Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' Says Koch-Backed Group; Experiment Tests Whether the Universe Is a 2-D Hologram

Did Google's Self-Driving Car Hit a Bump? | Comcast Denies Its Data Caps Are Actually 'Data Caps' To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend Experiment Tests Whether the Universe Is a 2-D Hologram Did Google's Self-Driving Car Hit a Bump? Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' Says Koch-Backed Group Comcast Denies Its Data Caps Are Actually 'Data Caps' Uber Reportedly Has a Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft Hot Comment: "True, but the gap of 'standard knowledge' isn't as bad as..." From the Vault: Hawking Picks Physics Over God for Big Bang Watch It: Grumpy Programmer's Advice for Young Computer Workers Poll Booth: Should police have cameras recording their work at all times? Sponsored Resource: The Truth About Cloud Security   Experiment Tests Whether the Universe Is a 2-D Hologram Four years ago, Fermilab proposed testing the theory that the universe could be a hologram, and the experiment is finally going online. Researchers operating with cutting-edge technology out of a trailer in rural Illinois, say the set of experiements they launched this week will help them determine whether or not we are living in a two-dimensional holographic universe, Jason Koebler reports. Sound Off>> Did Google's Self-Driving Car Hit a Bump? Google's vision of the car of the future drives itself, doesn't have a gas or brake pedal, and no steering wheel. But that last one might be an issue. California's DMV, which published safety guidelines aimed at manufacturers of self-driving vehicles in May, told the company it needs to add all those things back to their traditional locations so that occupants can take "immediate physical control" of the vehicle if necessary. Sound Off>> Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' Says Koch-Backed Group A conservative group with strong ties to the Koch brothers has been bombarding inboxes with emails filled with disinformation and fearmongering in an attempt to start a "grassroots" campaign to kill net neutrality -- at one point suggesting that "Marxists" think that preserving net neutrality is a good idea. The group also suggests that reclassifying the Internet as a public utility is the "first step in the fight to destroy American capitalism altogether." Sound Off>> Comcast Denies Its Data Caps Are Actually 'Data Caps' Ars Technica reports, "For the past couple of years, Comcast has been trying to convince journalists and the general public that it doesn't impose any 'data caps' on its Internet service. ... That's despite the fact that Comcast in some cities enforces limits on the amount of data customers can use and issues financial penalties for using more than the allotment." Sound Off>> Uber Reportedly Has a Playbook for Sabotaging Lyft The folks over at The Verge claim that "Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors." Interviews and documents show Uber reps ordering and canceling Lyft rides by the thousands, following a playbook with advice designed to prevent Lyft from flagging their accounts. Sound Off>>   Re: Truly the best scams "True, but the gap of "standard knowledge" isn't as bad as it used to be. At least it's getting better. If any message has gotten through, it's been not to give out information to an unknown phone caller. I'm sure it must work sometimes or they wouldn't be doing it, but since email spam has been largely eliminated from most end-user experiences, it seems going back to the phone scams is a bit..." --by AudioEfex Read More>>   Hawking Picks Physics Over God For Big Bang Four years ago, The Guardian reported that in his then-new book, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," Hawking wrote. Read More>>   Grumpy Programmer's Advice for Young Computer Workers Bob Pendleton, who is over 60 years old and has been programming since he was in his teens, shares his career experiences with younger programmers so they can avoid making his mistakes and possibly avoid becoming as grumpy as he is. Watch the Video>>   Should police have cameras recording their work at all times? It's not needed It should be at the officers' discretion It should depend on an officer's training/history It should be incentivized but not required It should happen whenever a city/state has funding It should happen everywhere, regardless of cost It's not feasible from a data storage/IT standpoint The cameras are likely to "accidentally" break anyway Cast Your Vote>>   The Truth About Cloud Security Security is the number one issue holding business leaders back from the cloud. But does the reality match the perception? Before you assume that on-site is the only way to keep data safe, you should take a comprehensive approach to evaluating risks. Doing so can lead to big benefits. Learn More>> Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.

