ICT news

• Before Google+ Shuts Down, The Internet Archive Will Preserve Its Posts

  17-03-2019 23:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery."But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge:
  In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up t
  
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• Ryzen Up: AMD to 3D Stack DRAM and SRAM on Processors

  17-03-2019 23:20
  AMD revealed at a recent high performance computing event that it is working on new designs that use 3D-stacked DRAM and SRAM on top of its processors to improve performance.
  
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• Why Robo-Calls Can't Be Stopped

  17-03-2019 22:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  "When your phone rings, there's about a 50 percent chance it's a spam robo-call," reports the Washington Post. Now a computer science professor who's researched robo-call technologies reveals the economics behind automatically dialing phone numbers "either randomly, or from massive databases compiled from automated Web searches, leaked databases of personal information and marketing data."
  It doesn't matter whether you've signed up with the federal Do Not Call Registry, although companies that c
  
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• AMD Confirms Its Processors Aren't Impacted by Spoiler Vulnerability

  17-03-2019 22:00
  AMD confirms that its processors aren't susceptible to the new Spoiler vulnerability.
  
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• Are We Getting Close To Flying Taxis?

  17-03-2019 21:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services:
  The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with another high-profile partner, Uber. The prototype, the Bell Nexus, was unveiled earlier this year. Boeing and Airbus also have prototypes of these flying cars in the works. Uber has become the face of the aerial mobility move
  
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• Texas Lawmakers Want To Stop Tesla From Fixing Its Own Cars

  17-03-2019 20:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  In Texas the local car dealer lobby has blocked Tesla from selling its cars directly to customers. They're using old laws meant to prevent car manufacturers from competing with their own local dealers -- but Tesla never had any local dealers!And according to Electrek, it gets worse...
  Despite this issue, Texans have bought thousands of Tesla vehicles, which the automaker delivers from other states to comply with the law. Tesla has been able to service those vehicles through its own service cente
  
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• Steam Game Streaming Goes Mobile With Valve's 'Game Streaming Everywhere'

  17-03-2019 20:30
  Valve has turned to Steam Link Anywhere and the largely open source Steam Networking Sockets APIs to help make sure Steam can withstand increased competition.
  
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• To Avoid Demonetization, YouTube and Twitch Streamers Sing Badly Over Copyrighted Songs

  17-03-2019 19:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  To avoid copyright claims, "YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have been performing terrible a capella covers of popular songs," reports the Verge:
  React videos are a huge part of YouTube's current culture; people lift popular movie trailers and film their reactions to what's happening on-screen. These videos are typically monetized... In recent months, YouTube creators have run into copyright issues while making TikTok reaction videos, where they collect cringey TikTok clips and either react
  
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• Vectordash Enables Cloud-Based Gaming With GPU 'Renting'

  17-03-2019 19:30
  A startup called Vectordash will pay cryptocurrency miners to use their GPUs for a cloud-based game streaming platform targeted at Mac users instead.
  
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• 'Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages'

  17-03-2019 18:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception
  
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• Some Companies Choose Microsoft's Cloud Service Because They're Afraid of Amazon

  17-03-2019 17:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  "In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," reports CNBC:
  The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start working its way into other industries -- like automotive. In a recent interview with CNBC, Volkswagen's Heiko Huttel, who runs the company's connected car division, said the carmaker chose Microsoft Azure late last year for its "
  
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• Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks To Be Opened By NASA

  17-03-2019 16:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  "Scientists are hoping to unlock some of the universe's mysteries through 50-year-old moon rocks," reports the New York Daily News -- specifically, three samples that spent that half century sealed in airtight canisters.
  One Apollo 18 sample from 1972 contains 1.8 pounds of a vacuum-sealed lunar core that is a stratified layer of rock that will be studied by six research teams. About 842 pounds of lunar rocks and soil have been brought back to Earth over six missions. Although a great deal of it
  
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• Intel Optane AMA Reader's Recap, Storage, Caching and Memory Explained

  17-03-2019 15:41
  
  Tom's Hardware held a 24 Hour AMA session with Intel's Optane team. Here's a recap in case you missed it.
  
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• Massive Study Finds Apple Watch Can Detect Undiagnosed Heart Rhythm Problems

  17-03-2019 15:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
  Researchers from Stanford University's School of Medicine presented results from a giant study sponsored by Apple Inc. that showed the Apple Watch can sometimes spot patients with undiagnosed heart-rhythm problems, without producing large numbers of false alarms. The Apple-sponsored trial enrolled 419,297 people and was one of the largest heart-screening studies ever.The study, details of which are being presented today at the American College of Cardiology c
  
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• F5 Acquired NGINX For $670M

  17-03-2019 15:04 via rss.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader skdffff quotes ZDnet:
  F5 Networks on Monday announced that it will acquire NGINX, which provides popular open-source software of the same name, for $670 million. The deal advances F5's aim of capitalizing on the trend toward multi-cloud deployments.
  F5 plans to enhance NGINX's current offerings with F5 security solutions and will integrate F5 cloud-native technology with NGINX's software load balancing technology. This should accelerate F5's time to market of applicatio
  
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• Are Large Cloud Providers a Threat To Open Source Vendors?

  17-03-2019 14:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers:
  In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped. Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so overpowering, in fact, that commercial open sou
  
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• Corsair Carbide 678C Review: Old-School Cool

  17-03-2019 14:03
  
  With its polished design and concealed external 5.25” bay, Corsair’s Carbide 678C is great for those who value old-school style and whisper-quiet operation.
  
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• After 40 Years 'Dungeons & Dragons' is Suddenly Popular

  17-03-2019 10:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity."
  The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of "Dungeons and Dragons" hit shelves, video platforms Twitch and YouTube are leading a renaissance of the fantasy roleplaying board game -- and business is booming. "DnD has been around for 45 years and it is more popular now than it has ever been,"
  
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• Are Online Activists Silencing Researchers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

  17-03-2019 07:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,759), shares Reuters' report about Michael Sharpe, a medical researcher studying chronic fatigue syndrome, "a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain."
  Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation... They objec
  
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• How Debian Almost Failed to Elect a Project Leader

  17-03-2019 04:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been:This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward... There is nobody there to do any campaigning.This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this sit
  
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• Google's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map

  17-03-2019 02:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..."It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, TripAdvi
  
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• Crytek Demos Ray Tracing on Previous-Gen GPUs, Including the Vega 56

  17-03-2019 02:05
  Crytek released a demo featuring real-time ray tracing running on an RX Vega 56. The company claims this scene will run on most modern AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
  
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• 19-Year-Old WinRAR Vulnerability Leads To Over 100 Malware Exploits

  17-03-2019 00:34 via rss.slashdot.org
  "Last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that's easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors," writes SlashGear. Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes their report:Check Point, the security researchers that revealed the WinRAR bug, explain that the software is exploited by giving malicious files a RAR extension, so that when opened they can automatically extract malware programs. These programs are
  
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