If it wasn’t already clear that Canada is becoming a hotbed for AI research, it is now: Samsung has opened an AI lab (shown below) at the Université de Montréal. The school’s faculty and students (including long-time Samsung partner Pro…
Source: Engadget – Samsung is the latest tech titan to open an AI lab in Canada
When you’re tasting whisky, nosing, the act of bringing your whisky to your nose and taking a sniff, is a step that a lot of people skip, but they shouldn’t. Smelling your booze can help you pick out flavors and aromas that you won’t be able to detect through sipping alone. It’s an important part of the process.
Source: LifeHacker – Nose Whisky Like a Pro Using This Whisky Expert’s Trick
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg’s report on the contractor Equifax first hired to investigate their breach:
Equifax and Mandiant got into a dispute just as the hackers were gaining a foothold in the company’s network… Mandiant warned Equifax that its unpatched systems and misconfigured security policies could indicate major problems, a person familiar with the perspectives of both sides said. For its part, Equifax believed Mandiant had sent an undertrained team without the expertise it expected from a marquee security company…
That rift, which appears to have squelched a broader look at weaknesses in the company’s security posture, looks to have given the intruders room to operate freely within the company’s network for months. According to an internal analysis of the attack, the hackers had time to customize their tools to more efficiently exploit Equifax’s software, and to query and analyze dozens of databases to decide which held the most valuable data. The trove they collected was so large it had to be broken up into smaller pieces to try to avoid tripping alarms as data slipped from the company’s grasp through the summer… By the time they were done, the attackers had accessed dozens of sensitive databases and created more than 30 separate entry points into Equifax’s computer systems. “They may not have immediately grasped the value of their discovery, but, as the attack escalated over the following months, that first group — known as an entry crew — handed off to a more sophisticated team of hackers,” reports Bloomberg, suggesting that the attack may have been sponsored by a nation-state.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Squabble With Contractor Delayed Equifax’s Response To Data Breach
Amazon is mainly selling the new Fire TV’s hardware-dependent features, such as 4K HDR video and Dolby Atmos sound, but there are some key software improvements, too. The online shopping giant has revealed that the device’s Fire OS 6 underpinnings r…
Source: Engadget – Amazon’s new Fire TV supports picture-in-picture and recording
South Koreans who were planning to raise funds using cryptocurrency will have to find an alternative method. The country has decided to follow in China’s footsteps and has banned raising money through all forms of virtual currency, according to Reute…
Source: Engadget – South Korea cracks down on use of digital cash for crowdfunding
Enlarge / Four billion years old? You don’t look a day over 2 billion! (credit: Tashiro et al/Nature)
You could be forgiven for thinking that the remnants of the Earth’s first life don’t want to be found. Between geology and happenstance, the earliest life has certainly covered its tracks well. While paleontologists studying dinosaurs can sometimes bring an unambiguously gigantic femur home, those who study the origins of life are usually left arguing over the significance of microscopic motes of rock.
A new discovery in northernmost Labrador, made by a team led by Takayuki Tashiro of the University of Tokyo, fits into that latter category. But don’t let its abstract smallness of the evidence dull your excitement. The researchers argue they have uncovered evidence that there was life on Earth more than 3.95 billion years ago—on a planet that isn’t much more than 4.5 billion years old itself.
Some of the evidence for early life is in the form of fossilized microorganisms. It can be difficult to rule out bacterium-shaped mineral bits that can form in other ways, but research published earlier this year identified microscopic structures that seem to fit the bill in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks that were once part of seafloor hydrothermal vents.
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95 billion years ago
Bill Gates uses an Android phone now. “It may not be the most surprising revelation, given profits are sinking faster than a boat without a hull and big-name partners are jumping ship left and right, but the founder of Microsoft has presumably left Windows Mobile,” reports Neonwin. Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates (no relation) writes:
I would assume this is the final nail in the coffin for Windows Phone and the rumored Surface Phone which may never see the light of day. Over the past few months we have seen a change in Microsoft with them being friendly to Linux with stories of porting .NET core over to Linux, helping write a custom Linux kernel, as well as introducing the not-so-popular-on-slashdot WSL Ubuntu for WIndows 10.
Noting the Android emulators in Visual Studio, he’s wondering if the company’s ambitions go beyond developers, and if they’re planning a Microsoft version of Android, “as the tools are in place with Ubuntu, Node.js, Python, Microsoft Code editor, and the Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.”
His original submission points out that 10 years ago these stories would have been unimaginable, but he also asks a second question: has Microsoft really changed? “Could we be seeing a new Microsoft now that the world is moving to mobile and they have no operating system in it?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Bill Gates Has An Android Phone. Has Microsoft Changed?
These flowery sculptures seem to grow and flourish, out of repurposed dead animal skulls.
Source: TreeHugger – Artist’s blossoming animal forms depict triumph of life over death
An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld announced the winners of this year’s “Best of Open Source Software Awards” — honoring 68 different projects, spread across five categories. Besides the 15 best software development tools, they also recognized the best cloud computing software, machine learning tools, and networking and security software (as well as the best databases and analytics tools).
“Open source software isn’t what it used to be,” writes Doug Dineley, the site’s executive editor. “The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision… But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you’re bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them… Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way — through the shared interest of commercial software vendors.”
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation — 7 of the 68 — though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages — specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products — .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which “smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Best Open Source Software Identified By InfoWorld Listicles
Source: Engadget – Equifax breach shows signs of a possible state-sponsored hack
Equifax Inc. has insisted that three executives who sold off over a million dollars in shares just days after news of a massive hack of 143 million Americans’ financial data spread internally were not aware of the breach when they made the sales.
