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11:25 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot GOP Congressman Turns Antitrust Hearing Into Personal Tech Support Session
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: We all have trouble with our email sometimes. We don't typically get to harangue the CEO of Google about why, say, Dad's Gmail is acting up, though....
10:45 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Google's $2.1 Billion Fitbit Deal Faces Full-Scale EU Antitrust Investigation
According to CNBC sources, Google's $2.1 billion bid for fitness tracker maker Fitbit will face a full-scale EU antitrust investigation next week. From the report: Alphabet unit Google this month offe...
10:05 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot One Mystery of Stonehenge's Origins Has Finally Been Solved
For more than four centuries, archaeologists and geologists have sought to determine the geographical origins of the stones used to build Stonehenge thousands of years ago. Pinning down the source of ...
09:25 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot US Adults Who Mostly Rely On Social Media For News Are Less Informed, Exposed To More Conspiracies: Study
According to a new report from Pew Research, U.S. adults who get their news largely from social media platforms tend to fllow the news less closely and end up less informed on several key subjects whe...
09:03 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Alphabet Reports First Revenue Decline In Company History
Google parent-company Alphabet beat expectations for its second quarter earnings Thursday, marking its first revenue decline in the company's history. CNBC reports: Here's how it did against Refinitiv...
08:45 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Apple Halved App Store Fee To Get Amazon Prime Video On Devices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple agreed in 2016 to halve its App Store fee for Amazon as part of a deal to put the e-commerce giant's Prime Video app on Apple's mobile devices...
08:04 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot A Year After an HR Crisis, Microsoft Backs Away From Releasing a Transparency Report
An anonymous reader shares a report: On March 20, 2019, a Microsoft employee who had been at the company for three years sent an email to a collection of listservs for women at the company, asking how...
07:30 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Apple Emails Reveal Internal Debate on Right to Repair
Tim Cook didn't reveal anything new during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. But emails his company shared with the committee spoke volumes. These internal discussions reve...
06:52 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Google's Web App Plans Collide With Apple's iPhone, Safari Rules
Google and Apple, which already battle over mobile operating systems, are opening a new front in their fight. How that plays out may determine the future of the web. From a report: Google was born on ...
06:04 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft To Remove All SHA-1 Windows Downloads Next Week
Microsoft announced this week plans to remove all Windows-related file downloads from the Microsoft Download Center that are cryptographically signed with the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1). From a r...
05:25 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Libraries Lend Books, and Must Continue To Lend Books: Internet Archive Responds To Publishers' Lawsuit
Internet Archive, in a blog post: Yesterday, the Internet Archive filed our response to the lawsuit brought by four commercial publishers to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the d...
04:45 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Top Antitrust Democrat: There's a Case To Break Up Facebook
Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who ended Wednesday's hearing by saying some Big Tech companies need to be broken up, says that Facebook in particular lacks significant competitors and should not have ...
04:11 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Telegram Hits Out at Apple's App Store 'Tax' in Latest EU Antitrust Complaint
Apple has another antitrust charge on its plate. Messaging app Telegram has joined Spotify in filing a formal complaint against the iOS App Store in Europe -- adding its voice to a growing number of d...
03:25 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot NASA Launches New Rover, Perseverance, To Look For Ancient Life on Red Planet
NASA is heading back to the Red Planet. The agency launched a new rover, a car-size robotic explorer named Perseverance, to Mars on an ambitious mission to scour the planet for evidence of ancient lif...
02:47 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Huawei Overtakes Samsung as World's Biggest Smartphone Vendor
For the first time ever, Huawei has shipped more smartphones worldwide over a quarter than any other company, according to a new report from analyst firm Canalys. From a report: Huawei has long harbor...
02:00 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Trump Suggests Delaying Election Amid Fraud Claims, But Has No Power To Do So
President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested that perhaps the United States would need to "delay the election" on November 3, claiming that mail-in voting would make this fall's election "the most ina...
01:00 pm - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Solve Mystery of the Origin of Stonehenge Megaliths
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Researchers have announced that they have solved a centuries-long mystery surrounding the origin of most of the large stones that make up the outer ring o...
10:00 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot A Plunge In Incoming Sunlight May Have Triggered 'Snowball Earths'
Jennifer Chu writes via Phys.Org: At least twice in Earth's history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic "Snowball Earth" events occurred in quick successio...
07:00 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Airbus To Build 'First Interplanetary Cargo Ship'
Airbus-France will build the huge satellite that brings the first Martian rock samples back to Earth. The BBC reports: This material will be drilled on the Red Planet by the US space agency's next rov...
03:30 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine Shows Promising Result In Animal Tests
Moderna's vaccine candidate against Covid-19 protected against the virus in a trial that inoculated 16 monkeys, an encouraging step on the path to a defense for humans against the pandemic. Bloomberg ...
02:10 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Hackers Broke Into Real News Sites To Plant Fake Stories
A disinfo operation broke into the content management systems of Eastern European media outlets in a campaign to spread misinformation about NATO. Wired reports: On Wednesday, security firm FireEye re...
01:30 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Nancy Pelosi Mandates Masks On House Floor
Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will require all House members and aids to wear masks on the floor, after Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert who has at times flouted the health recommendation tested positive for ...
12:55 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot Qualcomm Hints That the 5G iPhone Might Not Arrive In September
Qualcomm's Q3 earnings report might indicate a delay for Apple's upcoming 5G iPhones, with the company highlighting a "partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch" for its fourt...
12:02 am - Thu, July 30, 2020
Slashdot The Vatican Is Said To Be Hacked From China Before Talks With Beijing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Chinese hackers infiltrated the Vatican's computer networks in the past three months , a private monitoring group has concluded, in an appa...
11:20 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot When a Customer Gets Refunded For a Paid App, Apple Doesn't Refund the 30% Cut They Took From The Developer
When a customer gets refunded for an app they purchased, Apple doesn't refund the 30% cut they took from the developer, says developer Simeon Saens of Two Lives Left. While [online] payment processors...
10:40 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot TikTok's New CEO Says Company Will Reveal How Its Algorithms Work
In his first public statement as CEO of TikTok, former Disney exec Kevin Mayer says the company will be releasing that code that drives its content-moderation algorithms so that experts can observe ho...
10:00 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos 'Can't Guarantee' Policy Against Using Seller Specific Data Hasn't Been Violated
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: At the "Online Platforms and Market Power" virtual antitrust hearing today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke about a policy that is meant to prevent th...
09:21 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Zuckerberg Goes Off-Script, Blasts Apple and Google in Testimony
During today's testimony before a Congressional antitrust panel, Mark Zuckerberg went off-script a little bit pointing out how Facebook lags behind a number of competitors, including Alphabet, Amazon....
08:42 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Joins the Blender Development Fund
Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of Blender Foundation (which accepts donations to support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors), writes: Microsoft makes use of...
08:02 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Arizona Leads Multi-State Probe Into Older iPhones Slowing, Shutting Down
Arizona is leading a multi-U.S. state probe into whether Apple's deliberate slowing of older iPhones violated deceptive trade practice laws, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing documents. From a report...
07:22 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Google Offers Refunds After Smart Glasses Stop Working
Smart glasses company North has told customers that their $600 purchases will stop working in a few days' time. The Canadian company, recently purchased by Google, says its Focals glasses will cease f...
06:44 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Mark Zuckerberg Emails Outline Plan To Neutralize Competitors
An anonymous reader shares a report: In late February 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed his chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to float the idea of buying smaller competitors, including...
06:04 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Google One Now Offers Free Phone Backups Up To 15GB on Android and iOS
Google One, Google's subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who insta...
05:10 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Watch Now: Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook Top Execs Testify Before Congress in Historic Antitrust Hearing
The top executives at four of the world's largest and most powerful technology companies are testifying now before Congress in the culmination of a year-long antitrust inquiry. You can watch the lives...
04:44 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot After India and US, Japan Looks To Ban TikTok and Other Chinese Apps
A group of Japanese lawmakers is seeking to restrict the use of TikTok and other apps developed by Chinese firms, following in the footsteps of India, which has already blocked dozens of Chinese apps,...
04:04 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Visa, Mastercard Debit Fees Are Hurting Retailers, Sen. Richard Durbin Says
Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin is asking the Federal Reserve to probe allegedly anticompetitive practices that are forcing merchants to pay excessive debit-card fees levied during the coronavirus cris...
03:24 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Samsung Weighs Dropping Its Bixby AI Assistant and Galaxy Apps Store as Google Dangles New Mobile Apps Deal
Samsung is considering dropping its Bixby virtual assistant and Galaxy Apps Store from its mobile devices as part of a new global revenue-sharing deal with Alphabet's Google, Reuters is reporting, cit...
02:45 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot US Treasury To Make Recommendation on TikTok To Trump This Week
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Wednesday that popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok was under a national security review and that his agency would make a recommendation to the ...
02:09 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot AMC and Universal Agree To Let Movies Go From Theaters To Digital Rentals Much Sooner
AMC Theaters and Universal have reached a new agreement that dramatically shortens the theatrical exclusivity window -- the amount of time that films have to play in theaters before they'e allowed to ...
01:00 pm - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Misleading Virus Video, Pushed By the Trumps, Spreads Online
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a video posted Monday online, a group of people calling themselves "America's Frontline Doctors" and wearing white medical coats spoke a...
10:00 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Used Hydrogen Fuel Cells To Power a Data Center For Two Days Straight
Microsoft announced Monday that hydrogen fuel cells powered a row of its datacenter servers for 48 consecutive hours, bringing the company one step closer toward its goal of becoming "carbon negative"...
07:00 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Netflix Breaks Record With 160 Emmy Nominations
Netflix led the Emmy Awards race with a record-breaking 160 primetime nominations, beating the likes of linear television giant HBO and digital newcomers Disney+ and Apple TV+. Deutsche Welle reports:...
03:30 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Solve Mystery Behind Body Odor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers at the University of York traced the source of underarm odor to a particular enzyme in a certain microbe that lives in the human armp...
02:02 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Offshore Wind In Europe Won't Need Subsidies Much Longer
AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: Once renewable sources of electricity meet or beat the costs of fossil fuel generation, everything changes. With the immediate financial benefit just as clea...
01:25 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot India Is Reportedly Looking To Ban 275 More Chinese Apps -- Including PUBG, Zili and AliExpress
schwit1 writes: India has drawn up a list of 275 Chinese apps that it will examine for any violation of national security and user privacy, signaling heightened scrutiny and the possibility of more Ch...
12:45 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Trump's Plan To Regulate Social Media
Esther Schindler writes: A 55-page proposal to make the FCC rewrite a law through administrative rulemaking would threaten small social sites and generate vast amounts of new business for trial lawyer...
12:02 am - Wed, July 29, 2020
Slashdot Alcohol Delivery Service Drizly Confirms Data Breach
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Online alcohol delivery startup Drizly has told customers that it was hit by a data breach. In an email to customers obtained by TechCrunch, the co...
11:20 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Decimal Point Error Causes Etsy To Massively Overcharge For Shipping Labels
A decimal point error at e-commerce site Etsy briefly caused the company to overcharge for shipping labels by thousands of dollars. PCMag reports: Etsy sellers took to social media on Monday to notify...
10:40 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Rite Aid Deployed Facial Recognition Systems In Hundreds of US Stores
Rite Aid installed facial recognition technology across 200 stores in the U.S. "In the hearts of New York and metro Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white nei...
10:03 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the "...
09:23 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Iter: World's Largest Nuclear Fusion Project Begins Assembly
Thelasko writes: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase. After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" requi...
08:43 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Are We in an AI Overhang?
Andy Jones, a London-based machine learning researcher, writes: An overhang is when you have had the ability to build transformative AI for quite some time, but you haven't because no-one's realised i...
08:04 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Fastest US Supercomputer Enlisted in Fight Against Coronavirus
The fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is being put to work in the search for a vaccine to prevent the coronavirus and treat those infected by it. From a report: The Summit, housed in the U.S. Energy D...
07:24 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Pull Living Microbes, Possibly 100 Million Years Old, From Beneath the Sea
sciencehabit writes: Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The mic...
06:44 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Seeks Insights Into Startups by Investing in VC Funds
Facebook in recent weeks has approached a handful of small venture capital firms to discuss becoming an investor in their funds, The Information reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matte...
06:03 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Google Plans To Build a New Undersea Network Cable Connecting the US, UK and Spain
New submitter rewindustry writes: Google has announced plans to build a new undersea network cable connecting the US, UK and Spain. The tech giant says it is incorporating new technology into the cabl...
05:21 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Target and Walmart May Have Just Killed Black Friday as We Know It
An anonymous reader shares a report: Following Walmart's decision last week to shutter its doors on Thanksgiving Day over COVID-19 concerns, fellow big-box behemoth, Target, has announced that it will...
04:44 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot All Dogs in Shenzhen, China Will Get Microchipped By 2020
The world's hardware haven is taking a digital leap for pets. From a report: In May, China's southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K.,...
04:04 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot CES Comes To Its Senses and Will Go All-Digital For 2021
For the first time in more than 50 years, the CES technology tradeshow will be a digital-only event in January 2021. The event is the first big event of the year for the Las Vegas events calendar, and...
03:22 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Their Businesses Went Virtual. Then Apple Wanted a Cut.
After Airbnb and ClassPass began selling virtual classes because of the pandemic, Apple tried to collect its commission on the sales. From a report: ClassPass built its business on helping people book...
02:40 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Twitter Temporarily Limits Donald Trump Jr.'s Account
Twitter has limited some functionality on Donald Trump Jr.'s account after he tweeted a video that ran afoul of the company's policies on Covid-19 misinformation, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to C...
02:00 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Google's Top Search Result? It's Google
In Google's early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 "blue links" that led to different websites. "We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible...
01:00 pm - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Trump Blasts 'Trending' Section On Twitter: 'Really Ridiculous, Illegal, and, of Course, Very Unfair!'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: President Trump blasted Twitter's "trending" section in a Monday tweet, calling it "really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!" "So dis...
10:00 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot From Rocks To Icebergs, the Natural World Tends To Break Into Cubes
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Researchers have found that when everything from icebergs to rocks breaks apart, their pieces tend to resemble cubes. The finding suggests a univers...
07:00 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Rock From Mars Heads Home After 600,000 Year Odyssey Across Space
A tiny piece of Martian basalt the size of a 10p coin will be launched on board a U.S. robot probe on Thursday and propelled towards the red planet on a seven-month journey to its home world. The Guar...
03:30 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot What the Heroin Industry Can Teach Us About Solar Power
ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by fa...
02:02 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Election Officials Are Vulnerable To Exim Security Vulnerability, Report Shows
whh3 writes: The Wall Street Journal has an "exclusive" scoop about a report detailing that several counties host their own mail servers using a version of Exim that is vulnerable to exploitation (War...
01:25 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Airbus' Self-Flying Plane Completes Successful Taxi, Take-Off, and Landing Tests
Airbus just completed its Autonomous Taxi, Take-Off, and Landing project that saw one of its jets perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own. Business Insider reports: The European man...
12:45 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Intel Reorganizes In Wake of 7nm Woes; Chief Engineering Officer To Depart
FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from AnandTech: Coming in the wake of last week's disclosure that their 7nm yields are roughly a full year behind schedule, Intel this afternoon has announced that they...
12:02 am - Tue, July 28, 2020
Slashdot Garmin Begins Recovery From Ransomware Attack
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The American GPS and fitness-tracker company Garmin is dealing with the aftermath of a ransomware attack, the BBC has confirmed. Owners of its product...
11:25 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Locust Swarms Are Getting So Big That We Need Radar To Track Them
The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020's horrors. From a report: In June, remote sensing analyst Raj Bhagat noticed a strange signal on India's weather radar. It looked like a small band of ...
10:45 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot The Cold War Bunker That Became Home To a Dark-Web Empire
The New Yorker this week has a story about a Dutchman named Xennt, who lived underground in a vast nuclear bunker in Germany with his family, friends, and an assortment of clever misfits. The story is...
10:03 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Are 3D Printing Miniature Human Organs To Test COVID-19 Drugs
Scientists are conducting preliminary tests of COVID-19 drugs using 3D printed human organs, eliminating the need to perform tests on animals, or, of course, humans. The Week reports: For example, Ant...
09:25 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Cloudflare Launches Workers Unbound, the Next Evolution of Its Serverless Platform
Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda. TechCrunch reports: ...
08:45 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot You Can Now Boot a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft and Play Doom On It
If you've ever wanted to build a real and working Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft, now is the time. From a report: A new VM Computers mod has been created for Minecraft that allows players to order com...
08:03 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Huge Apparent Leak Unearths Nintendo's Prototype History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A massive leak of apparent Nintendo source code is giving gamers a rare, unauthorized look at Nintendo's development process dating back to the S...
07:23 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Hackers Stole GitHub and GitLab OAuth Tokens From Git Analytics Firm Waydev
Waydev, an analytics platform used by software companies, has disclosed a security breach that occurred earlier this month. From a report: The company says that hackers broke into its platform and sto...
06:45 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Qualcomm's Quick Charge 5 Can Get a Phone To 50 Percent Battery in Five Minutes
Qualcomm is giving its Quick Charge technology a sizeable boost, one that the company claims will be able to plug in and get a device with a 4,500mAh battery from 0 to 50% in five minutes and from emp...
05:55 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Takes EU To Court For Invading Privacy
Facebook has taken the EU to court for invading the privacy of its employees, Financial Times reported [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] Monday citing two people with dire...
