ICT news

• Bitcoin Prices Surge 26% in November, Pass $8000

  19-11-2017 23:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Bitcoin's value has increased more than 26% in less than three weeks, writes Bloomberg. An anonymous reader quotes their report:Bitcoin topped $8,000 for the first time, as investors set aside technology concerns that had derailed its advance earlier this month. Bitcoin rose 4.8 percent to $8,071.05 as of 7:17 a.m. Sydney time on Monday. Itâ(TM)s now up more than 700 percent this year after shrugging off a tumble of as much as 29 percent earlier this month. It's been a tumultuous year for
  
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• Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Its Reactors' Melted Uranium Fuel

  19-11-2017 22:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
  Earlier this year, remotely piloted robots transmitted what officials believe was a direct view of melted radioactive fuel inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant's destroyed reactors [YouTube] -- a major discovery, but one that took a long and painful six years to achieve... Japanese officials are now hoping that they can convince a skeptical public that the worst of the disaster is over, the New York Times reported, but it's not clear whether it's too l
  
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• Firefox vs Chrome: Speed and Memory

  19-11-2017 21:32 via rss.slashdot.org
  Mashable aleady reported Firefox Quantum performs better than Chrome on web applications (based on BrowserBench's JetStream tests), but that Chrome performed better on other benchmarks. Now Laptop Mag has run more tests, agreeing that Firefox performs beter on JetStream tests -- and on WebXPRT's six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workload tests.
  Firefox Quantum was the winner here, with a score of 491 (from an average of five runs, with the highest and lowest results tossed out) to Chrome's 460 --
  
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• In Defense of Project Management For Software Teams

  19-11-2017 20:31 via rss.slashdot.org
  mikeatTB writes: Many Slashdotters weighed in on Steven A. Lowe's post, "Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software?", where he slammed project management and called for product-centrism. Many commenters pushed back, but one PM, Yvette Schmitter, has fired back with a scathing response post, noting: "As a project manager, I'm saddened to see that project management and project managers are getting a bad rap from both ends of the spectrum. Business tends not to see the value
  
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• Cringely: Amazon Is Starting To Act Like 'Bad Microsoft'

  19-11-2017 19:28 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Cringely.com:
  My last column was about the recent tipping point signifying that cloud computing is guaranteed to replace personal computing over the next three years. This column is about the slugfest to determine what company's public cloud is most likely to prevail. I reckon it is Amazon's and I'll go further to claim that Amazon will shortly be the new Microsoft. What I mean by The New Microsoft is that Amazon is starting to act a lot like the old Microsoft of the 1
  
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• 46% of Americans Now Have High Blood Pressure

  19-11-2017 18:14 via rss.slashdot.org
  "Millions more Americans will now be diagnosed with high blood pressure," reports NBC News, which describes the condition as "one of the leading killers around the world."
  Anyone with blood pressure higher than 130/80 will be considered to have hypertension, or high blood pressure, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology said in releasing their new joint guidelines. "It's very clear that lower is better," said Dr. Paul Whelton of Tulane University, who chaired the commi
  
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• 'Lazy' Hackers Exploit Microsoft RDP To Install Ransomware

  19-11-2017 17:10 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader writes:
  An investigation by Sophos has uncovered a new, lazy but effective ransomware attack where hackers brute force passwords on computers with [Microsoft's] Remote Desktop Protocol enabled, use off-the-shelf privilege escalation exploits to make themselves admins, turn off security software and then manually run fusty old versions of ransomware.They even delete the recovery files created by Windows Live backup -- and make sure they can also scramble the database. "Because
  
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• Apple Fixes the iPhone X 'Unresponsive When It's Cold' Bug

  19-11-2017 16:06 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
  Apple released iOS 11.1.2 for iPhones and iPads Thursday afternoon. It's a minor, bug-fix update that benefits iPhone X users who encountered issues after acquiring the new phone just under two weeks ago... The update fixes just two problems. The first is "an issue where the iPhone X screen becomes temporarily unresponsive to touch after a rapid temperature drop." Last week, some iPhone X owners began reporting on Reddit and elsewhere that their touchscre
  
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• Thermaltake Toughpower iRGB Plus 1200W Platinum PSU Review

  19-11-2017 15:00
  
  After the TPG-1250-T, Thermaltake has a second digital PSU to show off. The TPI-1200F2FDP offers high performance and a variety of RGB lighting options, which many enthusiasts appreciate.
  
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• Scientists Develop Kill Switches In Case Bioengineered Microbes Go Rogue

  19-11-2017 13:01 via rss.slashdot.org
  schwit1 quotes UPI:
  Scientists at Harvard have developed a pair of new kill switches that can be used to thwart bioengineered microbes that go rogue. Researchers have been testing the use of bioengineered microbes for a variety of purposes, from the diagnosis of disease in the human body to the neutering of mosquitoes. But there remain concerns about releasing manipulated microbes into nature. Could their augmented genes have unintended consequences? Could they morph and proliferate?Kill-switche
  
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• 'I See Things Differently': James Damore on his Autism and the Google Memo

  19-11-2017 09:58 via rss.slashdot.org
  "James Damore opens up about his regrets -- and how autism may have shaped his experience of the world," writes the west coast bureau chief for the Guardian. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
  The experience has prompted some introspection. In the course of several weeks of conversation using Google's instant messaging service, which Damore prefers to face-to-face communication, he opened up about an autism diagnosis that may in part explain the difficulties he experienced with his memo. H
  
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• CNBC: Google's New 'Pixel Buds' Suck

  19-11-2017 06:54 via rss.slashdot.org
  Google's new Pixel Buds "are really bad" and "not worth buying," according to CNBC's technology products editor:
  The stand-out feature of Google Pixel Buds is that they're supposed to be able to translate spoken languages in near real-time. In my real-world tests, however, that wasn't the case at all. I took the Pixel Buds out on the streets of Manhattan, speaking to a Hungarian waiter in Little Italy, multiple vendors in Chinatown and more. If you press the right earbud and say "help me speak C
  
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• Musk-Backed 'Slaughterbots' Video Will Warn the UN About Killer Microdrones

  19-11-2017 03:50 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Space.com:
  A graphic new video posits a very scary future in which swarms of killer microdrones are dispatched to kill political activists and U.S. lawmakers. Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets. The makers of the seven-minute film titled Slaughterbots are hoping the startling dramatization will draw attention to what they view as a looming crisis -- the developmen
  
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• DJI Threatens Researcher Who Reported Exposed Cert Key, Credentials, and Customer Data

  19-11-2017 01:46 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
  DJI, the Chinese company that manufactures the popular Phantom brand of consumer quadcopter drones, was informed in September that developers had left the private keys for both the "wildcard" certificate for all the company's Web domains and the keys to cloud storage accounts on Amazon Web Services exposed publicly in code posted to GitHub. Using the data, researcher Kevin Finisterre was able to access flight log data and images uploaded by DJI customers,
  
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• Apple Is Served A Search Warrant To Unlock Texas Church Gunman's iPhone

  19-11-2017 00:42 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes the New York Daily News:
  Authorities in Texas served Apple with a search warrant in order to gain access to the Sutherland Springs church shooter's cellphone files. Texas Ranger Kevin Wright obtained the warrant last week, according to San Antonio Express-News.
  Investigators are hoping to gain access to gunman Devin Patrick Kelley's digital photos, messages, calls, videos, social media passwords, address book and data since January 2016. Authorities also want to know w
  
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