Source: Gizmodo – Equifax, Which Said Executives Did Not Know of Hack Before Trades, Has Launched a ‘Thorough Review’
This both is and isn’t a surprise: Luc Besson is still working on a sequel to 2014’s Lucy, and has written the script for it.
Source: Gizmodo – The Sequel to Luc Besson’s Lucy is Still Happening, and Has a Script
Enlarge (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A New York federal judge is upholding New York’s ban on photographing marked ballots in polling places, saying the First Amendment is trumped by the law’s stated goal to cut down on election fraud via vote buying and extortion.
US District Judge P. Kevin Castel said the statute deprives a perpetrator of election fraud the modern-day means to verify that a target voted a certain way. That verification method is a selfie of a voter holding a marked ballot at a polling place, which would then be posted to social media, he said.
“The State’s interest in the integrity of its elections is paramount. The law is also narrowly tailored…,” Castel wrote (PDF) Thursday. “Alternatively, the Court finds that the statute is a reasonable, viewpoint neutral restriction of speech within a non-public forum.”
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – New York voters have no 1st Amendment right to snap ballot booth selfies
If you’ve always wanted to own some cryptocurrency, a new app might be a good way to get your hands on some. Called Coinflash, the app takes the spare change left over from your purchases during the week and uses that cash to invest in the cryptocurrency of your choice through a Coinbase account.
Source: LifeHacker – Automatically Invest Your Spare Change in Cryptocurrency With This App
“If you don’t place a Capable Engineering crew to oversee a project that involves lives, you’re asking for trouble,” writes Slashdot reader Neuronwelder. Consumer Reports writes:
Congress is moving ahead with plans to let self-driving cars be tested on U.S. roads without having to comply with the same safety rules as regular vehicles… The House passed its version of the legislation earlier this month with little opposition. The Senate is expected to vote on its bill in the coming weeks… “Federal law shouldn’t leave consumers as guinea pigs,” said William Wallace, policy analyst for Consumers Union. “We were hopeful that this bill would include much stronger measures to protect consumers against known emerging safety risks. Unfortunately, in the bill’s current form, it doesn’t.”
The legislation, which would take effect in 18 months, would allow the deployment of up to 50,000 self-driving vehicles per company in the first year of its application, rising to 100,000 vehicles annually by the third year, exempt from essential federal safety standards… Automakers might be able to go beyond the limits by getting exemptions for more than one model. The bill also creates a means to go beyond 100,000 cars for each company, by allowing automakers to petition the NHTSA after five years for more vehicles.
“The bill pre-empts any state safety standards,” argues the group Consumer Watchdog, “but there are none yet in place at the national level.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – US Consumer Groups Warn ‘Robot Car Bill’ Threatens Safety
Regular firmware updates and improved security have rendered console jailbreaking a cat-and-mouse game with continually moving targets, but one group has managed to hack the system to play pirated games. While the process is not straightforward, a flurry of PS4 games, including GTA V and Far Cry 4, has hit the web to confirm this “landmark” moment.
…a potential pirate will need to jump through a number of hoops to enjoy any of these titles or others that may appear in the near future. KOTF explains as much in the NFO (information) files it includes with its releases. The list of requirements is long. First up, a gamer needs to possess a PS4 with an extremely old firmware version — v1.76 — which was released way back in August 2014. The fact this firmware is required doesn’t come as a surprise since it was successfully jailbroken back in December 2015.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – PS4 Piracy Now Exists
Nintendo has updated its Creators Program’s rules to add a new entry: members can no longer broadcast on YouTube Live. The gaming titan has long been extra protective of its properties and regularly issues takedown notices for videos that use its gam…
Source: Engadget – YouTube Live playthroughs are now a no-no for Nintendo Creators
Hopefully, anyone who sends you a Birchbox gift subscription will be someone you like and trust. But in case they’re not, be aware of this quirk of the beauty sample subscription box’s gifting system.
Source: LifeHacker – Watch Out—If You Get a Birchbox Gift Subscription, the Giver Gets Your Mailing Address
Vortex.com is one of the oldest domains on the internet — one of the first 40 ever registered, writes Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. So why does Google sometimes block the email he sends?
Here’s why. First, my message had the audacity to mention “Google Account” or “Google Accounts” in the subject and/or body of the message. And secondly, one of my mailing lists is “google-issues” — so some (digest format) recipients received the email from “google-issues-request@vortex.com”… Apparently what we’re dealing with here is a simplistic (and frankly, rather haphazard in this respect at least) string-matching algorithm that could have come right out of the early 1970s…! [A]t least in this case, it appears that Google is basically using the venerable old UNIX/Linux “grep” command or some equivalent, and in a rather slipshod way, too.
In addition, the article concludes, “I’ve never found a way to get Google to ‘whitelist’ well-behaved senders against these kinds of errors, so some users see these false phishing warnings repeatedly.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Why Google’s Gmail Phishing Warnings Give False Positives
ComputerBase has published a number of Forza 7 benchmarks, and the majority of them list the RX Vega 64 on top. The test system included an Intel Core i7 6850K overclocked to 4.3GHz, paired with 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 3000MHz in quad-channel mode. The drivers used were Crimson ReLive 17.93 for AMD and 385.69 for NVIDIA.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – AMD RX Vega 64 Outperforming NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti in Forza 7
