ICT news

• US Sues To Block AT&T Purchase of Time Warner

  20-11-2017 23:40 via rss.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Department of Justice is suing AT&T to block its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. "The legal challenge was expected after AT&T rejected a demand by the Justice Department earlier this month to divest its DirecTV unit or Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting -- which contains news network CNN -- in order to win antitrust approval," reports Reuters. From the report: AT&T's chief executive said then that he would defend the deal in court to win approval, and the company cr
  
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• An Ethereum Startup Just Vanished After People Invested $374K

  20-11-2017 23:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A startup on the Ethereum platform vanished from the internet on Sunday after raising $374,000 USD from investors in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) fundraiser. Confido is a startup that pitched itself as a blockchain-based app for making payments and tracking shipments. It sold digital tokens to investors over the Ethereum blockchain in an ICO that ran from November 6 to 8. During the token sale, Confido sold people bespoke digital tokens tha
  
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• Patriot Adds LEDs (But Not RGB) To Viper Series DDR4 Memory

  20-11-2017 22:40
  Patriot, best known for its enthusiast memory, SSDs, flash memory products, and gaming peripherals, announced its new Viper LED series DDR4 memory modules.
  
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• Amazon Launches a Cloud Service For US Intelligence Agencies

  20-11-2017 22:20 via rss.slashdot.org
  Amazon Web Services on Monday introduced cloud service for the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community. From a report: The launch of the so-called AWS Secret Region comes six years after AWS introduced GovCloud, its first data center region for public sector customers. AWS has since announced plans to expand GovCloud. The new Secret Region signals interest in using AWS from specific parts of the U.S. government. In 2013 news outlets reported on a $600 million contract between AW
  
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• Desktop Ryzen CPU Graces Asus ROG Strix Laptop

  20-11-2017 21:40
  The new ROG Strix GL702ZC has a desktop AMD Ryzen CPU inside.
  
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• Apple Could Have Brought a Big iPhone X Feature To Older iPhone But Didn't, Developer Says

  20-11-2017 21:40 via rss.slashdot.org
  Steven Troughton-Smith, a prominent iOS developer best known for combing new software codes for references for upcoming features, over the weekend indicated that portrait mode lighting effects, a major feature in the current iPhone generation -- iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, could technically be added to iPhone 7 Plus from last year. The feature works like this: you take a picture, go to the photos app on your new iPhone and play with the "Lighting" effects. He writes: So yeah you just need to he
  
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• Marvell Acquires Semiconductor Rival Cavium For $6 Billion

  20-11-2017 21:30
  The deal would see the two combine into a company that can take on other giant chip maker giants such as Intel and Broadcom.
  
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• Eric Schmidt Says Google News Will 'Engineer' Russian Propaganda Out of the Feed

  20-11-2017 21:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  Justin Ling, writing for Motherboard: Eric Schmidt, Executive Chariman of Alphabet, says the company is working to ferret out Russian propaganda from Google News after facing criticism that Kremlin-owned media sites had been given plum placement on the search giant's news and advertising platforms. "We're well aware of this one, and we're working on detecting this kind of scenario you're describing and deranking those kinds of sites," Schmidt said, after being asked why the world's largest searc
  
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• Dark Side of Gig Economy: Some Instacart Workers Go On Strike Over Pay That Can Be as Low as $1 Per Hour

  20-11-2017 20:20 via rss.slashdot.org
  From a report: Instacart shoppers and drivers -- the people who gather your groceries and deliver them to you after you order via the Instacart app -- are on strike. While independent contractors can't technically strike, via a Facebook group some of the company's thousands of employees have organized a "no delivery day" in the hopes of getting higher wages, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The strike is only taking place in a few of the 154 cities nationwide that Instacart operates in. The
  
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• Vote Now! The Tom's Hardware Definitive PC Games Part 2

  20-11-2017 20:10
  Tom's Hardware is assembling the definitive list of PC games in a number of genres, but we need your help. Give us your suggestions and vote for your favorite games.
  
