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World Chess Champion Plays Recklessly Online Using a Pseudonym Published on March 01, 2020 at 10:40AM World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTube commenter calls it "a revolution in the history of chess." Slate documents the antics in an article titled "DrDrunkenstein's Reign of Terror." "DrDrunkenstein" is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great. Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community... Carlsen appeared incognito as ...

Two Private Satellites Dock In Space In Historic First For Orbital Servicing Published on March 01, 2020 at 09:15AM schwit1 quotes Space.com: In a historic first for satellite operations, a commercial spacecraft "helper" has docked with a working communications satellite to provide life-extension services. The companies involved in the meetup — Northrop Grumman and Intelsat — hailed the operation, which took place Tuesday (Feb. 25), as the beginning of a new era that will see robotic spacecraft giving new life to older satellites that are low on fuel or require repairs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX Starship SN-1 Fails Pressure Test and Explodes Published on March 01, 2020 at 08:04AM SpaceX envisions Starship as a 387-foot-tall (118 meters) spacecraft/booster that can carry up to 100 people to Mars. Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) tipped us off to this progress report from Space.com: SpaceX's new Starship prototype appeared to burst during a pressure test late Friday (Feb. 28), rupturing under the glare of flood lights and mist at the company's south Texas facility. The Starship SN1 prototype, which SpaceX moved to a launchpad near its Boca Chica, Texas, assembly site earlier this week, blew apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test according to a video captured by SPadre.com. A separate video posted by NASASpaceflight.com member BocaChicaGal clearly shows the Starship SN1's midsection buckle during the test, then shoot upward before crashing back to the ground... SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has hinted that many of these prototypes will be needed ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Tom Steyer ends presidential campaign after Biden wins South Carolina primary 02/29/20 6:20 PM

Stealth Startup Plans Fundamentally New Kind of Computer with Circuit-Rearranging Processor Published on March 01, 2020 at 06:04AM VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia." ZDNet reports: The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been "focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance." It's not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Biden wins South Carolina Democratic primary, Fox News projects, in crucial boost to campaign after early losses 02/29/20 4:01 PM

What Happens After 550 Times the Usual Dose of LSD? Published on March 01, 2020 at 05:04AM "From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD," writes clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684). CNN reports: The 49-year-old woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in "significant pain." In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually "pure LSD in powder form." The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms -- equal to 0.1 milligrams. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling "pleasantly high" for the 12 hours after that -- still vomiting, but less often. According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open o...

Filming of Matrix 4 Brings 'Excitement, Some Damage' to San Francisco Published on March 01, 2020 at 04:04AM "It's only been a few months since we learned that The Matrix 4 was actually a real movie that was going to actually happen, and was actually going to star Keanu Reeves, and now the movie is actually filming in San Francisco..." writes Cinema Blend. "However, making things real is apparently causing real damage in the city by the bay." NBC Bay Area reports: Filming of "The Matrix 4" brought helicopters, explosions and cars flipping in the air to San Francisco over the weekend, but it also resulted in some damage. The heat from the explosions was so intense it melted the covers of a couple building lamps and melted the plastic cover of an advertising street sign. Workers who replaced the plastic said it cost about $2,000... Filming of "The Matrix 4" in San Francisco wraps up on Sunday. BGR reports that a few locals shared thei...

Twitter verified an account for a fake Republican Rhode Island congressional candidate named Andrew Walz that was actually run by a teenager, CNN Business first reported on Friday . The account has since been permanently suspended in violation of Twitter’s rules, a spokesperson confirmed to TIME. The 17-year-old high school student — who agreed to speak with CNN Business on the condition that his name not be used — reportedly lives in upstate New York. He told CNN Business he made a website for the fake candidate in “around 20 minutes” and the Twitter account in “maybe five minutes.” He said he got the fake candidate’s picture from a website called This Person Does Not Exist , which uses machine learning to generate realistic yet fake faces. Why’d he do it? Because he was “bored” and wanted to test Twitter’s “election integrity efforts,” CNN Business reports. The teen told CNN Business that he then submitted both the Twitter account and website to Ballotpedia, a nonprofi...

