccer are left wondering wh...

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has thrown the release schedule of cultural products into chaos, as now is an exceptionally bad time to drop anything that isn't a government check for lost wages. Jerem...

Tracking entire populations to combat the pandemic now could open the doors to more invasive forms of government snooping later. From a report: In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surve...

The number of "silent carriers" -- people who are infected by the new coronavirus but show delayed or no symptoms -- could be as high as one-third of those who test positive, according to classified C...

The Washington Post just ran an interesting op-ed from a research professor of economics at the University of Missouri:Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives and huge...

South Korea "has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to emulate," reported Nature earlier on Tuesday. "The country of 50 million appears to have greatly slowed its epidemic; it reported only 74 new ...

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Facebook plans to donate 720,000 masks — a combination of the coveted N95 respirators and more basic surgical masks — and 1.5 million pairs of gloves t...

An anonymous reader quotes the BBC:McDonald's will close all 1,270 of its restaurants in the UK by the end of Monday, as fears over the spread of coronavirus escalate. Previously, the fast food giant ...

"White House officials are asking tech companies for more insight into our social networks and travel patterns," reports Wired, noting that Facebook even "created a disease mapping tool that tracks th...

Amazon just launched "Prime Video Cinema," which lets you buy and watch movies that are just now playing in theaters, reports CNET:Movies currently offered through the hub include Onward, The Hunt, Th...

Forbes reports that in a world filled with school closings and social isolation, gaming has surged:- Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record...

"If you act quickly, both the gritty Tomb Raider origin story and 2014's Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris are free for the taking on Steam," reports CNET:We've already told you about a slew of free...

This week Politico published predictions from 34 "big thinkers" about what the future will be like after the coronavirus pandemic. (An associate professor of government and politics at the University ...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:German Chancellor Angela Merkel has gone into quarantine after being informed that a doctor who administered a vaccine to her has tested positive for th...

An anonymous reader writes:57-year-old U.S. Senator Rand Paul has tested positive for the coronavirus, reports CNN, citing a tweet from the senator's Twitter account. "He is feeling fine and is in qua...

"Thousands of full-time rideshare drivers are still out on the streets trying to carve out a living," notes The Hustle, interviewing more than 50 full-time rideshare drivers facing a difficult choice:...

"A successful firing test shows that Europe's lightweight Vega launcher is well on its way to cheaper and more efficient launches in 2025," reports Space.com, citing officials at the European Space Ag...

The Wall Street Journal reports that as the coronavirus pandemic began, America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "provided restrictive guidance on who should be tested." They're basing tha...

Remember how Apple closed all of its stores outside China? It's preventing some customers from picking up their repaired devices, according to 9to5Mac:As we noted last week, Apple Stores remained part...

An anonymous reader quotes 9to5Google:A new warning message is appearing on medical-related searches and search listings on Google Maps. This message is brief, but encourages users who are searching f...

Twitter announced it's working with global public health authorities to identify experts on the new coronavirus, and its prioritizing those accounts for official verification, reports Gizmodo:It's the...

"[W]e're missing out on the everyday exchanges that make us human..." argues a press release from Tinder. "And while we all know we need to stay home, the Tinder community has shown us that this doesn...

AmiMoJo quotes Reuters:Russian media have deployed a "significant disinformation campaign" against the West to worsen the impact of the coronavirus, generate panic and sow distrust, according to a Eur...

"Red faces in Red Square, again," writes a Forbes cybersecurity correspondent:Last July, I reported on the hacking of SyTech, an FSB contractor working on internet surveillance tech. Now, reports have...

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:Hospitals in numerous countries are struggling to provide basic supplies to healthcare workers, and tech companies are pitching in to address the shortfall. Tim Coo...

GameSpot calls it "like an AOL chat room" combined with Netflix. The Guardian reports:You log in, share a viewing link with friends, choose one person to be in charge of picking what you watch and, as...

An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There's over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you've got time, why ...

"Just had a long engineering discussion with Medtronic about state-of-the-art ventilators," Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday. Medtronic tweeted that the talks also involved Tesla. And TechCrunch notes th...

ZDNet reports that Singapore is fighting the coronavirus with a new smartphone app named "TraceTogether".The app is able to estimate the distance between TraceTogether smartphones as well as the durat...

A senior Russian official says an upcoming digital assets bill will ban the issuing and selling of cryptocurrencies. Forbes reports:"We believe there are big risks of legalizing the operations with th...

America's Food and Drug Administration has approved a coronavirus test from a company called Cepheid. It can deliver its results in about 45 minutes, "much faster than current tests that require a sam...

"The dramatic expansion of teleworking by U.S. schools, businesses and government agencies in response to the coronavirus is raising fresh questions about the capacity and security of the tools many A...

Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix. "While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, th...

"Former astronaut Alfred M. Worden, command module pilot on the Apollo 15 lunar landing, passed away March 18, 2020, in Texas," reports NASA.gov. His son-in-law told the New York Times Worden apparent...

Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely:Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hal...

Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 p...

An anonymous reader quotes the Dev newsletter from Inside.com:The U.S. Supreme Court has postponed hearing oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle copyright case and all other cases because of the cor...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: As law firms urge attorneys to work from home during the global pandemic, their employees' confidential phone calls with clients run the risk of bei...

According to users on Reddit and ResetEra, Bethesda launched Doom Eternal with a DRM-free copy of the game's executable sitting in plain sight amid the download package. Ars Technica reports: Forum us...

A quantum sensor could give Soldiers a way to detect communication signals over the entire radio frequency spectrum, from 0 to 100 GHz, said researchers from the Army. Such wide spectral coverage by a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Last year's summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600 billion tons of ice from Greenland -- enough to raise global sea levels by ...

Longtime Slashdot reader dbart writes: With the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in America, it's sensible to seize upon this resource to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here's my take on a way ...

In celebration of Windows 10 hitting 1 billion users, Microsoft's chief product officer Panos Panay teased Windows 10's next UI refresh. Gizmodo reports: In the video posted to Instagram, Microsoft st...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An emergency medicine physician says she and a colleague invented a way to connect four patients to a single ventilator, a hack that could signifi...

U.K. based road safety charity IAM RoadSmart has released a study showing how in-vehicle infotainment systems can substantially impair driver's reaction times even more than alcohol and cannabis. Appl...

HMD Global today unveiled its latest Nokia-branded mobile phones. "The Nokia 8.3 5G is the world's first global 5G phone, which means it supports bands in every country in which 5G is currently deploy...

Anthony Levandowski, former Google engineer and a pioneer of self-driving car tech, agreed to plead guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets from the internet giant. CNET reports: Levandowski left Go...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Repair specialist iFixit is building a database filled with repair information for the world's hospital equipment in anticipation of the increased d...

Russian hacker group Digital Revolution claims to have breached a contractor for the FSB -- Russia's national intelligence service -- and discovered details about a project intended for hacking Intern...

We've known about SARS-CoV-2 for only three months, but scientists can make some educated guesses about where it came from and why it's behaving in such an extreme way. From a report: The structure of...

NASA unsticks its Martian digging probe by whacking it with a shovel. From a report: Every day, the InSight lander's suite of instruments sends back data proving that the Red Planet isn't really dead....

Amazon's Prime Video, the world's second-largest streaming service, is set to join YouTube and Netflix in reducing the speed of its streams across Europe to make sure broadband networks can handle the...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collaborated with Microsoft to introduce the Coronavirus Self-Checker, a tool designed to better help you understand the disease which has caused ove...

MIT's Stu Schmill, in a press release: I'm happy to announce our decision to discontinue the use of subject tests starting with the 2020-21 admissions cycle for first-year and transfer admissions (for...

As if there weren't enough doom in the world right now, this week sees the release of not one but two new Doom games. Doom Eternal is the flashy AAA sequel with incredible graphics and accurately mode...

The 2020 spring edition of the Pwn2Own hacking contest has come to a close today. This year's winner is Team Fluoroacetate -- made up of security researchers Amat Cama and Richard Zhu -- who won the c...