05:23 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot NIST Study Finds That Masks Defeat Most Facial Recognition Algorithms
In a report published today by the National Institutes of Science and Technology (NIST), a physical sciences laboratory and non-regulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, researchers attemp...
04:44 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Zuckerberg To Tell Congress Facebook's Success Is Patriotic
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is prepared with what he sees as a compelling argument for lawmakers ready to grill him on antitrust issues: hindering American technological innovatio...
04:05 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot MP3 Turns 25
ArchieBunker writes: In the streaming era, music is accessed from a variety of online services, ephemeral in nature and never living on board the device. However, the online audio revolution really ki...
03:23 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Australian Regulator Says Google Misled Users Over Data Privacy Issues
Australia's competition regulator on Monday accused Alphabet's Google of misleading consumers to get permission for use of their personal data for targeted advertising, seeking a fine "in the millions...
02:48 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Twitter's Security Woes Included Broad Access To User Accounts
Twitter has struggled for years to police the growing number of employees and contractors who have the ability to reset users' accounts and override their security settings, a problem that Chief Execu...
02:03 pm - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Google To Keep Employees Home Until Summer 2021 Amid Coronavirus Pandemic
Google will keep its employees home until at least next July, making the search-engine giant the first major U.S. corporation to formalize such an extended timetable in the face of the coronavirus pan...
11:34 am - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Self-Replicating Chernobyl Mold Tested on ISS as a Space Radiation Shield
Humans on the moon and Mars would face the problem of damaging space radiation. But new research suggests one possible solution to the fact that "Space wants to kill you," according to CNET:To protect...
07:34 am - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Slashdot Interviews an Oxford Vaccine Trial Participant
Jennifer Riggins is participating in the Oxford Vaccine Trial. She's an American technology journalist and marketer who's self-employed in London — and she's also agreed to answer some questions...
04:01 am - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Python 'Dominates' IEEE Spectrum's 2020 List of Top Programming Languages
IEEE Spectrum's August issue will include an article titled "The Top Programming Languages." Calculated using metrics from 11 online sources, it concludes that "One thing remains constant: the dominan...
02:01 am - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot How a Chinese Agent Used LinkedIn to 'Lure' American Targets
Today the BBC told the story of Jun Wei Yeo, "an ambitious and freshly enrolled Singaporean PhD student" who was gradually recruited by Chinese intelligence. Yeo "would end up using the professional n...
12:34 am - Mon, July 27, 2020
Slashdot Digital Banking Site 'Dave' Admits Security Breach Impacting 7.5 Million Users
"Digital banking app and tech unicorn Dave.com confirmed today a security breach," reports ZDNet, "after a hacker published the details of 7,516,625 users on a public forum."In an email to ZDNet today...
10:42 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: How Long Do You Expect Your Smartphone To Last?
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen is facing "the death of another smartphone from acute battery swelling." And he wants to know if you're having the same problem:It seems to me that they've become quit...
09:40 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Apple Being Sued For Refusing To Help ITunes Gift Card Scam Victims
"Apple is being sued for allegedly refusing to help those who have fallen victim to a iTunes gift card scam," reports 9to5Mac, in an article shared by Slashdot reader AmiMoJo:An 11-count class action ...
08:39 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Criticized For Temporarily Blocking Entire Domain 'Dreamwidth.org'
Dreamwidth is an online journal service based on the LiveJournal codebase, according to Wikipedia — "a code fork of the original service, set up by ex-LiveJournal staff Denise Paolucci and Mark ...
07:40 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Researchers Achieve AI Breakthrough Using Light To Perform Computations
"Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in the development of artificial intelligence by using light instead of electricity to perform computations," reports the Independent. "The new approach signi...
06:35 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Trump and Biden Attack Social Media - By Running Ads on Social Media
In 100 days the U.S. will vote on whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden or somebody else should be America's president. But both candidates are also running political ads attacking social media — on s...
05:34 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Vigilante Sabotages Malware Botnet By Replacing Payloads With Animated GIFs
An anonymous reader writes: An unknown vigilante hacker has been sabotaging the operations of the recently-revived Emotet botnet by replacing Emotet payloads with animated GIFs, effectively preventing...
04:34 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Open-Source Intelligence Analyst Spotted Russian Missile Test In Arctic
An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:U.S. Navy submarines have spent years shadowing Russian warships, hoping to snap photographs of missile tests through the periscope. It is the stuff of Cold War legen...
03:34 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Researchers Use DNA to Store 'The Wizard of Oz' - Translated Into Esperanto
"DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive," reports Popular Mechanics. "Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze ...
02:34 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Will Global Warming Drive Polar Bears Toward Extinction?
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:Polar bears could become nearly extinct by the end of the century as a result of shrinking sea ice in the Arctic if global warming continues unabated, sci...
01:34 pm - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Western Bumblebee Population Drops Up To 93% Over the Last 20 Years
The western bumblebee is one of around 30 bumblebee species in the western U.S. and Canada. Now a federal review "unveils an alarming trend for the western bumblebee population, which has seen its num...
11:34 am - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot The North Poles of Jupiter's Moon Ganymede Probed by NASA Spacecraft
"NASA's Juno Jupiter probe has captured unprecedented views of the largest moon in the solar system," reports Space.com:During a close flyby of Jupiter on Dec. 26, 2019, Juno mapped the north polar re...
09:34 am - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot 'Solar Orbiter' Delivers Closest Pictures Ever Taken of the Sun
"A European and NASA spacecraft has snapped the closest pictures ever taken of the sun," reports the Associated Press, "revealing countless little 'campfires" flaring everywhere.Scientists on Thursday...
07:34 am - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Neural Network-Enhanced 'Cognitive Radio' Communicates With ISS
IEEE Spectrum reports:There's still plenty that can disrupt radio communications... Rather than waiting for a human on Earth to tell the radio how to adapt its systems — during which the command...
03:34 am - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot America Wants to Build Nuclear Power Plants on the Moon and Mars
"The U.S. wants to build nuclear power plants that will work on the moon and Mars, and on Friday put out a request for ideas from the private sector on how to do that," reports Time magazine:The U.S. ...
01:34 am - Sun, July 26, 2020
Slashdot Judge Urged To Release Documents About Google's Cellphone Tracking
Eight weeks ago Arizona's attorney general sued Google for allegedly deceiving users about when location data would be collected from their phones, tracking them without their clear consent.. Now an A...
11:35 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Is Work Easier For 'Digital Nomads'?
A digital nomad describes what no one ever warns you about after selling everything and then travelling to Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand "before doing the Working Holiday Visa thing in Au...
10:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Historic Moon Landing Footage Enhanced By AI, and the Results Are Incredible
"A photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and image...
09:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Do Drones Help Democratize Surveillance?
A University of San Diego (USD) professor has just published The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance. He tells a local newspaper that drones (as well as other aerial technologies...
08:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot SpaceX's Starlink Satellites Accused of 'Photo-Bombing' Shots of Comet Neowise
"Comet Neowise has been the brightest and most visible space snowball in a generation, but it's also the first naked-eye comet to visit us in the new era of satellite mega-constellations like SpaceX's...
07:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot 'Meow' Attack Has Now Wiped Nearly 4,000 Databases
On Thursday long-time Slashdot reader PuceBaboon wrote: Ars Technica is reporting a new attack on unprotected databases which, to date, has deleted all content from over 1,000 ElasticSearch and MongoD...
07:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot People Think CPR is More Effective Than It Really Is, Study Finds
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from HealthDay:In earlier studies, patients have pegged CPR survival rates at between 19% and 75%. But the real rate of survival is about 12% for ...
06:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Bill Gates Has a Message For Conspiracy Theorists
In an interview with CNN, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates responded to his prominence in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that have spread online: CNN: There are 16,000 Facebook posts espousing ...
05:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Giant Waves of Sand Are Moving On Mars
"Researchers have spotted large waves of martian sand migrating for the first time," reports Science magazine. "The discovery dispels the long-held belief that these 'megaripples' haven't moved since ...
04:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot State-of-the-Art Crypto Goes Post-Quantum (with Containerized TinySSH)
emil (Slashdot reader #695) writes: The advent of quantum computing poses a well-recognized threat to RSA and other well-known asymmetric cryptosystems. It has been four years since NIST opened the po...
03:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Is There a Sorting Algorithm Faster than Quicksort and Timsort?
When asked for the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers in 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama answered, "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go." But people a...
02:34 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Coronavirus Infection Rates: 10 US States Higher Than Any Country in the World
The New York Times has created a surprising interactive analysis of the number of coronavirus cases (per million residents) in different countries:With its cases surging since mid-June, the United Sta...
01:00 pm - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Apple To Give Employees Paid Time Off To Vote In US Election
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple told U.S. employees they can take as many as four hours off with pay on Election Day to vote or volunteer at a polling place. The policy appli...
10:00 am - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot The 20th Anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube
Steven Levy from Wired remembers the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. From the report: I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost...
07:00 am - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Pentagon's UFO Unit Will Make Some Findings Public
According to The New York Times, a secretive task force called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force is expected to release new and alarming findings that may involve vehicles made of material...
01:25 am - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Apple Begins Assembling iPhone 11 In India
Apple has begun assembling the current generation of iPhones in its plant near Chennai, India. TechCrunch reports: A small batch of locally manufactured iPhone 11 units has already shipped to retail s...
12:45 am - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot States Probe Apple For Potential Consumer Protection Violation
Texas is among a group of states whose attorneys general are probing Apple over potential violations of a consumer protection law, according to a document obtained by the Tech Transparency Project thr...
12:03 am - Sat, July 25, 2020
Slashdot Twenty Years On, Japan Government's Digital Ambitions Still Stuck In Piles of Paper
Two decades after Japan rolled out an ambitious plan to go digital, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the government's deeply rooted technological shortcomings as ministries remain stuck in a paper-driv...
11:25 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot ICE Bars New Foreign Students From US If Classes Are Fully Online
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a release on Friday barring new international students from entering the U.S. for their fall terms if th...
10:45 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Huawei CFO Asks For Extradition Case To Be Stayed, Says US Misled Canada
hackingbear writes: Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, have applied to a Canadian court seeking stays in the proceedings for her extradition to the United St...
10:40 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Trump Campaign Angry That Cell Carriers Blocked Company Texts To Voters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: President Trump's re-election campaign has accused Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile of "suppression of political speech" over the carriers' blocki...
10:05 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It's Very Unlikely, Experts Say
An anonymous reader shares a report: The anecdotes are alarming. A woman in Los Angeles seemed to recover from Covid-19, but weeks later took a turn for the worse and tested positive again. A New Jers...
10:02 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot NASA Delays James Webb Space Telescope To October 2021
NASA has announced that the often delayed James Webb space telescope (JWST) is to be delayed once more. Instead of a launch on 30 March 2021, the mission has now slipped to 31 October 2021. From a rep...
09:20 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Yahoo Disables All Article Comments
Yahoo has replaced the comments section under its articles with a survey. Now, there's a message that reads: "Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and pa...
08:43 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Indian IT Consultancies Struggle Against Technological Obsolescence
Few people outside their home country have heard of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies or Tech Mahindra, India's five biggest information technology (IT) consultancies. ...
08:02 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot CBS' Overzealous Copyright Bots HIt Star Trek Virtual Comic-Con Panel
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: San Diego Comic-Con -- like just about every large conference, convention, and gathering in 2020 -- has had to switch to an online-only virtual f...
07:24 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot FBI Warns US Companies About Backdoors In Chinese Tax Software
An anonymous reader writes: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent an alert on Thursday warning US companies about backdoor malware that is silently being installed on the networks of foreign...
06:43 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot NBA is Using Microsoft Teams To Brings Virtual Fans Into Its Real-World Games
When you tune into a National Basketball Association game after the league restarts its season on July 30 following a shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic, things will look a little different. Fro...
06:04 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: What Movies, TV Shows, and Games Have You Enjoyed of Late?
What are some titles -- movies, TV shows, or any console video games -- that have helped you stay calm in recent months? (No need to limit the listing to recently releases.)Read more of this story at ...
05:35 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Apple's Limits on Third-Party 'Find My' Integration Under Scrutiny
An anonymous reader shares a reporrt: Apple last month introduced the new "Find My" Network Accessory Program, built to allow third-party products to work with Apple's own Find My app. While Apple's A...
05:29 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Apple's Limits on Third-Party 'Find My' Integration Under Scrutiny
An anonymous reader shares a reporrt: Apple last month introduced the new "Find My" Network Accessory Program, built to allow third-party products to work with Apple's own Find My app. While Apple's A...
04:48 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot The Great Climate Migration Has Begun
Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?Read more of this story at Slashdot. ...
04:04 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot More Than 1,000 People at Twitter Had Ability To Aid Hack of Accounts
More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors as of earlier this year had access to internal tools that could change user account settings and hand control to others, Reuters is reporting cit...
03:25 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot U.S. Hatches Plan To Build a Quantum Internet That Might Be 'Unhackable'
U.S. officials and scientists unveiled a plan this week to pursue what they called one of the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century: building a quantum Internet. From a report: Sp...
02:47 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Google Keeps Tabs on Usage of Rival Android Apps To Develop Competitors
An internal program at Google known as "Android Lockbox" can give the company's employees access to information about how Android users interact with popular, non-Google apps and services, according t...
02:05 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Intel Says Its 7nm Chips Are Delayed By At Least a Year
If you've been following along with Intel's troubles moving away from its 14nm process to 10nm over the years, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the company is now having trouble getting i...
01:00 pm - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Who Still Needs the Office? US Companies Start Cutting Space
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Corporate America is downsizing its real estate footprint as companies allow more employees to work from home, a growing threat to the bottom line of ...
10:00 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot China's Tianwen-1 Mars Rover Rockets Away From Earth
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China has launched its first rover mission to Mars. The six-wheeled robot, encapsulated in a protective probe, was lifted off Earth by a Long March 5 rocket from ...
07:00 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot America's Daily COVID-19 Death Toll Passes 1,000 Again
AleRunner writes: The United States on Tuesday recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from COVID-19 for the first time since May, according to Politico. This trend continued and actually increased on W...
03:30 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Renewable Power Surpasses Fossil Fuels For First Time In Europe
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Japan Times: Renewable power for the first time contributed a bigger share in the European generation mix than fossil fuels as the fallout from the pandemi...
02:02 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Tesla Accuses Rivian of Poaching Employees, Stealing Secrets
According to a new lawsuit first reported by Bloomberg, Tesla alleges that four of its former workers took highly sensitive proprietary information as they left to work for the rival EV startup Rivian...
02:02 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot EU Demands Major Concessions From Google Over Fitbit Deal
The EU has demanded that Google make major concessions relating to its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-tracking company Fitbit if the deal is to be allowed to proceed imminently, according to peop...
01:25 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Twitter Is Considering Subscriptions Amid An Advertising Slump
Even though Twitter hit 186 million monetizable daily active users between April and June (up 34 percent year-over-year), it had an operating loss of $124 million during the quarter as ad revenue slow...
12:45 am - Fri, July 24, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Ignored Racial Bias Research, Employees Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for b...
11:20 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot KFC Tests 3D-Printed Chicken Nuggets In Russia
KFC announced that it will test chicken nuggets made with 3D bioprinting technology in Moscow, Russia, this fall. Business Insider reports: The chicken chain has partnered with 3D Bioprinting Solution...
10:40 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Nvidia Reportedly Could Be Pursuing ARM In Disruptive Acquisition Move
MojoKid writes: Word across a number of business and tech press publications tonight is that NVIDIA is reportedly pursuing a possible acquisition of Arm, the chip IP juggernaut that currently powers v...
10:02 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Garmin Services and Production Go Down After Ransomware Attack
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Smartwatch and wearables maker Garmin has shut down several of its services today to deal with a ransomware attack that has encrypted its internal netwo...
09:25 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Former Facebook Engineer Says That the Company Has Enshrined Failure in Its Policies
A Facebook engineer said in a farewell video that the company was "failing" to mitigate harm and has "enshrined that failure in our policies." From a report: Max Wang, a Boston-based former engineer w...
08:45 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot T-Mobile Will Require New Devices To Support VoLTE
T-Mobile is preparing to make support for Voice over LTE a requirement for all new devices, according to a report Thursday. The move was reportedly detailed in internal T-Mobile documents obtained by ...
08:03 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot The Record Industry Is Going After Parody Songs Written By an Algorithm
Georgia Tech researcher Mark Riedl didn't expect that his machine learning model "Weird A.I. Yankovic," which generates new rhyming lyrics for existing songs would cause any trouble. But it did. From ...
07:23 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot UK and US Say Russia Fired a Satellite Weapon in Space
The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a satellite in space. Joe2020 shares a report: In a statement, the head of the UK's space directorate said: "We are concern...
06:45 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot How To Sell Books in 2020: Put Them Near the Toilet Paper
If you want to sell books during a pandemic, it turns out that one of the best places to do it is within easy reach of eggs, milk and diapers. From a report: When the coronavirus forced the United Sta...
06:08 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Steve Wozniak Sues YouTube Over Twitter-Like Bitcoin Scam
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says YouTube has for months allowed scammers to use his name and likeness as part of a phony bitcoin giveaway similar to the one that was quickly extinguished by Twitter...
05:33 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Met With Startups About Investing, Then Launched Competing Products
Some companies regret sharing information with tech giant and its Alexa Fund. From a report: When Amazon.com's venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd, it gained access to the technology startup...
