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Submission + - Slackware now has a Patreon page. (patreon.com)

Submitted by TheBAFH
TheBAFH writes: After last year's Slackware store troubles (check July's 27th 2018 entry), Slackware's creator Patrick Volkerding now created a Patreon page trying to get the support that will make it possible for him to continue to maintain Slackware. The authenticity of the Patreon page has been confirmed by Mr. Volkerding in a post in the Slackware forum of LinuxQuestions.org: "I was going to wait to announce it until I had a few more planned updates done in -current that would be getting things closer to an initial 15.0 beta release, but since it's been spotted in the wild I'll confirm it."
Slackware is the longest active Linux distribution project, founded in 1993.

Submission + - Top House Republican says violent video games could be linked to mass shootings (usatoday.com) 4

Submitted by jriding
jriding writes: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said video games could contribute to future mass shootings when asked about it in a television interview on Sunday morning. Appearing on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, McCarthy was asked about how to understand factors contributing to a shooting.

"This may be a place where we could find this ahead of time," said McCarthy who discussed ways to detect future shooters.

"The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," continued McCarthy, "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others. We've watched studies show what it does to individuals, and you look at these photos of how it took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.

Submission + - Can injecting RF into a voting machine flip a vote?

Submitted by Lost Screw
Lost Screw writes: It certainly seems easy enough to imagine that if you inject RF into a computer, some kind of denial-of-service condition can be created. But if you inject RF into a voting machine, will it flip the vote? This is what Lewis Shupe of Allentown is attempting to do by running a go fund me to go to the Defcon 27 Voting Village. That link is https://www.gofundme.com/playa...

He claims all modern voting machines are FCC part 15 accepted, which states "This device complies with part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is
subject to the following two conditions:
1- This device may NOT cause harmful interference, and
2- This device must accept any interference received, including
interference that may cause undesired operation"

Creating a denial of service or flipping a vote is considered an undesired operation.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Would you rather buy a product or a service? SaaS is always bad? (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Concrete example: Product version of Microsoft Office 2013 versus the Service version called Microsoft Office 365.

SaaS is basically immortal and the permanent winner is the corporate cancer that sells it. But maybe SaaS is the natural result of producing terrible software? Microsoft "products" have been permanently broken for a LONG time. New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!

Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach, and several other corporate cancers are now eclipsing Microsoft, but I think Microsoft was the first major "success story" of the approach.

(Well, actually I do see at least one alternative, but there's no way to get there from here.)

Submission + - Executive Order: Unleashing HSAs For Direct Primary Care (townhall.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Treasury, to the extent consistent with law, shall propose regulations to treat expenses related to certain types of arrangements, potentially including direct primary care arrangements and healthcare sharing ministries, as eligible medical expenses under section 213(d) of title 26, United States Code.”

This passage made direct primary care doctors literally jump with excitement. So, what does it mean?

DPC doctors are a little-known category of physicians who have risked their professional careers on a novel, cost-effective, and patient-centered approach to medical care. They’ve cut out the insurance middlemen and put patients back in charge of their care. For a low monthly rate, usually between $39 and $99, patients get all their primary care visits with no copayment or additional charges. DPC physicians usually schedule in 30-minute to one-hour blocks, in contrast to the rushed visits of insurance-based practices. More than half of all medical care occurs within primary care offices, and with the extended time DPC doctors give patients, they can likely treat an even broader array of medical conditions. They even help patients find cheaper prices on medications, labs, and imaging, such as MRIs. Pairing a DPC subscription with catastrophic health insurance provides a much cheaper, and much better, alternative to the bureaucracy of traditional insurance plans.

And since this executive order helps direct primary care doctors, their bold risk is paying off for everyone. The EO will remove a needless obstacle to excellent affordable care, allowing patients to pay DPC doctors with funds they have saved in HSAs.

Submission + - SPAM: The New Schoolmarm is Squirrel AI 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: MIT Technology Report's Karen Hao reports on China's grand experiment in AI education that could reshape how the world learns. "While academics have puzzled over best practices, China hasn’t waited around," Hao writes. "It’s the world’s biggest experiment on AI in education, and no one can predict the outcome." Profiled is Squirrel AI ("We Strive to Provide Every Student an AI Super Teacher!"), which has opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students-equal to New York City’s entire public school system. From the article: "Squirrel’s innovation is in its granularity and scale. For every course it offers, its engineering team works with a group of master teachers to subdivide the subject into the smallest possible conceptual pieces. Middle school math, for example, is broken into over 10,000 atomic elements, or 'knowledge points,' such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. The goal is to diagnose a student’s gaps in understanding as precisely as possible. By comparison, a textbook might divide the same subject into 3,000 points; ALEKS, an adaptive learning platform developed by US-based McGraw-Hill, which inspired Squirrel’s, divides it into roughly 1,000. Once the knowledge points are set, they are paired with video lectures, notes, worked examples, and practice problems. Their relationships—how they build on each other and overlap—are encoded in a 'knowledge graph,' also based on the master teachers’ experience." Hao notes that the earliest efforts to "replicate" teachers date back to the 1970s, when computers first started being used in education. So, will AI-powered learning systems like Squirrel's deliver on the promise of PLATO's circa-1975 computer-assisted instruction?