The isolation caused by the spread of coronavirus means people are sitting inside all day streaming music, right? Actually, maybe not. At least for the most popular songs, people in some highly affect...

In a press conference today, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo announced orders for residents to stay at home amid rising COVID-19 concerns. The governor was careful to avoid terms like "shelter in...

YouTube has switched to standard definition streaming by default in Europe. From a report: We asked the company if it planned to do this yesterday, and today a spokeswoman confirmed the step. It's a t...

YouTube has launched a news shelf on its homepage dedicated to coronavirus coverage. From a report: The content will initially be available in 16 countries, and the company says it will expand it to m...

A global arms race for a coronavirus vaccine is underway. The New York Times reports: In the three months since the virus began its deadly spread, China, Europe and the United States have all set off ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: When the 2020 United States census, scheduled for April 1st, was planned, the areas of most concern were mapped. They include places like Deep E...

Iwastheone shares a report from Space.com: A cannonball that [Japan's Hayabusa2 probe fired at Ryugu, a 2,790-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid] is shedding light on the most common type of asteroid in th...

NASA needs 215 more petabytes of storage by the year 2025, and expects Amazon Web Services to provide the bulk of that capacity. However, the space agency didn't realize this would cost it plenty in c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Two years ago, the eCascadia [the electric version of the Freightliner Cascadia] was nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation -- a virtu...

All residents in the state of California are being ordered to "stay at home" to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. "We need to bend the curve in the state of California," Governor Gavin Newsom sai...

Mixed reality startup Magic Leap is trying to tempt potential buyers with a package for people stuck working from home. The Verge reports: The "Collaboration Package" is a 45-day trial of four Magic L...

According to a 13-page study from IT security vendor Positive Technologies, a whopping 97% of surveyed companies with at least 1,000 employees show evidence of suspicious activity in their network tra...

As millions of Americans hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19, U.S. broadband networks are seeing a significant spike in usage. While industry insiders say that the U.S. internet should be able ...

Razer CEO Ming-Liang Tan announced on Thursday that the company will shift a number of its manufacturing lines from producing its own products to making surgical masks. Polygon reports: As COVID-19, t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a great example of what can happen when smart, technically-oriented people come together in a time of need, an open-source hardware project star...

One of the biggest new additions to Apple's new iPad Pro is a new "Light Detection and Ranging" (LIDAR) system on the rear camera, which Apple argued was the missing piece for revolutionary augmented ...

A new DirectX badge is going to start showing up on graphics hardware: It's called DirectX 12 Ultimate, and it denotes support for "ALL next generation graphics hardware features," Microsoft announced...

Researchers from Intel and Cornell University trained a neuromorphic chip to learn and recognize the scents of 10 hazardous chemicals. Engadget reports: Using Intel's Loihi, a neuromorphic chip, the t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Wednesday, Twitter updated its safety policy to prohibit tweets that "could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19." The new pol...

Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, said it's maintaining above 90% on-time delivery of its products from factories worldwide. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan told customers in a let...

Netflix is cutting back on the bandwidth it takes to stream videos to members in the European Union after a European Commission member voiced concerns over network strain. From a report: "Following th...

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn addressed the ongoing work of the agency in terms of its work on potential treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 coronavirus currently sp...

Reading subscription service Scribd is offering free access to its library of over one million ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and more for the next 30 days (no commitment or credit card information req...

More than 99% of Italy's coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to a study [PDF] by the country's national health authority. Reader schwit1 shares ...

Mozilla has announced plans to remove support for the FTP protocol from Firefox. Going forward, users won't be able to download files via the FTP protocol and view the content of FTP links/folders ins...

Apple on Wednesday announced the Magic Keyboard, featuring a trackpad, that will work with newly unveiled iPad Pro models and some previous generation iPads. Is this the "convergence" everyone had bee...

Microsoft Teams, which launched worldwide in March 2017, passed 32 million daily active users (DAUs) this month. From a report: A week later, thanks in part to COVID-19, usage had spiked to 44 million...

The European Union is urging Netflix and other streaming platforms to stop showing video in high definition to prevent the internet from breaking under the strain of unprecedented usage due to the cor...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Employees for Best Buy-owned Geek Squad who visit people's homes to install electronics are fearful that they may get sick or help spread the coro...

theodp writes: In a Medium post, tech-backed Code.org explains how it will be supporting our community during school closures, which includes "a major investment in online education without an in-pers...

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Here on Earth, our lives have been transformed by the Global Positioning System, fleets of satellites operated by the United States and other countries that...

On Monday, the Imperial College report on COVID-19 was released and the results are terrifying. For those who may not know, the Imperial College in London "has advised the government on its response t...

The Steam Game Festival is returning for a spring edition starting today, featuring more than 40 indie games you can preview with free-to-play demos. The Verge reports: Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards...

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Construction on NASA's mobile launcher program for the new Space Launch System moon rocket is 44 percent over budget and three years behind schedule, a new report sai...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. ...

Now that Microsoft and Sony have published the technical specifications of their respective next-gen gaming consoles, we can compare them head-to-head to see which one has the edge. While Sony appears...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket overcame a rare in-flight engine failure soon after launch from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday to place 60 satellites in orbit for the company's Starlink Internet network. Sp...

According to The Associated Press and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler will shut down their factories for at least two weeks. "Meanwhile, Tesla appears to ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New York City is working with the hospitality industry to possibly convert entire hotels into hospitals for patients without the novel...

During today's PlayStation 5 livestream, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS4 Pro games, but the company made no mention of retro PS1, PS2, and PS3 title...

Louis Poinsignon of Cloudflare, sharing findings in a blog post: As the COVID-19 emergency continues and an increasing number of cities and countries are establishing quarantines or cordons sanitaire,...

Google said today it is pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. From a report: The company cited "adjusted work schedules" as the primary rea...

Today, we get another diminutive desktop option, but this one is designed for Linux and privacy. From a report: Yes, Purism is finally launching a tiny desktop, and it will come pre-installed with the...

Hospital workers in Washington state have been making protective medical gear out of office supplies and other run-of-the-mill materials as they deal with a severe shortage of equipment needed to care...

A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. From a report: The valve typically costs about $...

The 2019 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, was today awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, founding members of Pixar who helped shape the future of computer graphics. From a repo...

Despite COVID-19 forcing Apple to close down all retail stores outside of China indefinitely, the company just announced a new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro (starting at $799 and $949, respectively). Fro...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Table grapes -- the kind for snacking -- were the most vulnerable among seven crops badly affected by smog, including: wine grapes, strawberries, wa...

McGruber shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters. On Tuesday,...

Sonic the Hedgehog's latest weekend total allowed it to surpass Detective Pikachu and become the highest-grossing video game movie ever in the US. TheRichest reports: Sonic has now amassed $145.8 mill...

Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has received Category 1 certification from NASA, meaning it is authorized for use on more important missions, opening up a whole new revenue stream for the growing...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The coronavirus has now been identified in all 50 U.S. states, and more than 100 deaths in the country have been linked to the illness. Tho...

Tubi, a leader in the fast-growing free ad-supported streaming category, is being purchased by Fox for about $440 million. It's paying for the acquisition using cash from the sale of a minority stake ...

TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company's efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according t...

An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be car...

An anonymous reader shares a report from TechCrunch, written by Devin Coldewey: It's no secret I'm a fan of the reMarkable, a tablet with a paper-like display that's focused on text and sketching rath...

As countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic expect to run out of ventilators and other equipment, makers are desperately trying to fill the gap with proposals for open-source, do-it-yourself dev...

Popcorn Time, the highly popular and extremely-easy-to-use "Netflix for piracy" service, came back Tuesday after a years-long hiatus. The move comes as people around the world are quarantined or being...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Charter Communications engineer called the company's rules against working from home during the coronavirus pandemic "pointlessly reckless" and...

The U.S. government is in active talks with Facebook, Google and a wide array of tech companies and health experts about how they can use location data gleaned from Americans' phones to combat the nov...

