73981887
submission
itwbennett writes:
For years now, Foxconn has been talking up plans to replace pesky humans with robot workers in its factories. Back in February, CEO Terry Gou said he expected the automation to account for 70 percent of his company’s assembly line work in three years. But in the company's shareholder meeting Thursday, Gou said he had been misquoted and that 'it should be that in five years, the robots will take over 30 percent of the manpower.'
73963421
submission
itwbennett writes:
Despite the high demand for tech workers of pretty much all stripes, the hiring process is still rather drawn out, with the average time-to-hire for Software Engineers taking 35 days. That's one of the findings of a new study from career site Glassdoor. The study, led by Glassdoor's Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, analyzed over 340,000 interview reviews, covering 74,000 unique job titles, submitted to the site from February 2009 through February 2015. Glassdoor found that the average time-to-hire for all jobs has increased 80% (from 12.6 days to 22.9 days) since 2010. The biggest reason for this jump: The increased reliance on screening tests of various sorts, from background checks and skills tests to drug tests and personality tests, among others.
73946427
submission
jfruh writes:
Proving it's serious about transforming Messenger from a Facebook feature into a standalone service, Facebook has announced that users in some countries no longer need a Facebook account to use Messenger. If you live in the U.S., Canada, Peru, or Venezuela, all you need is a mobile phone number. So if you've been avoiding signing up for Facebook but frustrated by all your friends using its messaging service, you're in luck.
73946123
submission
jfruh writes:
For many, the idea of storing sensitive financial and other data in the cloud seems insane, especially considering the regulatory aspects that mandate how that data is protected. But more and more organizations are doing so as cloud providers start presenting offerings that fulfill regulatory needs — and people realize that information is more likely to be accidentally emailed out to the wrong address then hacked.
73940913
submission
itwbennett writes:
At the company's shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced a partnership with Oracle that could result in Yahoo becoming your default browser. Starting this month, when users are prompted to update to the next version of Java, they'll be asked to make Yahoo their default search engine on Chrome (and Internet Explorer, for what it's worth). And, according to a Wall Street Journal report, the button will be checked by default, so if you aren't looking out for it, you might unwittingly find yourself a Yahoo user.
73888879
submission
jfruh writes:
Tech writer Andy Patrizio suffered his most catastrophic hard drive failure in 25 years of computing recently, which prompted him to delve into the questions of which hard drives fail and when. One intriguing theory behind some failure rates involve a crisis in the industry that arose from the massive 2011 floods in Thailand, home to the global hard drive industry.
73888691
submission
jfruh writes:
More than 100,000 U.S. Navy computers still run on Windows XP, and while there's a migration plan in place, the Navy signed a $9.1 million contract with Microsoft to support those systems in the meantime. You could look at this as the US government falling behind technologically — but you could also see it as an organization that has systems that work perfectly fine for it being willing to pay for support rather than jumping too quickly into a potentially disruptive transition.
73771585
submission
jfruh writes:
In the mid-'00s, as Google scaled up its data centers to meet increasing demand, "we could not buy, for any price, a data-center network that would meet the requirements of our distributed systems," says Amin Vahdat, the company's networking technical lead. So they had to build their own software-defined networks inside what were essentially vast warehouse-sized computers. And now the company is starting to tell the world how they did it.
73738985
submission
jfruh writes:
You can't enter a password into an Apple Watch; the software doesn't allow it, and the UI would make doing so difficult even if it did. As we enter the brave new world of wearable and embeddable devices and omnipresent 'headless' computers, we may be seeing the end of the password as we know it. What will replace? Well, as anyone who's ever unlocked car door just by reaching for its handle with a key in their pocket knows, the answer may be the embeddable devices themselves.
73699873
submission
itwbennett writes:
The problem isn't new, but a report released Tuesday by Sonatype, the company that manages one of the largest repositories of open-source Java components, sheds some light on poor inventory practices that are all-too-common in software development. To wit: 'Sonatype has determined that over 6 percent of the download requests from the Central Repository in 2014 were for component versions that included known vulnerabilities and the company’s review of over 1,500 applications showed that by the time they were developed and released each of them had an average of 24 severe or critical flaws inherited from their components.'
73679649
submission
jfruh writes:
Facebook today announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.
73679553
submission
jfruh writes:
Ten times over four separate nights in the past year, telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the FBI is investigating the incidents as potential sabotage.
73605305
submission
jfruh writes:
Enforcement of the EU's controversial "right to be forgotten" has forced Google to remove thousands of URLs from its search index, but Europeans who wanted to find the banned links had an easy workaround — they could simply change their search engine from google.fr or google.de to google.com. But now a French court has declared that, if an IP address indicates that a user is inside the EU, even google.com searches should "forget" the offending pages.
73605269
submission
jfruh writes:
Ali Shukri Amin, a 17-year-old from Virginia, has pled guilty to charges that he aided ISIS by giving the group advice about using bitcoin. An odd and potentially troubling aspect of the charges is that this all took place in public — he Tweeted out links to an article on his blog about bitcoin and Darknet could help jihadi groups, making it difficult to say whether he was publishing information protected under free speech or was directly advising the terrorist organization.
73605207
submission
jfruh writes:
As part of a new user agreement created in preparation for its spinoff from eBay as an independent company, PayPal told users that the only way to avoid advertising robocalls from PayPal and its 'partners' was to stop using the service. This caused something of a firestorm, and now the FCC is saying the policy may violate Federal law, which requires an explicit opt-in to receive such messages.