Submission + - Voter Records For 80% of Chile's Population Left Exposed Online (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The voter information of more than 14.3 million Chileans, which accounts to nearly 80% of the country's entire population, was left exposed and leaking on the internet inside an Elasticsearch database. The data contained names, home addresses, gender, age, and tax ID numbers (RUT, or Rol Único Tributario) for 14,308,151 individuals — including many high-profile Chilean officials, including the country's president.

A spokesperson for the Chile Electoral Service said the data appears to have been scraped without authorization from its website, from a section that allows users to update their voting data. Chile now joins countries as the US, Mexico, Turkey, and the Philippines, whose voter information was gathered in bulk and then published online in one big pile, easy to access for any crooks.

Submission + - Scientists Top List of Most Trusted Professionals In US (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have topped a survey of trusted professions, with adults in the U.S. more confident that they act in the public’s best interests than employees from any other line of work studied. The survey found that confidence in scientists has risen markedly since 2016 and more than half of American adults believe the specialists should be actively involved in policy decisions surrounding scientific matters. The upswing in public trust, a rise of 10 percentage points since 2016, led to 86% of U.S. adults expressing at least a “fair amount” of confidence that scientists put the public interest first. The trust rating placed scientists above politicians, the military, business leaders, school principals and journalists. Trust in non-scientific professions has remained largely stable since 2016 with school heads on 77%, religious leaders on 57%, journalists on 47%, business leaders on 46% and politicians earning the lowest mark at 35%, the survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC found.

Submission + - NYT Publishes Anti-Google Rant, Doesn't Mention Author Is Facebook Board Member (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google’s largest competitors. Thiel first blasted Google as “treasonous” last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should investigate the company for working with the Chinese government. The tech investor even asked if Google had been infiltrated by Chinese spies, a highly inflammatory charge that he didn’t substantiate. Thiel has now followed up his anti-Google remarks in a new piece for the Times praising President Donald Trump and railing against “globalization.”

Thiel’s central argument is that anyone helping China to develop artificial intelligence technologies is assisting China’s military because, he says, all AI should be seen first and foremost as having military applications: "A.I. is a military technology. Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. Though less uncanny than Frankenstein’s monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army — to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already living amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war." Thiel, who in 2017 sold the majority of his Facebook shares but remains on its board of directors, goes on to characterize Google as “naive” for opening an AI lab in China while deciding to not renew a contract for its work on Project Maven, a U.S. military initiative for which the company was developing an AI system to analyze drone footage, following employee backlash.

Submission + - GermanWiper Ransomware Hits Germany Hard, Destroys Files, Asks For Ransom (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the past week, a new ransomware strain has been wreaking havoc across Germany. Named GermanWiper, this ransomware doesn't encrypt files but instead it rewrites their content with zeroes, permanently destroying users' data. As a result, any users who get infected by this ransomware should be aware that paying the ransom demand will not help them recover their files. Unless users had created offline backups of their data, their files are most likely gone for good. For now, the only good news is that this ransomware appears to be limited to spreading in German-speaking countries only, and with a focus on Germany primarily.

According to German security researcher Marius Genheimer and CERT-Bund, Germany's Computer Emergency Response Team, the GermanWiper ransomware is currently being distributed via malicious email spam (malspam) campaigns. These emails claim to be job applications from a person named "Lena Kretschmer." A CV is attached as a ZIP file to these emails, and contains a LNK shortcut file. The LNK file is boobytrapped and will install the GermanWiper ransomware. When users run this file, the ransomware will rewrite the content of various local files with the 0x00 (zero character), and append a new extension to all files. This extension has a format of five random alpha-numerical characters, such as .08kJA, .AVco3, .OQn1B, .rjzR8, etc.. After it "encrypts" all targeted files, GermanWiper will open the ransom note (an HTML file) inside the user's default browser. The ransom note looks like the one below. A video of the infection process is also available here. Victims are given seven days to pay the ransom demand. It is important to remember that paying the ransom note won't help users recover their files.

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