Shameless Plug

Are News Outlets Responsible For Comments Left On Their Facebook Pages? Published on June 01, 2020 at 09:44AM Leading media outlets in Australia lost big in court when a judge ruled publishers can be sued for comments left on their Facebook pages. They're now considering an appeal, reports the Financial Express: The court upheld an earlier ruling in the Supreme Court that the outlets were "first or primary distributors" of the comments about Dylan Voller, a former detainee at Northern Territory's Don Dale Youth Detention Centrethat were attached to news stories in December 2016 and January 2017... It said the outlets "encouraged and facilitated the making of comments by third parties which when posted on the page were made available to Facebook users generally and were therefore publishers of the comments". The court also held that the outlets could not rely on a defence of innocent dissemination... Justice John Basten said: "Perhaps with a degree of ...

The Minneapolis Police Department’s website has shown signs of a hack since late Saturday, days after a video purported to be from the hacktivist group Anonymous promised retribution for the death of George Floyd during an arrest. Websites for the police department and the city of Minneapolis were temporarily inaccessible on Saturday as protesters in cities around the U.S. marched against police violence aimed at black Americans. By Sunday morning, the pages sometimes required visitors to submit “captchas” to verify they weren’t bots, a tool used to mitigate hacks that attempt to overwhelm pages with automated requests until they stop responding. Officials with the police department and the city didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Anonymous posted a video on their unconfirmed Facebook page on May 28 directed at the Minneapolis police. The post accused them of having a “horrific track record of violence and corruption.” The speaker, wearing a hoodie and...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Riots break out in cities across US, including fires, violence near White House 05/31/20 7:57 PM

'Lord of the Rings' Reunion Brings Actors, Director, Writers Together on Zoom Published on June 01, 2020 at 07:04AM "Just about the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings gathered their Zoom screens together for a reunion nearly two decades after the end of the epic fantasy film trilogy," reports CNET: io9 notes that it was comic actor-singer Josh Gad who "gathered the hobbits, the wizards, the elves, and the wicked menfolk to go to Isen — YouTube, where they joke, talk shop, reminisce, and just seem to really thoroughly enjoy each others' presence. In this stream are Elijah Wood [Frodo], Sena Astin [Sam], Ian McKellen [Gandalf], Orlando Bloom [Legolas], Viggo Mortensen [Aragorn], Liv Tyler [Arwen], and more, along with director Peter Jackson and, presumably, the kind doting ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien just off-screen." The Wrap has more details, including the fact that the event was to support No Kid Hungry, a charity in support of ending childhood hunger, ...

Walmart Employees Complain Its Anti-Shoplifting AI Is Buggy, Inaccurate, and Dangerous Published on June 01, 2020 at 05:14AM Walmart uses "Everseen" AI technology in thousands of its stores "to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks," reports Wired. But some Walmart workers claim that instead it's often failed to stop actual instances of stealing, misidentified innocuous behavior as theft -- and made it harder for them to social distance: The workers said they had been upset about Walmart's use of Everseen for years and claimed colleagues had raised concerns about the technology to managers but were rebuked. They decided to speak to the press, they said, after a June 2019 Business Insider article reported Walmart's partnership with Everseen publicly for the first time. The story described how Everseen uses AI to analyze footage from surveillance cameras installed in the ceiling and can detect issues in real time, such as when a custo...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Semitrailer speeds into crowd of protesters on Minneapolis bridge; injuries unclear 05/31/20 4:29 PM

Are Food Delivery Services Actually Losing Money? Published on June 01, 2020 at 04:04AM Food delivery services like Grubhub should be thriving, especially during the pandemic. But they're not, The Markup reports: In August 2019, analysts from the investment firm Cowen estimated that Uber Eats was losing $3.36 on every order and would continue to lose money on every order for the next five years. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber Eats is not yet profitable in an email to employees in March after its parent company laid off more than 3,700 employees.... In early March, DoorDash filed to go public despite losing an estimated $450 million in 2019, according to The New York Times. DoorDash declined to comment on that estimate or its path to profitability, but regarding the latter CEO Tony Xu told Fortune in February that "we're working our way there...." Meanwhile, other companies have been ditching the food delivery business: Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub, ...

Linus Torvalds Argues Against 80-Column Line Length Coding Style, As Linux Kernel Deprecates It Published on June 01, 2020 at 03:04AM "The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the 'strong preferred limit'," reports Phoronix: The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be enforced. This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and he is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80x25 terminals... This deprecation involves updating the documentation on the kernel's coding style to be more sensible and updating the checkpatch.pl script that checks patches to no longer have a max line length of 80. Instead...