India could become the next global hotspot for virus cases, with experts warning containment measures that proved successful elsewhere in Asia may not work in the world's second-most populous country....

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Tuesday that European Union member nations will close EU's external borders for 30 days to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC reports: Movem...

Google Translate today launched Transcribe for Android, a feature that delivers a continual, real-time translation of a conversation. From a report: Transcribe will begin by rolling out support for 8 ...

Misleading text messages claiming that President Trump was going to announce a national quarantine buzzed into cellphones across the country over the weekend, underscoring how rapidly false claims are...

Global aviation is shutting down because of the coronavirus outbreak and travel restrictions designed to contain it, and many airlines will need government bailouts within weeks or face bankruptcy. Fr...

For decades, physicists have dreamed of this perfect amorphous solid. They desire ideal glass not so much for its own sake (though it would have unique, useful properties) but because its existence wo...

Facebook on Tuesday told employees that it would give each of them $1,000 bonuses in an effort to support its workforce working remotely as they wait out the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Faceb...

Microsoft's Bing team has launched a website for tracking coronavirus (COVID-19) infections across the globe. From a report: "Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping a...

Uber said on Tuesday that it has begun suspending shared rides on its ride-hailing platform in the United States and Canada to limit the spread of the coronavirus. From a report: The pooled option, wh...

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon plans to hire an additional 100,000 employees in the U.S. as millions of people turn to online deliveries at an unprecedented p...

A website intended to facilitate nationwide testing for coronavirus that was promoted by President Trump in a news conference on Friday quickly reached capacity when it went live in a small pilot proj...

Brave has filed a formal complaint against Google with the lead GDPR enforcer in Europe. The complaint comes after Dr. Johnny Ryan, Brave's chief policy and industry relations officer, promised to tak...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It might be stating the obvious, but your car's headlights are a safety device, and not all headlights are created equal. For a while, carmakers ...

MojoKid writes: Though Ryzen 4000 Series laptop processors aren't available just yet, some of AMD's partners are going to begin taking pre-orders for notebooks soon. As such, AMD is lifting the veil o...

Apple's A14 processor that's expected to debut this fall in Apple's iPhone 12 models is rumored to have a frequency reaching 3.1GHz. "This would be 400MHz higher than Apple's current A13 Bionic chip w...

New submitter andywest shares a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration attempted to persuade a German firm developing a possible vaccine for coronavirus to move its research work to ...

Tesla has begun deliveries for its Model Y crossover SUV, the company announced on Twitter Monday, matching analyst expectations on timing. CNBC reports: Tesla's announcement comes as many companies a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Already exhausted from testing for monkeypox and Lassa fever, Nigerian molecular bio-engineer Nnaemeka Ndodo had to work well past midnight earlier ...

Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area will be placed under a shelter-in-place directive by public health officials in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a move that will close virtually...

Israel has long been known for its use of technology to track the movements of Palestinian militants. Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to use similar technology to stop the movement of the...

Willy English shares a report from CNBC: The president of France on Monday said he was ordering people in the country to stay at home for up to 15 days because of the coronavirus outbreak. President E...

Microsoft has provided detailed tech specs for its forthcoming Xbox Series X gaming console, reader Dave Knott shares. Full system specs are as follows:CPU: 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz (3.6 GHz w/ SMT) Custom ...

Comcast's Universal Pictures said it is making its movies available to watch at home while they are still in theaters, a massive change from Hollywood's long-established business model that could upen...

When the coronavirus pandemic started worsening in the U.K. last week, Jennie Lan knew where she would feel safest: China. From a report: The graduate student at University College London was worried ...

Windows 10 is now running on over 1 billion monthly active devices, just six months after passing the 900 million device milestone. From a report: Microsoft has been consistently adding 100 million ac...

Canada is closing its borders to non-citizens because of the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday. From a report: "We can still slow the spread of this virus," Trudeau ...

Nat Friedman: npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers,...

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to hit the US, people nationwide are being encouraged to stay inside their homes and states and cities are beginning to close restaurants, bars, and other busines...

Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks. From a report: On March 1, the day after the fi...

France's competition agency has announced a $1.23 billion fine against Apple, claiming the tech giant conspired with distributors of gadgets such as the iPad to fix prices and limit competition. From ...

Stocks fell sharply on Monday even after the Federal Reserve embarked on a massive monetary stimulus campaign to curb slower economic growth amid the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: The S&P 5...

The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, Associated Press has reported. From the report: The National...

ZDNet reports that there'll be some changes in Microsoft's second version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, WSL2:Microsoft has decided to remove the Linux kernel from the Windows OS image with WSL2....

This week saw dramatic responses to the coronavirus pandemic. At least two different U.S. states have ordered all bars and restaurants to close, according to the AP, while "officials elsewhere in the ...

An anonymous reader quotes CNET:For years, smart speakers from Amazon, Google and Apple have traded data back and forth with other devices in the home. This is how their voice assistants turn on the s...

"Two months after a ban on private cars took effect on a major San Francisco street, bike and e-scooter ridership is soaring, and bus trips are getting quicker," reports CityLab:[T]he average number o...

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:Why were two apparently unexploded bombs sticking out of a lava tube on Hawaii's Mauna Loa? That's what Kawika Singson, a photographer, wondered in Februa...

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new technology being developed by McLaren Technology Centre for its "Elva," a multi-million dollar, 804-horsepower two-seat roadster. It doesn't have a windshield....

"However small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot better than they have been in the past," reports Smithsonian magazine:Sure, after decades of li...

The World Health Organization believes air pollution kills seven million people each year. But will this year be different? Forbes reports:The global lockdown inspired by the novel coronavirus, COVID-...

Microsoft recently added a COVID-19 tracking map at Bing.com. But they're not the only ones visualizing data on infection rates... Founded in 2008, BibBase offers a free web service that lets scientis...

Malware distributors "have started disseminating real-time, accurate information about global infection rates tied to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in a bid to infect computers with malicious soft...

"The United States Department of Justice has charged two New Jersey men with using drones to sneak drugs and other contraband into a federal prison..." reports CNN:The two men, Nicolo Denichilo, 38, a...

An anonymous reader quotes the "Naked Security" blog of anti-virus company Sophos:Researchers have discovered another big database containing millions of European customer records left unsecured on Am...

An anonymous reader quotes UPI: Scientists have developed a technique for repairing damaged DNA. The breakthrough, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, could pave the way for new ...

Volkswagen's chief strategist Michael Jost predicts their vehicle-to-grid electric car batteries could open up a new business opportunity: selling their electricity back to the power grid during peak ...

AmiMoJo quotes MacRumors: Apple today updated its support document on cleaning Apple products with new information that confirms it's okay to to use a 70 percent isopropyl alcohol wipe or Clorox Disin...

Willy English writes:Apple will be temporarily closing its stores outside Greater China until March 27 but its online stores will still be open. In a tweet, CEO Tim Cook said that "we must do all we c...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes SlashGear: NASA wants the public to help it track very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) satellites and the potential light pollution issues they may cause. The space age...

Slashdot reader Willy English quotes CNBC:AT&T is asking all of its employees who have the ability to work remotely to do so until further notice, as the coronavirus spreads across the globe. The ...

There's a Three Stooges movie where aliens try to attack the earthlings where it will hurt them the most -- Disneyland. The Los Angeles Times points out that in fact the park has been closed just thre...

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Or...

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post a...

DevNull127 writes: MIT has a long-standing tradition. High school seniors who've been accepted into next year's class at MIT are informed on Pi Day (March 14th — that is, 3/14). And each year th...

The tech jobs marketplace at Hired.com crunched their data on more than 400,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year to produce their annual "State of Software Engineers" report. Among...

schwit1 quotes the International Business Times:Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche announced Friday it had received emergency approval from U.S. regulators for a new and much faster test for diagnosing ...

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat quotes CNN: Robert Ross was sitting in his San Francisco home office in October 2018 when he noticed the bars on his phone had disappeared and he had no cell co...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp spotted this announcement at Minecraft.net:As COVID-19 concerns prompt school closures around the world, many educators are turning to remote learning to keep students...

