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Submission + - Alexa, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth...

Submitted by rmdingler
rmdingler writes: Arkansas authorities have issued a warrant for the audio records of an Amazon Echo that was present at a suspicious death.
A report today from The Information details how police in Bentonville, Arkansas, have issued a warrant for the audio records of the Amazon Echo speaker belonging to James Bates, a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. Amazon has handed over Bates’ purchase history and account information to law enforcement, but it has declined to release his speaker’s records.
In February, police arrested Bates, age 31, and charged him with the murder of Victor Collins, age 47, according to local news. According to a medical examiner, Collins was strangled in a hot tub. Bates pleaded not guilty in April and made bail shortly after, but the case will go to trial in early 2017. Both men worked for Walmart, which is headquartered in Bentonville.

Submission + - Dashcam Footage Shows Tesla Autopilot Predicting Surprise Crash (inverse.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Tesla’s autopilot might make you drive like a grandma, but that’s a small price to pay since it can also, apparently, see the future. A dashcam video seems to show the autopilot for a Tesla Model X predict that the two cars ahead of it were about to crash, even though the human driver would’ve had no way to see the collision coming.

Electek reports that the crash took place on the Autobahn in the Netherlands. Hans Noordsij, a Dutch electric car enthusiast who first reported the incident, said that nobody in the crash was seriously injured, according to the driver of the Tesla. In the video, you can hear the Tesla’s Forward Collision Warning start pinging for seemingly no reason — then the car ahead of the Tesla slams into the SUV in front of it that had been hidden from view.

The Tesla was able to tell this was going to happen thanks to the September autopilot update, which added radar — a tried-and-true technology that Elon Musk said could cut accident rates in half. The radar aspect of the autopilot allowed the Model X to track two cars ahead of itself. Even though the SUV wasn’t visible, the radar knew where it was — and that it was about to get rear-ended.

Submission + - CannyFS: FUSE filesystem making rm -rf faster than ever

Submitted by cnettel
cnettel writes: Doing I/O over a large directory tree is far slower than handling the same amount of data in a single file. This is due to the latency for individual requests, even if data is laid out sequentially. In theory, many tasks could be done in parallel, but many common tools are purely serial in their I/O.

CannyFS is a new GPLed FUSE-based file system wrapper that will immediately return from operations such as writing to or creating new files, while queuing them. In effect, standard tools such as tar, rm, and unzip suddenly launch I/O in parallel. Especially over high-latency SAN, NAS, or WAN mounts using NFS or sshfs, this can give huge time reductions. Test the proof-of-concept code, or read the paper on arXiv.

Submission + - Adobe Releases Flash Player 24 for Linux Four Years After the Last Major Update (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Adobe released today Flash Player 24 for Linux, after previously abandoning the application without explanation in 2012. The NPAPI architecture of Flash Player for Linux is now on par with Windows and Mac releases on version 24, after spending the last few years stuck at version 11.2 and only receiving small patches and security fixes, but no new features.

Today's Flash Player 24 for Linux release comes after Adobe teased its release on August 31, and later released a Beta version (v23) in October. Despite updating Flash Player for Linux to the same version number as its Windows and Mac alternatives, the Linux variant still lags behind on features. While Flash Player 24 includes all the security features included in the Windows and Mac versions, the Linux version doesn't support accelerated GPU 3D acceleration and video DRMs. If users need these features, Adobe says users should use Chrome for Linux, where Google's own port, the Pepper Flash plugin (PPAPI architecture) supports them.

Submission + - Prenda LAW gets arrested 1

Submitted by skr95062
skr95062 writes: Well the other shoe has finally dropped on the Prenda LAW masterminds. Paul Hansmeier and John Steele have been arrested following a 18 count indictment being handed down on Wednesday. The charges include fraud, money laundering, perjury and a multi million-dollar extortion scheme. They had their license to practice LAW suspended earlier this year.
ARS has the coverage here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Submission + - YouTube Bans North Korea's State-Owned TV Channel (asiancorrespondent.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube has blocked North Korea’s state television channel, purportedly to avoid breaching U.S. sanctions against the totalitarian state. The Korean Central Television’s page, which broadcasts breaking news videos including Pyongyang’s nuclear tests and leader Kim Jong Un’s outings, now has a message saying “the account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines." YouTube’s community guidelines bans harmful, dangerous, violent and graphic content, as well as videos that violate copyright laws or that contain threats and that may incite others to commit violence. According to The Washington Post, the action to terminate the account was taken in November because the North Korean government could earn money from YouTube through advertisements, which would in turn violate a U.S. directive that bans any person or company from doing business with the hermit state.

Comment Re:huh? (Score 5, Insightful) 164

by damacus (#53478951) Attached to: Apple Removes the 'Time Remaining' Battery Indicator In New macOS Update

The big gripe here is that Apple's 15" 2015 MBP had a 99.5 watt-hour battery (rated for 9 hours wireless web) while the 2016 15" MBP has a 76 watt-hour battery that's rated for 10 hours. The 2015 model came very close to the rated time, which makes sense with its 31% larger battery.

Apple removing the estimated time, which it's provided for a long time, feels like a really childish response to the backlash they're receiving. It's been largely understood by most that these times are simply estimates based on the recent rate of consumption.

These 2016 MacBook Pros are great machines, but they should've been in the 'MacBook' or 'MacBook Air' product lines.. not Pro.

Submission + - How to set up a government email server

Submitted by Skidge
Skidge writes: A guy involved with setting up early email service for whitehouse.gov gives his suggestions on how it should be done today. (Hint: not much different than back then.) He says in regards to Hillary Clinton: "You’d be president today if you and the DNC weren’t so stupid about IT."

Submission + - FCC Enacts Major New Online Privacy Rule

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The FCC has voted to enact a new rule that will force broadband companies to get consent from customers before they sell information about those customers’ online movements, history, and other actions.

The new rule will require broadband companies to have customers opt in to the sale or sharing of their online histories as part of marketing or ad deals. It includes restrictions on the way that providers can share users’ location data and other information and also ensures that they will have to tell consumers exactly what data they collect and what they do with it. The changes do not apply to how broadband providers can use customer information in their own marketing, though.

The new regulations also require that broadband providers have “common-sense” data breach notifications and reasonable security practices.

The vote by the FCC makes distinctions between broadband providers and phone carriers and other service providers. Before the vote, providers and others had urged the FCC to align its rules with existing ones from the FTC on usage of customer data for marketing.

Submission + - How Google Almost Killed ProtonMail (protonmail.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From 2015 through 2016 for nearly a year, results from searching e.g. "secure email" or "encrypted email" would vary little in most popular search engines and commonly yield mention of ProtonMail, typically within the first page. Not in Google, though. The ProtonMail team investigated and could find no cause. After receiving no substantial reply to their inquiries, ProtonMail turned to Twitter in August, where soon after, Google responded after correcting the issue. Yen, author of the ProtonMail article, writes the following in reference to what he calls "Search Risk":

"The danger is that any service such as ProtonMail can easily be suppressed by either search companies, or the governments that control those search companies. This can happen even across national borders. For example, even though Google is an American company, it controls over 90% of European search traffic. In this case, Google directly caused ProtonMail’s growth rate worldwide to be reduced by over 25% for over 10 months."

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