 

Birds Burst into Flames Flying Over Solar Energy Plants; Comcast Training Materials Leaked

Ballmer Quits Microsoft Board | 51% of Computer Users Share Passwords To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend Birds Burst into Flames Flying Over Solar Energy Plants 51% of Computer Users Share Passwords Comcast Training Materials Leaked Ballmer Quits Microsoft Board Transition from Fission to Fusion Needs to Be Quick Hot Comment: "Spying serves a valuable purpose. It allows a country..." From the Vault: Flash on Android Is 'Shockingly Bad' Watch It: Tim O'Reilly Talks Tech Big and Small Poll Booth: How many devices are connected to your home Wi-Fi? Sponsored Resource: Increase Your Data Center IQ Birds Burst into Flames Flying Over Solar Energy Plants "Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the concentrated beams of solar energy focused upward by the plant's 300,000 mirrors -- 'streamers,' for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair," according to an Associated Press report. Sound Off>> 51% of Computer Users Share Passwords Help Net Security reports that, "Consumers are inadvertently leaving back doors open to attackers as they share log in details and sign up for automatic log on to mobile apps and services, according to new research by Intercede." Sound Off>> Comcast Training Materials Leaked The Verge reports on leaked training manuals from Comcast, which show how selling services is a required part of the job, even for employees doing tech support. The so-called "4S training material" explicitly states that 20 percent of a call center employee's rating for a given call is dependent on effectively selling the customer new Comcast services. Sound Off>> Ballmer Quits Microsoft Board After leaving his position as CEO of Microsoft a year ago, Steve Ballmer has still held a position as a member of the board of directors for the company. Now, he is leaving the board, explaining why in a letter to fresh Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "I have become very busy," Ballmer explains. Sound Off>> Transition from Fission to Fusion Needs to Be Quick Yale's Jason Parisi makes a compelling case for fusion power, and explains why fusion is cleaner, safer, and doesn't provide opportunities for nuclear smuggling and proliferation. The only downside will be the transition period, when both fission and fusion plants coexist--which could be dangerous. Sound Off>> Re:Bottom line... "Spying serves a valuable purpose. It allows a country to ascertain whether another country's pols are lying or telling the truth. It can also help prevent surprise attacks, and it can help explain another country's behavior. We should want countries to spy on each other, then there are fewer secrets. Nation states arose not because of mistrust, but from shared language, culture, and so on. Trust has almost nothing to do with it." --by gtall Read More>>   Flash on Android Is 'Shockingly Bad' Four years ago, GigaOm wrote, "Flash has been touted as one of the advantages for Android mobile devices. But how does Flash video perform on handsets running Google's mobile OS? To find out we asked Kevin Tofel to test Flash video on his Nexus One -- and the results are not good." Read More>> Tim O'Reilly Talks Tech Big and Small Tim O'Reilly has been a powerful force in tech book publishing, popularized the term Web 2.0, and has been at least a godfather to the open source movement. He's also an interesting person in general. Timothy Lord got ahold of him via Hangout while he was in a relaxed mood, happy to give detailed responses to your questions that ranged from small everyday tech to big concepts like the Internet as "global brain". Watch the Video>>    How many devices are connected to your home Wi-Fi? 1 - 2 3 - 4 5 - 6 7 - 8 9 - 10 More than 10 Hard to tell since I chipped all the squirrels in the neighborhood Cast Your Vote>> Increase Your Data Center IQ Discover how to improve network efficiency, lower IT costs and more proactively manage your physical, virtual and cloud environments. Industry experts show you how to build data center success. Learn More>> Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.

 

IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns; Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots

Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask | Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed? Hot Comment: "I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to..." From the Vault: Google CEO: Kids Will Have to Change Names to Escape 'Cyber Past' Watch It: Microsoft Open Source Explained Poll Booth: Of the following, I'd rather play ... Sponsored Resource: 10 Ways Flash Boosts Your Storage Performance IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns Due to a new set of routes published earlier this week, the Internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a Tertiary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600, have started randomly forgetting portions of the Internet. Cisco warned its customers in May that this Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) problem was coming and that a number of routers and networking products would be affected, ZDNet reports. Sound Off>> Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots In its most recent quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter disclosed that approximately 8.5% of its users are actually bots. Some of these 23 million bots were created to make revenue-generating URLs, others were created to collect followers that would later be sold to whoever needs a ready audience, and a few were created to mimic stereotypes just for fun. Sound Off>> Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask Wired reports that a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI. "Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function." Sound Off>> Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground Phil Plait reports that a trio of U.S. Congressmen are asking NASA to investigate what they call "an epidemic of anomalies" at SpaceX. They sent a memo demanding that SpaceX be held accountable to taxpayers for mission delays stemming from the development of new rockets. Plait notes, "[A]s a contractor, the rules are different for them than they would be if NASA themselves built the rockets, just as the rules are for Boeing or any other contractor. Sound Off>> Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed? GreyViking notes that the majority of job application forms are multiple screens long, and because they're invariably HTTPS, they'll time out after a finite time, which isn't always made known to the user-- among many other shortcomings. "Sometimes it seems that the biggest obstacle to getting a job can be being able to conquer the online application, and really, there has to be a better way: but what is it?" Sound Off>> Engineers do dress well "I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to dressing well, or to reasonable dress codes. They're mostly opposed to stupid dress codes that make them uncomfortable while working for no good reason. Reasonable dress for a meeting with outside customers is different from that for a group of engineers banging out a solution to a code problem, and what's reasonable when you've hauled someone in on their day off to deal with an emergency isn't the same as what they'd wear during a normal workday. Management tends to lose sight of all this because they've got much different jobs from the engineers and the dress norms for them are going to be different from those for engineers because the routine situations are going to be different." --by jxander Read More>>   Google CEO: Kids Will Have to Change Names to Escape 'Cyber Past' Four years ago, the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to the Wall Street Journal: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." And he said that people's private lives are so well documented now that the young will have to change their names when reaching adulthood to avoid their youthful indiscretions. Read More>> Microsoft Open Source Explained Microsoft does not immediately come to mind when many people think of open source. Timothy Lord caught up with someone at OSCON who aims to change that--Olivier Bloch, who works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., not directly for the big bad parent company. Find out what he has to say about where Microsoft is going with its happy talk about open source. Watch the Video>>   Of the following, I'd rather play ... Gin Rummy Bridge Hearts Checkers Poker Black Jack Chess Falken's Maze Cast Your Vote>> 10 Ways Flash Boosts Your Storage Performance The demand for new storage capacity continues to grow at astounding rates and IT is being tasked to ensure that growth doesn't make performance an issue. Find out what you should be doing now to ensure the flash storage in your infrastructure gives the maximum performance boost while keeping users happy. Learn More>>  Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.

 

FBI Hits Tor Users with Drive-By Downloads of Malware; Investment Giant Bets Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company

Facebook Seeks Devs to Make Linux Network Stack That Rivals FreeBSD | Nearly Half on Watchlist Unconnected to Terrorist Groups To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend Investment Giant Bets Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company FBI Hits Tor Users with Drive-By Downloads of Malware Facebook Seeks Devs to Make Linux Network Stack That Rivals FreeBSD Nearly Half on Watchlist Unconnected to Terrorist Groups Verizon Throttles Data to Provide 'Incentive to Limit Usage' Hot Comment: "The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your..." From the Vault: Shorter Video Games Coming Soon Watch It: JavaScript-Powered IoT Construction Kit Poll Booth: My degree of colorblindness... Sponsored Resources: App Release and Deployment for Dummies Investment Giant Bets Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company Motherboard reports that "as the cost of solar continues to fall, and more people opt for the distributed power offered by solar, there will be less demand for big power plants and the utilities that operate them." In fact, a major investment giant has now released three separate reports that argue Tesla Motors is going to help kill power companies off altogether. Sound Off>> FBI Hits Tor Users with Drive-By Downloads of Malware Wired is reporting that "the FBI has been quietly experimenting with drive-by hacks as a solution to one of law enforcement's knottiest Internet problems: how to identify and prosecute users of criminal websites hiding behind the powerful Tor anonymity system." Despite successfully busting some bad guys with the approach, it's engendering controversy. Sound Off>> Facebook Seeks Devs to Make Linux Network Stack That Rivals FreeBSD Facebook posted a career application that states the company is "seeking a Linux Kernel Software Engineer to join our Kernel team, with a primary focus on the networking subsystem. Our goal over the next few years is for the Linux kernel network stack to rival or exceed that of FreeBSD." There are a couple of especially interesting bullet points in the listing. Sound Off>> Nearly Half on Watchlist Unconnected to Terrorist Groups According to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept, "Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government's Terrorist Screening Database--a watchlist of 'known or suspected terrorists' that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments--more than 40 percent are described by the government as having 'no recognized terrorist group affiliation.'" Sound Off>> Verizon Throttles Data to Provide 'Incentive to Limit Usage' About a week ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked for Verizon's justification on its policy of throttling users who pay for unlimited data usage. In its response, Verizon explained that customers on unlimited plans "use disproportionately large amounts of data, and, unlike subscribers on usage-based plans, they have no incentive not to do so during times of unusually high demand." Sound Off>>  Idiots "The entire point of a university degree is to give you a guided tour of your ignorance. It's not to teach you everything about the subject, it's to tell you everything that you may want to learn within a subject so that you can then pick the bits to study in more detail yourself. If you let students pick the modules that they want, then you may as well just say 'here's a library, go and learn some stuff' and you'll get more or less the same results." --by TheRaven64 Read More>>    Shorter Video Games Coming Soon Three years ago, Blake Snow wrote that according to one expert, 90% of players who start a game will never see the end of it and it's not just dull games that go unfinished. Bottom line: people have less time to play games, have more options than ever, and are more inclined to play quick-hit multiplayer modes--even at the expense of 100-hour epics. Read More>> JavaScript-Powered IoT Construction Kit The Kinoma Create can "quickly and easily create personal projects, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things prototypes," according to Kinoma, a company that was launched in 2002 by ex-Apple employees. Peter Hoddie, a Kinoma founder and one of Apple's original QuickTime developers, shows Timothy Lord how the new IoT construction kit works. Watch the Video>>   My degree of colorblindness: I am not colorblind, as far as I know I am mildly colorblind (red-green) I am severely colorblind (red-green) I am mildly colorblind (blue-yellow) I am severely colorblind (blue-yellow) I have a different form of colorblindness I am totally colorblind Cast Your Vote>> App Release and Deployment for Dummies Today's competitive marketplace requires the organization to frequently release and deploy applications at the pace of user demands, with reduced cost, risk, and increased quality. Get a deep-dive look at the basics of application release and deployment and best practices for implementation along with resources. Learn More>>  Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.