Stanford University announced strict new rules for undergraduates after a student tested positive for COVID-19:"The university already went to online classes last week," notes the Los Angeles Times. N...

In countries where websites, blogs and a free press are strictly limited, Minecraft "is still accessible by everyone," notes the official official web site for Reporters Without Borders (an internatio...

An anonymous reader quotes the nonprofit environmental magazine Grist:On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a new set of guidelines for citizens hoping to help contain the burgeoning ...

"We don't often talk about power supplies, but Intel's new ATX12VO spec — that's an 'O' for 'Oscar,' not a zero — will start appearing soon in pre-built PCs from OEMs and system integrator...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a startling report from the Washington Post:Whisper, the secret-sharing app that called itself the "safest place on the Internet," left years of users' most in...

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:Sweden's Data Protection Authority (DPA) has slapped Google with a 75 million kronor ($8 million) fine for "failure to comply" with Europe's General Data Protect...

Using a single lens that is about one-thousandth of an inch thick, researchers have created a camera that does not require focusing. Phys.Org reports: "Our flat lenses can drastically reduce the weigh...

ArchieBunker quotes a report from Road & Track: You can always count on Koenigsegg to do things differently. Take the Swedish brand's newest car, the Gemera, a 1700-hp four-seat hybrid grand toure...

After years of civil war, South Sudan is beginning to build the nation's electric sector from the ground up. "With only a handful of oil-fired power plants and crumbling poles and wires in place, the ...

An anonymous reader quotes Politico:President Donald Trump on Friday said that he would eliminate the interest on federal student loans "until further notice" as part of a package of emergency executi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: So-called "acoustic metamaterials" are specifically designed to control and manipulate sound waves, usually for the purpose of dampening or trans...

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will now allow passengers to bring on board hand sanitizer containers up to 12 ounces in size, which is much larger than the standard 3.4 ounces (100 m...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple hasn't really touched the current MacBook Air design since its 2018 debut unless you count the addition of True Tone, but it might be close to a substantial ...

A team of scientists led by Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford, have created a new "fireproof" solid-state electrolyte for use in lithium-ion batteries. IEEE Spectrum reports: They used a flame...

Global downloads of business apps including Tencent Conference, WeChat Work, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack have risen nearly five fold since the start of the year, data showed, as the coronavirus ou...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The coronavirus threat and official policies of "social distancing" are leading millions to stay home, doing meetings via video chat and probably w...

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language. From a report: "Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class...

Europe has become the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic as cases in China slow and the deadly coronavirus runs through Italy and nearby countries, World Health Organization officials said Friday....

Microsoft announced on Friday that Bill Gates is leaving the board. CNBC reports: "I have made the decision to step down from both of the public boards on which I serve -- Microsoft and Berkshire Hath...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: The U.S. Department of Defense on Thursday said it wishes to re-evaluate its decision to award the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar cloud contract ...

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency over the fast-spreading coronavirus. In addition to providing about $50 billion in federal aid to fight the disease and temporarily ...

President Trump declared a national emergency on Friday afternoon, a move that would give him authority to use $40 billion allocated by Congress for disaster relief to address the coronavirus crisis. ...

The Russian trolls are back -- and once again trying to poison the political atmosphere in the United States ahead of this year's elections. But this time they are better disguised and more targeted, ...

Proton Technologies, the company behind encrypted email provider ProtonMail, has announced plans to circumvent censorship by routing connections to its servers through third-party infrastructure, whic...

The Brno University Hospital in the city of Brno, Czech Republic, has been hit by a cyber-attack right in the middle of a COVID-19 outbreak that is picking up steam in the small central European count...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said Friday that major internet providers -- including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon Communications -- have agreed to not terminate service for the next 60 ...

Italy's school shutdown is driving a surge in internet traffic as kids turn to online video games to stave off boredom. From a report: With schools, shops and restaurants closed in an attempt to limit...

Apple will move its annual developers conference, WWDC, online instead of hosting an in-person event, the company announced Friday. From a report: WWDC is Apple's annual developer's conference. The co...

President Donald Trump plans to declare a national emergency on Friday over the coronavirus outbreak, invoking the Stafford Act to open the door to more federal aid for states and municipalities, Bloo...

ZTE, the Chinese telecom giant that pleaded guilty three years ago to violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea, is the subject of a new and separate bribery investigation by the Justice D...

Microsoft's Build developer conference is the latest tech event to be affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The software giant was planning on holding its annual developer confe...

"Iranian authorities began digging a pair of trenches for victims just days after the government disclosed the initial outbreak," writes Slashdot reader schwit1. "Together, their lengths are that of a...

AT&T is the first major ISP to confirm that it will be suspending all broadband usage caps as millions of Americans bunker down in a bid to slow the rate of COVID-19 expansion. Consumer groups and...

A new study reports that iron rain likely falls through the thick, turbulent air of WASP-76 b, a bizarre "ultrahot Jupiter" that lies about 640 light-years from the sun, in the constellation Pisces. S...

Europe and Russia have decided to push back the launch of their joint robotic rover to Mars until 2022, rather than launch this year as originally planned. More testing is needed on the vehicle's para...

President Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill banning the use of federal funds to purchase equipment from telecom companies deemed a national security threat, such as Chinese telecom group Huawei...

An anonymous reader writes: The coronavirus appears able to linger in the air for up to three hours and on plastic and stainless steel surfaces for two to three days, according to laboratory tests run...

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced legislation to further restrict the use of the popular viral video app TikTok on government devices. TechCrunch reports: The ...

A federal court on Thursday ordered Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who has jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange,...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to new research published today, modern RAM cards are still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks despite extensive mitigations that have been deplo...

Tim Anderson reporting via The Register: The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on. The Facebook Conta...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Following D-Wave's announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, V...

China's National Health Commission said on Thursday that the country has passed the peak of the coronavirus epidemic and that the number of new cases is declining. The officials noted that medical tre...

Draconi writes: The price of Bitcoin dropped from it's March 6th, 2020 high of $9,126 to under $5,800 today as market sell-offs accelerated with the S&P and Dow Jones dropping 7% in early hours tr...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast mistakenly published the names, phone numbers, and addresses of nearly 200,000 customers who paid monthly fees to make their numbers unli...

The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government's response ...

Microsoft today released a patch for a vulnerability in the SMBv3 protocol that accidentally leaked online earlier this week during the March 2020 Patch Tuesday preamble. From a report: The fix is ava...

IBM is taking Airbnb to court over what it claims is the illegal use of four patents -- the latest in a string of suits against online companies involving historic and arguably broad innovations -- in...

A leading civil liberties group is suing Homeland Security, claiming the agency is keeping the details of its airport face recognition program secret, which it says raises "profound civil liberties co...

Google's G Suite, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Hangouts, Meet and other apps, quietly passed a major milestone at the end of last year: It now has more than 2 billion monthly active users, G Sui...

An anonymous reader writes: According to new research published this week, modern RAM cards are still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks despite extensive mitigations that have been deployed by manufactu...

An anonymous reader writes: Women and girls face a "growing crisis" of online harms, with sexual harassment, threatening messages and discrimination making the web an unsafe place to be, Sir Tim Berne...

Chancellor Angela Merkel is on her way out and her power is waning, but in her typically low-key, no-nonsense manner, the German leader on Wednesday laid out some cold, hard facts on the coronavirus i...

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will launch MacBook models with an all-new design in the second or third quarter of 2021, but did not indicate whether these will be Pro or Air model...

According to 9to5Google, Google is working on a native Chrome OS app for printing and scanning documents. From the report: While there are many ways to start printing on Chrome OS, there's no real way...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Magic Leap, a mysterious maker of augmented reality glasses, is reportedly considering strategic options that include selling itself. The startup is work...

President Trump announced he will restrict travel from Europe to the U.S. for the next 30 days in a bid to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The "strong but necessary" restrictions will not apply ...

According to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy. Phys.Org reports: In princip...