The 'Go' Team Releases Version 1.14 Published on March 01, 2020 at 03:04AM The new 1.14 release of the Go programming language "is dotted with performance and security improvements," reports the developer news site DevClass, "but also gives devs more flexibility when it comes to module use." And they also give a nice overview of Go's development process: Go is the language most containerization projects are built with. The wide adoption of this approach is one of the reasons that made the Go team implement a new feedback-based system for language enhancements. In it, only a limited number of new features are proposed for an upcoming release, giving the community room to weigh in on them. If they decide a change will do more good than harm the feature will make it into the new version. However, since alterations affect a quite wide range of people, they are often heavily disputed. This already led to the abandoning of a proposal thought to improve the l...

Is Microsoft Retaliating For Chrome's Warnings About Extension Security in Edge? Published on March 01, 2020 at 02:04AM Several pundits criticized Google for warning Edge users to switch to Chrome if they wanted to use Chrome extensions "securely". "In Chrome, a plugin can be remotely disabled by the Chrome team if it's considered unsafe for whatever reason," notes PC World. "Google lacks the ability to remotely disable the same plugin within Edge, prompting Google to recommend switching to Chrome, a source close to Google said." Though PC World notes that Google isn't giving the same warning to Opera users... Yet now when you try to add Chrome Extensions to Edge, Microsoft also gives you a warning of its own -- that extensions installed from sources other than the Microsoft Store "are unverified [by Microsoft], and may affect browser performance." And while Google.com is still displaying an ad for Chrome to web surfers using Edge, ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert President Trump speaks at CPAC on closing day of conference 02/29/20 12:32 PM

Some Clever Farmers are Harvesting Metals From Plants Published on March 01, 2020 at 01:04AM The New York Times reports: Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms -- about 700 are known -- flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die.... The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...? On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker...

Fox News Breaking News Alert President Trump to deliver update on coronavirus measures 02/29/20 10:34 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Washington state health officials say 1 person has died from coronavirus 02/29/20 10:10 AM

Chasing AMD, Intel Promises Full Memory Encryption in Upcoming CPUs Published on March 01, 2020 at 12:04AM "Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015). Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves." SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the re...

Oregon Engineer Proved Right About Traffic Lights Published on February 29, 2020 at 11:04PM "Mats Järlström's emotions were clearly visible Friday morning. After years of arguing red light traffic cameras are flawed, the official Journal of the Institute of Transportation Engineers said he was right," reports a local news station in Portland, Oregon: The ITE sets traffic policy recommendations for the United States — and they said cities should be using his formula. "It is a big deal," Järlström told KOIN 6 News. "It's the top." Six years ago he tried to tell the Beaverton City Council there's a problem with its red light cameras. Then there was the State of Oregon, which fined him for practicing engineering without a license. He had to file a federal lawsuit to continue his research to prove drivers making turns at intersections often get caught in a dilemma when they're slowing down to make a turn and the yellow light isn't long eno...

Tesla and PG&E To Build World's Largest Battery Farm Near Silicon Valley Published on February 29, 2020 at 10:04PM "Tesla will work with PG&E to build the world's largest battery facility able to store energy generated by both solar and wind power in Monterey, California," writes long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior. Clean Technica reports: "Certainly, combined, this is going to be the largest battery facility in the world, so it's a big boost to our community and our country," said Monterey County Supervisor John Phillips. Both projects will utilize hundreds of lithium-ion batteries to store clean and renewable energy. They will also use the existing power lines to transmit the energy around Monterey County and parts of Silicon Valley. Next month, Tesla and PG&E hope to break ground on their project with hopes that it will be completed by the end of this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health Experts Worry Coronavirus May Be Spreading Undetected in the US Published on February 29, 2020 at 09:04PM The Boston Globe's Stat News site reports that the new coronavirus "may be spreading in parts of the Pacific Northwest, with California, Oregon, and Washington State reporting Friday that they have diagnosed cases with no travel history or known contact with another case...." Problems with a coronavirus test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have meant that little testing for the new virus has been done in the U.S. Worried infectious diseases experts have warned that the lack of apparent cases in the country cannot be taken as a sign the virus isn't spreading, undetected in some places... The discovery that the virus may be spreading in the country should not come as a surprise, said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. "It just tells us where th...