04:50 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot AT&T's 5G Network Goes Nationwide With No Extra Cost on Unlimited Plans
Having launched preliminary 5G services using millimeter wave hardware in late 2018, AT&T has technically been operating a 5G network for a year and a half -- but between the "5G+" network's few c...
04:17 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Adds $100 Million To Landmark Facial Recognition Settlement Payout
Facebook has agreed to pay a total of $650 million in a landmark class action lawsuit over the company's unauthorized use of facial recognition, a new court filing shows. From a report: The filing rep...
03:36 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Google Takes Aim at Amazon. Again.
Google is getting serious about competing with Amazon in online shopping -- just like it did in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. The New York Times: But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to gri...
02:45 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Popular Chinese-Made Drone Is Found To Have Security Weakness
Cybersecurity researchers revealed on Thursday a newfound vulnerability in an app that controls the world's most popular consumer drones, threatening to intensify the growing tensions between China an...
02:05 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot With 24/7 Programming, the Future of TV Looks a Lot Like Its Past
Plex is bringing back the cable grid. The popular media center app added 80 live TV channels Thursday, complete with a programming guide that will look very familiar to anyone who has ever subscribed ...
01:00 pm - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot AI System Detects Posts By Foreign 'Trolls' On Facebook and Twitter
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Foreign manipulation campaigns on social media can be spotted by looking at clues in the timing and length of posts and the URLs they contain, re...
10:00 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode Display On Human Skin
In a new report on Science Advances, Minwoo Choi and a team of scientists in Electronic Engineering and Materials Science in the Republic of Korea, developed a wearable, full-colour OLED display using...
07:00 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Unveil Largest 3D Map of the Universe Ever
Iwastheone shares a report from Live Science: After five years of peering into the deepest reaches of space, researchers have released what they call the "largest three-dimensional map of the universe...
03:30 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Experimental Blood Test Detects Cancer Up To Four Years Before Symptoms Appear
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For years scientists have sought to create the ultimate cancer-screening test -- one that can reliably detect a malignancy early, before t...
02:02 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Major Study Rules Out Super-High and Low Climate Sensitivity To CO2
Scott K. Johnson writes via Ars Technica: One of the most important numbers in climate science is 3C. This isn't about a projection of future warming or the impacts that come with it, though. It's abo...
01:25 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Harmful Lies Spread Easily in the UK Because the Nation Lacks a Law To Regulate Social Media, Study Concludes
Misleading and harmful online content about Covid-19 has spread "virulently" because the UK still lacks a law to regulate social media, an influential group of MPs has said. From a report: The Digital...
12:45 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Tesla Turns a Profit For the Fourth Quarter In a Row, Chooses Austin For Next Gigafactory
Tesla turned a profit of $104 million in the second quarter of 2020. "As a result, Tesla has now been profitable for four straight quarters for the first time in company history -- an elusive benchmar...
12:02 am - Thu, July 23, 2020
Slashdot Russian Elite Given Experimental COVID-19 Vaccine Since April
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scores of Russia's business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, according to people famili...
11:20 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft's Livestreaming Service Mixer Shuts Down Today
Microsoft's livestreaming platform Mixer will shut down later today and encourage users to migrate over to Facebook Gaming's livestreaming service, with treasured Mixer Partners getting partner status...
10:42 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Appeals Court Blocks Trump Appointee's Takeover of Web Nonprofit
transporter_ii shares a report from Politico: A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that foste...
10:04 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot New York Bans Use of Facial Recognition In Schools Statewide
The New York legislature today passed a moratorium banning the use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification in schools until 2022. VentureBeat reports: The bill, which has yet...
09:30 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft President Raised Apple Issues To House Antitrust Group
Microsoft President Brad Smith raised concerns to U.S. lawmakers about what the company regards as Apple's anti-competitive behavior around its app store, Bloomberg reports. From the report: Smith, wh...
08:50 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Security Breach Exposes More Than One Million DNA Profiles On Major Genealogy Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On July 19, genealogy enthusiasts who use the website GEDmatch to upload their DNA information and find relatives to fill in their family trees ...
08:08 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Bay Area Tech Workers Consider Moving Amid Layoff Fears
More than half of tech workers in the Bay Area are concerned about being laid off or furloughed in the next six months, or their salaries hitting a plateau or dropping, according to a new report from ...
07:25 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Appeals Court Blocks Trump Appointee's Takeover of Web Nonprofit
A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that fosters technology aimed at undermining internet ce...
06:54 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Banks in US Can Now Offer Crypto Custody Services, Regulator Says
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is letting all nationally chartered banks in the U.S. provide custody services for cryptocurrencies. From a report: In a public letter dated July 22...
06:17 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Apple Will Start Sending Special Devices To iPhone Hackers
Apple has announced that it will send special devices that make it easier to find flaws and vulnerabilities in its mobile operating system iOS to iPhone hackers that apply and qualify for a program th...
06:03 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Apple Hires Economists To Help Prove Its App Store Commissions Aren't Anti-Competitive
Ahead of an antitrust hearing on Capitol Hill next week, Apple is fighting back against the perception that its App Store charges onerous commission rates to developer by hiring economists from the fi...
05:22 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Ubisoft Lays Out Anti-Harassment Plan
Ubisoft Chief Executive Officer Yves Guillemot said in a statement moments ago that the company faces "a very serious challenge following the recent allegations and accusations of misconduct and inapp...
04:44 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Ubisoft Family Accused of Mishandling Sexual Misconduct Claims
An anonymous reader shares a report: Five brothers started Ubisoft Entertainment SA in 1986 and since then the video game company has survived seven generations of game consoles, four recessions, a ho...
04:04 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Twitter Takes Down 7,000 Accounts Linked To QAnon
Twitter has removed thousands of accounts linked to QAnon, a group known for spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation online. From a report: "We've been clear that we will take strong enforcem...
03:24 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot AT&T Tells Customers To Upgrade Their Phones To Avoid Losing Voice Calls -- Two Years Early
There are countless stories of carriers trying to convince people they need a new phone, but this latest example from AT&T is especially worrying. From a report: Through an email going out to thou...
02:46 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Global Coronavirus Cases Exceed 15 Million
Global coronavirus infections surged past 15 million on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, with the pandemic gathering pace even as countries remain divided in their response to the crisis. From...
02:00 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Slack Accuses Microsoft of Illegally Crushing Competition
Microsoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respec...
01:00 pm - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot How Hollywood Accidentally Built Netflix
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: [T]he story really starts in 2008, when Netflix broke into streaming in a big way, through a backdoor: It purchased the digital streaming rights to movies...
10:15 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot An Earthquake With a Preliminary Magnitude of 7.8 Struck Off the Coast of Alaska Early Wednesday Morning.
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.8 struck off the coast of Alaska early Wednesday morning. From a report: The earthquake was centered 60 miles, or 98 kilometers, south-southeast, of Per...
10:00 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Gmail Is About To Start Testing Verification-Like Logos For Email
One of the biggest announcements made in Google's recent announcement of security enhancements for G Suite services is that authenticated logos are coming for emails from participating companies. Enga...
07:00 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Venus, Long-Thought Dormant, Shows Signs of Volcanic Activity
Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to be recently active -- and probably still are today -- painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant ...
03:30 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot 'World's Most Wanted Man' Involveld In Bizarre Attempt To Buy Hacking Tools
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fugitive executive of the embattled payment startup Wirecard was mentioned in a brazen and bizarre attempt to purchase hacking tools and surve...
02:10 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Ramps For Disabled People Trace Back To Ancient Greece
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The ramps for disabled people that smooth entry into many public buildings today aren't a modern invention. The ancient Greeks constructed similar r...
01:25 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot Elon Musk Says Neuralink Will Stream Music Straight Into Your Brain
Elon Musk says Neuralink recipients will be able to stream music directly into their brains, with no headphones needed. Futurism reports: It's still entirely unclear if Neuralink's brain-computer inte...
12:46 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot TikTok Plans To Add 10,000 Jobs in US as Trump Admin Considers Banning It
TikTok said Tuesday that it plans to create 10,000 jobs in the United States over the next three years, a substantial increase from the roughly 1,400 employees it currently has in the country. From a ...
12:02 am - Wed, July 22, 2020
Slashdot SUSE Releases Major Linux Update
SUSE has released the next versions of its flagship operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 2 and its latest infrastructure management program, SUSE Manager 4.1. ZDNet reports: S...
11:20 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot COVID-19 Vaccines With 'Minor Side Effects' Could Still Be Pretty Bad
"The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics," argues Hilda Bastian, a former consumer health care advocate a...
10:40 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Teams Opens Its Doors To Third-Party Apps During Meetings
Microsoft is allowing third-party app developers to integrate into the Microsoft Teams meeting experience for the first time. The Verge reports: The new developer-focused features will let apps integr...
10:02 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Ajit Pai Urges States To Cap Prison Phone Rates After He Helped Kill FCC Caps
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is urging state governments to impose price caps on prison phone calls, three years after Pai helped kill Obama-era FCC rul...
09:25 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Ukraine President Plugs 15-Year-Old Film To Free Hostages
In what sounds like a Black Mirror episode, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy complied with a hostage-takers demands and posted a six-second video urging the public to watch the 2005 film "Earthli...
08:46 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Wants To Create a Government-Funded AI University
The U.S. government's approach of letting Silicon Valley drive the country's technological boom has left the government itself scrambling for tech talent. Now, a federal commission led by ex-Google CE...
08:03 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Metacritic Changes Its User Review Policy To Combat Score Bombing
Just hours after The Last of Us Part II's release last month, some gamers posted ultra-low scores for the title on Metacritic. Since the story unfolds over 20 to 30 hours of gameplay, it was hard to b...
07:22 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot The App of the Summer Is Just a Random-Number Generator
Thelasko writes: Last year Slashdot reported on the Randonaut phenomenon. The Atlantic reports how a new app has spread the phenomenon further this summer From the report: Randonauting is also simple....
06:43 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Ransomware Gang Demands $7.5 Million From Argentinian ISP
A ransomware gang has infected the internal network of Telecom Argentina, one of the country's largest internet service providers, and is now demanding $7.5 million as ransom to unlock encrypted files...
06:04 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot US Charges Two Chinese Spies For a Global Hacking Campaign That Targeted COVID-19 Research
U.S. prosecutors have charged two Chinese nationals, said to be working for China's state intelligence bureau, for their alleged involvement in a massive global hacking operation that targeted hundred...
05:27 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot House Votes To Ban TikTok on Federal Devices
The House has voted to bar federal employees from downloading the video-sharing app TikTok on government-issued devices as part of a $741 billion defense policy bill. From a report: Lawmakers voted 33...
04:45 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot AMD Brings Power And Performance Of Ryzen 4000 Renoir Processors To Desktop PCs
MojoKid writes: Today AMD took the wraps off a new line of desktop processors based on its Zen 2 architecture but also with integrated Radeon graphics to better compete against Intel with OEM system b...
04:05 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Return and Enter Are Two Different Keys
John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: A New York Times mini crossword clue over the weekend was based on the notion that "Enter" is just a synonym for the Return key. It's not. They're two different...
03:24 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot LinkedIn Cuts 960 Jobs as Pandemic Puts the Brakes on Corporate Hiring
Microsoft's professional networking site LinkedIn said on Tuesday it would cut about 960 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce, as the coronavirus pandemic is having a sustained impact on demand for its...
02:45 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot EU Clinches Massive Stimulus Deal To Bind Continent Together
European Union leaders agreed on an unprecedented stimulus package worth 750 billion euros ($860 billion) to pull their economies out of the worst recession in memory and tighten the financial bonds h...
02:05 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Apple Says Its Supply Chains and Products Will Be Carbon Neutral by 2030
Apple this morning announced plans to make its entire business carbon neutral within the next 10 years. The news follows the company's push toward a fully carbon neutral corporate structure, adding it...
01:00 pm - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Rare and Hardest To Crack Enigma Code Machine Sells For $437,000
An anonymous reader writes: A rare 1944 four-rotor M4 Enigma cipher machine, considered one of the hardest challenges for the Allies to decrypt, has sold at a Christie's auction for $437,955. As noted...
10:00 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Uber Drivers To Launch Legal Bid To Uncover App's Algorithm
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Minicab drivers will launch a legal bid to uncover secret computer algorithms used by Uber to manage their work in a test case that could increase transparen...
07:00 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot UAE Successfully Launches Hope Probe, Arab World's First Mission To Mars
The first Arab space mission to Mars has blasted off aboard a rocket from Japan, with its unmanned probe -- called Al-Amal, or Hope -- successfully separating about an hour after liftoff. The Guardian...
03:30 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Google Promises Privacy With Virus App But Can Still Collection Location Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When Google and Apple announced plans in April for free software to help alert people of their possible exposure to the coronavirus, the co...
02:10 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot A New Artificial Material Effectively Cannot Be Cut
Researchers from the University of Stirling, UK, have embedded ceramic spheres in aluminum foam to create a material that couldn't be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. "They ...
01:30 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Overrides Fact-Checks When Climate Science Is 'Opinion'
Facebook says its fact-checking process is one of the ways it plans to fight disinformation heading into the U.S. presidential election, but as Ars Technica points out, opinion content is largely exem...
12:50 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Most Dedicated VPN IP-Addresses Are Not Anonymous
"Many VPN services advertise themselves as ideal tools to offer security, privacy, and anonymity. To ensure the latter, they often have no-logging policies to prevent individual users from being expos...
12:10 am - Tue, July 21, 2020
Slashdot Lithium Can Be Extracted From Groundwater At Geothermal Installations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Scientists at the KIT Energy Center at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say there is enough lithium dissolved in the groundwater extracted ...
11:30 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot The Brain Behind the Google Pixel Camera Is Building a Universal Camera App For Adobe
Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google's Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today. The Verge reports: Levoy headed u...
10:50 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft-Owned Minecraft Will Stop Using Amazon's Cloud
Microsoft will stop relying on Amazon to help it run the popular Minecraft video game. CNBC reports: The shift represents an obvious way for Microsoft to cut back on payments to one of its toughest co...
10:10 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Your 'Doomscrolling' Breeds Anxiety. Health Experts Offer Ways To Stop the Cycle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: So many of us do it: You get into bed, turn off the lights, and look at your phone to check Twitter one more time. You see that coronavirus infections are...
09:30 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Brings Procmon To Linux
ProcMon for Linux is Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software. ProcMon is a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite. From a rep...
08:50 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Patients Aren't Being Told About the AI Systems Advising Their Care
At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools -- many of them unproven -- to help predict whether hospitalized ...
08:10 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot US Accuses Supplier for Amazon, Apple, Dell, GM, Microsoft of Human Rights Abuses
The US Department of Commerce added 11 Chinese companies to its list of firms implicated in human rights violations, including China's reported campaign against Muslim minority groups from an area of ...
07:32 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Marco Rubio Hopes UFOs Are Aliens, Not Chinese Planes
Florida Senator Marco Rubio said he hopes that UFOs are extraterrestrials and not advanced Chinese aircraft. From a report: In a July 16 interview with CBS reporter Jim DeFede about a range of topics,...
06:58 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Samsung Blu-ray Players Reportedly Bricked By XML Parsing Error
Hammeh writes: Since the middle of last month, thousands of Samsung customers found their older internet-connected Blu-ray players had stopped working. In the days that followed, complaints about devi...
06:13 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot OpenAI's New Language Generator GPT-3 is Shockingly Good -- and Completely Mindless
"Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future," Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco-based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few da...
05:25 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Coinbase Says It Prevented Over 1,000 Customers From Sending $280,000 Worth of Bitcoin To Twitter Hackers
Crypto exchange Coinbase has said that it prevented little over 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to Twitter hackers who hijacked high-profile accounts to advertise a bitcoin scam last week. From a...
04:44 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot BadPower Attack Corrupts Fast Chargers To Melt or Set Your Device on Fire
Chinese security researchers said they can alter the firmware of fast chargers to cause damage to connected (charging) systems, such as melt the components, or even set devices on fire. Iwastheone sha...
04:08 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Source Code of Covid Tracker Ireland App Goes Global With Linux Project
The Linux Foundation Public Health initiative has chosen the Covid Tracker Ireland app as one of its first two open-source Covid-19 projects. From a report: Since its launch, more than 1.3m people hav...
03:25 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Zuckerberg: No Deal With Trump
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, under fire for allowing President Trump to post inflammatory statements on his platform, tells Axios there's no truth to whispers that the two have a secret understanding...
02:48 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Plans For Single-Screen Windows 10X Rollout in Spring 2021; Dual-Screen in Spring 2022
Microsoft officials haven't provided a public update on the company's Windows 10X plans since they acknowledged in early May that they were switching gears by making it available first on single-scree...
01:53 pm - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Coronavirus Vaccine Developed By University of Oxford Appears Safe and Trains the Immune System, Trials Involving More Than 1000 People Showed
A coronavirus vaccine the University of Oxford is developing with AstraZeneca showed promising results in early human testing, a sign of progress in the high-stakes pursuit of a shot to defeat the pat...
10:34 am - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Full Text of US State Department Cables Finally Released, Showing Safety In Chinese Lab
Slashdot reader destinyland writes: On April 7th, a Trump campaign advisor told the Los Angeles Times "One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China." Within weeks the...