A vulnerability in version 3.1.1 of the Server Message Block (SMB) -- the service that's used to share files, printers, and other resources on local networks and over the internet -- can allow attacks...

Washington state and San Francisco are banning large gatherings to help reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The bans are a way to create social distancing, which may help people avoid coming i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: More than two years after winning an electricity bet, Elon Musk's resulting Australian solar and wind farm is an almost total success. The f...

"Motherboard built and analyzed a database of over 500 iPhones seized by law enforcement," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. "It's a deep dive into the ongoing "Going Dark" conversation." Here's an excerp...

Hanwang Technology, a Chinese firm specializing in facial recognition software, says it can now identify people that are wearing masks to protect against the coronavirus. The company says it used a sa...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service t...

The U.S. should take a slew of steps today to prevent a major cyberattack that could wreak wide-scale devastation on the U.S., a year-long study mandated by Congress reported Wednesday. From a report:...

Google is stepping up its measures against the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: The tech giant will recommend that its workers across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa work from home sta...

Law enforcement agencies in India used facial recognition to identify more than 1,100 individuals who took part in communal violence in the national capital last month, a top minister said in the lowe...

Amazon has sold millions of Fire TV streaming devices in recent years, but its efforts to expand the Fire TV platform to smart TVs and cable set-top boxes have been slow-going. That's not by accident,...

The COVID-19 viral disease that has swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday. From a report: ...

The European Commission has set out a plan to move towards a 'right to repair' for electronics devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops. From a report: More generally it wants to restrict s...

The latest event to be cancelled as a result of the spread of the novel coronavirus is, ironically, a scientific meeting on coronaviruses. From a report: On March 9, the official meeting of the Intern...

Faced with an array of opponents for its sensor-laden city of tomorrow in Toronto, a Google sibling has drastically dialed back plans. The critics now want the tech giant to quit altogether. From a re...

E3 2020 as we know it is over. From a report: Multiple sources familiar with the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)'s plans have confirmed to Ars Technica that the organization, which is respons...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police used a shadow company to create an array of Android and iOS apps that looked innocuo...

Apple Watch will add the ability to detect blood oxygen levels for the first time, 9to5Mac has learned based on an exclusive look at iOS 14 code snippets. From the report: Blood oxygen levels between ...

PSO J030947.49+271757.31 is the most distant blazar ever observed, originating when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, almost 13 billion years ago. Phys.Org reports: PSO J0309+27, for sho...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The second person ever to be cured of HIV is still free of active virus more than two years on, a study published by medical journal The Lancet HIV reveal...

theodp writes: We fundamentally believe that coding is a language and that just like other languages are required in school, coding should be required in school," Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in 2016 a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter today updated its Developer Policy to clarify rules around data usage, including in academic research, as well as its position on bots, amo...

According to a report from The Information, Huawei expects to see a 20% drop in sales of its Android smartphones during 2020, thanks largely to U.S. government restrictions on Huawei's access to Ameri...

In a letter to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif says the university is moving all classes online for the rest of the semester to slow the spread of COVID-19. Here's an excerpt: The overall ...

In a conference yesterday, Elon Musk said SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will have latency below 20 milliseconds -- low enough to support competitive online gaming. "Despite that, the SpaceX CE...

Elon Musk announced on Twitter that Tesla has produced one million electric cars. The Verge reports: Musk made the announcement by sharing a picture of the car, a red Model Y, and congratulated the Te...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Two cybersecurity company employees who attended an annual industry conference last month in San Francisco have tested positive for the coronavirus....

Alphabet's Google told its staff in North America to not go into their offices unless they have to, becoming one of the latest companies seeking to protect workers from the spreading coronavirus. From...

News outlet 9to5Mac, which tracks Apple news, has gotten hold of an iOS 14 build that uncovers a range of hardware details and software features that Apple intends to reveal later this year. The devic...

The 2020 election will be "the most secure, most protected election in the history of the United States of America," Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecur...

Mozilla today launched Firefox 74 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox 74 includes stricter rules for add-ons, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled by default, and a handful of developer features.Read more of...

Just over a month after Uber received a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) license to test driverless cars on public roads, the company has resumed autonomous testing in San Francisco. From...

To combat resistant bacteria and refill the trickling antibiotic pipeline, scientists are getting help from deep learning networks. From a report: Once-powerful antibiotics are losing their efficacy a...

A federal judge said in court documents that Amazon's protest lawsuit over rival Microsoft being awarded a highly lucrative defense project was "likely to succeed on the merits" of one of its main arg...

Warning that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States was expected to grow, the Trump administration on Monday evening said that testing for the virus would ramp up quickly in the coming w...

Microsoft announced today a coordinated takedown of Necurs, one of the largest spam and malware botnets known to date, believed to have infected more than nine million computers worldwide. From a repo...

A team of academics from universities across the world, along with vulnerability researchers from Bitdefender, today disclosed a new security flaw in Intel processors. From a report: Named Load Value ...

Since Covid-19 began to spread, Google has aggressively intervened in some of its most popular online services to limit the spread of misinformation. This is a departure for a company that has relied ...

Hailing it as its most significant update to its vSphere virtualization manager in a decade, VMware today is overhauling its portfolio of products to include native support of the Kubernetes orchestra...

As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many...

A growing proportion of women in M.B.A. programs has yielded greater gender parity in classes -- and more business-school weddings. From a report: Liza Merolla and her husband, Justin Merolla, are amo...

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for ZDNet: Google has removed an Android app from the official Play Store that was developed by the Iranian government to test and keep track of COVID-19 (coronavirus) infec...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform for tech developers and investors, has been secretly collecting data from millions of people who have...

"A study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine confirms the recommended 14-day quarantine period for those suspected of having been infected by the COVID-19 virus," writes Slashdot read...

Amazon is now offering its "Just Walk Out" technology to other retailers. "The technology uses a combination of cameras, sensors, computer vision techniques and deep learning to allow customers to sho...

According to a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have achieved a new record quantum key distribution (QKD) transmission distance of over 509 kilometers. Phys.Org reports: "Us...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: AMD processors manufactured between 2011 and 2019 (the time of testing) are vulnerable to two new attacks, research published this week has revealed (PD...

bigwophh writes: As the number of publishers pulling out of Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud game streaming service continues to grow, the company has found an ally in Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, who vo...

Amazon on Monday asked employees at its New York and New Jersey offices to work from home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This comes as the company told employees at its offices in the San F...

A petition with over 350,000 signatures is calling on Pornhub to stop posting non-consensual videos and marketing them as "pornography." Kate Isaacs writes via The Guardian: Pornhub's argument that "e...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Lambda School, the controversial coding bootcamp, is threatening a former employee for speaking out about problems at the school. In an article publ...

Sonos is reversing course on a plan to brick all trade-in devices, so if someone wants to give or sell you a used speaker, it will still work. For now. Ars Technica reports: Sonos launched its "trade ...

According to a report Green Car Reports, Honda said it discontinued the company's Clarity Electric and has no plans for the model to return. CNET reports: The battery-electric version of the Clarity r...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: A federal jury couldn't reach a verdict on whether a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for ...

Target quietly soft-launched a new concept store in downtown San Francisco a few days ago: The Game Room lets people try out Magic Leap and Oculus Quest headsets, gaming PCs and mobile gaming rigs. It...

First known U.S. case offers lessons in how and how not to fight the outbreak. From a report: The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everythi...

schweini shares a report: Every year the world celebrates the anniversaries of masterworks and maestros. In 2020, a host of events and publications commemorated the lives of Ludwig van Beethoven, Raph...

Telecom operators in India have started to warn users of Covid-19 spread after more than three dozen cases have been detected in the nation. From a report: Subscribers of Reliance Jio, Airtel, and sta...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Australia's privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach -- which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the...

Stanford University canceled in-person classes for the final two weeks of the quarter, switching to online instruction amid rising concern about the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: As the coronav...

Italy has placed up to 16 million people under quarantine as it battles to contain the spread of coronavirus. From a report:Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will n...

