What little hope there was for Lovecraft Country’s first season trying to tell a single, cohesive story went completely out the window this week with “I Am,” a statement episode that gave Aunjanue Ellis’ Hippolyta Freeman everything she’d ever dreamed of…just to ask her to give it all up.
Source: io9 – Lovecraft Country Has Given Up Cohesive Storytelling in Favor of Something More Dramatic
At an indoor, largely maskless victory party in August, Marjorie Taylor Greene had a message for her detractors. Greene, a bargain-basement conspiracy theorist, had handily won her primary runoff, despite warnings from a handful of spooked Republican activists. In her heavily red corner of Georgia, the nomination…
Source: Kotaku – How a Bargain-Basement Internet Conspiracy Theorist Rode the QAnon Wave to the Edge of Congress
While COVID-19 can claim some credit for more workers than ever performing their job duties remotely over the course of this year, the fact is the corporate world has been moving in that direction for a long time. At the same time, more businesses are trusting their data with private datacenters or public cloud hosting solutions. The…
Source: Hot Hardware – Dell Hybrid Client: Seamless Cloud-Optimized Computing With Ubuntu
Although Apple cracked open the door for game streaming services to run on iPhone and iPad earlier this month, you can’t use Stadia, xCloud or GeForce Now on those devices yet. Well, at least not officially.Members of the Stadia subreddit have been t…
Source: Engadget – A Redditor got Stadia to run on an iPhone
When dining out or ordering in, I rarely order the same dish every time. There’s a whole menu to enjoy, and I consider myself a flavor explorer. But, when trying a new establishment, I’ll often get something I’ve had many times, at other, similar establishments. I call these “benchmark dishes,” and they’re very…
Source: LifeHacker – Choose a ‘Benchmark Dish’ to Evaluate New Restaurants
Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images News)
The Internal Revenue Service is considering adding a question to Form 1040—America’s primary income tax form—asking tax filers if they dealt in virtual currency in 2020. It would be the agency’s latest attempt to crack down on underreporting of cryptocurrency profits.
If an American buys bitcoin, ether, or another cryptocurrency and then sells it later at a profit, she or he will typically owe capital gains tax on the difference. But blockchains do not have the tax reporting infrastructure that has become standard for conventional financial institutions. So the IRS doesn’t have an easy way to figure out who has received a cryptocurrency windfall. In the early years of the bitcoin boom, many taxpayers failed to report large bitcoin-related profits.
In recent years, the IRS has increased pressure on cryptocurrency traders to comply with tax laws. A 2014 bulletin laid out the basic rules for paying taxes on virtual currency price gains. In 2016, the IRS sought transaction data about thousands of users of Coinbase, a popular US-based cryptocurrency exchange. Coinbase complied with the request in 2018 after some legal wrangling.
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Source: Ars Technica – IRS may put cryptocurrency question at the top of 1040 to catch cheaters
Samsung is going rugged with the new Galaxy Tab Active3. This device is built for harsh environments and those who work in them, such as first responders, soldiers, and more. The design’s focus was taking the Galaxy Tab Active2 up a notch by improving productivity and portability capabilities.
The Galaxy Tab Active3 is built to be tough.
Source: Hot Hardware – Samsung Launches Galaxy Tab Active3 Rugged Tablet With IP68-Rated S-Pen
Amazon announced that it’s annual Prime Day shopping event would be on October 13 and 14 this year, but we’re already starting to see Prime-exclusive deals available. One of them knocks the 3rd-generation Echo Dot to its lowest price ever — only $20…
Source: Engadget – Early Prime Day deal drops 3rd-gen Echo Dot to (when you buy two)
Gateway, the major PC brand of the 1990s with the iconic cow-spotted logo, is back — well, kind of. Acer now owns the company and has decided to start selling Gateway-branded laptops again, exclusively at Walmart. From a report: As is often the case with Walmart-exclusive laptops, the main attraction is the price. On the most affordable end is the Gateway Ultra Thin series, which starts with a $179 11.6-inch laptop with an AMD A4, and spans up to a $499 15.6-inch model with a Core i5. There’s also a $199 11.6-inch touchscreen 2-in-1 available, powered by an Intel Celeron processor. The names aren’t very interesting, but they do come in a variety of fun colors, including purple, blue, green, and rose gold, as well as black. On the higher end is the Gateway Creators series, two 15.6-inch laptops meant for media editing and gaming. No funky colors on these — they only come in black — but they do seem to have some decent specs. You can choose the $799 rig with a Ryzen 5 4600H and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU or a $999 model with a Core i5 and an RTX 2060. That puts them a step above the Ultra Thin series in price, but they’re still fairly inexpensive as creator-focused machines go. I would guess thatâ(TM)s at least partially because they don’t seem to have a lot of storage — only 256GB each.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Gateway is Back, And It’s Selling AMD-Powered Budget Laptops at Walmart
Recently, the Mercurial project has
been discussing its plans to migrate away from the compromised SHA-1 hashing algorithm in favor of
a more secure alternative. So far, the discussion is in the planning stages
of algorithm selection and migration strategy, with a general transition plan
for users. The project, for the moment, is favoring the BLAKE2 hashing algorithm.