Fox News Breaking News Alert US signs peace deal with Taliban 02/29/20 5:14 AM

Ghostcat Bug Impacts All Apache Tomcat Versions Released in the Last 13 Years Published on February 29, 2020 at 05:31PM Apache Tomcat servers released in the last 13 years are vulnerable to a bug named Ghostcat that can allow hackers to take over unpatched systems. From a report: Discovered by Chinese cybersecurity firm Chaitin Tech, Ghostcat is a flaw in the Tomcat AJP protocol. AJP stands for Apache JServ Protocol and is a performance-optimized version of the HTTP protocol in binary format. Tomcat uses AJP to exchange data with nearby Apache HTTPD web servers or other Tomcat instances. Tomcat's AJP connector is enabled by default on all Tomcat servers and listens on the server's port 8009. Chaitin researchers say they discovered a bug in AJP that can be exploited to either read or write files to a Tomcat server. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FCC Proposes Hefty Fines To Carriers for Not Protecting Consumer Location Data Published on February 29, 2020 at 04:00PM The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it has proposed fining the nation's four largest wireless carriers $200 million for selling access to their customers' location information without taking reasonable measures to protect customers' real-time location information. From a report: The agency is proposing T-Mobile face a fine of more than $91 million. AT&T will be fined more than $57 million. It's fining Verizon more than $48 million. And Sprint's fine will be more than $12 million. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the proposed fines have put wireless carriers on notice that they need to do a better job protecting consumers' privacy. "This FCC will not tolerate phone companies putting Americans' privacy at risk," he said in a statement. Still, the amount of the fines is a drop in the bucket for the nation...

Microsoft's Cortana Drops Consumer Skills as it Refocuses on Business Users Published on February 29, 2020 at 01:30PM With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. From a report: That's very much in line with Microsoft's new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans. Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release. As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoft's suite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are ...

When AI Can't Replace a Worker, It Watches Them Instead Published on February 29, 2020 at 10:32AM Whether software that digitizes manual labor makes workers frowny or smiley will come down to how employers choose to use it. From a report: When Tony Huffman stepped away from the production line at the Denso auto part factory in Battle Creek, Michigan, to talk with WIRED earlier this month, the workers he supervised were still being watched -- but not by a human. A camera over each station captured workers' movements as they assembled parts for auto heat-management systems. The video was piped into machine-learning software made by a startup called Drishti, which watched workers' movements and calculated how long each person took to complete their work. [...] Denso's use of Drishti shows how some jobs will be transformed by artificial intelligence even when they're unlikely to be eliminated by AI anytime soon. Many jobs in manufacturing require dexterity and resourc...

Telescopes Detect 'Biggest Explosion Since Big Bang' Published on February 29, 2020 at 08:15AM Scientists have detected evidence of a colossal explosion in space -- five times bigger than anything observed before. Iwastheone shares a report: The huge release of energy is thought to have emanated from a supermassive black hole some 390 million light years from Earth. The eruption is said to have left a giant dent in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Researchers reported their findings [PDF] in The Astrophysical Journal. "I've tried to put this explosion into human terms and it's really, really difficult," co-author Melanie Johnston-Hollitt told BBC News. "The best I can do is tell you that if this explosion continued to occur over the 240 million years of the outburst -- which it probably didn't, but anyway -- it'd be like setting off 20 billion, billion megaton TNT explosions every thousandth of a second for the entire 240 million years. So that...

Fox News Breaking News Alert CDC: 2nd coronavirus case due to 'community spread' confirmed in California 02/28/20 4:57 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert President Trump holds a rally in North Charleston, S.C., 24 hours before the polls close in the state's Democratic primary. Watc 02/28/20 4:09 PM