07:34 am - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot Google Will Disable Microsoft's RAM-Saving Feature for Chrome in Windows 10
"Google has decided to disable a feature in Windows 10 version 2004 that allowed Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers to use a lot less RAM," reports ZDNet:Windows 10 gave Win32 apps including Chrome ac...
03:59 am - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot America's Border Patrol 'Can Track Everyone's Car' By Buying License Plate-Reader Data
America's border-protection agency "can track everyone's cars all over the country thanks to massive troves of automated license plate scanner data, a new report reveals," reports Ars Technica. And th...
02:03 am - Mon, July 20, 2020
Slashdot What Happened When Microsoft Analyzed Its Own Remote Work Patterns?
Harvard Business Review just published a new analysis by the director of Microsoft's Workplace Analytics team, a director on Microsoft's workplace intelligence team, and the editor of Microsoft Workpl...
11:46 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Solar Battery in One Device Sets New Efficiency Standard
Ars Technica reports on an international team's demonstration of a device merging photovoltaic and battery hardware into a single, unified device "that can have extensive storage capacity... a device ...
10:54 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Could Pine64's Cheap Linux Smartphone Replace Your PC?
TechRadar reports on Pine64's new "PinePhone Convergence Package" handset, calling it "a Linux desktop you can keep in your pocket" that can be used as a PC when plugged into an external display and a...
09:44 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Watch The United Arab Emirates Launch a Spacecraft to Mars
In less than 15 minutes, the United Arab Emirates will launch a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hop...
09:44 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot The United Arab Emirates Successfully Launch a Spacecraft to Mars
The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hope Mars prob...
08:47 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot 'If War Breaks Out on Top of the World'
The United States Air Force's elite "PJ" pararescue units and Alaska National Guard units "are ready to respond if war breaks out on top of the world," reports a new article in Popular Mechanics:With ...
07:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Airbnb Criticized For Asking Its Customers To Donate to Their Past Hosts
"Airbnb has been in hot water with hosts since the coronavirus crisis began, since the company told hosts to refund guests who needed to cancel their trips due to the pandemic," reports Travel + Leisu...
06:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Open Source Proponents React to Google's 'Open Usage Commons'
Google's announcement of a new open source initiative called the Open Usage Commons "caused some consternation among other open source proponents," according to Diginomica:IBM's reaction is typical. I...
05:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Surveillance Software Scanning File-Sharing Networks Led To 12,000 Arrests
Mr. Cooper was a retired high school history teacher using what NBC News calls those peer-to-peer networks where "the lack of corporate oversight creates the illusion of safety for people sharing ille...
04:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot 'Mozilla VPN' Launches in Six Countries
"Starting today, there's a VPN on the market from a company you trust," Mozilla announced Wednesday. Mozilla VPN is now officially available for Windows and Android in six countries: the U.S., Canada,...
03:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Statisticians Warn That AI Is Still Not Ready To Diagnose COVID-19
Discover magazine reports:For years, many artificial intelligence enthusiasts and researchers have promised that machine learning will change modern medicine. Thousands of algorithms have been develop...
02:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Disney Reportedly Joins Facebook Boycott, Slashes Ad Spending
An anonymous reader quotes the Verge:Disney has significantly reduced its spending on Facebook and Instagram ads amid concerns about the social media platform's enforcement of its content policies, Th...
01:34 pm - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Lyft Sparks Uproar After Opening Online Store to Sell Masks to Its Drivers
"The ride-hailing platform Lyft has opened an online store to sell masks and other protective gear as the Covid-19 pandemic intensifies, enraging drivers and labor organizers who say the company shoul...
10:34 am - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Are Whiteboard Coding Interviews Just Testing For Social Anxiety?
An anonymous reader quotes The Register:People applying for software engineering positions at companies are often asked to solve problems on a whiteboard, under the watchful eye of an interviewer, as ...
07:34 am - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Washington Post: Asymptomatic 'Superspreaders' May Be Propelling the Pandemic
Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events":Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably s...
04:34 am - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot The FBI Secretly Used Travel Company 'Sabre' As A Global Surveillance Tool
Engadget reports:The FBI doesn't necessarily have to rely on spy databases or phone records to collect vast amounts of information about suspects — it might just have to ask a travel company for...
01:45 am - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Hoax That Fooled Armed Protesters Was Created By a Socialist Troll on Food Stamps
Remember that anonymous online hoaxster who urged hundreds of armed protesters to counter a non-existent flag-burning event at America's historic Civil War battefield at Gettysburg? An investigation b...
12:04 am - Sun, July 19, 2020
Slashdot Stockton Basic Income Program Extended. Is Support For the Idea Growing?
A $500-a-month basic-income program in Stockton, California will be extended through 2021 "in response to the economic strain put on participants by the coronavirus pandemic," reports the New Yorker:W...
11:04 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot John McAfee Loses Bet: Bitcoin Hasn't Hit $500K
Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quotes Mashable:Three years ago on this date, on July 17, 2017, McAfee, the eccentric founder of the antivirus software company bearing his name, made the bet of a lifeti...
09:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot 'Will 2020 Be The Year Of Rust In The Linux Kernel?'
An intriguing exchange happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing List after a post by Nick Desaulniers, a Google software engineer working on compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang (and LLVM). Hackaday repo...
08:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Dogs May Use Earth's Magnetic Field to Navigate
sciencehabit shares an article from Science magazine:Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional — albeit hidden — sensory talent: a...
07:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Many New Details Emerge About Twitter's Breach
The New York Times claims to have traced the origins of a Twitter security breach to "a teasing message between two hackers late Tuesday on the online messaging platform Discord." [The Times' article ...
06:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Could Working Remotely Kill Silicon Valley's Culture?
This week Medium's editor-at-large argued remote working could kill Silicon Valley in a new article on Medium's business site "Marker" — because working remotely could bring an end to those "ser...
05:19 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Covid-19 Immunity From Antibodies May Last Only Months, New Study Suggests
CNN shares some bad news. "After people are infected with the novel coronavirus, their natural immunity to the virus could decline within months, a new pre-print paper suggests." The paper was co-auth...
04:03 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Burger-Flipping Robot 'Flippy' Gets New Test at White Castle
Remember Flippy, the burger-flipping robot who was fired for being too slow? Since then he's been busy — and his robotic arm just landed a test gig flipping burgers in a White Castle restaurant ...
03:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Face Masks Offer More Protection from Coronavirus Than Many Think
Face masks "offer much more protection against coronavirus than many think," reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate version here ....]There's a common refrain that masks don't protect you; they pro...
02:34 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Is Microsoft Planning To Phase Out Xbox Live Gold?
Yesterday, a Microsoft rep confirmed that the option to purchase 12 months of Xbox Live Gold has been removed from the Microsoft Store. That's exactly a week ahead of the July 23 games presentation, w...
01:00 pm - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot VPN With 'Strict No-Logs Policy' Exposed Millions of User Log Files
New submitter kimmmos shares a report from BetaNews: An unprotected database belonging to the VPN service UFO VPN was exposed online for more than two weeks. Contained within the database were more th...
10:00 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Hybird Solar Converter Harvests Both Sunlight and Heat At 85% Efficiency
Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cos...
07:00 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Netflix's Most Expensive Movie Ever Will Be a $200M James Bond-Level Thriller From the Russo Bros.
The directing duo behind the highest-grossing film of all time are set to break another movie record for Netflix. From a report: This time, brothers and Avengers: Endgame filmmakers Joe and Anthony Ru...
05:00 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Cloudflare's 23-Minute Outage Today Also Took Down Major Web Sites
"Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service," reports TechCrunch:The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 P...
03:30 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot The Entire World's Carbon Emissions Will Finally Be Trackable In Real Time
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: There's an old truism in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the a...
02:03 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot South Korea Commits $61 Billion For 'Net-Zero Society' By 2025
South Korea announced it's investing $61 billion by 2025 to become a "net-zero society," according to a statement from the country's Ministry of Environment, reports a local news source. Interesting E...
01:25 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot CDC: Most COVID-19 Cases In New York City In March Traced To Europe
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Up to 75% of the coronavirus strains circulating in New York City in early March shared genetic similarities with those seen in Europe and other areas of North Americ...
12:45 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot Chrome 84 Arrives With SameSite Cookie Changes, Web OTP API and Web Animations API
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and...
12:02 am - Sat, July 18, 2020
Slashdot The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Will Be Available By Dialing '988' In 2022
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will be available for people in suicidal crisis under a new easier-to-remember phone number in two years. The Verge reports: On Thursday, the Federal Communica...
11:20 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot GitHub Buries Giant Open-Source Archive In An Arctic Vault
Microsoft-owned GitHub has finally moved its snapshot of all active public repositories on the site to a vault in Norway. ZDNet reports: GiHub announced the archiving plan last November and on Februar...
10:40 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Tech Firms Hire 'Red Teams.' Scientists Should, Too
The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today's fights over cancel culture. From a repor...
10:02 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot FCC: Phone Carriers That Profit From Robocalls Could Have All Calls Blocked
"Bad-actor" phone companies that profit from robocalls could be blocked by more legitimate carriers under rules approved unanimously yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: ...
09:20 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot California Orders Online Schooling In Hardest-Hit Counties
California said public schools in the state's hardest hit counties won't be able to open for on-campus classes until the spread of the coronavirus in that area is contained. The order means that stude...
08:43 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Suspect Is Arrested In Grisly Killing of Tech CEO Fahim Saleh
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The former personal assistant of a young tech entrepreneur found decapitated and dismembered in his Manhattan apartment was arrested early ...
08:04 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Russian Hackers Are Linked To Sweeping Bid To Steal Vaccine Data
Russian state intelligence is hacking international research centers that are racing to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the U.K., U.S. and Canadian governments said. From a report: It is unclear whether r...
07:22 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Twitch Tells US Army To Stop Sharing Fake Prize Giveaways That Sent Users To Recruitment Page
Twitch has intervened to stop the US Army using fake prize giveaways on its esports channel to redirect viewers to army recruitment pages. From a report: The practice was brought to light by a report ...
06:43 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot India Tops a Million Coronavirus Cases as Pandemic Hits Villages
India on Friday became the third country in the world to record more than one million coronavirus cases, behind only the United States and Brazil, as infections spread further out into the countryside...
06:04 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Uber Aims To Become a More 'Actively Anti-Racist' Company
Uber on Friday unveiled several "long-term commitments" the ride-hailing company says will help it improve equality and fairness, including doubling Black representation in its leadership and taking s...
05:23 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Cisco Fires Workers for Racial Comments During Diversity Forum
During a series of Cisco online all-hands meetings on race in early June, some workers posted comments in message channels that other staff and company management said were demeaning to Black people, ...
04:47 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot What Twitter's Worst Hack Means For Its Bottom Line
The breach revealed Twitter's engineering prowess and management practices as subpar. Hedge fund Elliott Management can't be happy about its investment. From a report: Even if Twitter's user growth is...
04:08 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Discontinues Xbox One X and Xbox One S Digital Edition Ahead of Series X Launch
Microsoft is officially halting production of its Xbox One X and Xbox One S All-Digital Edition consoles. From a report: "As we ramp into the future with Xbox Series X, we're taking the natural step o...
03:20 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Attorney General Barr Accuses Hollywood, Big Tech of Collaborating with China
U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at Hollywood companies, including Walt Disney on Thursday as well as large technology firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft over company actions with China...
02:41 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Homeland Security Worries Covid-19 Masks Are Breaking Facial Recognition, Leaked Document Shows
While doctors and politicians still struggle to convince Americans to take the barest of precautions against Covid-19 by wearing a mask, the Department of Homeland Security has an opposite concern, ac...
02:00 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Firefox Working on Fixing a One-Year-Old Bug in Its Android App That Keeps Camera Active After Users Have Minimized the App or Locked Their Phone
Mozilla says it's working on fixing a bug in Firefox for Android that keeps the smartphone camera active even after users have moved the browser in the background or the phone screen was locked. From ...
01:00 pm - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at IBM's X-Force security team revealed today that they've obtained roughly five hours of video footage that appears to have been recorded d...
10:00 am - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot British Airways Announces Immediate Retirement of Boeing 747 Fleet
British Airway has announced that it will immediately retire its Boeing 747 fleet following the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The airline was forced to store all of its 28 747-400s due to reduced dem...
07:00 am - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Next Hubble, Delayed Yet Again
The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months. Space.com reports: The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March ...
05:03 am - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Tech Firms Like Facebook Must Restrict Data Sent From EU To US, Court Rules
The European Court of Justice has ruled that the "Privacy Shield" data transfer agreement, which had allowed tech companies to transfer EU user data to the US, failed to adequately protect Europeans' ...
03:53 am - Fri, July 17, 2020
Slashdot Who's Behind Wednesday's Epic Twitter Hack?
Brian Krebs has written a blog post with clues about who may have been behind yesterday's Twitter hack, which had some of the world's most recognizable public figures tweeting out links to bitcoin sca...
03:28 pm - Thu, July 16, 2020
Slashdot Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee To Help Them Hijack Accounts
A Twitter insider was responsible for a wave of high profile account takeovers on Wednesday, according to leaked screenshots obtained by Motherboard and two sources who took over accounts. From a repo...
02:15 pm - Thu, July 16, 2020
Slashdot Chrome 84 Arrives With SameSite Cookie Changes, Web OTP API and Web Animations
An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched Chrome 84 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 84 resumes SameSite cookie changes, includes the Web OTP API and Web Animations API, and r...
02:09 pm - Thu, July 16, 2020
Slashdot DDR5 Memory Specification Released
Marking an important milestone in computer memory development, today the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association is releasing the final specification for its next mainstream memory standard, DDR5 SDR...
12:10 am - Thu, July 16, 2020
Slashdot Deepfake Used To Attack Activist Couple Shows New Disinformation Frontier
An anonymous reader shares a report: Oliver Taylor, a student at England's University of Birmingham, is a twenty-something with brown eyes, light stubble, and a slightly stiff smile. Online profiles d...
11:30 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google Takes on Zoom and Slack By Bundling Video Calls and Chat Into Gmail for Business Users
Google is making its popular Gmail app more of a productivity powerhouse. From a report: The Alphabet subsidiary is incorporating more applications into the business version of Gmail so that users don...
10:49 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Comments on Slashdot
Comments are currently disabled while we perform maintenance. Should be back up and running soon. Thanks.Read more of this story at Slashdot. ...
10:36 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google is Quietly Experimenting With Holographic Glasses and Smart Tattoos
A simple pair of sunglasses that projects holographic icons. A smartwatch that has a digital screen but analog hands. A temporary tattoo that, when applied to your skin, transforms your body into a li...
10:10 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Bank of America, Google, and Red Hat Executives Join OASIS Board of Directors
OASIS, the international standards and open source consortium, this week announced that three new members were elected to its Board of Directors: Jeremy Allison of Google, Rich Bowen of Red Hat, and W...
09:30 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Smokers Quit in Highest Numbers in a Decade
More than one million people have given up smoking since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, a survey for charity Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) suggests. From a report: Of those who had quit in the previo...
08:40 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Several High Profile Twitter Accounts Including Those of Bill Gates and Elon Musk Have Been Hijacked To Tweet Bitcoin Scams
Security researcher Marcus Hutchins reports: A bunch of high profile cryptocurrency Twitter accounts have been hijacked to tweet bitcoin scams. Likely a 3rd party App compromise rather that Twitter it...
08:10 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Apple Wins Fight Over $14.9 Billion Tax Bill in Blow To EU
Apple won its court fight over a record 13 billion-euro ($14.9 billion) Irish tax bill in a crushing blow to European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager's crackdown on preferential fisc...
07:30 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google Invests $4.5 Billion in India's Reliance Jio Platforms
Google has become the latest high-profile firm to back India's Reliance Jio Platforms. From a report: The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.73% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Re...
07:00 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot US Announces Visa Restrictions For Employees of Huawei and Other Chinese Tech Companies
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday announced visa restrictions on employees of Chinese technology companies, including Huawei, in the latest Trump administration move against Beijing. From a ...
06:30 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Secret Trump Order Gives CIA More Powers To Launch Cyberattacks
The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sw...
05:57 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Tech CEO Found Decapitated and Dismembered In His NYC Apartment
According to ABC News, 33-year-old tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh was discovered decapitated and dismembered in his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday. The death was deemed a homicide and no arrests have b...
05:22 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Tech CEO Found Decapitated and Dismembered In His NYC Apartment
According to ABC News, 33-year-old tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh was discovered decapitated and dismembered in his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday. The death was deemed a homicide and no arrested have ...
02:45 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Apple Wins Fight Over $14.9 Billion Tax Bill in Blow To EU
Apple won its court fight over a record 13 billion-euro ($14.9 billion) Irish tax bill in a crushing blow to European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestagerâ(TM)s crackdown on preferen...
02:29 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Secret Trump Order Gives CIA More Powers To Launch Cyberattacks
The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what amounts to a sw...
02:08 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google Invests $4.5 Billion in India's Reliance Jio Platforms
Google has become the latest high-profile firm to back India's Reliance Jio Platforms. The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.73% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Reliance Industri...
02:02 pm - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google Invests $4.5 Billion in India's Reliance Jio Platforms
Google has become the latest high-profile firm to back India's Reliance Jio Platforms. The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.73% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Reliance Industri...
10:00 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Huawei Fights Back
mspohr writes: Looks like Huawei is going to fight back against the U.S. for the sanctions it has imposed on the company... using the U.S. patent system, which recently made some changes to FRAND agre...
