Yesterday Billboard magazine reported that Elon Musk had dropped a rap song on SoundCloud — an auto-tuned song called “RIP Harambe.”
Posted under the handle Emo G Records, the two-minute track pays tribute to the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla who was killed in 2016 after a 3-year-old climbed into its living area. It’s unclear if Musk stumbled upon the track, which has his name on it, or if he released the track himself…
“RIP Harambe” had more than 200,000 plays as of Sunday afternoon.
Some Twitter users left bemused replies, like “Dude, sober up by Thursday’s contempt hearing.” But the song appears to be part of a longer series of tweets. An anonymous reader writes:
On Friday Musk had shared a blank tweet containing nothing but an emoji of a duck with his 25.5 million followers. It drew over 24,000 re-tweets, and 4,300 comments — far more than the Harambe song (which drew only 14,000 retweets and 1,600 comments.) “Duck emoji FTW,” Musk tweeted triumphantly on Sunday, following up on his earlier observation that “Duck emoji defeats Emo G Records. Crushing victory.”
In its comments there was also a joke about X.com (the original online banking site Musk launched in 1999, which was eventually merged into PayPal). In 2017 Musk repurchased the domain because “it has great sentimental value” — but replaced it with an entirely blank page with one lowercase x. In response to the duck emoji, someone tweeted that next Musk needed to update X.com.

Musk promptly replied by tweeting the URL x.com/x — which (due to the site’s error-handling) pulls up a web page with a single lowercase y.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Elon Musk Continues To Amuse Himself On Twitter, Sharing Song, Duck Emoji

A Brooklyn landlord plans to install facial recognition technology at the entrance of a 700-unit building, according to Gothamist, “raising alarm among tenants and housing rights attorneys about what they say is a far-reaching and egregious form of digital surveillance.”
[Last] Sunday, several tenants told Gothamist that, unbeknownst to them, their landlord, Nelson Management, had sought state approval in July 2018 to install a facial recognition system known as StoneLock. Under state rules, landlords of rent-regulated apartments built before 1974 must seek permission from the state’s Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) for any “modification in service.” Tenants at the two buildings, located at 249 Thomas S. Boyland Street and 216 Rockaway Avenue, said they began receiving notices about the system in the fall. According to its website, Kansas-based company StoneLock offers a “frictionless” entry system that collects biometric data based on facial features. “We don’t want to be tracked,” said Icemae Downes, a longtime tenant. “We are not animals. This is like tagging us through our faces because they can’t implant us with a chip.”
It is not clear how many New York City apartments are using facial scanning software or how such technology is being regulated. But in a sign of the times, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development last June began marketing 107 affordable units at a new apartment complex in the South Bronx. Among the amenities listed was “State of the Art Facial Recognition Building Access….” Across the real estate industry, New York City landlords have increasingly been moving to keyless entry systems, citing convenience as well as a desire to offer enhanced security. Over the years, in response to appeals filed by tenants, HCR has ruled in favor of key fob and card entry systems, saying that such substitutions did not violate rent-stabilization and rent-control laws. But the latest technology has triggered even more concerns about the ethics of data collection….
Last month, the management company reached out to a group of tenants to assuage their concerns about StoneLock. But tenants said the presentation, if anything, only deepened their fears that they were being asked to submit to a technology that had very little research behind it.
“This was not something we asked for at any given time,” one tenant complaint, while one of the attorneys representing the tenants said that, among other things, their landlord had “made no assurances to protect the data from being accessed by NYPD, ICE, or any other city, state, or federal agency.”
“Citing concerns over the potential for privacy and civil liberties violations, tenants at Brownsville’s Atlantic Plaza Towers filed an objection to the plan in January…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Tenants Outraged Over New York Landlord’s Plan To Install Facial Recognition Technology

“DEVUAN.ORG HAS BEEN PWNED” reads a new message at the home page for Devuan (a fork of Debian without systemd) — which re-redirects to a new page named pwned.html, reports Slashdot reader DevNull127:
In all capital letters, its carefully-indented message (complete with an ascii-art logo) now informs visitors that “the web sucks — JavaScript sucks — browsers suck.” Posting the URLs to several gopher sites, it adds that “Gopher is the way — gopher is the future.”
“Kiss port 80 goodbye. Join the revolution on port 70.”

The attackers identify themselves as “Green Hat Hackers,” a term generally understood to mean ambitious newbie hackers who want to improve their skills. “Stop the madness,” continues their message, which appeared just hours before the first day of April.
“Get yourself a gopher client.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Devuan.org Now Points To ‘Pwned’ Page With Gopher URLs

Fox Business News reports:

– “Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Boeing provided incomplete or misleading information about its best-selling 737 Max aircraft to U.S. air safety regulators and customers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.”
– That investigation began five months ago — after the first crash that killed 189 people, but before the second one.
Nine days after that November 7 crash, America’s Federal Aviation Administration had issued an international emergency order “warning that Boeing had discovered an ‘unsafe condition’ that is ‘likely to exist or develop’ in other planes,” reports the Washington Post:

The FAA directive said if erroneous data is received by the 737 Max jet’s flight control system, the plane’s nose could be pushed down repeatedly. Failing to address that “could cause the flight crew to have difficulty controlling the airplane,” push the nose down and lead to “significant altitude loss, and possible impact with terrain,” according to the notice. The notice told pilots that, if bad data causes problems to appear, they should “disengage autopilot” and use other controls and adjust other switches to fly the plane….
Investigators scouring black box data believe an automatic anti-stalling feature was engaged before a Boeing 737 Max jet crashed and killed 157 people in EthiÂoÂpia, an administration official said Friday. The feature, known as MCAS, also was a factor in the October crash in Indonesia, according to investigators. The investigators said inaccurate information from an outside sensor led MCAS to force the nose of the plane down over and over again.
That explanation is also supported by the positioning of equipment on the aircraft’s tail “in a way that would push the plane’s nose downward, consistent with the black box finding,” reports the Washington Post.
Fox Business also reports that Boeing currently has over 4,600 “unfilled” orders for its 737 Max jets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Prosecutors Were Already Investigating Whether Boeing Provided ‘Incomplete or Misleading’ 737 Information

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Federal legislation proposed Thursday would give state prison officials the ability they have long sought to jam the signals of cellphones smuggled to inmates within their walls… The legislation could help provide a solution to a problem prison officials have said represents the top security threat to their institutions.
Corrections chiefs across the country have long argued for the ability to jam the signals, saying the phones — smuggled into their institutions by the thousands, by visitors, errant employees, and even delivered by drone — are dangerous because inmates use them to carry out crimes and plot violence both inside and outside prison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Lawmakers Propose Allowing Prisons To Jam Signals From Smuggled Cellphones