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Comment Re:Please give me professional news instead of fam (Score 1) 95

If you want the news, you know where to find it. I dropped off fb years ago as my feed was no longer about my friends and what they were doing but about politics and click bait like I Fucking Love Science. I liked my friends a lot more before they started sharing how stupid they are. The one thing I miss about fb is it reminded me to visit Penny Arcade, which I guess if I was still on these new changes would eliminate that.

Submission + - SPAM: Uber's Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In May 2015 about 10 investigators for the Quebec tax authority burst into Uber Technologies Inc.’s office in Montreal. The authorities believed Uber had violated tax laws and had a warrant to collect evidence. Managers on-site knew what to do, say people with knowledge of the event.

Like managers at Uber’s hundreds of offices abroad, they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco. When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.

Most tech companies don’t expect police to regularly raid their offices, but Uber isn’t most companies. The ride-hailing startup’s reputation for flouting local labor laws and taxi rules has made it a favorite target for law enforcement agencies around the world. That’s where this remote system, called Ripley, comes in. From spring 2015 until late 2016, Uber routinely used Ripley to thwart police raids in foreign countries, say three people with knowledge of the system. Allusions to its nature can be found in a smattering of court filings, but its details, scope, and origin haven’t been previously reported.

The Uber HQ team overseeing Ripley could remotely change passwords and otherwise lock up data on company-owned smartphones, laptops, and desktops as well as shut down the devices. This routine was initially called the unexpected visitor protocol. Employees aware of its existence eventually took to calling it Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s flamethrower-wielding hero in the Alien movies. The nickname was inspired by a Ripley line in Aliens, after the acid-blooded extraterrestrials easily best a squad of ground troops. “Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Ancient DNA Reveals a Completely Unknown Population of Native Americans

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Sunrise girl-child ("Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay") lived some 11,500 years ago in what is now called Alaska, and her ancient DNA reveals not only the origins of Native American society, but reminds the world of a whole population of people forgotten by history millennia ago.

"We didn't know this population existed," says anthropologist Ben Potter from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

"It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this newly revealed people to our understanding of how ancient populations came to inhabit the Americas."

Given the nature of this field of research – and the scope of the new findings – it's unlikely the new hypotheses will remain uncontested for long.But in the light of all the new evidence researchers are uncovering, it's clear the first settlers of America carried a more diverse lineage than we ever realised.

"[This is] the first direct evidence of the initial founding Native American population," Potter says. "It is markedly more complex than we thought."

The findings are reported in Nature .
Link to Original Source

Submission + - A 37-year-old tour of CES (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: The annual tech-industry ritual known as CES takes place next week in Las Vegas. Over on YouTube, I found a video tour of the 1980 edition of the show thatâ(TM)s a fascinating snapshot of what was cool back then: âoeVideo Tape Recorders,â video cameras which required you to tote a VTR on a shoulder strap, a futuristic technology called compact discs, and an advanced home-video formatâ"longitudinal video recordingâ"which never actually shipped.

Submission + - Nvidia Prohibits Consumer GPU Use In Data Centers? (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Xesdeeni
Xesdeeni writes: (Except blockchains)

Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers â" forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.

The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: âoeNo Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.â

Is this really even legal?

First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively.

Second, because how can a customer (at least in the US) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/... https://wccftech.com/nvidia-ge... https://www.google.com/amp/s/w...

Submission + - 'Mapping the Swamp' report finds 30,000 feds earn more than any governor (issuu.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The 40-page report, titled “Mapping the Swamp” and released by government watchdog group OpenTheBooks, focused on the “size, scope and power” of the federal government — and found salary spending for high-paid employees on the rise.

“The number of highly compensated federal employees is growing,” the report said, describing six-figure salaries as increasingly common.

According to the report, the number of federal employees making $200,000 or more increased by 165 percent between fiscal 2010 and 2016. Federal employees making $150,000 or more grew by 60 percent, with the number making more than $100,000 increasing by 37 percent in the same time period.

Submission + - Intel CPUs probably inherently unsecure

Submitted by zdzichu
zdzichu writes: Something strange happened in IT world during last weeks. Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) patchset was fast-tracked and included in the Linux kernel. More over, KPTI was also included in -stable branch (version 4.14), which should only receive bugfixes – not such big and intrusive changes.

Coincidentally, Microsoft has introduced similar changes into Windows builds recently.

That's a lot of churn without clear explanation. There are speculations that we are seeing the fallout of embargoed, critical security vulnerability in Intel CPUs. But we lack concrete information, and even the comments in patches are redacted.

AMD processors are not affected by the issue. The whole situation spells bad news for Intel.

Submission + - The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook (wsj.com)

Submitted by Templer421
Templer421 writes: By her second day on the job, Sarah Katz knew how jarring it can be to work as a content moderator for Facebook Inc. She says she saw anti-Semitic speech, bestiality photos and video of what seemed to be a girl and boy told by an adult off-screen to have sexual contact with each other.

Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.

Comment Re:People don't know this? (Score 1) 360

by RevDobbs (#55815413) Attached to: Obama Warns Against Irresponsible Social Media Use

Worse, this isn't even a "social media" or "Internet" problem. Are we doing to somehow enforce diversity and equal time for counter arguments at union halls? Fraternal organizations? Bars?

People tend to congregate with the like-minded; unless one makes an effort to seek both sides of an issue then they will only get the one. Information bubbles and confirmation bias existed before the Internet and will exist after.

Submission + - Could this be used to make undetectable explosives? (3ders.org)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: Researchers at Purdue University have developed a way to 3D print energetic materials using inkjet printing technology. The project allows energetic materials to be deposited with unprecedented precision and "safety".

I should note that by "safety" they mean it's "safe" to make not necessarily to use.

Could this 3D printing technique be used to make undetectable explosives? I mean I believe explosives scanners (like the ones in the airports) look for either obvious shapes (sticks of dynamite with wires) or the more sophisticated ones use neutron bombardment to detect nitrogen compounds. However by precisely, at a micro scale, printing together an oxidizing agent along with something like "nano aluminum" or "nano copper" (as demonstrated here), you can also get an "energetic material" (bang). Because it is 3D printed you could also make it into any shape you wanted, say a laptop cover.

I guess almost anything flammable can be made into an explosive IF it is paired with an oxidizer and ground up into particles small enough to react quickly (think corn dust igniting in grain silos). This printer allows you to do this in a solid form.

Is this a danger? Short of putting an electric spark to every piece of sizable plastic a passenger carries, what could be done to detect it?

By the way, I imagine the military will love this. It makes "shaped charges" look absolutely primitive by comparison, now you can make the charges with varying composition in any 3D shape down to the micron. It might even have nuclear weapon implications because precisely controlling the explosive charges is important for the implosion. In fact maybe you could use it to deposit NUCLEAR isotopes in a precise fashion thus improving yield by enhancing the reaction's efficiencies because they could be deposited in a smooth gradient. So the day of the holy hand (nuclear) grenade may be upon us!

Submission + - Google Home is Leaving Elderly and Disabled Users Behind (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: You cannot install or routinely maintain Google Home units without a smartphone and the Google Home smartphone app. There are no practical desktop based and/or remotely accessible means for someone to even do this for you. A smartphone on the same local Wi-Fi network as the device is always required for these purposes.

This means that many elderly persons and individuals with physical or visual disabilities — exactly the people whose lives could be greatly enhanced by Home’s advanced voice query, response, and control capabilities — are up the creek unless they have someone available in their physical presence to set up the device and make any ongoing configuration changes. Additionally, all of the “get more info” links related to Google Home responses are also restricted to the smartphone Home app.

Submission + - Is this Foldercrate going to beat Google services?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is an internet startup from Switzerland named Foldercrate, it combines email, cloud storage, calendar, notes, tasks, contacts and chat in one single service and also offers total privacy and a lot of customization options. The startup just recently started an Open Beta but is still in development, however, some people even say its potential could surpass Google services even at this stage, what do you guys think? Go check it out: https://foldercrate.com/

Submission + - How the world's fastest workstation PC compares to other machines

Submitted by FatdogHaiku
FatdogHaiku writes: I ran across this Popular Science comparison of a fully loaded HP Z8 G4 desktop workstation against common devices we are familiar with.
World's fastest workstation comparison.
You can pick it up stock for $2325.76, but who wants stock? I want the beast Popsi was talking about. So diving into the config page of the HP Store, here are some tidbits:
Stock it comes with a single 6 core Intel® Xeon® Bronze 3104 Processor with an option to add a second CPU. Top of the line is an Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 Processor (2.5 GHz, up to 3.8 GHz w/Turbo Boost, 38.5 MB cache, 2666MHz, 28 core) for $17590...
a second one will set you back another $18,000.
Stock it includes 8 gigs of RAM but you can bump that up to 768 GB (12x64 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Load Reduced Memory per Processor at $14800 (x 2 if you have the second processor).
Who doesn't want Internal M.2 storage ( up to $799)? Lots of options for storage, clear up to 2 TB SATA SSD at $1039 and $1149 for a second one. I think I'd do the OS on SSD (a config option) and storage on a RAID array.
For graphics there is an assortment of AMD and NVIDIA offerings all the way up to the NVIDIA QUADRO GP100 (16 GB HBM2, 4 x DisplayPort 1.4; 1 Dual link DVI-I, PCIe) for $6870 and a second one for $6999.00.

Yes, Linux ready is an option. Otherwise it ships with Windows 10.

Just playing was not hard to get up around $80,000, and that's not everything I could have selected. Head on over and play with the configuration at:
http://store.hp.com/us/

No, I don't get any money for posting this but if you buy one please let us know how well it runs...

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