07:00 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot SpaceX's Starlink Asks Potential Service Testers For Addresses, Says Private Beta Starts This Summer
A private beta for SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service will kick off this summer, with a "public beta to follow," reads an email sent out to those who've registered their interest in becoming...
03:30 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Samsung: Expect 6G In 2028, Enabling Mobile Holograms and Digital Twins
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: [A]s 5G continues to roll out, 6G research continues, and today top mobile hardware developer Samsung is weighing in with predictions of what's to...
03:30 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Your Car Is Spewing Microplastics That Blow Around the World
rmdingler shares a report: When you drive, tiny bits of plastic fly off your tires and brakes. Now scientists have shown how all that road muck is blowing into environments like the Arctic. When the w...
02:10 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Google Faces Lawsuit Over Tracking In Apps Even When Users Opted Out
Google records what people are doing on hundreds of thousands of mobile apps even when they follow the company's recommended settings for stopping such monitoring, a lawsuit seeking class action statu...
01:30 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot White House Reportedly Orders Hospitals To Bypass CDC During COVID-19 Data Collection
The Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to send coronavirus patient data to a database in Washington, DC as part of a new initiative that may bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prev...
12:50 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Verizon Has Turned To Google Cloud's Contact Center AI To Automate Phone Calls
Verizon has turned to Google Cloud's Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations. The Register reports: The Contact Center AI technology will, we're told, ...
12:10 am - Wed, July 15, 2020
Slashdot Baby Was Infected With Coronavirus In Womb, Study Reports
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers on Tuesday [reported in the journal Nature Communications] strong evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted from a pregn...
11:30 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Google Steers Users To YouTube Over Rivals
A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google gives its online video service YouTube the advantage when choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web. From the report: Take a cl...
10:50 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Is It Time To Kill the Penny?
COVID-19 has constipated the economy and prompted the U.S. Mint to cut back on coin production to keep its workers safe. As NPR's Greg Rosalsky writes, this could be a rallying cry for a long-running ...
10:10 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot German Court Bans Tesla Ad Statements Related To Autonomous Driving
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany has banned Tesla from repeating what a court says are misleading advertising statements relating to the capabilities of the firm's driver assi...
09:30 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot IBM Job Ad Calls For a Minimum 12 Years' Experience With Kubernetes -- Which is Six Years Old
IBM's Global Technology Services has posted a job ad calling for candidates with a "minimum 12+ years' experience in Kubernetes administration and management." From a report: Which is a little odd bec...
08:35 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Trump Administration Rescinds Rule on Foreign Students
Facing eight federal lawsuits and opposition from hundreds of universities, the Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer or leave th...
08:10 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Warns of a 17-Year-Old 'Wormable' Bug
Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now on...
07:30 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot China Will Sanction Lockheed Martin Over Arms Sales To Taiwan
China said on Tuesday it would place sanctions on Lockheed Martin for its involvement in arms sales to Taiwan, a move that could further escalate tensions between Beijing and Washington. hackingbear w...
06:50 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate Plan
Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Tuesday a new plan to spend $2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building sectors, part...
06:10 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Lenovo and AMD Launch Threadripper Pro CPU To Take on Intel Xeon
AMD finally brings a workstation-class -- in other words, security-conscious -- processor to challenge the Intel Xeon on the desktop with its Ryzen Threadripper Pro. With up to 64 cores, the pro versi...
05:33 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Hundreds of Hyperpartisan Sites Are Masquerading as Local News
The growth of partisan media masquerading as state and local reporting is a troubling trend we've seen emerge amid the financial declines of local news organizations. But what do these outlets mean fo...
04:46 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Israeli Court Rules NSO Group Can Continue Exporting Spyware
The infamous spyware company NSO Group scored a major win in what critics are calling a "disgraceful ruling" in an Israeli court this week. From a report: The court ruled that NSO can keep exporting i...
04:11 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Adds Support For Custom '' Email Addresses in Office 365
Microsoft is adding support for custom email addressing to Office 365 email services, a feature it hopes to complete in Q3 2020. From a report: Custom email addresses are an optional feature that some...
03:23 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Introduces Dash Cart, Essentially an Amazon Go Store on Wheels
Amazon just reinvented the lowly shopping cart. The company on Tuesday unveiled the Amazon Dash Cart, which is infused with weight sensors and cameras that allow it to scan your items as you're placin...
02:43 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot UK Bans Huawei From 5G Network, Raising Tensions With China
Britain announced on Tuesday that it would ban equipment from the Chinese technology giant Huawei from the country's high-speed wireless network, a victory for the Trump administration and a reversal ...
02:01 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Google Is in Advanced Talks To Invest $4 Billion in Jio Platforms
Google is in advanced talks to buy a $4 billion stake in Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's technology venture, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, seeking to join...
01:00 pm - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Porsche Found a Way To 3D-Print Lightweight Pistons That Add More Horsepower
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: With select bucket seats from the 911 and 718 as well as various classic car parts -- including clutch release levers for the 959 -- already being p...
10:00 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Desert Quakes May Have Boosted Chances of 'Big One' Striking California
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A pair of earthquakes that struck the remote California desert 1 year ago have raised the risk of 'the big one' hitting Southern California, accordi...
07:00 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Enigma Code-Breaking Machine Rebuilt At Cambridge
Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer -- an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of G...
05:17 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Grant Imahara, Host of 'MythBusters' and 'White Rabbit Project,' Dies At 49
Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer and roboticist who hosted the popular science show MythBusters and Netflix's White Rabbit Project, has died suddenly following a brain aneurysm. He was 49. From T...
03:30 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise But Keep Your Window Open
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was...
02:02 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Sustainable Engineers At Kenoteq Are Reinventing the Brick
Engineers from Kenoteq are working to reinvent the humble clay-fired brick, which has remained largely the same for thousands of years and causes significant environmental problems. Not only are the m...
01:25 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot California Investigating Google For Potential Antitrust Violations
California has opened its own antitrust probe into Google, leaving just one state that has yet to do so. "In September, attorneys general from 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia annou...
12:45 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot US Threatens To Restrict WeChat Following TikTok Backlash
Amid intense scrutiny over TikTok as a potential national security risk in the U.S., WeChat, the essential tool for Chinese people's day-to-day life, is also taking heat from Washington. TechCrunch re...
12:02 am - Tue, July 14, 2020
Slashdot Johnnie Walker Maker Creates Plastic-Free Paper-Based Spirits Bottle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The multinational drinks company Diageo says it has created the world's first paper-based spirits bottle that is 100% plastic-free. The company s...
11:20 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Self-Driving Startup Built a 'Car Without Wheels' For Remote Driving
Self-driving startup Voyage built a physical "Telessist Pod" with software that allows a remote operator to give instructions to a self-driving car.Iwastheone shares a report from Ars Technica "For al...
10:40 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Ubisoft Is Giving Everyone 'Watch Dogs 2' After a Giveaway Glitch
Ubisoft announced on Monday that it will give away Watch Dogs 2 for free after a giveaway glitch made it harder for fans to get copies than they initially intended. Uproxx reports: Sunday's Ubisoft Fo...
10:03 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot US Utilities Are Cleaning Up Their Act With Emissions Down 8%
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. utilities are producing less greenhouse gases as they continue to shift away from coal. Carbon dioxide emissions from the 100 biggest U.S. elec...
09:25 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Google Announces 100,000 Scholarships for Online Certificates in Data Analytics, Project Management and UX
Google today announced three new online certificate programs in data analytics, project management and user experience design. From a report: The certificates are created and taught by Google employee...
08:44 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft's AI Generates Voices That Sing in Chinese and English
Researchers at Zhejiang University and Microsoft claim they've developed an AI system -- DeepSinger -- that can generate singing voices in multiple languages by training on data from music websites. F...
08:05 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Flight Simulator Landing on Windows 10 Next Month
Fans of Microsoft's famous Flight Sim won't have long to wait until the latest incarnation arrives. From a report: This promises to be the most detailed and authentic version to date, with incredibly ...
07:28 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot The Math of Social Distancing Is a Lesson in Geometry
Sphere packing might seem like a topic only a mathematician could love. Who else could get excited about finding the most efficient way to arrange circles in the plane, or spheres in space? But right ...
06:50 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic
Type a query into the Google search bar on a smartphone and there's a good chance the results will be dominated by advertising. From a report: That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, r...
06:10 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Chipmaker Analog Devices To Buy Rival Maxim For About $21 Billion
Hammeh writes: Semiconductor maker Analog Devices said on Monday it would buy rival Maxim Integrated Products for about $21 billion in the largest U.S. deal this year, aiming to boost its market share...
05:25 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot DNC and RNC Warn Campaigns About Using TikTok
The Democratic and Republican national committees have warned their staffs about using the Chinese-owned app TikTok. From a report: The Democratic National Committee warned Democratic campaigns, commi...
04:50 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Worked With Google To Bring Progressive Web Apps To the Play Store
Microsoft has been collaborating with Google to ensure that their tools interoperate and can help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store. From a report: "We're glad to an...
04:08 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Apple Puts $400 Million Toward Affordable Housing
Apple announced Monday that it is allocating $400 million toward affordable housing and homeowner assistance programs in California this year, as part of the $2.5 billion commitment announced in Novem...
03:32 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Bottleneck for US Coronavirus Response: The Fax Machine
Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation's largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the vi...
02:43 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot The Data-Driven Tech Engine at the Heart of Hollywood's Content Factories
America's studios, creators and marketers are relying, more than ever, on digital platforms that allow them to gauge what audiences like-- and would like to see more of. From a report: They're not jus...
02:01 pm - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Google To Invest $10B in India
Google said today it'll invest about $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years. The company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that money will be divided into investment equity investments, partn...
11:34 am - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Metronome or Music Computer? Music Geek Tries the Raspberry Pi/Linux-Based 'Organelle'
navindra (Slashdot reader #7,571) is a professional coder and an amateur musician. He writes: Music and technology have always been intertwined and this has never been truer with computer technology. ...
07:44 am - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot A Volunteer Supercomputer Team is Hunting for Covid Clues
The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according...
04:06 am - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Can Tesla Build Cheaper Electric Cars With Advanced (and Cobalt-Free) Batteries?
"One of the main reasons we're not all driving electric vehicles is the price," argues a transportation writer in Forbes — explaining how Tesla hopes to finally change that:The company is placin...
01:34 am - Mon, July 13, 2020
Slashdot Data Scientist Tries AI/Human Collaboration For Audio-Visual Art
"Swirls of color and images blend together as faces, scenery, objects, and architecture transform to music." That's how AI training company Lionbridge is describing Neural Synesthesia. Slashdot reader...
10:44 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Cancer Patient Complains: My Facebook Feed Is Full of 'Alternative Care' Ads
The author of an opinion piece in the New York Times describes what happened after sharing their cancer diagnosis on Facebook:Since then, my Facebook feed has featured ads for "alternative cancer care...
09:43 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot WSJ: 'Quit Chrome. Safari and Edge Are Just Better Browsers'
The Wall Street Journal's senior personal tech columnist just published an article urging readers to "quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers." It begins with the reporter pretending to ...
08:05 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Should We Plan For a Future With Fewer Cars?
The New York Times ran a detailed piece (with some neat interactive graphics) arguing "cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is ...
06:34 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Announces It Won't Be the Ones Building PHP 8.0 for Windows
Today I learned that Microsoft "has been providing support for the development and building of the PHP programming language on Windows," according to Bleeping Computer. "This support includes developi...
05:35 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Linus Torvalds Hopes Intel's AVX-512 'Dies A Painful Death'
"Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors," reports Phoronix:In a mailing list discussion stemming from the...
04:34 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot iPhone User Sues Microsoft's LinkedIn For Spying Through Apple's 'Clipboard'
"Microsoft's LinkedIn was sued by a New York-based iPhone user on Friday for allegedly reading and diverting users' sensitive content from Apple Inc's Universal Clipboard application," reports Reuters...
03:34 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Delays Reported For Possible Covid-Inoculating Plasma Shot
"It might be the next best thing to a coronavirus vaccine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Scientists have devised a way to use the antibody-rich blood plasma of Covid-19 survivors for an upper-arm in...
01:34 pm - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Wells Fargo Tells Employees: Delete TikTok from Company Phones
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:Wells Fargo does not want TikTok on its employees' phones. According to The Information, the financial institution sent its employees a note, telling them to remove...
11:34 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot TIOBE's Surprisingly Popular Programming Languages: R, Go, Perl, Scratch, Rust, and Visual Basic 6
The R programming language is experiencing a surge in popularity "in the slipstream of Python," according to this month's TIOBE index, leaping into the top ten. "For historical context, we wrote of R'...
09:04 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Newly-Discovered Comet Neowise: Now Visible at Dawn and Dusk
"A newly-discovered comet is giving skywatchers quite the show during the month of July," reports CBS News:Astronomers discovered the comet, known as Comet C2020 F3 NEOWISE, back in March. It was name...
07:54 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Is Our Solar System's Ninth Planet Actually a Primordial Black Hole?
An anonymous reader quotes Forbes:Conventional theory has it that Planet 9 — our outer solar system's hypothetical 9th planet — is merely a heretofore undetected planet, likely captured by...
04:54 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Disney World Reopened Today in Florida, Joining Sea World and Universal
"Cinderella Castle has sat silent for 116 days..." reported CNN Business. But no more — at least, not at Disney World, which today began its grand reopening:"It's three times the size of Disneyl...
04:24 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot Rust Programming Language To Use 'Allowlist' in Place of 'Whitelist'
"Other terms are more inclusive and precise," reads a merged Pull request for the Rust programming language titled "Avoid 'whitelist'." "This doesn't look like it affects any 'user visible' flags or a...
01:34 am - Sun, July 12, 2020
Slashdot The Linux Team Approves New Neutral Terminology
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Linus Torvalds approved on Friday a new and more inclusive terminology for the Linux kernel code and documentation. Going forward, Linux developers have been asked to...
11:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Why Did a Tech Executive Install 1,000 Security Cameras Around San Francisco?
The New York Times explains why Chris Larsen installed over a thousand surveillance cameras around San Francisco to monitor 135 city blocks:It sounds sinister. A soft-spoken cryptocurrency mogul is pa...
10:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Spintronics Researchers Demonstrate How to Process Magnetic Vortices for Data Storage
Research continues in a field which involves using the spin and magnetism of electrons in solid-state devices — spintronics. hackingbear shared this report from Nature:Electric control of magnet...
09:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot TikTok Pulls Out of Hong Kong
AmiMoJo quotes TechCrunch: TikTok announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national sec...
08:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot The F-16's Replacement Won't Have a Pilot At All
"The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21," reports Aviation Week. "By fiscal 2023, the Air Force ...
07:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Right to Repair Advocates Accuse Medical Device Manufacturers of Profiteering
A new Motherboard article interviews William, a ventilator refurbisher who's repaired at least 70 broken ventilators that he's bought on eBay and from other secondhand websites, then sold to U.S. hosp...
06:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot 'Guilty' Verdict for Russian Who Stole 117M Dropbox and LinkedIn Login Codes in 2012
In 2012 "Russian hacker" Yevgeniy Nikulin breached the internal networks of LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring, and then sold their user databases on the black market, reports ZDNet. (He stole 117 mill...
05:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot AI Site Claims Simulated Conversations With Famous Dead Scientists
Slashdot reader shirappu writes: AI|Writer is an experiment in which artificial intelligence is used to simulate both real and fictitious famous personalities through written correspondence. Users can...
04:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Terry Pratchett's Earliest Stories To Be Published In September
Long-time Slashdot reader sjritt00 writes:A final collection of Terry Pratchett's early stories will be published in September as The Time-Travelling Caveman. These stories appeared in the Bucks Free ...
03:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Is Twitter Shifting the Balance of Power From Companies to Their Employees?
Last week leaked audio surfaced of investors arguing that journalists have too much power. But the Verge's Silicon Valley editor asks, "What if you take the whole discussion of "tech versus journalism...
02:34 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot DuckDuckGo Restored in India, Responds to Favicon Concerns
DuckDuckGo made the news twice this week. First its service was reinstated across India last Saturday, after being unreachable for nearly three days, for reasons which remain unclear. "We have contact...
01:00 pm - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Apple To Teach Teachers To Teach Coding For Free
theodp writes: From the Home Office in Cupertino: "Apple today announced a new set of tools to help educators teach coding to students from grade school to college. In addition to significant enhancem...
10:00 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot US Secret Service Creates New Cyber Fraud Task Force
The U.S. Secret Service announced the creation of the Cyber Fraud Task Force (CFTF) after the merger of its Financial Crimes Task Forces (FCTFs) and Electronic Crimes Task Forces (ECTFs) into a single...
07:00 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot 'Broken Heart Syndrome' Has Increased During COVID-19 Pandemic, Small Study Suggests
Rick Schumann writes: Researchers at a Cleveland clinic performed a study with 1,914 patients into a phenomenon called "Broken Heart Syndrome," where someone can be experiencing heart attack-like symp...
03:30 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Police Surveilled Protests With Help From Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests t...
02:30 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Canadian Genetic Non-Discrimination Act Upheld
Long-time Slashdot reader kartis writes: Canada's Supreme Court upheld the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act (GINA) which prohibits under criminal penalty, employers or insurers from demanding or using g...
01:50 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Tyson Bets On Robots To Tackle Meat Industry's Worker Shortage
At Tyson's 26,000-square-foot, multi-million dollar Manufacturing Automation Center near its headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, the company will apply the latest advances in machine learning to mea...
