John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

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Geekish

Anyone who works as a freelancer these days has to be at least a bit familiar with techie things. But it isn’t just that. When I was a kid and those vaguely SF puppet shows were on the television and all the other kids wanted to be Greg Gogetem or Steve Savetheuniverse, I wanted to be the guy in a white coat and glasses called Doc or Brains. Here are some technology-related feeds I find useful and/or entertaining.

Slashdot » Data Collected by the US Justice Department Exposed in Consultant's Breach

Saturday 13 April 23:22:57 UTC 2024

DOJ-Collected Information Exposed In Data Breach Affecting 340,000 Information Collected An anonymous reader shared this report from Security Week: Economic analysis and litigation support firm Greylock McKinnon Associates, Inc. (GMA) is notifying over 340,000 individuals that their personal and medical information was compromised in a year-old data breach. The incident was detected on May 30, 2023, but it took the … [Link]

Slashdot » Google Finally Launches Android's 'Find My Device' Network

Saturday 13 April 23:22:51 UTC 2024

This week the new "Find My Device" feature rolled out to Android devices around the world, starting in the U.S. and Canada. "With a new, crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices, Find My Device can help you find your misplaced Android devices and everyday items quickly and securely," according to a Google blog post. ZDNet explains: Although Google … [Link]

Slashdot » Cloud Brightening Research Begins in California

Saturday 13 April 23:22:50 UTC 2024

Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California… trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back toward … [Link]

Slashdot » The Linux Foundation's 'OpenTofu' Project Denies HashiCorp's Allegations of Code Theft

Saturday 13 April 23:22:49 UTC 2024

The Linux Foundation-backed project OpenTofu "has gotten legal pushback from HashiCorp," according to a report — just seven months after forking OpenTofu's code from HashiCorp's IT deployment software Terraform: On April 3, HashiCorp issued a strongly-worded Cease and Desist letter to OpenTofu, accusing that the project has "repeatedly taken code HashiCorp provided only under the Business Software License (BSL) and … [Link]

Slashdot » Should the US Ban Chinese EVs?

Saturday 13 April 23:22:48 UTC 2024

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called on U.S. President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the U.S. automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy." Brown's … [Link]

Slashdot » Japanese Astronauts To Land On Moon As Part of New NASA Partnership

Saturday 13 April 23:22:47 UTC 2024

Under a new agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the first non-American on the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign will be a Japanese astronaut. SpaceNews reports: At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama signed an agreement regarding an additional Japanese contribution … [Link]

Slashdot » ESA Prepares To Create Solar Eclipses To Study the Sun

Saturday 13 April 23:22:46 UTC 2024

Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA's Proba-3 (PRoject for On-Board … [Link]

Slashdot » Will America's Next Soldiers Be Machines?

Saturday 13 April 22:13:00 UTC 2024

Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin: Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the … [Link]

Slashdot » New Spectre V2 Attack Impacts Linux Systems On Intel CPUs

Saturday 13 April 21:04:00 UTC 2024

An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer: Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors. Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec group from VU Amsterdam. The researchers … [Link]

Slashdot » US Government Says Recent Microsoft Breach Exposed Federal Agencies to Hacking

Saturday 13 April 20:04:00 UTC 2024

From the Washington Post: The U.S. government said Thursday that Russian government hackers who recently stole Microsoft corporate emails had obtained passwords and other secret material that might allow them to breach multiple U.S. agencies. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday issued a rare binding directive to an undisclosed number … [Link]

Slashdot » 'Defeated' CEO's Finally Concede Hybrid Working Is Here to Stay

Saturday 13 April 19:04:00 UTC 2024

"After a year of cracking down with rigid return-to-office mandates, defeated CEOs are now finally accepting that hybrid working is here to stay," reports Fortune: KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years. So it's official: Leaders who believe … [Link]

Slashdot » 73-Year-Old Clifford Stoll Is Now Selling Klein Bottles

Saturday 13 April 18:04:00 UTC 2024

O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month: Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises). First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side surface. ("Need … [Link]

Slashdot » House Votes To Extend — and Expand — a Major US Spy Program

Saturday 13 April 4:00:00 UTC 2024

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized. After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community's spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 (PDF) of … [Link]

Slashdot » Calpine's California Battery Plant Is Among World's Largest

Saturday 13 April 2:50:00 UTC 2024

Calpine's billion-dolllar Nova Power Bank near Los Angeles will be among the largest in the world when it comes online later this year. According to Reuters, the plant is built on the site of a failed gas-fired power plant and "will be able to power about 680,000 homes for up to four hours when charged." From the report: The 680-megawatt … [Link]

Slashdot » Scientists Discover First Nitrogen-Fixing Organelle

Saturday 13 April 2:10:00 UTC 2024

In two recent papers, an international team of scientists describes the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell, which the researchers are calling a nitroplast. Phys.Org reports: The discovery of the organelle involved a bit of luck and decades of work. In 1998, Jonathan Zehr, a UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor of marine sciences, found a short DNA sequence … [Link]

Slashdot » 96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Info With Meta, Google, Data Brokers

Saturday 13 April 1:30:00 UTC 2024

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals — despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private — frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today. Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally … [Link]

Slashdot » Adobe Firefly Used Thousands of Midjourney Images In Training Its 'Ethical AI' Model

Saturday 13 April 0:50:00 UTC 2024

According to Bloomberg, Adobe used images from its competitor Midjourney to train its own artificial intelligence image generator, Firefly — contradicting the "commercially safe" ethical standards the company promotes. Tom's Guide reports: The startup has never declared the source of its training data but many suspect it is from images it scraped from the internet without licensing. Adobe says only … [Link]

Slashdot » Huawei Building Vast Chip Equipment R&D Center In Shanghai

Saturday 13 April 0:10:00 UTC 2024

AmiMoJo writes: Huawei Technologies is building a massive semiconductor equipment research and development center in Shanghai as the Chinese tech titan continues to beef up its chip supply chain to counter a U.S. crackdown. The centre's mission includes building lithography machines, vital equipment for producing cutting-edge chips. To staff the new center, Huawei is offering salary packages worth up to … [Link]

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