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• AWS S3 Misconfiguration Exposes Pentagon Surveillance

  20-11-2017 19:45
  UpGuard, an Australian IT company, revealed that the Pentagon has allowed its surveillance operation data gathering to be exposed to the public in an apparent configuration error for its AWS S3 buckets.
  
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• Another Tor Browser Feature Makes It Into Firefox: First-Party Isolation

  20-11-2017 19:41 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader writes: Unbeknown to most users, Mozilla added a privacy-enhancing feature to the Firefox browser over the summer that can help users block online advertisers from tracking them across the Internet. The feature is named First-Party Isolation (FPI) and was silently added to the Firefox browser in August, with the release of Firefox 55. FPI works by separating cookies on a per-domain basis. This is important because most online advertisers drop a cookie on the user's computer f
  
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• Progression Improvements Come To 'Need For Speed: Payback'

  20-11-2017 19:14
  Ghost Games also plans to tweak the contents of the tune-up shop in a future update.
  
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• Deep Learning Is Eating Software

  20-11-2017 19:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  Pete Warden, engineer and CTO of Jetpac, shares his view on how deep learning is already starting to change some of the programming is done. From a blog post, shared by a reader last week: The pattern is that there's an existing software project doing data processing using explicit programming logic, and the team charged with maintaining it find they can replace it with a deep-learning-based solution. I can only point to examples within Alphabet that we've made public, like upgrading search rank
  
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• Regaining America's Supercomputing Supremacy With The Summit Supercomputer

  20-11-2017 18:30
  Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new Summit supercomputer should rocket the U.S. back into the lead over China with the fastest supercomputer in the world.
  
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• The Secret to Tech's Next Big Breakthroughs? Stacking Chips

  20-11-2017 18:20 via rss.slashdot.org
  Christopher Mims, writing for the Wall Street Journal: A funny thing is happening to the most basic building blocks of nearly all our devices. Microchips, which are usually thin and flat, are being stacked like pancakes (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled). Chip designers -- now playing with depth, not just length and width -- are discovering a variety of unexpected dividends in performance, power consumption and capabilities. Without this technology, the Apple Watch wouldn't be possible
  
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• Spam Is Back

  20-11-2017 17:40 via rss.slashdot.org
  Jon Christian, writing for The Outline: For a while, spam -- unsolicited bulk messages sent for commercial or fraudulent purposes -- seemed to be fading away. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act mandated unsubscribe links in email marketing campaigns and criminalized attempts to hide the sender's identity, while sophisticated filters on what were then cutting-edge email providers like Gmail buried unwanted messages in out-of-sight spam folders. In 2004, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told a crowd at the Worl
  
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• Teardown: Kailh Low-Profile Switches

  20-11-2017 17:00
  We tear down Kaihua's new low-profile switches: the 1232, 1350, and 1442.
  
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• Stock Music Artists Aren't Always Happy About How Their Music Is Used

  20-11-2017 17:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  mirandakatz writes: If you're a stock music composer, you sign over the rights to whatever music you put up on a variety of hosting sites. That can get complicated -- especially when your music winds up being used to soundtrack hate speech. At Backchannel, Pippa Biddle dives into the knotty world of stock music, writing that stock music is 'a quick way for a talented musician to make a small buck. But there's a hidden cost: You lose control over where your work ends up. In hundreds, if not thous
  
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• Windows ASLR Vulnerability

  20-11-2017 16:57 via us-cert.gov
  Original release date: November 20, 2017
  The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has released information on a vulnerability in Windows Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) that affects Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review CERT/CC VU #817544 and apply the necessary workaround until a patch is released. This product is provided subject to this Notif
  
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• Security Problems Are Primarily Just Bugs, Linus Torvalds Says

  20-11-2017 16:20 via rss.slashdot.org
  Linus Torvalds, in his signature voice: Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security problems are primarily "just bugs." Those security people are f*cking morons. Because honestly, the kind of security person who doesn't accept that security problems are primarily just bugs, I don't want to work with. Security firm Errata Security has defended Linus's point of view.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• We Can't Trust Facebook To Regulate Itself, Says Former Operations Manager

