Running is usually a chill solitary activity, but if you’re the type to overthink your social interactions, it also poses a few problems. One is what you do when you encounter another runner coming toward you (you nod or give a half-wave). Another, trickier question is what to do when you’re about to pass someone else.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Pass Someone the Right Way When You’re Running
If you’re in the market for storage for a wide range of devices, Amazon is currently running a sweet promotion on SanDisk and Western Digital products. Depending on your needs, the discounts come in as low as 20 percent and can hit as high as 52 percent.
The biggest discount can be found on the SanDisk 1TB Ultra microSDXC card. This is a
Source: Hot Hardware – SanDisk And WD SSDs, SDXCs, USB Sticks Up To 52% Off With These Hot Storage Deals
It turns out school reopenings are disrupting the cash flow of industrious teenagers who spent the pandemic scooping up in-demand products via bots and reselling them for a hefty profit. From a report: “Yes, I am back in school. Yea, it’s very annoying,” said one US high school student named Dillon, who regularly buys video game consoles and graphics cards with automated bots. “I am sitting in math class and drawing class with my computer open, and I get told to shut it down during a [product] drop sometimes,” he told PCMag in an interview. Dillon may be young, but he’s among the legion of online scalpers who spent the pandemic at home buying and reselling the tech world’s most-wanted products. “I would say around $10,000 to $12,500 average a month,” he told PCMag. “Some months it would be exponentially higher, some would be lower.”
Using automated bots he purchased and installed on his computer, and intel from other online resellers, Dillon scooped up products like the PlayStation 5 ahead of other consumers and sold them off at inflated pricing. But lately, Dillon’s reselling hit a snag. After months away from high school because of the pandemic, he’s now back in the classroom, where computer use can be strictly controlled. “When everything closed [during the pandemic], I could do whatever I wanted because I was doing my school from home,” he said. But with the return of in-classroom teaching, Dillon says his profits have now fallen by about 25%.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – School Reopenings Stymie Teens’ Reseller Gigs
Twitch might have another way to deter “hate raids” and similar abuse: make it impractical to create a troll account. The livestreaming service has introduced an option that lets streamers and moderators require one-time phone or email verification for chatters. Broadcasters can either require it for everyone or set exemptions based on account age, follow duration or status. A streamer can require verification only for first-timers, for example, or waive the requirement for subscribers and VIPs.
The company will allow as many as five accounts to verify through one phone number for the sake of businesses. However, trolls can’t rely on this to evade bans. Twitch will ban every account linked to a phone number if one of them faces a ban, whether it’s one channel or across the entire service. You also can’t use VOIP or landline numbers
Twitch said it would gauge the impact of verification after launch. It also teased plans for another tool to fight ban evasion in the “coming months.”
This might not spook the most determined harassers. They may create new email addresses or borrow phone numbers. It might reduce the dependence on moderators to curb bad behavior, however, and could discourage ‘casual’ harassment from those who were previously unafraid to lose their accounts. Don’t be surprised if you see fewer hit-and-run incidents the next time you’re watching a stream.
Source: Engadget – Twitch lets streamers require verification before viewers can chat
Officials with the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are imploring the public to report sightings of a Steller’s sea eagle, which escaped from its enclosure this past Saturday. Multiple sightings have been reported, but the bird has so far managed to evade capture.
Source: Gizmodo – A Giant Eagle Named Kodiak Is on the Loose in Pittsburgh
Compared to what we were driving just a decade ago, today’s connected cars and trucks are practically computers on wheels. From content streaming infotainment systems to the background processes that interpret sensor data and power the advanced driver assist features, software has become a fundamental component in modern vehicles. To better manage those countless lines of code, GM announced on Wednesday that it has developed an end-to-end software platform, dubbed Ulfiti (rhymes with “multiply”).
GM’s latest vehicles already enjoy features like OTA software updates and on-board internet connectivity thanks to the company’s Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP). the Linux-based Ulfiti is designed to sit on top of that existing architecture and serve as a central hub for select software systems, separating them from the vehicle’s core operations.
“In all of the embedded controllers, we refactored them and extracted the software from the hardware out of them, making them available to our SOA layer,” Scott Miller, Vice President of Software Defined Vehicle. at General Motors, said during a recent teleconference. “Basically we’re abstracting them and making them available for a powerful hub for all the vehicle’s systems.”
“Then we’re adding this service oriented layer on our high performance computing that we have in the vehicle for infotainment and safety,” he continued. “And we’re going to organize those abstractions as services.”
This will enable GM to more quickly develop and deploy updates, new features and apps to customers. In essence, Ultifi will serve a similar function as Android does on smartphones — an API layer sitting between the underlying hardware and the end user. GM did note that Ultifi will run in conjunction with existing automotive OSes, such as Android Automotive, which GM announced in 2019 it would begin supporting.
“Android Automotive is a certain subset of functionality in the car,” Darryl Harrison, GM’s Director of Global Product Development, explained. “Ultifi is more of an umbrella overall strategy. Some vehicles will have Android Automotive and some will have other infotainment apps and services.”
In essence, GM wants to treat your vehicle like a rolling smartphone, offering users continuous OTA updates, cloud-based personalization options that drivers can transfer between GM vehicles, and smart home connectivity. The company is also considering pushing out various safety and comfort upgrades through via OTA, such as using the vehicle’s onboard cameras to automatically engage the child locks when they detect children in the back seat or remotely closing the vehicle’s sunroof if you parked outdoors and the weather forecast calls for rain.
GM is also considering using Ultifi to offer subscription services to users, such as on-demand Supercruise that drivers can enable on long road trips but cancel once they reach their destination. Ulfiti could also allow for improved V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2X (vehicle to everything) applications including near-real time traffic and road hazard updates. Expect to see Ulfiti in select GM vehicles — both internal combustion and EV — starting in 2023.