01:30 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Apple Supplier Foxconn To Invest $1 Billion In India
Foxconn plans to invest up to $1 billion to expand a factory in southern India where the Taiwanese contract manufacturer assembles Apple iPhones. Fox Business reports: The move, the scale of which has...
01:10 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio
Julianne Pepitone from IEEE Spectrum writes about the uncertain future of ham radio. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Will the amateur airwaves fall silent? Since the dawn of radio, amateur oper...
12:25 am - Sat, July 11, 2020
Slashdot Charter's Hidden 'Broadcast TV' Fee Now Adds $197 a Year To Cable Bills
Charter is raising the "Broadcast TV" fee it imposes on cable plans from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August. "Charter has raised the fee repeatedly -- it stood at $9.95 in early 2019 before a...
11:55 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Android 10 Had the Fastest Adoption Rate of Any Version of Android Yet
Google announced that Android is seeing the fastest adoption rates of any version of Android. The Verge reports: According to Google, Android 10 was installed on 100 million devices five months after ...
11:25 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Considers Political-Ad Blackout Ahead of US Election
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook is considering imposing a ban on political ads on its social network in the days leading up to the U.S. election in November, according to ...
10:45 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Google Bans Stalkerware Ads
Google announced plans this week to ban ads that promote stalkerware, spyware, and other forms of surveillance technology that can be used to track other persons without their specific consent. From a...
10:04 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Delays Next Video Game Half a Year After Latest One Flops
Following scathing reviews of a computer game it released in May, Amazon.com is delaying its next big-budget game by at least six months. From a report: The decision represents another setback for the...
09:24 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Signal's New PIN Feature Worries Cybersecurity Experts
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Vice: Ever since NSA leaker Edward Snowden said "use Signal, use Tor," the end-to-end encrypted chat app has been a favorite of people who care about privacy...
08:45 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Apple Advises Against MacBook Camera Covers Due To Display Cracking
Apple, in a new support document, is warning users against closing their MacBook lids with a cover over the camera. From a report: Placing a cover, sticker or tape over a laptop camera is a practice a...
08:05 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot France To Introduce Controversial Age Verification System For Adult Websites
The French Parliament unanimously agreed this week to introduce a nationwide age verification system for pornography websites, months after President Emmanuel Macron pledged to protect children agains...
07:25 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot US Finalizing Federal Contract Ban For Companies That Use Huawei, Others
The Trump administration plans to finalize regulations this week that will bar the U.S. government from buying goods or services from any company that uses products from five Chinese companies includi...
06:45 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Nearly 70,000 Tech Startup Employees Have Lost Their Jobs Since March
Technology startups have been laying off tens of thousands of workers to cope with the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, potentially blunting a key innovation pipeline for the enterprise i...
06:04 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Scientists Make Precise Gene Edits To Mitochondrial DNA For First Time
A peculiar bacterial enzyme has allowed researchers to achieve what even the popular CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing system couldn't manage: targeted changes to the genomes of mitochondria, cells' crucial ...
05:22 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Makes Employees Delete TikTok From Phones, Citing Security Risk
Amazon has asked its employees to delete the Chinese-owned video app TikTok from their cellphones, citing "security risks," according to a company email sent on Friday. From a report: In the email, wh...
05:22 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Makes Employees Delete TikTok From Phones, Citing Security Risk [Update]
Amazon has asked its employees to delete the Chinese-owned video app TikTok from their cellphones, citing "security risks," according to a company email sent on Friday. From a report: In the email, wh...
04:44 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot A Moment of Clarity Regarding the Raison d'Etre for the App Store
John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Feel free to file Google's release this week of an update to their iPad Gmail app with support for split-screen multitasking under "better late than never," but...
04:04 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Apple Reaches New Stage in Development of AR Devices
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted key parts of Apple's business, but it hasn't derailed the company's plans to build what could be its next important technology platform -- augmented reality devi...
03:21 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Should We Be Drinking Less?
Can a daily drink or two lead to better health? For many years, the federal government's influential dietary guidelines implied as much, saying there was evidence that moderate drinking could lower th...
02:45 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Asia IT Giant's CEO Warns Trump's Visa Curbs Will Cost US
The chief executive officer of Asia's largest IT services firm warned that a U.S. freeze on thousands of employment visas will only raise costs for American corporations like Wall Street banks, auto m...
02:08 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Chicago Police Department Arrest API Shutdown is Its Own Kind of 'Cover Up'
Asraa Mustufa and David Eads, reporting for Chicago Reporter: With Chicago reeling this week from a bloody July 4 weekend that saw more than 80 shootings claim the lives of at least 17 people, includi...
01:00 pm - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Worldwide PC Shipments Grew Due To Work-From-Home Arrangements
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The PC industry bounced back in the second quarter of 2020 after its weakest quarter in years mostly due to shelter-in-place orders prompted by the c...
10:00 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Giant Clams Manipulate Light To Assist Their Symbiotic Partner
Special cells in giant clams shift the wavelength of light to protect them from UV radiation and increase the photosynthetic activity of their symbionts, shows research from King Abdullah University o...
07:00 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Jack Dorsey Donates $3 Million To US Mayors For Universal Basic Income Pilot Programs In 15 Cities
Jack Dorsey, the billionaire CEO of Twitter and Square, is donating $3 million to help fund Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), a new coalition of 15 mayors across the country who want to explore th...
03:30 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Power Pioneer Invents New Battery That's 90% Cheaper Than Lithium-Ion
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who ...
02:30 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Will Pay $135,000 To Settle Alleged US Sanction Violations
In a statement (PDF) issued this week, the U.S. Treasury Department notes that Amazon has agreed to pay $134,523 to settle potential liability over alleged sanctions violations. TechCrunch reports: Th...
01:50 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot More Pre-Installed Malware Has Been Found In Budget US Smartphones
Pre-installed malware has been discovered on another budget handset connected to Assurance Wireless by Virgin Mobile. ZDNet reports: Back in January, cybersecurity researchers from Malwarebytes discov...
01:10 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot TikTok Mulls Changes to Business to Distance Itself From China
Bytedance said it's evaluating changes to the corporate structure of its TikTok business as U.S. concerns grow over the parent company's Chinese origins. Bloomberg reports: Executives are discussing o...
12:30 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot xMEMS Announces World's First Monolithic MEMS Speaker
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: In the last few years, semiconductor manufacturing has become more prevalent and accessible, with MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) technology n...
12:01 am - Fri, July 10, 2020
Slashdot Indian Army Personnel Banned From Using 89 Apps
schwit1 writes: Indian troops will not be allowed to use some of the world's most well-known applications. The move goes further than for civilians when the government banned 59 apps, including TikTok...
11:20 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Apple's ARM-Based Macs To Support Thunderbolt
tlhIngan writes: For those worried that the transition Apple is doing to ARM-based Macs will drop Thunderbolt, Apple has stated that they will continue to support Thunderbolt. This was a worry since T...
10:40 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Portland Approves 10% Cap On Fees That Food Delivery Apps Can Charge Restuarants
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: The Portland City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to make it illegal for third-party food delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub to colle...
10:05 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot AI Researchers Create Testing Tool To Find Bugs in NLP From Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
AI researchers have created a language-model testing tool that discovers major bugs in commercially available cloud AI offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yesterday, a paper detailing the Ch...
09:25 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Chrome and Firefox Are Getting Support For the New AVIF Image Format
The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image form...
08:45 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot TikTok Traders Are Pumping Joke Cryptocurrency Dogecoin -- and the Price is Up 95%
Day traders on viral video app TikTok are encouraging people to speculate on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. Based on an old Internet meme -- an overly sincere and whimsically grammar-challenge...
08:03 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Google Campus Security Singled Out Black, Latinx Employees
Google's campus security system subjected Black and Latinx workers to bias and prompted complaints to management, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, leading t...
07:24 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Australia, UK Open Probe Into Clearview Over Data Privacy
Australian and British privacy regulators opened a joint probe into Clearview AI, saying they want to examine how the company's facial-recognition technology uses people's data, just days after the co...
06:45 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Will Astronauts Ever Visit Gas Giants Like Jupiter?
Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. From a report: Jupiter, like the other gas giants, doesn't have a rocky surface, but tha...
06:04 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Apple Releases iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 To Public Beta Testers
Apple today seeded the first public betas of upcoming iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 updates to its public beta testing group, two weeks after first providing the updates to developers after the WW...
05:25 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Your Next Samsung Phone May Not Come With a Charger in the Box
Days after it was rumored that Apple might not ship a charger with its next iPhone, Samsung is copying that, too. According to a new report from South Korea, future Samsung phones may not ship with a ...
04:46 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Apple's UK Stores Paid $7.7M in Tax Despite $1.7B in Sales
The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which ope...
04:04 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Musk Says Tesla Is 'Very Close' To Developing Fully Autonomous Vehicles
Tesla's Elon Musk said the carmaker is on the verge of developing technology to render its vehicles fully capable of driving themselves, repeating a claim he's made for years but been unable to achiev...
03:22 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft's New KDP Tech Blocks Malware By Making Parts of the Windows Kernel Read-Only
Microsoft today published technical details about a new security feature that will soon be part of Windows 10. From a report: Named Kernel Data Protection (KDP), Microsoft says this feature will block...
02:41 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot UK Universities Comply With China's Internet Restrictions
UK universities are testing a new online teaching link for students in China -- which will require course materials to comply with Chinese restrictions on the internet. From a report: It enables stude...
02:00 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Smartwatch Hack Could Trick Patients To 'Take Pills' With Spoofed Alerts
Security researchers say a smartwatch, popular with the elderly and dementia patients, could have been tricked into letting an attacker easily take control of the device. From a report: These watches ...
01:00 pm - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot New Study Detects Ringing of the Global Atmosphere
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A ...
10:00 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Spreading Rock Dust On Fields Could Remove Vast Amounts of CO2 From Air
Spreading rock dust on farmland could suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, according to the first detailed global analysis of the technique. The Guardian reports: The chemi...
07:00 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Will Require Third-Party Sellers To Disclose Names, Addresses
Amazon announced a new policy Wednesday requiring third-party sellers in its marketplace to publicly display their names and addresses starting Sept. 1. Geekwire reports: The disclosure is already req...
03:30 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Shock-Dissipating Fractal Cubes Could Forge High-Tech Armor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Tiny, 3-D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially ...
02:02 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot The Far Side Returns After 25 Years, and It's All Digital
Gary Larson has released new comics for the The Far Side, the first strips since January 1995. Larson does however caution that this is "not a resurrection of The Far Side daily cartoons." He adds: "I...
01:25 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Police Are Buying Access To Hacked Website Data
Some companies are selling government agencies access to data stolen from websites in the hope that it can generate investigative leads, with the data including passwords, email addresses, IP addresse...
12:45 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot Over 100 Wi-Fi Routers Fail Major Security Test -- Protect Yourself Now
schwit1 shares a report from Tom's Guide: Using its own analytical software, the [Fraunhofer Institute] tested the most recently available firmware for 117 home Wi-Fi models currently sold in Europe, ...
12:02 am - Thu, July 9, 2020
Slashdot China's Great Firewall Descends On Hong Kong Internet Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: At midnight on Tuesday, the Great Firewall of China, the vast apparatus that limits the country's internet, appeared to descend on Hong Kong. Unv...
11:20 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Nvidia Eclipses Intel As Most Valuable US Chipmaker
Nvidia has overtaken Intel for the first time as the most valuable U.S. chipmaker. Reuters reports: In a semiconductor industry milestone, Nvidia's shares rose 2.3% in afternoon trading on Wednesday t...
10:40 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 865: Breaking the 3GHz Threshold
Today, Qualcomm is announcing an update to its extremely successful Snapdragon 865 SoC: the new Snapdragon 865+. AnandTech reports: The new Snapdragon 865+ is a new binned variant of the [Snapdragon 8...
10:02 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Google Open Sources Trademarks With the Open Usage Commons
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Google has announced it is launching a new organization, Open Usage Commons (OUC), to host the trademarks for three of its most important new open-sourc...
09:25 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Google Scrapped Cloud Initiative in China, 'Sensitive Markets'
Google abandoned plans to offer a major new cloud service in China and other politically sensitive countries due in part to concerns over geopolitical tensions and the pandemic, Blloomberg reported We...
08:45 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Robinhood Has Lured Young Traders, Sometimes With Devastating Results
Robinhood users buy and sell the riskiest financial products and do so more frequently than customers at other retail brokerage firms, but their inexperience can lead to staggering losses. From a repo...
08:05 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Thousands of Contracts Highlight Quiet Ties Between Big Tech and US Military
Over the past two years, thousands of tech company employees have taken a stand: they do not want their labor and technical expertise to be used for projects with the military or law enforcement agenc...
07:24 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Warning of Serious Brain Disorders in People With Mild Coronavirus Symptoms
Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned. From a report:...
06:46 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Too Little, Too Late: Facebook's Oversight Board Won't Launch Until 'Late Fall'
Facebook has announced that the limp "Oversight Board" intended to help make difficult content and policy decisions will not launch until "late fall," which is to say, almost certainly after the elect...
06:01 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Mozilla Suspends Firefox Send Service While It Addresses Malware Abuse
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has temporarily suspended the Firefox Send file-sharing service as the organization investigates reports of abuse from malware operators and while it adds a "Report...
05:24 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Google and Canonical Bring Flutter Apps To Linux and the Snap Store
An anonymous reader writes: Google is partnering with the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical to bring Linux support to its open source UI framework Flutter. Today's Linux alpha announcement also means F...
04:47 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot MIT and Harvard Sue DHS and ICE Over International Student Rule
Shag writes: Two days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said international students must leave the US if their fall classes will be taught entirely online, MIT and Harvard are suing I...
04:13 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Brooks Brothers Files For Bankruptcy
Brooks Brothers, the 200-year-old menswear retailer that has dressed 40 US presidents and unofficially became the outfitter of Wall Street bankers, has filed for bankruptcy. From a report: The private...
03:22 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Twitter is Working on a Subscription Platform Codenamed Gryphon
Twitter is working on a new subscription platform under the codename Gryphon, according to two online job postings. From a report: A remote contractor position listed on LinkedIn is seeking a backend ...
02:41 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Intel Unveils the Thunderbolt 4 Spec, Debuting in PCs in the Fall
Intel unveiled Thunderbolt 4 on Wednesday, the next iteration of the I/O specification that provides a high-speed peripheral bus to docks, displays, external storage and eGPUs for PCs. Rather than inc...
02:07 pm - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Linux Company SUSE Outbids Competitors for Fast-growing Startup Rancher Labs
SUSE, a Linux distribution company controlled by private equity firm EQT, has agreed to acquire Rancher Labs, a start-up with technology that helps organizations run software in virtual containers acr...
10:00 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Zoom Offering Hardware As a Service Offering
Zoom is teaming up with four video conferencing hardware makers to launch Zoom Hardware as a Service, designed to make Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone more available to enterprises. ZDNet reports: The hardw...
07:00 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot WHO To Review Evidence of Airborne Transmission of Coronavirus
After hundreds of experts urged the World Health Organization to review mounting scientific research, the agency acknowledged on Tuesday that airborne transmission of the coronavirus may be a threat i...
03:30 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot City Builds Open-Access Broadband Network With Google Fiber As Its First ISP
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google Fiber's wireline broadband is expanding to a new city for the first time in several years as part of a public-private partnership to build...
02:03 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Security Cameras Can Tell Burglars When You're Not Home, Study Shows
schwit1 shares a report from CNN: Some popular home security cameras could allow would-be burglars to work out when you've left the building, according to a study published Monday. Researchers found t...
01:30 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot AMD Launches Ryzen 3000XT Series CPUs At Higher Clock Speeds To Battle Intel
MojoKid writes: Last month, AMD made its Ryzen 3000XT series processors official, after weeks of leaks and speculation. Ryzen 3000XT series processors are tweaked versions of the original 3000X series...
01:09 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Mathematician Ronald Graham Dies At 84
The American Mathematical Society has announced the passing of Ronald Graham, "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years." He died July...
12:45 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Cops Seize Server That Hosted BlueLeaks, DDoSecrets Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Authorities in Germany have seized a server used by the organization that published a trove of US police internal documents commonly known as Blue...
12:02 am - Wed, July 8, 2020
Slashdot Only 9% of Visitors Give GDPR Consent To Be Tracked
Marko Saric, a digital marketing consultant and blogger, conducted his own experiment to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner and grant GDPR consent to their information being co...
11:25 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Nokia To Add Open Interfaces To Its Telecom Equipment
Nokia has become the first major telecom equipment maker to commit to adding open interfaces in its products that will allow mobile operators to build networks that are not tied to a vendor. Reuters r...
11:03 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Boycott Leaders 'Disappointed' After Meeting With Zuckerberg, Sandberg
Leaders from four of the organizations spearheading the #StopHateforProfit campaign sat down with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox today to discuss the demands of a...
10:45 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Brings Android OS Development for Surface Duo In-house With Movial Acquisition
Microsoft is forming a team internally under the Microsoft Devices division that will handle the development of the Android OS for Surface Duo going forward. Windows Central: According to my sources, ...
10:05 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Trump Administration Begins Formal Withdrawal From WHO
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a senior administration official confirm...
09:25 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot 7th Former eBay Employee Charged In Cyberstalking Campaign Targeting Natick Couple
A seventh former eBay employee is now facing federal charges in connection with a cyberstalking campaign that allegedly targeted a Natick couple who wrote critical content about the company in its new...