FCC Approves Plan To Pay Satellite Companies To Give Up Airwaves Published on February 29, 2020 at 06:01AM U.S. regulators approved a plan to pay Intelsat SA and other satellite providers to give up airwaves so they can be redeployed for the fast 5G mobile networks being rolled out. From a report: The Federal Communications Commission on a 3-2 vote Friday approved Chairman Ajit Pai's plan for as much as $9.7 billion to clear the frequencies, with the money coming from bidders expected to include large telephone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. The action "will help deliver 5G services to consumers across our country and promote our global leadership," said Pai. The satellite companies use the spectrum to beam TV and radio programs to stations, but say they can give up part of it while still serving customers on frequencies they retain, in part because they would use new satellites to carry data. The FCC will sell the airwaves at a public auction. Pai earlie...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Dow closes down 356 points after late Friday rally, sliding over 3,500 points in worst week since financial crisis 02/28/20 1:07 PM

Apple Has Blocked Clearview AI's iPhone App for Violating Its Rules Published on February 29, 2020 at 02:30AM An iPhone app built by controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI has been blocked by Apple, effectively banning the app from use. From a report: Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup "violated" the terms of its enterprise program. The app allows its users -- which the company claims it serves only law enforcement officers -- to use their phone camera or upload a photo to search its database of three billion photos. But BuzzFeed News revealed that the company -- which claims to only cater to law enforcement users -- also includes many private sector users, including Macy's, Walmart, and Wells Fargo. Clearview AI has been at the middle of a media -- and legal -- storm since its public debut in The New York Times last month. The company scrapes public photos from social media sites, drawing ire from the big tech giants which claim Clearview...

WHO Raises Coronavirus Threat Assessment To Its Highest Level Published on February 29, 2020 at 01:39AM World Health Organization officials said Friday they are increasing the risk assessment of the coronavirus, which has spread to at least 49 countries in a matter of weeks, to "very high" at a global level. From a report: "We are on the highest level of alert or highest level of risk assessment in terms of spread and in terms of impact," said Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's health emergencies program. The group isn't trying to alarm or scare people, he said. "This is a reality check for every government on the planet: Wake up. Get ready. This virus may be on its way and you need to be ready. You have a duty to your citizens, you have a duty to the world to be ready." The world can still avoid "the worst of it," but the increased risk assessment means the WHO's "level of concern is at its highest," he said at a ...

Tracy Drain, with one of her childhood inspirations … Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura via NASA https://ift.tt/2I8qXxO

Freeman Dyson, Visionary Technologist, Is Dead at 96 Published on February 29, 2020 at 12:50AM darenw shares a report: Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth's environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper -- worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize -- that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great achievements of modern science. But it was as a writer and technological visionary that he gained public renown. He imagined exploring the solar system with spaceships propelled by nuclear explosions and establishing distant colonies nourished by genetically engineere...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Appeals court temporarily blocks ‘Remain-in-Mexico’ policy 02/28/20 10:44 AM

Students from the greater Seattle area will have an opportunity next week to talk with a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station. February 28, 2020 from NASA https://ift.tt/38avH0w

Senate Unanimously Approves Bill To Ban Purchase of Huawei Equipment With Federal Funds Published on February 29, 2020 at 12:10AM The Senate unanimously approved legislation on Thursday that would ban the use of federal funds to purchase telecommunications equipment from companies deemed a national security threat, such as Chinese group Huawei. From a report: The bipartisan Secure and Trusted Telecommunications Networks Act, which the House passed in December, bans the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from giving funds to U.S. telecom groups to purchase equipment from companies deemed threats. The bill would require the FCC to establish a $1 billion fund to help smaller telecom providers to rip out and replace equipment from such companies, and to compile a list of firms seen as posing a threat to telecom networks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bernie Sanders Has an Audacious -- and Hugely Expensive -- Climate Plan Published on February 28, 2020 at 11:19PM Senator Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in this year's presidential election, has put forth the most audacious climate plan among the contenders. But there are doubts about the political and economic feasibility of his sweeping vision, as well as the wisdom of some of his particular technical proposals. From a report: Notably, the plan restricts tools that could help rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, including nuclear power and technologies that can capture carbon dioxide. Sanders wants to pump more than $16 trillion into a version of the Green New Deal that would eliminate emissions from the US power sector, as well as all ground transportation, within a decade. To pull it off, he wants the government to play a much larger role in the electricity sector. His plan would direct new or expanded federal agencies to build nearly $2.5 tri...