The Brave browser is working on a feature that will randomize its "fingerprint" every time a user visits a website in an attempt to preserve the user's privacy. From a report: Brave's decision comes a...

According to code seen by 9to5Mac, Apple is set to roll out rich system-wide support for mouse cursors with iOS 14. From a report: Apple added rudimentary compatibility with external mice in iOS 13 Ac...

Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo ...

John Oliver slammed Disney-owned Hotstar on Sunday for censoring his show, "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," in India saying the local streaming service had edited at least three of his episodes i...

DoNotPay, the digital lawyer that shot to prominence for its bot that helps drivers appeal parking tickets, has launched a new product aimed at consumers. With the DoNotPay Subscription Sharing Chrome...

An excerpt from a piece on the situation at Wuhan, where many are quarantined: Schools are suspended until further notice. With many workplaces also shut, notoriously absent Chinese fathers have been ...

The S&P 500 fell more than 7% Monday, triggering circuit breakers that prevent a further plunge. From a report: The index hit "limit down" shortly after the open, halting trading below that level ...

Twitter and activist hedge fund Elliott Management have agreed to a truce that will shake up the social-media company's board but leave its Chief Executive Jack Dorsey in place [The link may be paywal...

Cows fertilizing the soil can replenish the land and reduce carbon in the atmosphere, reports CNN -- with a farming practice called "ultra-high density grazing".Conventional thinking says that cows ar...

There's more than 280,000 students in the prestigious University of California system, spread throughout 10 campuses across the state. But now "a growing number" of students and faculty members are wa...

Fast Company just published a 4,000 appreciation of Wikipedia's volunteer editors:[W]hile places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter struggle to fend off a barrage of false content, with their scatter...

"ADHD may also bring with it an advantage: the ability to think more creatively," argues a new article in Scientific American:Three aspects of creative cognition are divergent thinking, conceptual exp...

The Verge takes a 5,000-word look at a Kickstarter campaign "that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers." "The difference in this stor...

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:In a press release Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a former Acting Inspector General for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with the theft of ...

Medical researchers are trying to make history, reports CNBC -- including a 100-person R&D group within AWS: Amazon is working on a cure for the common cold in a years-long, top secret effort call...

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:The state of Utah has given an artificial intelligence company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and "public safety" cameras, 911 emergency systems...

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times:Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins...

"Why did this particle mysteriously disintegrate?" asks Popular Mechanics. Slashdot reader aeropage shared their report:Scientists have proposed a new kind of subatomic particle to explain another par...

Quartz tells the story of a large-scale heroin and methamphetamine dealer named Francisco Ruelas-Payan who's now serving 15 years in prison:While phone records and GPS location devices were useful in ...

The five years between 2013 and 2017 saw a 200% increase in the number of commercially-insured Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or early-onset dementia between the ages of 30 to 64. "While...

An anonymous reader quotes SD Times:The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced plans to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform ("forge") this year. Members of the FSF tech team are ...

"If you live in California, under the rules of the newly enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, you can see what Clearview has gathered on you, and request that they stop it," writes Vice. I recentl...

"Well, those crazy chemistry cats have done it," writes Science Alert:Nearly 200 years after the molecule was discovered by Michael Faraday, researchers have finally revealed the complex electronic st...

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:Airlines have wasted thousands of gallons of fuel running empty "ghost" flights during the coronavirus outbreak because of European rules saying operators c...

Fast Company's Mark Sullivan argues that cancelling this year's tech conferences could have a silver lining -- by encouraging a movement toward virtual conferences:There are developers across the U.S....

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:The team building Amazon's Prime Now same-day delivery service knew that the quickest delivery options tended to be the worst for the planet. A guaranteed one-hour...

"America is approaching one of its most contentious hours," writes the Phildadelphia Inquirer, "and officially, it's one that doesn't exist."According to the National Conference of State Legislators, ...

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a tale for our time: "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's all it took...

Ars Technica's senior space editor visited SpaceX's South Texas Launch Site for a long profile of Elon Musk (who was wearing an "Occupy Mars" t-shirt). Just two weeks ago Musk had called an all-hands ...

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:Python is tying with Java as the second most popular programming language behind JavaScript, according to developer analyst RedMonk's latest ranking. The second spot f...

"At its Financial Analyst Day, AMD disclosed additional details regarding its next generation CPU and GPU architectures," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid:- While the company isn't ready to disclose con...

Canada's federal and national police service the RCMP denied it was using facial recognition technology just a few weeks ago. But now long-time Slashdot reader satanicat quotes the CBC:[L]ast week, as...

Though SETI@Home has shut down, "users with a fondness for distributed computing might take a look at Folding@home, which is trying to figure out the structures of proteins on the surface of the SARS-...

Science Alert reports:The candidate culprit is a recently discovered subatomic particle called a d-star hexaquark. And in the primordial darkness following the Big Bang, it could have come together to...

In a scathing editorial, EFF continues to oppose Ethos Capital's plan to buy the PIR's .org domain registry for $1.1 billion, arguing that "the current system is stable and functional, and changing it...

"A nonprofit startup is offering an open-source nuclear plant plan," reports Popular Mechanics:A mechanical engineer-turned-tech entrepreneur has plans to, well, empower people around the world to bui...

A call center scammed 40,000 people over the last 14 months, bringing in $8 million. But within four months their own computer system had been remotely breached by "online vigilante" Jim Browning, acc...

"New academic research published last month looked at the phone-home [telemetry] features of six of today's most popular browsers and found that the Brave browser sent the smallest amount of data abou...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, a cybersecurity firm discovered the first-ever Android malware that came with the capability to steal the 2FA (two-factor authentication) codes generat...

Italy's competition watchdog said on Friday it had fined former phone monopoly Telecom Italia (TIM) 116 million euros ($131 million) for abusing its dominant position in the broadband market in an att...

Many Lyft and Uber drivers have seen a bump in business from the spreading coronavirus, but they're also weighing the risks of staying safe versus continuing to earn a paycheck. From a report: A study...

An anonymous reader shares a report: FreeNAS is a free and open source operating system designed for network-attached storage (NAS) devices. For much of the past decade, the project has been led by th...

Startup accelerator Y Combinator announced today that it has moved its demo day online, citing a "growing concern over COVID-19," or coronavirus. From a report: The demo day has historically drawn cro...

Speaking at the RSA security conference last week, Microsoft engineers said that 99.9% of the compromised accounts they track every month don't use multi-factor authentication, a solution that stops m...

After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to ...

South by Southwest, the annual tech, film and music conference held in Austin, Texas, has been canceled due to concerns surrounding the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. From a report: Local government o...

Ten years ago, David Wang pulled off a remarkable trick, installing Android on the first-generation iPhone. Now Wang and his colleagues at cybersecurity startup Corellium are doing it again with the o...

As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread in the US and other countries, demand for products like face masks and hand sanitizer has led to a spike in prices. To combat price gouging, online retaile...

An anonymous reader shares a report: For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutra...

Quibi, a streaming service that has already raised more than $1.6 billion, is finally almost here, and in an effort to entice people who are probably already spending too much on content every month, ...

A bipartisan pair of US senators on Thursday introduced long-rumored legislation known as the EARN IT Act. The bill is meant to combat child sexual exploitation online, but if passed, it could hurt en...

NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling ...

Investors and clients of the facial recognition start-up freely used the app on dates and at parties -- and to spy on the public. From a report: One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, t...

Tens of millions of merchants and users in India are struggling to make online transactions and use several popular services after the nation's central bank seized control of Yes Bank, the fourth larg...

The number of coronavirus cases has reached 100,276, with 55,694 recovered and 3,404 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. From a report: The UK...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Last fall, during a visit to Barnes & Noble's flagship store in New York City's Union Square, the British bibliophile James Daunt strode about t...

Facebook filed a lawsuit this week against Namecheap, claiming the domain name registrar has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered throu...

Organic compounds called thiophenes were recently discovered on Mars, and a new study published in the journal Astrobiology thinks their presence would be consistent with the presence of early life on...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Nearly a month after ending his long shot Democratic presidential campaign, Andrew Yang launched on Thursday a nonprofit group focused on making the centr...