08:43 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot EPA Approves Two Lysol Products as the First To Effectively Kill Novel Coronavirus on Surfaces
The US Environmental Protection Agency has approved two Lysol products as effective against the novel coronavirus when used on hard, non-porous surfaces. From a report: Lysol Disinfectant Spray and Ly...
08:05 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Will Axe Control Panel From Windows 10
Microsoft seems to be getting a kick out seeing users struggle to find Windows 10 features these days. After moving the Fresh Start feature in the latest version, 2004, and reducing the number of days...
07:25 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Walmart's Amazon Prime Competitor Will Launch This Month
Amazon may have a 15-year head start, but Walmart is close to finally unveiling its own membership program that it hopes will eventually become an alternative to Amazon Prime. From a report: Walmart p...
06:45 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Why Time Feels So Weird in 2020
Some days seem to pass very slowly while some weeks, and even months, fly by. A set of simple perception tests illustrate some factors that can distort our sense of time.Read more of this story at Sla...
06:05 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Billionaire-Backed Code.org Received $1-2 Million Federal PPP Loan
theodp writes: Code.org's $10+ million "Diamond" supporters include Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Infosys. Its $3+ million "Platinum" supporters include Google, the Gates Foundation, and the Ballme...
05:28 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot US is 'Looking at' Banning TikTok and Chinese Social Media Apps, Pompeo Says
The U.S. is "looking at" banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News. From a report: His comments come amid rising tensions between the U.S. and Ch...
04:46 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro Tests Positive for Covid-19 After Months of Dismissing the Seriousness of the Virus
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for Covid-19, following months of downplaying the virus. From a report: Bolsonaro himself announced the result, speaking on Brazilian TV channels...
04:07 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Seizes Six Domains Used in COVID-19 Phishing Operations
Microsoft has obtained a court order this month allowing the company to seize control of six domains that were used in phishing operations against Office 365 customers, including in campaigns that lev...
03:33 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Exec Peggy Johnson Joins Troubled Augmented Reality Startup Magic Leap as CEO
Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson will join Magic Leap as CEO in August, the startup announced Tuesday. From a report: Johnson joins the augmented reality start-up after leading Microsoft's M&A st...
02:43 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Alphabet's Loon Launches Its Balloon-Powered Kenyan Internet Service
Alphabet's Loon has officially begun operating its commercial internet service in Kenya. This is the first large-scale commercial offering that makes use of Loon's high-altitude balloons, which essent...
02:03 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Big Tech Faceoff With China Risks Sparking Exodus From Hong Kong
Facebook, Google and Twitter -- all of which are blocked in the mainland -- are now headed toward a showdown with China that could end up making Hong Kong feel more like Beijing. From a report: Hours ...
01:00 pm - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot US Online Grocery Sales Hit Record $7.2 Billion In June
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Despite the slow reopening of the U.S. economy over the past several weeks, online grocery shopping is continuing to reach ever-higher numbers as A...
10:00 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Hackers Are Exploiting a 5-Alarm Bug In Networking Equipment
Andy Greenberg writes via Wired: Late last week, government agencies, including the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team and Cyber Command, sounded the alarm about a particularly nasty vuln...
07:00 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Moon's Metal-Rich Craters Challenge Popular Theories About Its Origin
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The most popular theory of the moon's origins contends the satellite was formed when a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, vaporizing large portions of Earth's upp...
03:30 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Giant Flywheel Project In Scotland Could Prevent UK Blackouts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A giant flywheel in north-east Scotland could soon help to prevent blackouts across Britain by mimicking the effect of a power station but withou...
01:30 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft's Next Xbox Series X Game Showcase Coming July 23
Microsoft will be holding its next Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, the company announced today. Ars Technica reports: Unlike Microsoft's May promotional event, which focused on third-party launch titl...
12:50 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot New H.266 VCC Codec Up To 50% More Efficient Than Previous Standard
The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute on Tuesday announced the H.266 Versatile Video Coding codec, which will power more data-efficient video capture and transmission on future iPhones. AppleInsider...
12:30 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Is Interested In Acquiring Warner Bros. Gaming Unit
According to a new report from The Information, Microsoft is interested in bidding on Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, which is currently a division of AT&T. From a report: Warner Bros. Int...
12:10 am - Tue, July 7, 2020
Slashdot How Google Docs Became the Social Media of the Resistance
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to fa...
11:34 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Foreign Students Must Leave the US If Their Universities Transition To Online-Only Learning
ugen shares a report from Reuters: Foreign students must leave the United States if their school's classes this fall will be taught completely online or transfer to another school with in-person instr...
10:50 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot PlayStation's Secret Weapon: A Nearly All-Automated Factory
According to Nikkei Asian Review, much of the PlayStation's success can be attributed to an unassuming factory in Japan that is almost entirely operated by robots. From the report: On the outskirts of...
10:10 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Fujitsu Announces Permanent Work-From-Home Plan
Technology firm Fujitsu announced a new "Work Life Shift" program that will offer unprecedented flexibility to its 80,000 workers in Japan. "Staff will be able to work flexible hours, and working from...
09:30 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Supreme Court Upholds Cellphone Robocall Ban
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 1991 law that bars robocalls to cellphones. The case, argued by telephone in May because of the coro...
08:50 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Broadband's Underused Lifeline For Low-income Users
The federal government's main program to keep lower income people connected is only serving one-fifth of the people it could help, even during a pandemic that has forced school and work online. From a...
08:21 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Facial-Recognition Firm Ends Operations in Canada, Watchdog Says
Canada's privacy watchdog said facial recognition software provider Clearview AI will no longer offer its services in the country, suspending a contract with its last remaining client, the Royal Canad...
08:12 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot China Confirms Case of Bubonic Plague In Inner Mongolia
China has confirmed one case of bubonic plague in northern province Inner Mongolia, according to a statement on the local health authority's website. From a report: The patient is now under treatment ...
07:35 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot DNA Inherited From Neanderthals May Increase Risk of Covid-19
A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists don't yet know why this particular segment increases the ris...
06:44 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Harvard Will Allow Some Students on Campus This Fall So Long as They Take Coronavirus Tests Every 3 Days
Harvard University is welcoming freshmen and some other students back to campus this fall semester, but students will have to take coronavirus tests every three days, classes will still be taught onli...
06:05 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Hong Kong Government Tells Schools To Remove Books Breaching Security Law
Hong Kong's government on Monday ordered schools to review and remove any books that might breach a sweeping new security law that Beijing imposed last week on the restless city. From a report: "In ac...
05:27 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot US Secret Service Reports an Increase in Hacked Managed Service Providers
The US Secret Service sent out a security alert last month to the US private sector and government organizations warning about an increase in hacks of managed service providers (MSPs). From a report: ...
04:45 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot US Tech Giants Halt Reviews of Hong Kong Demands For User Data
Facebook and Twitter have confirmed they have suspended processing demands for user data from Hong Kong authorities following the introduction of a new Beijing-imposed national security law. From a re...
04:22 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot The Stunning Second Life of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'
A fifteen-year-old cartoon is an unlikely contender for most-watched show in America. And yet when "Avatar: The Last Airbender" arrived on Netflix, in May, it rose through the ranks to become the plat...
03:21 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Next-gen Games May Cost $70. It's Overdue, But Also Worrisome.
For years, it was long believed that $60 is the only price that the U.S. games market could bear (and they're often more expensive in international markets). But industry leaders and journalists have ...
02:40 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot BMW is Going All-in On In-car Microtransactions
BMW has detailed an overhaul to the digital systems that power its luxury vehicles, including a new map and navigation system, a revamped digital assistant, a "digital key" (first shown off at Apple's...
02:00 pm - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Uber Agrees To Buy Food-Delivery Service Postmates for $2.65 Billion in Stock
Uber has bought food-delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion in stock, the companies announced Monday. From a report: The deal brings together the fourth-largest U.S. food delivery service with U...
10:34 am - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Venture Capitalists' Critiques of Journalism Secretly Leaked to Journalists
A confrontation between venture capitalists and journalists has been slowly playing out on Twitter — and in an incendiary article on VICE US. It started when... A luggage startup's co-CEO compla...
07:34 am - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Political Protests Are Now Happening in Videogames
Business Insider reports that some players are adapting their avatars in the game world of Animal Crossing: New Horizons to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the real world:In ...
04:04 am - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Tesla to Make Molecule Printers for Gates-Backed Vaccine Developer
Tesla is building mobile molecule printers to produce a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed in Germany by CureVac, reports Reuters:CureVac, an unlisted German company, has said it is developing...
01:34 am - Mon, July 6, 2020
Slashdot Why Apple Stopped Updating Over 15,000 Games in China's App Store
Apple "has faced mounting pressure from the Chinese government in recent weeks to comply with local regulations, including that all games show proof of a government granted license," writes Engadget. ...
11:30 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Stops Selling 'Active Content' Games in Kindle Reader's Store
Once upon a time, you could play Scrabble on your black-and-white Kindle readers. Or chess or sudoko, or even solve New York Times Crossword Puzzles. Amazon's Kindle Store had included 500 slick Java-...
10:00 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Hundreds of Armed US Counter-Protesters Fall for 'Apparent Hoax'
Yesterday as America celebrated its Independence Day, the Washington Post reports something unusual happened at the historic Civil War battefield at Gettysburg: For weeks, a mysterious figure on socia...
09:03 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Woman Who Harassed Starbucks Barista Now Wants Half the Money He Raised
destinyland writes: Amber Lynn Gilles walked into a Starbucks without a mask, later complaining on Facebook about the server who'd asked her to wear one. ("Next time I will wait for cops and bring a m...
07:54 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Chrome Experimental Feature Will Throttle Javascript-Timer Wakeups on Backgrounded Tabs
Slashdot reader techtsp writes: Starting with October's release of Chrome 86, the web browser will offer a way to limit JavaScript timer wake ups in background web pages to one wake up per minute, res...
06:43 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot How Crowdfunding Transformed Tabletop Board Games
The board game Frosthaven has become Kickstarter's "most-funded board game on the site ever, with nearly $13 million pledged toward funding the game's development," reports NPR. "Only two projects hav...
05:34 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Is Slashdot the Answer to Facebook's Fake News Problem?
David Collier-Brown led the Sun Microsystems Canada team specializing in performance and capacity planning. He later becoming a consulting systems programmer and performance engineer, as well as an O'...
04:34 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Linus Torvalds Likes His New AMD Threadripper System
This week Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel re-created their keynote conversation for a special all-virtual edition of the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America. ZDNet reports:W...
03:34 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot 200 Scientists Say WHO Ignores the Risk That Coronavirus 'Aerosols' Float in the Air
"Six months into a pandemic that has killed over half a million people, more than 200 scientists from around the world are challenging the official view of how the coronavirus spreads," reports the Lo...
02:34 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Could We Not Use DNS For a Certificate Revocation Mechanism?
Long-time Slashdot reader dhammabum writes:As reported in the recent slashdot story, starting in September we system admins will be forced into annually updating TLS certificates because of a decision...
01:34 pm - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Body Cam with Military Police Footage Sold on Ebay
"A security researcher was able to access files on a Axon body-worn camera he purchased from eBay that had video files of Fort Huachuca Military Police officers conducting investigations and filling o...
11:15 am - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot The WHO Announces End of Its Testing of Hydroxychloroquine
"The World Health Organization announced Saturday that it discontinued its trial on hydroxychloroquine's effect on COVID-19 patients in hospitals," reports UPI:WHO said in a statement that it accepted...
09:04 am - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Study Finds Hydroxychloroquine May Have Boosted Survival. Other Researchers Have Doubts
"A surprising new study found the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped patients better survive in the hospital," reports CNN. "But the findings, like the federal government's use ...
05:49 am - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Rocket Lab Loses Seven Satellites After 'Something Went Wrong'
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:On Sunday morning, local time in New Zealand, Rocket Lab launched its 13th mission. The booster's first stage performed normally, but just as the second stage n...
03:02 am - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Starting Soon: A Penumbral Lunar Eclipse
"If your family's Fourth of July fireworks plans are up in smoke because of the pandemic, watch the sky for a lunar eclipse instead," reports CNN. It begins in just 5 minutes -- and then lasts for two...
01:04 am - Sun, July 5, 2020
Slashdot Stanford Economist Predicts Working-From-Home Continues, City Centers Decline
The new "working-from-home economy" will likely continue after the pandemic, predicts Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1. Bloom cites results from sever...
11:04 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot US Senate Amends EARN IT Act -- To Let States Restrict Encryption
Long-time Slashdot reader stikves reminded us that a committee in the U.S. Senate passed an amended version of the "EARN IT" act on Thursday. And this new version could do more than just end personal ...
09:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Released an Emergency Security Update to Fix Two Bugs in Windows Codecs
Tuesday Microsoft published two out-of-band security updates to patch two vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, reports ZDNet:Tracked as CVE-2020-1425 & CVE-2020-1457, the two b...
08:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Released an Emergency Security Update to Fix Two Bugs in Windows Codecs
Tuesday Microsoft published two out-of-band security updates to patch two vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, reports ZDNet:Tracked as CVE-2020-1425 & CVE-2020-1457, the two b...
08:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Divers Find Evidence of Prehistoric Mining Operation in North America
Iwastheone shared this article from CBS News:Experts and cave divers in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula have found ocher mines that are some of the oldest on the continent. Ancient skeletons were found in ...
07:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Halfway Through ISS Mission, NASA Astronauts Anticipate Their Ride Back to Earth
"They've been up there about a month now, floating around on the International Space Station, keeping tabs on their ride home," reports the Washington Post:"Certainly, the highlight for both Doug and ...
06:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Is Our Technology Literally Changing Our Brains?
Nicholas Carr authored The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains back in 2010. This week he offered an up-to-date assessment in his newest interview with Vox co-founder Ezra Klein. "The p...
05:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Former Yahoo Engineer Who Infiltrated 6,000 Accounts Avoids Jail
This week finally saw the federal sentencing of a former Yahoo software engineer who "admitted to using his access through his work at the company to hack into about 6,000 Yahoo accounts" back in 2018...
04:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Moderate Drinking May Improve Cognitive Health for Older Adults, Study Says
"A new study found low to moderate drinking may improve cognitive function for White middle-aged or older adults," reports CNN:The findings support prior research which found that, generally, one stan...
03:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Does Success in Life Depend on Understanding Both Technology and Constitutional Law?
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2019's The Two Codes Your Kids Need to Know, the New York Times' Thomas Friedman reported that of all the skills and knowledge the College Board tested youn...
02:34 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Americans Lag Behind Other Countries -- and Pay More for Their Cellphone Service
"American consumers pay significantly more for cellphone service than people in many other countries," reports the New York Times. It's in an article headlined "The U.S. Is Lagging Behind Many Rich Co...
01:00 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Facebook, Twitter, Google Face Free-Speech Test in Hong Kong
U.S. technology titans face a looming test of their free-speech credentials in Hong Kong as China's new national-security law for the city demands local authorities take measures to supervise and regu...
12:00 pm - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Ubisoft CEO Lays Out a Plan To Change the Company's Toxic Culture
A week after launching investigations into many claims of harassment and misconduct, Ubisoft's CEO gave an update on what the company is doing to change things. From a report: In a letter posted on it...
10:01 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Chrome for Android is Finally Going 64-bit, Giving it a Speed Boost in Benchmarks
An anonymous reader shares a report: The first Android version to support 64-bit architecture was Android 5.0 Lollipop, introduced back in November 2014. Since then, more and more 64-bit processors sh...
08:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Germany is First Major Economy To Phase Out Coal and Nuclear
German lawmakers have finalized the country's long-awaited phase-out of coal as an energy source, backing a plan that environmental groups say isn't ambitious enough and free marketeers criticize as a...
06:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Sprint 5G is No More, as T-Mobile Focuses On its Own Network
A day after formally completing the sale of Boost, Virgin and other Sprint prepaid networks to Dish, T-Mobile is pulling the plug on Sprint 5G. From a report: The move is one in a long list of issues ...
04:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Fresh Calls For Guarantees on Digital Taxation in Future UK-US Trade Deal
One of America's largest internet advocacy groups has published a six-point wish list for a future UK-US trade deal, including calls for no unilateral digital taxes. From a report: The Internet Associ...
03:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot WHO Sees First Results From COVID Drug Trials Within Two Weeks
The World Health Organization (WHO) should soon get results from clinical trials it is conducting of drugs that might be effective in treating COVID-19 patients, its Director General Tedros Adhanom Gh...
02:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Walmart is Converting Its Parking Lots Into Pop-up Drive-in Theaters For the Summer
Walmart said this week that it was converting some of its parking lots into drive-in theaters for the summer as the movie industry struggles amid the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The retail be...
01:00 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot New Apple macOS Big Sur Feature To Hamper Adware Operations
With macOS 11, also known as Big Sur, Apple has removed the ability to install macOS profile configurations from the command-line. ZDNet reports: This ability was previously a core feature of macOS' e...
12:07 am - Sat, July 4, 2020
Slashdot Twitter Engineers Replacing Racially Loaded Tech Terms Like 'Master,' 'Slave'
For Regynald Augustin, a Black programmer at Twitter, the impetus for change arrived in an email last year with the phrase "automatic slave rekick." The words were just part of an engineering discussi...
10:09 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'
The Linux Foundation recently uploaded its video from the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference: Europe. And there was a poignant moment when Linus Torvalds did his traditional keynote conv...