Source: LWN.net – [$] Mercurial planning to transition away from SHA-1
Audi has given its e-tron electric car a fancy new look—this is the Audi e-tron Sportback. [credit:
Audi ]
December 2018 marked the arrival of the Audi e-tron, the first in a massive onslaught of post-dieselgate electric vehicles from Volkswagen Group. With brands across VW Group still working on new bespoke EV platforms and architectures, the e-tron was a bit of a stopgap, intended to reach the market quickly to show that upper management was now serious about electrification. Now it has company in the form of the new Audi e-tron Sportback.
Audi says that the e-tron Sportback is for its customers who care about the planet but also about aesthetics—basically you buy this car if the thought of an A7‘s carbon footprint is unbearable. To my eyes, the design team should consider its work a success. The e-tron Sportback is a more attractive vehicle than either the e-tron SUV or the closely related (but internal combustion engine-powered) Q8. In fact, if you ignore everything below the top of the wheel arches, it’s a stunner, particularly the flare of the bodywork around the rear wheel and then that little ducktail spoiler.
Overall, the roofline of the e-tron Sportback is about half an inch (12.7mm) lower than the e-tron, and in US-spec with reflective side-view mirrors it has a drag coefficient of 0.28 (a reduction of 0.02).
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Source: Ars Technica – The Audi e-tron Sportback is a stylish sophomore electric car
No, you’re not getting an iPhone 12, not now, and certainly not for free. As of this writing, there is no iPhone 12—it only exists in the realm of rumor and fantasy until Apple actually announces the thing—but that hasn’t stopped scammers from using it as a lure to draw in unsuspecting victims.
Source: LifeHacker – Don’t Let Your Friends Get Suckered by This iPhone 12 Scam
Anyone planning a trip to Thailand should be advised to keep their opinions to themselves. Wesley Barnes, an American living in Thailand, found out this month that the Thai defamation laws can be extreme after a negative online review of a resort landed him behind bars.
Source: Gizmodo – American Could Get Two Years in Thai Prison for TripAdvisor Review
OpenSSH 8.4 is out. The SHA-1 algorithm is deprecated and the “ssh-rsa”
public key signature algorithm will be disabled by default “in a
near-future release.” They note that it is possible to perform
chosen-prefix attacks against the SHA-1 algorithm for less than USD$50K.
Source: LWN.net – OpenSSH 8.4 released
I have a new part-time job. The pay is terrible. I am the unpaid secretary and bookkeeper for my son’s game of Pokémon Go. I’m apparently a tutor for others, too.
Source: Kotaku – Playing Pokémon Go With My Son Is My New, Unpaid Part-Time Job
Back in 2016, we carried a feature looking at 5 music software that were highly promising. The five music programs are qomp, Lollypop, Yarock, Pragha, and Volumio. How did these 5 music players fare over the last 4 years? Did they see a stable release, were they able to capture any market share at all, or are they only remembered like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail?
Source: LXer – Now and Then: The Journey of 5 Open Source Linux Music Players
California’s scary wildfire season, which has scorched a record 3.6 million acres, isn’t over yet. Throughout the Northern California, tens of thousands of people are vacating their homes again as new fires ignited across the region.
Source: Gizmodo – California’s Wildfire Season Reignites as Flames Roar Into Towns Across Wine Country
Tomorrow night, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will face off in Cleveland during the first presidential debate of the 2020 election season. Whether you’re watching purely for the spectacle or are somehow still unsure who will get your vote, the debate will likely make for an unusual 90 minutes of television at the very…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Watch the First Presidential Debate Live
LG 75″ 8K TV | $2,149 | BuyDig | Promo Code ASL250
Source: Gizmodo – This 8K TV from LG Will Complete Your Next-Gen Gaming Setup for ,149—That’s 46% off the List Price!
Around 40 per cent of staff in British and American corporations have access to sensitive data that they don’t need to complete their jobs, according to recent research. From a report: In a survey commissioned by IT security firm Forcepoint of just under 900 IT professionals, 40 per cent of commercial sector respondents and 36 per cent working in the public sector said they had privileged access to sensitive data through work. Worryingly, of that number, about a third again (38 per cent public sector and 36 per cent private) said they had access privileges despite not needing them. Overall, out of more than 1,000 respondents, just 14 per cent from the private sector thought their org was fully aware of who had the keys to their employers’ digital kingdoms. Carried out by the US Ponemon Institute, a research agency, the survey also found that about 23 per cent of IT pros across the board reckoned that privileged access to data and systems was handed out willy-nilly, or, as Forcepoint put it in a statement, “for no apparent reason.” Access management is a critical topic for IT security bods, especially as COVID-19-induced remote working introduces challenges for the monitoring of data access and intra-org flows.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Too Many Staff Have Privileged Work Accounts For No Good Reason, Reckon IT Bods