Protesting Mark Zuckerberg Comments About Fact-Checking, Fake News About Mark Zuckerberg Goes Viral Published on June 01, 2020 at 02:04AM "I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday. Since then, Vice reports, "Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network..." Zuckerberg's quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party system to do so. Nonetheless, Donald Trump later quoted Zuckerberg's favorable response in a tweet. Now, two satirical articles by websites with Australian domain names are going viral on Facebook, spreading misinformation about Zuckerberg and calling attention to his stance against fact checking by social media companies. The first article, posted on Thursday by a site called The Chaser, is titled "'Social ...

82-Year-Old Ridley Scott Shares Some Secrets About 'Alien' Published on June 01, 2020 at 01:04AM Ridley Scott was the fifth choice to direct the 1979 film Alien, remembers the Los Angeles Times, "meaning that no one was expecting the film to become as important and influential as it now is." This week they chronicled some more remembrances about the film from 82-year-old Ridley Scott: The central role of Ellen Ripley — also portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in three subsequent sequels — was originally written as a man... "I think it was Alan Ladd [then president of 20th Century Fox] who said, 'Why can't Ripley be a woman?' And there was a long pause, that at that moment I never thought about it. I thought, why not, it's a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went... I found Sigourney by word of mouth. Somebody had been told that Siourney was on an off-Broadway stage doing something, that I should meet. And I did," Scott s...

Dutch Restaurant Will Re-Open With Robot Waiters Published on June 01, 2020 at 12:04AM When Dutch restaurants open tomorrow, one will be using two shiny white-and-red robot waiters, reports the Associated Press: "Hello and welcome," the robots say — in a voice best described as pre-programmed. Their duties will include greeting customers, serving drinks and dishes and returning used glasses and crockery. It's unclear whether diners will be expected to tip. One thing the robots will certainly do is see that social distancing rules are respected. "We will use them to make sure the five feet we need during the corona crisis sticks," Leah Hu said. "I've had negative reactions," she said, "such as saying it makes it impersonal." But it may prove just what customers crave when Dutch restaurants are allowed to reopen Monday as lockdown restrictions are further eased. In a stab at quasi-human panache, one robot wears a chiffon scarf around its ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert NASA astronauts board Space Station in historic SpaceX mission 05/31/20 10:35 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert President Trump says US to designate Antifa group as a terrorist organization amid ongoing riots 05/31/20 9:51 AM

Microsoft Edge To Save Edits Made To PDF Files Without Saving a Copy Each Time Published on May 31, 2020 at 11:04PM techtsp quotes The Windows Club: In a major breakthrough, Microsoft Edge now supports Native File System API, which will take progressive web apps and their usage to a whole new level. An official roadmap entry points towards the new development, which only means one thing: Bridging the native app gap using modern web technologies... This is exactly where Microsoft Edge's Native File System API support comes into play, and Edge is already rolling out a native PDF editing support that uses this Native File System API. In the future, Microsoft Edge users can easily save edits made to PDF documents back to the file instead of saving a copy each time... Starting in Google Chrome 83, a new origin trial has started for the Native File System API for all desktop platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS. We saw it in action in the text editor demo.... Over the last few...

Zoom's New, Stronger Encryption May Only Protect Paying Clients Published on May 31, 2020 at 10:04PM "Zoom plans to strengthen the encryption of its service for paying customers," reports Newsweek, "but the upgrade will not be available to users of its free service." Zoom security consultant Alex Stamos later confirmed the details of the reported move in an interview with Reuters, which first reported the changes on Friday. But he also told the news outlet that Zoom's plans could still change. "The CEO is looking at different arguments," Stamos said. "The current plan is paid customers plus enterprise accounts where the company knows who they are." In the wake of privacy concerns, he added that Zoom was making significant efforts to upgrade safety and trust on its platform. In an emailed statement to Newsweek, a Zoom spokesperson said: "Zoom's approach to end-to-end encryption is very much a work in progress — everything from o...

Ask Slashdot: Why is Microsoft Blocking Its Own Server Pages? Published on May 31, 2020 at 09:04PM Long-time Slashdot reader lpq writes: I followed a link that pointed at a Microsoft security advisory about ".lnk" files. The original link, https://ift.tt/2zFeeT0, produced this message: Your request has been blocked. This may be due to several reasons. 1. You are using a proxy that is known to send automated requests to Microsoft. Check with your network administrator if there is any proxy and what User-Agent they are sending in the request header. 2. Your request pattern matches an automated process. To eliminate, reduce the volume of requests over a period of time. 3. Reference ID: 41.70790b91.4823110533.409105b4 It turns out the advisory number doesn't matter, just the extension for "Active Microsoft Server Page" (https.../.mspx) at the end. I guess there were too many security advisory lookups for MS to handle! *snort*! The .mspx extension indicates a page ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert SpaceX spacecraft docks with space station on historic NASA mission 05/31/20 7:26 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Watch Sunday Mass live from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC at 10:15 am on FoxNews.com 05/31/20 7:15 AM

Watch NASA Astronauts on SpaceX Crew Dragon Docking with ISS Published on May 31, 2020 at 07:41PM "We're so close that we're getting shadows from the station on the Dragon..." "@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago. They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube. 1,024,406 people are already watching... "NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting ...

