61995317
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Social Security numbers of roughly 18,000 California physicians and health-care providers were inadvertently made public after a slip-up at health insurance provider Blue Shield of California, the organization said Monday. The numbers were included in monthly filings on medical providers that Blue Shield is required to make to the state's Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). The provider rosters for February, March and April 2013 included the data and were available under the state's public records law.
61975397
submission
jfruh writes:
The Moto 360 is one of the most anticipated of the next generation of Android-based smartwatches — so eagerly awaited that the announcement that it wouldn't be released until later this year was met with boos at Google's I/O conference. Blogger Matthew Mombrea wonders if Motorola Mobility, still under Google's control pending its sale to Lenovo, is deliberately delaying the 360's rollout, in order to give a chance to faithful Google partners LG and Samsung to establish their own offerings in the market.
61974713
submission
jfruh writes:
Not content to merely be spectacularly successful at selling Android phones, Samsung wants to be taken as seriously as competitors like Apple, Google, and Amazon. Part of that plan was to get into the business of selling content — but that agenda has been a total flop, and now the company is pulling back. Samsung had already shuttered its ebooks service, and is now shutting down its video and music services as well.
61973587
submission
itwbennett writes:
Using supercomputers to predict and study pollution patterns is nothing new. And already, China's government agencies, and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, publicly report real-time pollution levels to residents. But IBM is hoping to design a better system tailored for Beijing that can predict air quality levels three days in advance, and even pinpoint the exact sources of the pollution down to the street level, said Jin Dong, an IBM Research director involved in the project.
61811111
submission
jfruh writes:
As social networks proliferated in the early '10s, so did the idea of a corporate social network — a Facebook-like community on an intranet where employees could interact. Unfortunately, corporate users are staying away in droves, perceiving the systems as one more in-box they'd have to take care of and getting their social-networking fix from Facebook and the like.
61810711
submission
jfruh writes:
In much of the developing world, millions of people use low-cost featurephones to access the internet — and for phone calls, those phones use the "caller pays" method, where receiving calls are free. To adapt to this maket, Facebook is launching ads in India that call users back after they click on them to indicate their interest.
61769671
submission
jfruh writes:
The FTC has filed a complaint against T-Mobile for its complicity and profit in assessing millions of dollars for SMS services that customers never asked for. The SMS services offered "flirting tips, horoscope information and celebrity gossip" for $10 a month, and in some cases the charges kept coming for years after customers requested they be removed.
61769259
submission
jfruh writes:
Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day. Using the Mac network utility little snitch, he eventually tracked down the culprit: a screensaver on his new Kindle Fire TV.
61703003
submission
itwbennett writes:
Google has launched a new site, CookieChoices.org, to help visitors of European sites learn more about the digital breadcrumbs they leave behind through cookies. The site, which includes code that publishers can use to incorporate notifications into their own sites and apps, is meant to address European laws that require that digital publishers give visitors to their sites and apps information about their use of cookies and other data. The notifications could take the form of pop-up alerts or a bar at the top of the screen, ostensibly to give details like the visitor's browsing history or profile information.
61686389
submission
Esther Schindler writes:
For a lot of slashdot denizens, the fashion choice for a job interview is, "What's clean?"
But still: Some of us give more thought to it than that. We know that how we dress conveys something, even if it's "proof that I'm a techie who is above such things." And — among women more than men, I think — some of us care about that image. And want to look pretty. (I do.)
So, in this article, with the help of a few brave volunteers, we examine how that dress or suit really comes across to the people who might ask, "When can you start?" You see six real-world people in real-world outfits, and hear what our esteemed judges think is the best choice for that IT job interview. Plus, you can vote on the outfits you think are best for each individual, and compare your opinion to those of the fashionistas and hiring managers. It's IT meets career meets fashion police – practical and, I hope, also fun.
61588683
submission
jfruh writes:
In the early days of bitcoin, a lot of miners used specialized GPU rigs to crunch through the math needed to create more bitcoin. As the calculations grew more difficult, many miners moved to specialized ASICS — and the rumor spread that the shift was having an impact on the overall GPU market. But the extent has been greatly exaggerated.
61559943
submission
jfruh writes:
GitHub has become a sort of default repository to upload and open-source information, even info that isn't code, like music or proposed legislation. A few people have even open sourced their own DNA on the platform. But if you really want information on your genetic code to be useful to scientists and researchers, there are probably better places to do it.
61559865
submission
jfruh writes:
Intel's RealSense 3D cameras, coming tablets and PCs in the next year or so, can do a number of interesting things, like putting a fake background behind you in a video chat or making kids' books more interactive and fun. But one creepy-sounding feature is that they can analyze your mood based on your facial expression. No word yet on how exactly your computer will react to your anger or sadness.
61534615
submission
itwbennett writes:
Four years after a string of suicides brought unwanted attention to his company, Foxconn Technology Group's CEO said none of the deaths had to do with poor working conditions at its factories. 'It wasn't because the workers were tired,' Terry Gou said on Wednesday at the company's annual shareholders' meeting. 'Some of it was because the work is monotonous, but 90 percent of it had to do with personal relationships or because of family disputes.'
61531535
submission
itwbennett writes:
The Citizen Lab, part of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Kaspersky Lab both published analyses on Tuesday of a surveillance product called Remote Control System (RCS) from Hacking Team in Italy. Over time, the cost of the spying toolkits has fallen and they are now within reach of nearly all governments, the Citizen Lab said in its writeup. Kaspersky Lab found 64 RCS command-and-control servers in the U.S., the most of any country, followed by 49 in Kazakhstan, 35 in Ecuador and 24 in the U.K. Other countries with double-digit numbers of control servers included Canada, China and Colombia.
