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Murder Suspect Asked Siri Where To Hide a Dead Body Screenshot-sm 160

An anonymous reader writes A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garner ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate. According to police allegations, a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo murdered his roommate via strangulation in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving Bravo's ex- girlfriend. According to a detective working the case, Bravo subsequently fired up Siri on his iPhone and asked it "I need to hide my roommate."

Comment It's 2014, where's our HD? (Score 1) 286

The original Xbox even had marginal support for 720p. When the 360 came out, I was so excited to finally have a device that could make use of my extremely expensive 1080p screen... but alas, the majority of games were only 720p. They did look very pretty in their own right... but on a nine-foot wide screen, the jaggies are pretty noticeable. The only games that got 1080p were kids games that required minimal processing power... and pretty sure most kids couldn't give a flying fuck that they were actually getting the full 1080p.

So then the PS4 and Xbox One come along. Surely, with the average three year old gaming PC being easily able to play games in 1080p with moderate graphical quality, these snazzy next gen consoles will FINALLY support the HD standard that came out A DECADE AGO, right?

Noop. And now the PC MASTERRACE fanboys have that much more to gloat over.

Comment This seems pointless (Score 1) 110

Why not just throw your laptop in your car and do a few laps around your neighborhood? You could cover the same amount of area in half an hour that took the cat a week. It's not like the cat can get closer to networks than your car can, as most WAPs broadcast far enough to reach the road, not to mention the wifi adapter is more powerful and antenna is bigger on a laptop than on a cat collar contraption.

I understand that this is more of a proof-of-concept and a cool gadget to rig up, however if this gentleman is already into wardriving, then he's probably already mapped most of his neighborhood, and the information his cat obtained is nothing new.

Security

Connected Collar Lets Your Cat Do the War-Driving 110

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Security researcher Gene Bransfield, with the help of his wife's grandmother's cat, decided to see how many neighborhood WiFi access points he could map and potentially compromise. With a collar loaded with a Spark chip, a Wi-Fi module, a GPS module, and a battery, Coco the cat helped Gene identify Wi-Fi networks around the neighborhood and then reported back. The goal here is obvious: Discover all of the unsecured, or at least poorly-secured, wireless access points around the neighborhood. During his journey, Coco identified dozens of Wi-Fi networks, with four of them using easily-broken WEP security, and another four that had no security at all. Gene has dubbed his collar the "WarKitteh", and it cost him less than $100 to make. He admits that such a collar isn't a security threat, but more of a goofy hack. Of course, it could be used for shadier purposes." (Here's Wired's article on the connected cat-collar.)
The Courts

Judge Rejects $324.5 Million Settlement For Tech Workers, Argues For More 268

An anonymous reader writes with this news from Reuters: A U.S. district judge on Friday ruled that the $324.5 million settlement negotiated by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe with the tech workers who brought an antitrust lawsuit against them was too low. The judge cited the settlement amount of a similar lawsuit brought against Disney and Intuit last year which resulted in plaintiffs obtaining proportionally more for lost wages. And yet, according to the judge, the current plaintiffs have "much more leverage". She cited evidence clearly showing Apple's Steve Jobs strong-arming the other companies in the suit into agreeing to a no-employee-poaching agreement, and in one instance, of Google failing to rope in Facebook into a similar agreement which resulted in a 10% increase of all Google employee salaries. In other words, clear evidence that the no-poaching agreement effectively suppressed the salaries of these companies' tech workers. Another hearing is scheduled for September 10.
Medicine

WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak An International Emergency 183

mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that, with the Ebola outbreak growing out of control, the WHO has declared an international health emergency. From the article: With cases rapidly mounting in four West African countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) today declared the Ebola outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a designation that allows the agency to issue recommendations for travel restrictions but also sends a strong message that more resources need to be mobilized to bring the viral disease under control. ... This is only the third time the health agency has issued a PHEIC declaration since the new International Health Regulations (IHR), a global agreement on the control of diseases, were adopted in 2005. The previous two instances were in 2009, for the H1N1 influenza pandemic, and in May for the resurgence of polio.
Transportation

Planes Can Be Hacked Via Inflight Wi-fi, Says Researcher 151

wired_parrot writes In a presentation to be shown Thursday at the Black Hat conference, cybersecurity consultant Ruben Santamarta is expected to outline how planes can be hacked via inflight wi-fi. Representatives of in-flight communication systems confirmed his findings but downplayed the risks, noting that physical access to the hardware would still be needed and only the communication system would be affected.
Power

Gaza's Only Power Plant Knocked Offline 868

necro81 (917438) writes "Gaza's only power plant (see this profile at IEEE Spectrum — duct tape and bailing wire not included) has been knocked offline following an Israeli strike. Reports vary, but it appears that Israeli tank shells caused a fuel bunker at the plant to explode. Gaza, already short on electricity despite imports from Israel and Egpyt, now faces widening blackouts."

Comment Neat idea, but overpriced for what you get (Score 2) 33

For $50, you get a tiny monochrome screen, a D-pad and TWO WHOLE BUTTONS, and a non-rechargeable 9 hour battery.

A coin cell battery? This is 2014, and it doesn't have a rechargeable battery? He did mention you can get rechargeable coin cells, but they only last an hour. So with moderate use, you're gonna be spending a few bucks a week on coin cell batteries, not to mention having to carry around spares with you.

Yes, it's nice and thin, but nobody is gonna stick this in their wallet unless he invents a flexible PCB.

Or, for $30, you can get a brand new LG smartphone from Walmart, running Android 4.4, with a 3.5" color touchscreen, a dual core 1.2ghz processor, camera, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, accelerometers, speakers and a microphone, several gigs of storage space, and a RECHARGEABLE battery that will last 10 hours heavily used and over a week in standby. I guess the only downside is that touchscreens aren't as good as D-pads and physical buttons for games, but you could always buy a USB controller and get a lot more buttons. And while it IS about the size of a credit card, but half an inch thick. And instead of shelling out a few bucks a week on coin cell batteries, you could spend that money on a straight talk cellular plan and get UNLIMITED INTERNET ACCESS!

Stats

OKCupid Experiments on Users Too 161

With recent news that Facebook altered users' feeds as part of a psychology experiment, OKCupid has jumped in and noted that they too have altered their algorithms and experimented with their users (some unintentional) and "if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work." Findings include that removing pictures from profiles resulted in deeper conversations, but as soon as the pictures returned appearance took over; personality ratings are highly correlated with appearance ratings (profiles with attractive pictures and no other information still scored as having a great personality); and that suggesting a bad match is a good match causes people to converse nearly as much as ideal matches would.
IT

Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space? 208

New submitter Christian Gainsbrugh (3766717) writes I work at a company that is currently transitioning all our servers into the cloud. In the interim we have half a rack of server space in a great datacenter that will soon be sitting completely idle for the next few months until our lease runs out. Right now the space is occupied by around 8 HP g series servers, a watchguard xtm firewall, Cisco switch and some various other equipment. All in all there are probably around 20 or so physical XEON processors, and probably close to 10 tb of storage among all the machines. We have a dedicated 10 mbs connection that is burstable to 100mbs.

I'm curious what Slashdot readers would do if they were in a similar situation. Is there anything productive that could be done with these resources? Obviously something revenue generating is great, but even if there is something novel that could be done with these servers we would be interested in putting them to good use.

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