Waymo's Self-Driving Minivans Return to Phoenix, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area Published on May 31, 2020 at 07:04PM Digital Trends reports: Waymo is planning to relaunch its fleet of self-driving minivans into Bay Area streets on June 8, according to an email acquired by The Verge. However, instead of transporting passengers, the vehicles will instead focus on delivering packages for non-profit organizations #DrawTogether, which gives art kits to children, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired... The pending return to the Bay Area follows Waymo's restart of its testing program in Phoenix, as lockdown restrictions were eased earlier this month... The autonomous vehicles will also soon also make their way back in Detroit and Los Angeles. The Verge argues that Waymo "is the latest autonomous vehicle operator to discover that doing deliveries allows it to sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles off the r...

Should Maintainers of Open Source Projects Be Paid? Published on May 31, 2020 at 04:04PM Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, writes "Over the last few weeks I've interviewed a range of open source project maintainers, most of which don't directly get paid for supporting their projects... Is this a bad thing?" It's not completely clear. Linux Foundation executive Chris Aniszczyk has been an outspoken opponent of open source "tip jars" that seek to sustain projects with donations. "These [open source developers] should be encouraged to start businesses or your business should hire them directly," he argues. But many such developers don't want a 9-to-5 corporate job, preferring the independence of contract work. Open source sustainability, in other words, is messy. Most open source project maintainers with whom I've spoken got started because it was a "fun" way to spend their free time. They had a variety o...

Microsoft Replaces Dozens of Staff With AI for News Stories on MSN Published on May 31, 2020 at 01:04PM "Workforce automation is about to cost dozens of news contractors their jobs," writes Engadget: The Seattle Times and The Guardian report that Microsoft is letting go of dozens of news contractors (about 50 in the US, 27 in the UK) after June 30th due to a shift to AI news production on MSN. The workers were responsible for choosing, editing and curating stories. The work included identifying trending news stories, planning content, and rewriting headlines, according to the Seattle Times. "It's been semi-automated for a few months but now it's full speed ahead,'' one of the terminated contractors tells them. "It's demoralizing to think machines can replace us but there you go.'' Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fox News Breaking News Alert Los Angeles mayor calls for National Guard help 05/30/20 8:25 PM

What Would The Internet Look Like If America Repeals Section 230? Published on May 31, 2020 at 09:04AM "REVOKE 230!" President Trump tweeted Friday, and NPR reports that the movement to revoke its safeguards "is increasingly becoming a bipartisan consensus... But experts caution that eliminating the legal protections may have unintended consequences for Internet users that extend far beyond Facebook and Twitter." "We don't think about things like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive and all these other public goods that exist and have a public-interest component that would not exist in a world without 230," said Aaron Mackey, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties nonprofit. Without Section 230, experts argue, sites would have less tolerance for people posting their opinions on YouTube, Reddit, Yelp, Amazon and many other corners of the Internet... The tech industry, unsurprisingly, is fighting hard to preserve Sec...

Apple Opens 100 More US Stores -- With Mandatory Temperature Checks For Customers Published on May 31, 2020 at 07:04AM "Apple is in the process of reopening 100 U.S. retail stores," reports Apple Insider, adding "as expected, those outlets look a lot different post-coronavirus." For example, the company is performing temperature-checks at the door and requiring facial coverings before entering the store. Apple has also indicated that it will provide facial coverings to customers if need be. As you approach the Apple Store, you should notice some changes right away. In the Lynnhaven Mall in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the Apple Store had multiple employees outside to guide customers into lines — one line for walk-ups, and another for reservations. While waiting in line, an employee asks you a series of four questions and takes your temperature: - Do you currently have a fever? - Do you currently have a cough? - Are you currently experiencing any respiratory issues? -...

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Brian Babin of Texas will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. CDT Sunday, May 31, at Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, to discuss the successful docking of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Robert May 30, 2020 from NASA https://ift.tt/3eEgcln

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched from Launch Complex 39A on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station. via NASA https://ift.tt/3gEg9ru

Eight Amazon Workers Have Now Died from Covid-19 Published on May 31, 2020 at 03:04AM The Los Angeles Times tells the story of 63-year-old Harry Sentoso, an Amazon warehouse worker who was called back to work on March 29th -- and died two weeks later of Covid-19. Across the country, Amazon workers have documented more than 1,000 cases among warehouse workers as of May 20, and 7 deaths. Sentoso is the eighth.... The company has put new measures in place to make its warehouses safer for employees, but the number of cases at its facilities keeps rising... Amazon also fired two tech workers who had publicly criticized safety and working conditions at the company's warehouses... The week before Sentoso died, the company began requiring employees to wear masks on site, and started checking the temperature of workers before they could enter. It began requiring employees to stay six feet apart in late March, and staggered shifts and canceled in-person meetings to make that easier. The co...

