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 » The IRS's New Tax Software: Rave Reviews, But Low Turnout
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File — an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Tiny nematode worms can grow enormous mouths and become cannibals
One species of nematode worm turns into a kin-devouring nightmare if it grows up in a crowded environment with a poor diet [Link]
Slashdot » Roku Makes 2FA Mandatory For All After Nearly 600K Accounts Pwned
Roku has made two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for all users following two credential stuffing attacks that compromised approximately 591,000 customer accounts and led to unauthorized purchases in fewer than 400 cases. The Register reports: Credential stuffing and password spraying are both fairly similar types of brute force attacks, but the former uses known pairs of credentials (usernames and passwords). The … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Geoscientists are using telecom 'dark fibres' to map Earth’s innards
The networks of fibre optic cables that criss-cross the planet could be used to better understand what’s happening inside it [Link]
Slashdot » Linus Torvalds Injects Tabs To Thwart Kconfig Parsers Not Correctly Handling Them
Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format. Due to a patch having been queued last week to replace a tab with a space character in the kernel tracing … [Link]
Slashdot » A D&D Actual Play Show Is Going To Sell Out Madison Square Garden
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redditor commented, … [Link]
Slashdot » Crickets From Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak
The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. Krebs on SecurityL: The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is … [Link]
Slashdot » Stanford Releases AI Index Report 2024
Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]: 1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning. 2. Industry continues to dominate frontier … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Why AIs that tackle complex maths could be the next big breakthrough
Research-level mathematics might seem an unlikely proving ground for artificial intelligence, but recent developments suggest it offers a route to automated human-like reasoning [Link]
Slashdot » Ubisoft Revokes Access To Purchased Game, Sparking Digital Ownership Debate
Ubisoft has come under fire from players who claim the company has revoked access to a game they had previously purchased. Users attempting to launch "The Crew" on Ubisoft Connect are met with a message stating, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" The game has also been moved to … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Parkinson's disease progression slowed by antibody infusions
Monthly infusions with the drug prasinezumab appeared to slow the progression of motor symptoms in people with advanced Parkinson's disease [Link]
Slashdot » UK Starts Drafting AI Regulations for Most Powerful Models
The UK is starting to draft regulations to govern AI, focusing on the most powerful language models which underpin OpenAI's ChatGPT, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Policy officials at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology are in the early stages of devising legislation to limit potential harms caused by the emerging … [Link]
Slashdot » Song Lyrics Have Become Simpler and More Repetitive Over the Last Five Decades
Abstract of a paper on Nature: Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular … [Link]
New Scientist – News » Deadly upwellings of cold water pose threat to migratory sharks
Climate change is making extreme cold upwellings more common in certain regions of the world, and these events can be catastrophic for animals such as bull sharks [Link]
Slashdot » Security Engineer Jailed For 3 Years For $12M Crypto Hacks
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in … [Link]
Slashdot » Senator Warren Claims TurboTax 'Relentlessly' Upsells Customers in Letter To FTC
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax "continues to relentlessly upsell" customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free. From a report: As noted in the letter, Warren's staff analyzed TurboTax's services using a sample taxpayer and found that the company attempted to upsell the customer … [Link]
Slashdot » Sony's PS5 Pro is Real and Developers Are Getting Ready For It
Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. From the report: Sources familiar with Sony's plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their games … [Link]
Slashdot » iOS App Store's First Game Boy Emulator Taken Down Just Days Later
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of … [Link]
Slashdot » Telecom Fights Price Caps as US Spends Billions on Internet Access
AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon are quietly trying to weaken a $42.5 billion federal program to improve internet access across the nation, aiming to block strict new rules that would require them to lower their poorest customers' monthly bills in exchange for a share of the federal aid. From a report: In state after state, the telecom firms have blasted … [Link]
Slashdot » Apple Loses Mantle as World's Biggest Phone Seller To Samsung as China Sales Drop
Apple has lost its spot as the world's biggest mobile phone seller after a steep sales drop as South Korean rival Samsung retook the lead in the global market share. From a report: Samsung had been the biggest seller of mobile phones for 12 years until the end of 2023, when sales of Apple's iPhone models overtook it. Global smartphone … [Link]
Slashdot » Emissions Dropped 1.8% Every Year in California's Bay Area. Researchers Credit EVs
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berkeley set up dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor … [Link]
Slashdot » Disneyland Adds 'Stars Wars' Touches (and New Droids) for 'Season of the Force' Event
A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports: Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a long and colorful history of heroes and legends, Jedi and Sith, royalty … [Link]
Slashdot » California Replaces Gas Plant with Giant, Billion-Dollar Grid Battery
Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova. It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S." The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into … [Link]
The Joy of Tech » Sol's Witnesses
See the light! [Link]
Slashdot » CNN Reporter 'Still Haunted' By Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster
After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci … [Link]
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