06:02 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Mysterious Explosion and Fire Damage Iranian Nuclear Enrichment Facility
A fire ripped through a building at Iran's main nuclear-fuel production site early Thursday, causing extensive damage to what appeared to be a factory where the country has boasted of producing a new ...
05:01 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Who Is the Mystery Shopper Leaving Behind Thousands of Online Shopping Carts?
A Google crawler has been adding products to e-commerce site shopping carts, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. From a write-up: Sellers have been complaining about a serial cart abandoner na...
04:00 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Google-backed Groups Criticize Apple's New Warnings on User Tracking
A group of European digital advertising associations on Friday criticized Apple's plans to require apps to seek additional permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. Fr...
03:01 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot LinkedIn Says iOS Clipboard Snooping After Every Key Press is a Bug, Will Fix
A LinkedIn spokesperson told ZDNet this week that a bug in the company's iOS app was responsible for a seemingly privacy-intrusive behavior spotted by one of its users on Thursday. From a report: The ...
02:01 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Mozilla Common Voice Updates Will Help Train the 'Hey Firefox' Wakeword For Voice-Based Web Browsing
Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devi...
01:00 pm - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Nuclear 'Power Balls' May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make nuclear meltdowns a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be sma...
10:00 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Announces New Windows 10 Start Menu Design, Updated Alt-Tab
Microsoft is testing a number of Windows 10 upgrades to a small number of testers, including changes to the Alt-Tab function and a new Start menu design. The Verge reports: "We are freshening up the S...
07:00 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Core of a Gas Planet Seen For the First Time
A team of astronomers has discovered what they think are the rocky innards of a giant planet that's missing its thick atmosphere. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature. The BBC repo...
03:30 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Inside the Plot To Kill the Open Technology Fund
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: [The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, which is part of the umbrella group called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM)...
02:00 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Is Shutting Down TikTok Clone Lasso and Pinterest Rival Hobbi
Facebook confirmed that it's shutting down two of its little-known social media apps shortly after their launch. TikTok rival Lasso and Pinterest rival Hobbi will both be terminated on July 10. CNBC r...
01:25 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot JPMorgan Drops Terms 'Master,' 'Slave' From Internal Tech Code and Materials
JPMorgan Chase is eliminating terms like "blacklist," "master" and "slave" from its internal technology materials and code as it seeks to address racism within the company, said two sources with knowl...
12:45 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot Next-Gen Console Games Will Be $10 More Expensive
If NBA 2K21 is any indication, the price of $59.99 new console games is about to be over: "NBA 2K21 will cost $69.99 on PS5 and Xbox Series X, an increase of $10 compared to the recommended price for ...
12:02 am - Fri, July 3, 2020
Slashdot BMW Wants To Sell Car Features On Demand
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BMW is planning to move some features of its new cars to a subscription model, something it announced on Wednesday during a briefing for the pres...
11:20 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot India's Richest Man Takes On Zoom
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: India's Reliance Jio Platforms, which recently concluded a $15.2 billion fundraise run, is ready to enter a new business: Video conferencing. On Th...
10:41 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot New Free Speech Site Gets in a Tangle Over ... Free Speech
The social network bills itself as a 'no censorship' bastion -- but it's already had to remind users what is and isn't allowed. From a report: In recent weeks, Donald Trump has started having his twee...
10:00 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot 'Fallout' TV Series From 'Westworld' Creators In the Works At Amazon
According to Hollywood Reporter, "Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the best-selling video game franchise Fallout, with married writers and showrunners Joy and Nolan attached to oversee the po...
09:22 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft Will Ban Forza Players Who Add the Confederate Flag To Their Digital Cars
Microsoft has just announced it will ban players who use the controversial confederate flag in Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, which both allow users to personalize their cars with custom designs....
08:45 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft is Force-Feeding Edge To Windows Users With a Spyware-like Install
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: If I told you that my entire computer screen just got taken over by a new app that I'd never installed or asked for -- it just magically appeared on my desktop, ...
08:04 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Google's Fitbit Takeover Probed by EU Regulators
The EU is questioning whether Google's proposed takeover of Fitbit will harm competition, or give it access to too much personal data. From a report: Fitbit makes fitness-tracking watches that monitor...
07:24 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Boeing Quietly Pulls Plug on the 747, Closing Era of Jumbo Jets
Boeing hasn't told employees, but the company is pulling the plug on its hulking 747 jumbo jet, ending a half-century run for the twin-aisle pioneer. From a report: The last 747-8 will roll out of a S...
06:44 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot World's Pile of Electronic Waste Grows Ever Higher: Study
The world's mountain of discarded flat-screen TVs, cellphones and other electronic goods grew to a record high last year, according to an annual report released Thursday. New submitter Splyncryth writ...
06:13 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Advertisers Will Be Back To Facebook 'Soon Enough', Zuckerberg Assures Employees
As the ads boycott grows, Mark Zuckerberg shows no sign of backing down. From a report: "My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough" the Facebook chief executive h...
05:39 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Facebook Says 5,000 App Developers Got User Data After Cutoff Date
Social media giant Facebook disclosed on Wednesday a new user privacy incident. The company said that it continued sharing user data with approximately 5,000 developers even after their application's ...
04:48 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot One Out of Every 142 Passwords is '123456'
In one of the biggest password re-use studies of its kind, an analysis of more than one billion leaked credentials has discovered that one out of every 142 passwords is the classic "123456" string. Fr...
04:08 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Apple and Google Block Dozens of Chinese Apps in India
Two days after India blocked 59 apps developed by Chinese firms, Google and Apple have started to comply with New Delhi's order and are preventing users in the world's second largest internet market f...
03:33 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot WeWork Founder Warned Staff in 2016: 'You Do Not Get a Chance Like This Again'
To many of its employees, WeWork was much more than a job. Adam Neumann, the co-founder and former chief executive officer, kept workers motivated by invoking a higher calling to community-building an...
02:48 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot How Police Secretly Took Over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime
Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots. From a report: Something wasn't ri...
02:08 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot The Sci-Hub Effect: Sci-Hub Downloads Lead To More Article Citations
Excerpt of a paper on Arxiv [PDF]: Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various character...
01:00 pm - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot New Mac Ransomware Is Even More Sinister Than It Appears
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The threat of ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven't been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple's Mac computers since the fi...
10:00 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot 3D-Printed Plant-Based Steaks Could Arrive In 2021
In 2021, Israeli startup Redefine Meat plans to launch a 3D printer that will allow customers to produce plant-based flank steak at home. Engadget reports: Redefine Meat says that through 3D printing,...
07:00 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot US Secures World Stock of Key COVID-19 Drug Remdesivir
The U.S. has bought up virtually all the stocks of remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat COVID-19. The Guardian reports: Remdesivir, the first drug approved by licens...
03:30 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot MIT Removes Huge Dataset That Teaches AI Systems To Use Racist, Misogynistic Slurs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other proble...
02:02 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot People Testing Negative For COVID-19 Antibodies May Still Have Some Immunity, Study Suggests
Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: For every person testing positive for antibodies, two were found to have specific T-cells which identify and destroy infected cells. This was seen even in people...
01:25 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Firefox 78: Protections Dashboard, New Developer Features, and the End of the Line For Older MacOS Versions
williamyf shares a report from The Register: Mozilla has released Firefox 78 with a new Protections Dashboard and a bunch of updates for web developers. This is also the last supported version of Fire...
12:45 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Dish Buys Prepaid Carrier Boost Mobile For $1.4 Billion
Today, Dish announced the $1.4 billion acquisition of Boost Mobile. With this purchase, Dish secures its place in the retail wireless market and will serve more than nine million customers. Engadget r...
12:02 am - Thu, July 2, 2020
Slashdot Multiple Service Providers Are Blocking DuckDuckGo In India
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Just a few days after India banned 59 Chinese apps, many users in the country are reporting that privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is inac...
11:20 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Apple Recloses More Than 25% of Its US Retail Stores Due To COVID-19 Spikes
Apple will close 30 additional stores in the United States by Thursday, the company said, bringing the total number of reclosures in the United States to 77 as Covid-19 cases rapidly rise in several r...
10:40 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Kongregate No Longer Accepting New Games, Shutting Down Forums and Chat
Kongregate, a video game publisher and web gaming portal featuring over 128,000 titles, announced that many features on the site are going away. The site is no longer allowing uploads of new flash gam...
10:02 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Uncovered: 1,000 Phrases That Incorrectly Trigger Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concer...
09:25 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Zoom Misses Its Own Deadline To Publish Its First Transparency Report
How many government demands for user data has Zoom received? We won't know until "later this year," an updated Zoom blog post now says. From a report: The video conferencing giant previously said it w...
08:45 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Detroit Police Chief: Facial Recognition Software Misidentifies 96% of the Time
Detroit police have used highly unreliable facial recognition technology almost exclusively against Black people so far in 2020, according to the Detroit Police Department's own statistics. From a rep...
08:05 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Ads Are Taking Over Samsung's Galaxy Smartphones
Max Weinbach, writing for Android Police: I have been using Samsung phones every day for almost 4 years. It was because Samsung had fantastic hardware paired with --depending on the year -- good softw...
07:25 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot A Massive Star Has Seemingly Vanished from Space With No Explanation
Astronomers are perplexed by the unexplained disappearance of a massive star located 75 million light years away. From a report: A decade ago, light from this colossal star brightened its entire host ...
06:45 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Tesla Becomes Most Valuable Automaker in Latest Stock Rally
Tesla on Wednesday became the highest-valued automaker as its shares surged to record highs and the electric carmaker's market capitalization overtook that of former front runner Toyota Motors. From a...
06:04 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot MIT Apologizes, Permanently Pulls Offline Huge Dataset That Taught AI Systems To Use Racist, Misogynistic Slurs
MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms. From a report: The database was removed t...
05:21 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Minecraft Is Now Home To a Virtual Library of Censored Journalism
schwit1 shares a report: Free press advocates have created a virtual library in Minecraft that bypasses censorship in oppressive countries to house censored journals and articles. The virtual space wa...
04:42 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Alphabet-owned Verily Suspended Employee Bonuses To Fund Diversity Initiatives
Verily Life Sciences, the Alphabet-owned healthcare company, is suspending employee spot bonuses. From a report: The money will be funneled instead to fund diversity and inclusion initiatives. The mov...
04:04 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot China's Influence Via WeChat Is 'Flying Under the Radar' of Most Western Democracies
China's WeChat, like most social networks, is a haven for disinformation and "fake news". Less well-known, at least in the West, is its role in mobilising Chinese diaspora communities to support parti...
03:25 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot After Lackluster Launch, Amazon Pulls 'Crucible' Back Into Closed Beta Weeks After Game's Release
Little more than a month after a much-hyped entry into big-budget video games, Amazon is pulling back "Crucible," its new free-to-play PC shooter, and moving the title to closed beta. From a report: "...
02:49 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Sydney Now Powered By 100% Renewable Electricity
The City of Sydney is now powered by 100% renewable electricity, generated from wind and solar farms in regional New South Wales. From a report: The "green energy" deal which came into effect on Wedne...
02:05 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Apple Races To Push Ahead With 5G iPhone Mass Production
Apple is pushing its suppliers to try to reduce production delays for its first 5G iPhones as the U.S. tech company aims to limit the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Apple is fac...
01:00 pm - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Supreme Court Says Generic Domains Like Booking.com Can Be Trademarked
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office erred by finding the term booking.com was too generic for trademark protection, the Supreme Court ruled on T...
10:00 am - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Earth's Final Frontier: The Global Race To Map the Entire Ocean Floor
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: An ambitious project to chart the seabed by 2030 could help countries prepare for tsunamis, protect marine habitats and monitor deep-sea mining. But the chal...
07:00 am - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Asteroid Impact, Not Volcanic Activity, Killed the Dinosaurs, Study Finds
Scientists have gone back and forth over exactly what caused a mass extinction event 66 million years ago, which destroyed about 75% of all life on Earth, including all of the large dinosaurs. Some ha...
03:30 am - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Dr. Anthony Fauci Says New Virus In China Has Traits of 2009 Swine Flu, 1918 Pandemic Flu
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that U.S. health officials are keeping an eye on a new strain of flu carried by pigs in Ch...
12:10 am - Wed, July 1, 2020
Slashdot Declining Eyesight Can Be Improved By Looking At Red Light, Pilot Study Says
swell shares the findings from a small pilot study that suggests a few minutes of looking into a deep red light could have a dramatic effect on preventing eyesight decline as we age. CNN reports: Rese...
11:30 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Someone Mysteriously Sent Almost $1 Billion In Bitcoin
Someone transferred bitcoins worth close to $1 billion on Tuesday morning, a move that was public for everyone to see while the identities of the sender and receiver remain unknown. Motherboard report...
10:50 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot 400 TB Storage Drives In Our Future: Fujifilm
One of the two leading manufacturers of tape cartridge storage, FujiFilm, claims that they have a technology roadmap through to 2030 which builds on the current magnetic tape paradigm to enable 400 TB...
10:10 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Qualcomm Made a Modern Smartwatch Chip: Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of repackaging the same basic smartwatch chip over and over again, Qualcomm has graced Wear OS with a modern smartwatch SoC. Meet the...
09:30 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot YouTube TV Jacks Up Pricing To Become Most Expensive Cable TV Alternative
On Tuesday, Google's YouTube TV announced a monthly $15 price hike, bringing its streaming package of channels to $64.99 monthly, from $49.99. "YouTube TV is now the most expensive of the cable TV str...
08:50 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Android's AirDrop Competitor Is Coming Soon
Android's long-awaited "Nearby Sharing" feature, which allows you to share files between Android devices wirelessly, is rolling out to beta testers. Android Police reports: Nearby Sharing may appear s...
08:10 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot National Mask Mandate Could Save 5 Percent of GDP, Economists Say
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: After a late-spring lull, daily coronavirus cases in the United States have again hit record highs, driven by resurgent outbreaks in state...
06:08 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Uber's New Strategy: Buy Unprofitable Companies, ???, Profit
Uber's new strategy is just like its old one. Make its money-losing business bigger by buying other money-losing businesses like Postmates. From a report: After Uber's merger talks with food-delivery ...
05:17 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot FCC Declares Huawei, ZTE 'National Security Threats'
The Federal Communication Commission has declared Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE "national security threats," a move that will formally ban U.S. telecom companies from using federal funds to bu...
04:51 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft, LinkedIn To Retrain Unemployed Workers for In-Demand Jobs
Microsoft and its LinkedIn unit will provide free job training to help unemployed workers prepare for in-demand jobs as the global pandemic pushes U.S. joblessness to levels as bad as those during the...
04:09 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Amazon Launches Space Push To Drive Cloud-Computing Growth
Amazon.com is boosting efforts to lure military and commercial space organizations as major users of its cloud-computing services, hoping to benefit from rising government spending and burgeoning priv...
03:30 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Universities and Tech Giants Back National Cloud Computing Project
Leading universities and major technology companies agreed on Tuesday to back a new project intended to give academics and other scientists access to the computing resources now available mainly to a ...
02:48 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Apple Executive Defends App Store Rules Scrutinized by EU and US
The Apple executive in charge of the App Store in Europe said that the company's policies ensure a level playing field for developers and ease-of-use for customers as regulatory scrutiny over the plat...
02:10 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Google Removes 25 Android Apps Caught Stealing Facebook Credentials
Google has removed this month 25 Android apps from the Google Play Store that were caught stealing Facebook credentials. From a report: Before being taken down, the 25 apps were collectively downloade...
01:00 pm - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Disney Research Creates Face-Swapping Technique For High-Res Video
shirappu writes: A new paper by Disney Research shows off a newly developed neural network that can swap faces in photos and videos at high-resolution. The idea behind this technology is to replace an...
10:00 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot China Approves COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate For Military Use
schwit1 writes: Same vaccine being tested in Canada. But China just skipped ahead and approved it for one year for its soldiers without full long-term data. The COVID-19 vaccine (Ad5-nCoV) in question...
07:00 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot First Apple Silicon Benchmarks Destroy Surface Pro X
As expected, developers with early access to Apple silicon-based transition kits have leaked some early benchmarks scores. And it's bad news for Surface Pro X and Windows 10 on ARM fans. Thurrott repo...
03:30 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot An Embattled Group of Hackers Picks Up the WikiLeaks Mantle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department...
02:10 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Samsung Is Reportedly Working On a More Affordable Galaxy Fold
According to a report from a South Korean publication, Samsung is working on Galaxy Fold Lite for as cheap as $900. Samsung will reportedly cut costs by downgrading the camera capabilities and interna...
01:30 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot With DOJ Charges, Former VC Mike Rothenberg Could Now Be Facing Serious Jail Time
Connie Loizos writing via TechCrunch: While some in Silicon Valley might prefer to forget about investor Mike Rothenberg roughly four years after his young venture firm began to implode, his story is ...
12:50 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot Microsoft's Second Next-Gen Xbox Reportedly Set For August Reveal
Microsoft's second next-gen Xbox is rumored to be fully revealed in August. According to Eurogamer, the console will be named the Xbox Series S. From a report: Microsoft has been working on this secon...
12:10 am - Tue, June 30, 2020
Slashdot A Hacker Gang is Wiping Lenovo NAS Devices and Asking for Ransoms
A hacker group going by the name of 'Cl0ud SecuritY' is breaking into old LenovoEMC (formerly Iomega) network-attached storage (NAS) devices, wiping files, and leaving ransom notes behind asking owner...