Cisco Discloses Security Breach That Impacted VIRL-PE Infrastructure Published on May 31, 2020 at 02:11AM Thursday Cisco disclosed a security breach that impacted a small part of its backend infrastructure and two of its commercial products also bundling the SaltStack software package as part of their firmware. ZDNet reports: Cisco said that hackers used a vulnerability in the SaltStack software package, which Cisco bundles with some products, to gain access to six servers... The six servers provide the backend infrastructure for VIRL-PE (Internet Routing Lab Personal Edition), a Cisco service that lets users model and create virtual network architectures to test network setups before deploying equipment in real situations. "Cisco identified that the Cisco maintained salt-master servers that are servicing Cisco VIRL-PE releases 1.2 and 1.3 were compromised," the company said Thursday. Cisco said it patched and remediated all hacked VIRL-PE servers on May 7, when it deployed...

Tunguska Meteor That Blasted Millions of Trees in 1908 Might Have Returned To Space Published on May 31, 2020 at 01:17AM schwit1 quotes Space.com: A new explanation for a massive blast over a remote Siberian forest in 1908 is even stranger than the mysterious incident itself. Known as the Tunguska event, the blast flattened more than 80 million trees in seconds, over an area spanning nearly 800 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) — but left no crater. A meteor that exploded before hitting the ground was thought by many to be the culprit. However, a comet or asteroid would likely have left behind rocky fragments after blowing up, and no "smoking gun" remnants of a cosmic visitor have ever been found. Now, a team of researchers has proposed a solution to this long-standing puzzle: A large iron meteor hurtled toward Earth and came just close enough to generate a tremendous shock wave. But the meteor then curved away from our planet without breaking up, its mass and momentum...

Fox News Breaking News Alert SpaceX rocket lifts off in historic flight carrying 2 NASA astronauts to International Space Station 05/30/20 12:25 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert WATCH LIVE: Two NASA astronauts are awaiting liftoff in a historic flight on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station 05/30/20 12:16 PM

Watch Live: SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts to ISS Published on May 31, 2020 at 12:11AM "Crew Dragon's hatch is closed, securing @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug in the spacecraft ahead of liftoff," SpaceX tweeted an hour ago. Livestreaming of the launch has already begun, with liftoff scheduled in about 41 minutes. GeekWire reports: If liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida occurs today at 3:22 p.m. ET (12:22 p.m. PT), it'll be a feat that America hasn't been able to perform since NASA retired its space shuttles, nearly nine years ago. "We are going to launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared during a launch-eve briefing at the space center's countdown clock. But even Bridenstine acknowledged that's not a sure bet for today. "Weather challenges remain with a 50% chance of cancellation," he tweeted this morning. A drenching rainstorm swept over Florid...

IPv6 Adoption Hits 32%. Will Stats Show How Many Returned to the Office? Published on May 30, 2020 at 11:04PM Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google's IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time. But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%. Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2018 'Hacking Attempt' Claimed By Georgia Was A Security Test They'd Requested Themselves Published on May 30, 2020 at 10:04PM An anonymous reader quotes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a "failed hacking attempt" of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party. But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reveal that there was no such hacking attempt. The evidence from the closed investigation indicates that Kemp's office mistook planned security tests and a warning about potential election security holes for malicious hacking. Kemp then wrongly accused his political opponents just before Election Day — a high-profile salvo that drew national media attention in one of the most closely watched races of 2018... The internet activity ...

Dell's All-AMD Gaming Laptop Hailed as a 'Budget Blockbuster' Published on May 30, 2020 at 09:04PM AMD "has a potent combination of both CPU and GPU technologies," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid, that "can play well in the laptop market especially, where a tight coupling of the two processing engines can mean both performance and cost efficiencies." One of the first all-AMD laptops to hit the market powered by the company's new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors is the Dell G5 15 SE, it's a 5.5 pound, 14.4-inch machine [with a 15.6-inch display] that sports an understated design for a gaming notebook but with an interesting glittery finish that resists fingerprints well. With a retail price of $1199 (starting at $879), the model tested at HotHardware is powered by an AMD Ryzen 4800H 8-core processor that boosts to 4.2GHz and an AMD Radeon RX 5600M mobile GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 memory... In the benchmarks, AMD's SmartShift technology load-balances ...