Anthony Levandowski, the controversial engineer at the center of the recent legal battle between Google's Waymo and Uber, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The move comes shortly after a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter said on Thursday it is banning posts that "dehumanize" people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that h...

Participants in Ontario's prematurely cancelled basic income pilot project were happier, healthier and continued working even though they were receiving money with no-strings attached. That's accordin...

bobthesungeek76036 writes: COVID-19 has another victim: RedHat has cancelled this year's Summit event in San Francisco and it will now be a virtual event. "We are taking this precautionary measure aft...

Last July, Hawaii representative and long-shot presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard sued Google for infringing on her free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign's advertising account after the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Moments after Iran announced that a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader had died as a result of the coronavirus, the government blocked access to...

Twitter user Scott Bell is reporting that his uncle from Venice, California, has tested positive for the coronavirus. According to Bell, "he was skiing in the Italian alps with 6 other guys," 4 of whi...

Microsoft has announced that its cross-platform automation tool and configuration framework PowerShell 7 is now generally available. From a report: Available for Windows, macOS and Linux, PowerShell 7...

Scientists monitoring the movements of the worst locust outbreak in Kenya in 70 years are hopeful that a new tracking program they will be able to prevent a second surge of the crop-ravaging insects. ...

Drive down any U.S. interstate and there's a good chance you will see a pun or a funny reference on the next electronic message board you spot. From a report: Such messages have become ubiquitous acro...

A year ago, we started to see the first wave of foldable devices and they were ... disappointing. But companies are not backing down. TCL is already looking ahead with a pair of foldable and rollable ...

In January, a new law gave consumers the power to stop companies collecting their personal information. The law, known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (or the CCPA), can be a powerful tool for ...

A major electronics manufacturer for defense and communications markets was knocked offline after a ransomware attack, TechCrunch reported Thursday. From the report: A source with knowledge of the inc...

Wolfcom, a company that makes technology for police, is pitching body cameras with live facial recognition to law enforcement groups across the United States, OneZero reported Thursday. From a report:...

Dan Luu, writing in a blog post: The sleight of hand that's happening when someone says that we can keep software simple and compatible by making everything handle text is the pretense that text data ...

The new coronavirus knows no national borders or social boundaries. That doesn't mean that social boundaries don't exist. An anonymous reader shares a report: "En route to Paris," Gwyneth Paltrow wrot...

You can breathe in harmful chemicals from tobacco use even in non-smoking venues because they are carried on smokers' bodies and clothes. From a report: Third-hand smoke -- the residue from cigarette ...

Security researchers say that a bug in one of Intel's CPU technologies that was patched last year is actually much worse than previously thought. From a report: "Most Intel chipsets released in the la...

As Chinese factories hit by the coronavirus look to restart production, the pain is only beginning for carriers that rely on steady shipments of Asian smartphones. From a report: AT&T is bracing f...

Google Assistant is able to read web pages and news articles on Android devices worldwide today, a company spokesperson said. From the report: You can trigger the feature by simply saying "Hey Google,...

Ampere has unveiled the industry's first 80-core ARM-based 64-bit server processor today in a bid to outdo Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in datacenter chips. From a report: Ampere announced today t...

Certain apps are hiding themselves and stealing resources and data from mobile devices, according to a new report by security firm McAfee. From a report: This is a growing threat comprising almost hal...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you look beyond the memes, cat videos, and quirky acronyms (TIL, OP, ELI5) you'll find a treasure trove of resources that will help you quickly get ...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Whether it's calculating your risk of catching the new coronavirus or gauging the chance of rain on your upcoming beach vacation, you use a mix of s...

One of the hottest movies in the Warner Bros. library is a nine-year-old drama that kills off Gwyneth Paltrow in its first 15 minutes. From a report: Fears of the coronavirus have prompted movie fans ...

Greg Kogan, writes in a blog post: The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and... Its entire crew can f...

France's top court ruling opens the way for Uber drivers to be reclassified as employees, the country's highest court ruled on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of rulings globally to grant more rights ...

Apple will now allow push notifications to be used for advertising, so long as users agree to receive the ads first. From a report: Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its tr...

couchslug writes: Physical commuting has a horrific and enormously expensive carbon footprint. It's costly in lives (auto and other transportation accidents, pollution) and wasted time (billions of ho...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is planning tens of billions of dollars worth of cost cuts, AT&T President and COO John Stankey told investors yesterday. Stankey al...

An Amazon employee at the company's Seattle headquarters has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and has subsequently been sent to quarantine. CNET reports: The online retail giant has about 55...

The PlayStation 2 is celebrating its 20th anniversary as it launched in Japan on March 4, 2000. "It was released in the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world a year later and would go on to become th...

The release of upcoming James Bond film "No Time To Die" has been pushed back from April To November due to coronavirus fears. "The 25th installment in the storied spy franchise will commence its run ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person's body. The ground...

Los Angeles-area officials have discovered six new COVID-19 cases in the county over the last 48 hours, prompting them to declare a local emergency to help free up federal and state funding. From a re...

Since it was founded in March 2006, there has been only one type of post possible on Twitter: a tweet. But starting today, the 280-character post is being joined by an ephemeral South American cousin:...

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of avoiding social media, drug companies are growing bolder about advertising on Facebook and other social networks, according to interviews with adver...

Chinese social media platforms, including Tencent's WeChat, censored keywords related to coronavirus as early as December [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], potentially li...

TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (it...

The most promising startups using artificial intelligence are U.S.-based companies working in the fields of health care, retail and transportation, according to a study that looked at budding AI compa...

India's Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned central bank's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country in what many said was a "historic" verdict. From a report: The Reserve Bank of In...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: SETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and wan...

Microsoft is bringing the original Halo campaign to Windows PCs today. The Verge reports: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary has been remastered with 4K support for PC, and it arrives 18 years after the...

A team of researchers from Plex Corporation, Bruker Scientific LLC and Harvard University has found evidence of a protein inside of a meteorite. They have written a paper describing their findings and...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, cosmic inflation stretched the tiny seed of our universe and transformed energy into matte...

rufey writes: The free SSL certificate provider Let's Encrypt is going to revoke 2.6% of the SSL certs issued by them that are currently active, due to a bug in boulder, the Certificate Authority Auth...

In an investigation of neural connectivity in 30 infants ranging from six to 57 days old (with an average age of 27 days), neuroscientists found that circuit wiring precedes, and thus may guide, regio...

A new lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders alleges that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses a rigged algorithm to detain virtually everyone ICE's New York ...

The latest "feature drop" for Google's Pixel line of Android phones includes the ability to "firmly press" on the screen "to get more help from your apps more quickly." If that sounds familiar, it's b...

The World Health Organization is warning that the novel coronavirus could be far more dangerous than the flu, with a mortality rate of 3.4%. The new estimates come as the U.S. death toll from the viru...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Networking giant Cisco is getting into the coronavirus monitoring and mitigation game with its Webex remote meeting property. The company notes t...

Google has announced that it will not host an in-person I/O 2020 over coronavirus concerns. The company is looking into an alternative format. 9to5Google reports: Google I/O 2020 was announced in Janu...

Caitlin McGarry, reporting for Gizmodo: There are currently 342 potential borrowers waiting for 197 digital copies of Ronan Farrow's investigative thriller Catch and Kill at the Los Angeles Public Lib...

John Gruber spotted this announcement on decades old Apple news aggregation site MacSurfer's website: Dear MHN Readers: Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease o...

A tally of the number of people tested for the novel coronavirus disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website on Monday. From a report: The change was first reported by jour...

The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Keith Rabois, onstage in January at a tech conference, said his first choice for president was a Democrat, Pete Buttigieg. And, sure, it would be a close call for...

China's largest cyber-security vendor has published today a report accusing the CIA of hacking Chinese companies and government agencies for more than 11 years. From a report: The report, authored by ...

"The best-kept secret in quantum computing." That's what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell's efforts in building the world's most powerful quantum computer. In a race w...