  20-11-2017 15:40 via rss.slashdot.org
  schwit1 shares an op-ed on the New York Times by Sandy Parakilas, a former operations manager on the platform team at Facebook: Sandy Parakilas led Facebook's efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse. As the world contemplates what to do about Facebook in the wake of its role in Russia's election meddling, it mus
  
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• Intel Planning To End Legacy BIOS Support By 2020, Report Says

  20-11-2017 15:00 via rss.slashdot.org
  Michael Larabel, writing for Phoronix: Intel is planning to end "legacy BIOS" support in their new platforms by 2020 in requiring UEFI Class 3 or higher. Making rounds this weekend is a slide deck from the recent UEFI Plugfest. Brian Richardson of Intel talked about the "last mile" barriers to removing legacy BIOS support from systems. By 2020, they will be supporting no less than UEFI Class 3, which means only UEFI support and no more legacy BIOS or CSM compatibility support mode. But that's no
  
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• EKWB Slim 240 Liquid Cooling Kit Review

  20-11-2017 15:00
  
  How much cooling can you pack into an inexpensive open loop kit?
  
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• Critics Debate Autism's Role in James Damore's Google Memo

  20-11-2017 13:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  James Damore "wants you to know he isn't using autism as an excuse," reports a Silicon Valley newspaper, commenting on the fired Google engineer's new interview with the Guardian. But they also note that "he says being on the spectrum means he 'sees things differently'," and the weekend editor at the entertainment and "geek culture" site The Mary Sue sees a problem in the way that interview was framed.It's the author of this Guardian article, not James Damore himself, who makes the harmful sugge
  
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• 10-Year-Old Boy Cracks the Face ID On Both Parents' IPhone X

  20-11-2017 09:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader writes: A 10-year-old boy discovered he could unlock his father's phone just by looking at it. And his mother's phone too. Both parents had just purchased a new $999 iPhone X, and apparently its Face ID couldn't tell his face from theirs. The unlocking happened immediately after the mother told the son that "There's no way you're getting access to this phone."Experiments suggest the iPhone X was confused by the indoor/nighttime lighting when the couple first registered their
  
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• Upsurge in Big Earthquakes Predicted for 2018

  20-11-2017 06:44 via rss.slashdot.org
  hcs_$reboot writes:
  "Scientists say the number of severe quakes is likely to rise strongly next year because of a periodic slowing of the Earth's rotation," reports the Guardian. "They believe variations in the speed of Earth's rotation could trigger intense seismic activity, particularly in heavily populated tropical regions. Although such fluctuations in rotation are small -- changing the length of the day by a millisecond -- they could still be implicated in the release of vast amounts of und
  
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• Net Neutrality is Essentially Unassailable, Argues Billionaire Barry Diller

  20-11-2017 03:36 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Finance:
  The billionaire media mogul behind such popular sites as Expedia, Match.com and HomeAdvisor has a one-word forecast for traditional media conglomerates concerned about being replaced by tech giants: serfdom. "They, like everyone else, are kind of going to be serfs on the land of the large tech companies," IAC chairman Barry Diller said... That's because Google and Facebook not only have such massive user bases but also dominate online advertising. "Googl
  
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• First Ever Anti-Aging Gene Discovered In a Secluded Amish Community

  20-11-2017 01:36 via rss.slashdot.org
  "This is one of the first clear-cut genetic mutations in human beings that acts upon aging and aging-related disease," Dr. Douglas Vaughan, a medical researcher at Northwestern University, told Newsweek. schwit1 quotes Science Alert:
  As far as we know, it looks like the only community in the world known to harbour it is an Old Order Amish community living in Indiana... Vaughan's team tested 177 people from the Amish community of Berne, Indiana, and found 43 people with one mutated SERPINE1 gene
  
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• What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change

  20-11-2017 00:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Countries are scrambling to limit the rise in the earth's temperature to just two degrees by the end of this century. But Slashdot reader dryriver shares an article titled "What They Don't Tell You About Climate Change."
  No, it is not that Climate Change is a hoax or that the climate science gets it all wrong and Climate Change isn't happening. According to the Economist, it is rather that "Fully 101 of the 116 models the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to chart what lies ahead as
  
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