Source: Engadget – GM’s new software hub will update your next EV like a smartphone
Here’s an ominous sign of the times: Alongside other more mundane data like traffic, satellite, transit maps, and tree cover, fire will now be one of the top layers in Google Maps
Source: Gizmodo – Google Maps Adds Wildfire Layer to Help You Find the One Place That’s Not Burning
Heading out for the great outdoors? Perhaps a different country or an area where the internet connection is spotty? You should download Google Maps offline before you step out. Once you have offline maps, you can use them to find your way, including turn-by-turn navigation when your GPS isn’t dependent on mobile data…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Download Your Google Maps Directions Before Driving Through Bad Reception
It seems Microsoft has been hard at work on not only Windows 11, but also revamping and opening up the Microsoft Store to be able to include even more functionality for its customers. This will no doubt be advantageous to Windows users as the new Microsoft Store is set to launch alongside Windows 11 on October 5th.
Perhaps the biggest news
Source: Hot Hardware – Windows 11 Launch To See Revamped Microsoft Store Embrace Epic Games, Amazon Storefronts
Work toward the signing of BPF programs has
been finding its way into recent mainline kernel releases; it is intended
to improve security by limiting the BPF programs that can be successfully
loaded into the kernel. As John Fastabend described in his “Watching
the super powers” session at the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference,
this new feature has the potential to completely break his tools. But
rather than just complain, he decided to investigate solutions; the result
is an outline for an auditing mechanism that brings greater flexibility to
the problem of controlling which programs can be run.
Source: LWN.net – [$] Taming the BPF superpowers
What If’s first season has given Marvel Studios an opportunity to reimagine many of its live-action, cinematic greatest hits as relatively fresh animated stories that mostly end up reminding you why you liked the originals. The series has worked best as a celebration of the studio’s box office successes from the past…
Source: Gizmodo – What If Finally Gave the MCU an Age Worthy of Ultron
In a new milestone for the US government’s anti-robocall efforts, phone companies are now prohibited from accepting calls from providers that did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission deadline that passed this week. From a report: “Beginning today, if a voice service provider’s certification and other required information does not appear in the FCC’s Robocall Mitigation Database, intermediate providers and voice service providers will be prohibited from directly accepting that provider’s traffic,” the FCC said yesterday. Specifically, phone companies must block traffic from other “voice service providers that have neither certified to implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards nor filed a detailed robocall mitigation plan with the FCC.” As we’ve written, the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs) protocols verify the accuracy of Caller ID by using digital certificates based on public-key cryptography.
STIR/SHAKEN is now widely deployed on IP networks because large phone companies were required to implement it by June 30 this year, but it isn’t a cure-all. Because of technology limitations, there was no requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN on older TDM-based networks used with copper landlines, for instance. The FCC has said that “providers using older forms of network technology [must] either upgrade their networks to IP or actively work to develop a caller ID authentication solution that is operational on non-IP networks.” The FCC also gave carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers until June 30, 2023, to comply with the STIR/SHAKEN requirement, though the commission is seeking comment on a plan to make that deadline June 30, 2022, instead because “evidence demonstrates that a subset of small voice service providers appear to be originating a high number of calls relative to their subscriber base and are also generating a high and increasing share of illegal robocalls compared to larger providers.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Phone Companies Must Now Block Carriers That Didn’t Meet FCC Robocall Deadline
Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem…
Source: Phoronix – Libcamera Maturing Well As Open-Source Camera Stack
CSF is also known as “Config Server Firewall” is a free and advanced firewall for Linux systems. It comes with some advanced security features such as intrusion, flood, and login detections.
Source: LXer – How to Install Config Server Firewall (CSF) on Debian 11
A security researcher has discovered an Apple AirTags vulnerability that can effectively turn an affordable tracker into a cheap phishing lure. This is made possible through the tracker’s “Lost Mode,” where the intention is that if a user loses their AirTag, they can mark it as missing. Supposing an honest individual comes across the lost
Source: Hot Hardware – Apple AirTags Weaponized Against Good Samaritans With This Unpatched Security Exploit
An international team of paleontologists discovered a human jawbone in a cave in southwestern Sulawesi, one of the major islands of Indonesia. The remains are the first indication of a human presence on the island during the Pleistocene epoch, a period of great climatic change and rapid human dispersal.
Source: io9 – Ice Age Human Jawbone Found on Indonesian Island Known for Ancient Cave Art
Details about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Insomniac Games’ webslinging sequel first revealed during the September PlayStation showcase, are still scarce. However, Marvel Entertainment’s creative vice president Bill Rosemann gave us a juicy morsel to chew on: the superhero game will kind of feel like Star Wars: The Empire…
Source: Kotaku – The Next Spider-Man Game Will Be Darker, Like Empire Strikes Back
At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. From a report: By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say — and repeated in an interview this past Sunday — that “search is not a solved problem.” That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.
For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing “Things to know” boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there’s a section of a video that’s relevant to the general topic — even when the video as a whole is not — it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It’s making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Search’s Next Phase: Context is King
Sometimes users need to replicate data from one MySQL DB server to one or more MySQL DB servers automatically. In this article, we will learn how to set up master-slave MySQL database replication in Ubuntu 20.04.
The post Master-Slave Replication (MySQL 8) on Ubuntu 20.04 appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Master-Slave Replication (MySQL 8) on Ubuntu 20.04
In our body-obsessed culture, you may experience an understandable urge to say something—anything—when you notice a friend, co-worker, or acquaintance has lost some weight since you last saw them. But even the most well-intentioned comments can end up sounding dismissive, fatphobic, or simply rude.
Source: LifeHacker – Don’t Say These Things to Someone Who Has Lost Weight (and What to Say Instead)