There are robots on the prowl at Facebook's server farms. The social networking giant has quietly built a fleet of mobile robots to patrol its data centers, and now has a team dedicated to automating ...

Twitter is "strongly encouraging" its almost 5,000 global employees to work from home due to concerns over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, the company said Monday. From a report: The social me...

Robinhood on Tuesday reported technical issues for a second day following an outage that kept clients from trading on a historic market rally. From a report: As U.S. stocks traded actively again in wa...

The U.S. Federal Reserve delivered an emergency half-percentage point interest rate cut Tuesday in a bid to protect the longest-ever economic expansion from the spreading coronavirus. From a report: "...

J. Fergus, writing for Input: Someone finally did it. We can now follow who we want on our own terms and get that information chronologically. Fraidycat is an app and browser extension that allows jus...

The coronavirus has found a crack in the nation's public health armor, and it is not one that scientists foresaw: diagnostic testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its first a...

hackingbear writes: According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, Chinese hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients a few weeks ago now have empty beds. Trials of experimental drugs are ha...

theodp writes: On its Careers page, zero-commission online broker Robinhood explains its founders "decided it was more important to build products that would provide everyone with access to the financ...

Nvidia has announced it has shifted its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) to be online-only due to concerns from the coronavirus outbreak. People who had registered for the event, which was originally s...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have found evidence that Earth was covered by a global ocean that turned the planet into a "water world" more than 3 billion years ago...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Studies of the origin of life are replete with paradoxes. Take this doozy: Every known organism on Earth uses a suite of proteins -- and the DNA tha...

AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pu...

According to a report from The Information, Apple plans to introduce a trackpad-equipped keyboard attachment for the iPad Pro alongside its new iPad Pro models sometime this year. Ars Technica reports...

A woman that tested positive for coronavirus was "mistakenly released" from isolation Saturday, causing the mayor of San Antonio to declare a public health emergency in the city. Dallas News reports: ...

Troy Hunt, the owner and founder of the well-known and respected data breach notification website "Have I Been Pwned," announced in a blog post today that his website is no longer being sold and will ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Huawei, which for years has denied violating American trade sanctions on Iran, produced internal company records in 2010 that show it was dire...

A woman who recently traveled to Iran is New York's first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday night. The ...

After years of development and hype, Google's long-rumored push into video games arrived last November, with the launch of Google Stadia. Google Stadia isn't a game console, nor is it a game platform,...

Gordon Moore's 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of t...

Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and other large companies are being sued by a California environmental group for creating a plastic pollution "nuisance" and misleading consumers about the recyclability of plastic...

To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduc...

stikves writes: An organization called Vista Group recently uploaded dozens of VHS and cassette tapes from the 90s and early 2000s to the Internet Archive, and the content within is worth a retro-nost...

Microsoft will retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications on June 30, 2020, according to a new post by Alex Payne, GM, Global Technical Learning at Microsoft Worldwide Learning, on the Microsoft Learni...

AT&T has launched its newest video service brand, called AT&T TV, and it could be the beginning of the end for AT&T's DirecTV offering. From a report: That's because AT&T TV is like Di...

Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries. Fr...

The email addresses and travel details of about 10,000 people who used free wi-fi at UK railway stations have been exposed online. From a report: Network Rail and the service provider C3UK confirmed t...

Malware developers are always trying to outdo each other with creations that are stealthier and more advanced than their competitors'. At the RSA Security conference last week, a former hacker for the...

A new system uses software to dictate quarantines -- and appears to send personal data to police, in a troubling precedent for automated social control. From a report: As China encourages people to re...

An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change -- including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is...

Turkey deployed dozens of unmanned "drone" combat aircraft over Syria, calling the maneuver a new military milestone, reports Bloomberg:Turkey deployed swarms of killer drones to strike Russian-backed...

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested that Lockheed Martin's F-35 Lightning II, the costly stealth jet considered to be pinnacle of U.S. military aviation, 'would have no chance' if pitted against a drone [f...

Iowa City's school board heard presentations from "two companies pitching digital surveillance services," complains a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, expressing concerns about their offers to ...

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before ...

The news site Axios (founded by former Politico staffers) reports on an issue discovered at an Atlanta lab for America's Centers for Disease Control that was manufacturing "relatively small amounts" o...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually exti...

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006, coding up the first prototype (with the help of a contractor) when he was still in his 20s. Dorsey's now it's CEO -- but "A major Republican donor has purchased...

"Officials at central banks are considering how and whether to create a digital form of cash," reports Qz:As money gets swept up by tech innovation, government authorities are taking a closer look at ...

Leading CIOs, CTOs and technology executives on the "Forbes Technology Council" just made some predictions for the future:Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has...

news.com.au reports:The GitHub Arctic Vault program is part of the now Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub...aimed at preserving the information for generations to come... "We chose to store GitHub...

LetterRip (Slashdot reader #30,937) shares a report from Ars Technica:More than 34,000 people have deluged the Federal Aviation Administration with comments over a proposed regulation that would requi...

Remember when Tulsa, Oklahoma offered $10,000 to remote workers who'd relocate to their city? It was an immensely popular program. "You have better odds of getting into Harvard or Yale than you do of ...

An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati:SpaceX has been awarded a $117 million launch contract for NASA's Psyche mission that will study a unique metal asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. The NASA mission...

Bustle's tech site Input reports on some research from the U.K.-based human rights charity Privacy International:Facebook wants you to think it's consistently increasing transparency about how the com...

"Amazon has pulled more than 1 million items from its digital shelves due to claims that the products could either cure or help prevent the spread of coronavirus," reports SiliconValley.com:The move c...

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes the PetaPixel photography blog on a new smartphone being sold in Japan: Aimed at parents who want to keep their kids from making bad choices, the TONE e20 has an AI-powered "S...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN:French automaker Citroën has unveiled the Ami, a tiny electric car that's designed from the outset to be as cheap as possible. The car isn't very fast and it looks ...

"I love that my car recorded a hit-and-run on my behalf," writes a technology columnist at the Washington Post. "Yet I'm scared we're not ready for the ways cameras pointed inside and outside vehicles...

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTu...

schwit1 quotes Space.com: In a historic first for satellite operations, a commercial spacecraft "helper" has docked with a working communications satellite to provide life-extension services. The comp...

SpaceX envisions Starship as a 387-foot-tall (118 meters) spacecraft/booster that can carry up to 100 people to Mars. Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) tipped us off to this progress report from Sp...

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Int...

"From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD," writes...

"It's only been a few months since we learned that The Matrix 4 was actually a real movie that was going to actually happen, and was actually going to star Keanu Reeves, and now the movie is actually ...

The new 1.14 release of the Go programming language "is dotted with performance and security improvements," reports the developer news site DevClass, "but also gives devs more flexibility when it come...

Several pundits criticized Google for warning Edge users to switch to Chrome if they wanted to use Chrome extensions "securely". "In Chrome, a plugin can be remotely disabled by the Chrome team if it'...

The New York Times reports:Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils t...

"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil...

"Mats Järlström's emotions were clearly visible Friday morning. After years of arguing red light traffic cameras are flawed, the official Journal of the Institute of Transportation Engineers...

"Tesla will work with PG&E to build the world's largest battery facility able to store energy generated by both solar and wind power in Monterey, California," writes long-time Slashdot reader Okia...

The Boston Globe's Stat News site reports that the new coronavirus "may be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have di...

Apache Tomcat servers released in the last 13 years are vulnerable to a bug named Ghostcat that can allow hackers to take over unpatched systems. From a report: Discovered by Chinese cybersecurity fir...

The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it has proposed fining the nation's four largest wireless carriers $200 million for selling access to their customers' location information ...

With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skill...

Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it. From a report: When Tony Huffman stepped away from the production line at ...

Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space -- five times bigger than anything observed before. Iwastheone shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanate...

U.S. regulators approved a plan to pay Intelsat SA and other satellite providers to give up airwaves so they can be redeployed for the fast 5G mobile networks being rolled out. From a report: The Fede...