Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Let the inverse be true (Score 1) 55

If these co pansies do not want cancelling to be as easy as signing up, then let’s not have the rule. Instead, let’s have a rule that signing up should be as difficult as cancelling. Any company with difficult cancellations that is too easy to sign up to should be heavily penalized.

Yeah. I think that’ll do it.

Submission + - The California DMV Is Making $50M a Year Selling Drivers' Personal Info (vice.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The California Department of Motor Vehicles is generating revenue of $50,000,000 a year through selling drivers’ personal information, according to a DMV document obtained by Motherboard. DMVs across the country are selling data that drivers are required to provide to the organization in order to obtain a license. This information includes names, physical addresses, and car registration information. California’s sales come from a state which generally scrutinizes privacy to a higher degree than the rest of the country.

In a public record acts request, Motherboard asked the California DMV for the total dollar amounts paid by commercial requesters of data for the past six years. The responsive document shows the total revenue in financial year 2013/14 as $41,562,735, before steadily climbing to $52,048,236 in the financial year 2017/18. The document doesn't name the commercial requesters, but some specific companies appeared frequently in Motherboard's earlier investigation that looked at DMVs across the country. They included data broker LexisNexis and consumer credit reporting agency Experian. Motherboard also found DMVs sold information to private investigators, including those who are hired to find out if a spouse is cheating. It is unclear if the California DMV has recently sold data to these sorts of entities. In an email to Motherboard, the California DMV said that requesters may also include insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, and prospective employers.

Submission + - AMD Launches Threadripper 3970X, 3960X And Smokes Intel's New 18-Core CPU (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel and AMD have been duking it out in the high-end desktop processor space lately. AMD's return to competitive footing versus Intel has propelled the company forward and the brand has a loyal, passionate following due the competitive performance-per-dollar its 3d Gen Ryzen processors bring versus Intel offerings. Today, both companies have launched new flagship many-core CPUs, the Intel Core i9-10980XE, which is an 18-core chip, and the AMD 3rd Gen Threadripper 3970X and 3960X, which are 32-core and 24-core chips, respectively. Intel's Core i9-10980XE brings a lower price of $999 and competes more favorably versus AMD's lower-end 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X that's priced at just $750. Meanwhile, the new AMD Threadripper 3960X at $1399 and Threadripper 3970X at $1999 leave Intel's fastest desktop chip in the dust in multi-threaded workloads, sometimes by a wide margin. In addition, while Threadripper 3960X and 3970X pull only about 26 to 36 Watts of additional power versus Intel's new Core i9-10980XE, they do it with 33% — 77% more core resources. Regardless, it's impressive how the tables have turned, as AMD is now firmly entrenched with some better value propositions in high-end desktop processors, and better performance in many cases as well.

Submission + - FedEx delivery robots invade New York City streets (nypost.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: “First of all, @FedEx, never get a robot to do a New Yorker’s job. We have the finest workers in the world,” Hizzoner wrote. “Second of all, we didn’t grant permission for these to clog up our streets. If we see ANY of these bots we’ll send them packing.”

Having failed miserably as a presidential candidate, DeBlasio is no doubt trying to line-up his post-mayoral career as an opinion writer at Vox.com

Submission + - IBM Rescue Geeks get 1960's mainframe back to top secret Mi6 Base in UK! (ibms360.co.uk)

Adam Bradley writes: You might remember some time ago we posted about our efforts to rescue an IBM 360 Mainframe from an abandoned building in Germany. We have now successfully got it back to the UK and to it's new home at an ex. Top Secret Mi6 base! You can read more about it on our latest blog post here: https://ibms360.co.uk/?p=485. The traffic from Slashdot on our original posts was incredible, we definitely got slashdotted! I was up until the early hours migrating servers :). We really hope the readers of slashdot enjoy our new post!

Slashdot Top Deals

"There... I've run rings 'round you logically" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus

Working...