 

Simple Scam Cheated Apple Out of More than $300K; How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons

An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax | The Sims 2 Giveaway Contains SecuROM To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend Simple Scam Cheated Apple Out of More than $300K How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax The Sims 2 Giveaway Contains SecuROM Is It Common to Run Mission-Critical Servers Without a Firewall? Hot Comment: "It will also likely cause the bombs to kill more people. A lack..." From the Vault: The Case Against Net Neutrality Watch It: Can Open Source Robot Bring Manufacturing to Desktops? Poll Booth: How long ago did you last assemble a computer? Sponsored Resource: The Risks of DIY Disaster Recovery Simple Scam Cheated Apple Out of More than $300K According to a Secret Service criminal complaint, Sharron Laverne Parrish Jr., 24,  allegedly tricked Apple Store employees in 16 states into accepting fake authorization codes to purchase $309,768 worth of Apple goods, reports the Business Insider. Sound Off>> How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons With the fifth edition of D&D soon to come out at Gen Con this year, Jon Peterson, author of Playing at the World, has released a new piece to answer a historical question: how was it, back in 1985, that Gary Gygax was ousted from TSR and control of D&D was taken away from him? Sound Off>> An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax The Daily Dot's EJ Dickson reports how she discovered that a hoax factoid she added over five years ago as a stoned sophomore to a Wikipedia article had not just remained on Wikipedia all this time, but come to be cited by in "innumerable blog posts and book reports," as well as a book on Jews and Jesus. Sound Off>> The Sims 2 Giveaway Contains SecuROM EA is giving away copies of The Sims 2: Ultimate Collection, for free, but not disclosing that it includes the controversial SecuROM anti-piracy software. Five years ago following criticism for using SecuROM in Spore and other games, EA went back to simple serial code authentication for The Sims 3. Sound Off>> Is It Common to Run Mission-Critical Servers Without a Firewall? An anonymous reader who is helping a client with a new point-of-sale system said that during the setup, the vendor disabled the local firewall, and after a number of emails back and forth, the vendor eventually said, "that's just how they do it and the contract dictates that's how we need to run it." Is this common? Sound Off>> Re:This might actually kill more than the bombs "It will also likely cause the bombs to kill more people. A lack of power will cause people to leave their homes and try to find somewhere that has clean water or air conditioning, which means a higher density of people packed into a smaller area. This means higher death counts when Israeli missiles inevitably hit another civilian area, as they've been doing since the start of this war." --by Joe Gillian Read More>>   The Case Against Net Neutrality Four years ago, Lee Sharpe wrote a blog that tried to make the case that Net Neutrality may actually be bad for America. He wrote, "if the government stays out, each company will set its own policies. If you don't like the FCC's policies, you are stuck with them unless you leave the United States. If you don't like your internet service provider's policies, you can simply switch to another one. So which model sounds better to you?" Read More>> Can Open Source Robot Bring Manufacturing to Desktops? FirePick is developing a robotic machine that is capable of assembling electronic circuit boards and 3D printing. While there are several companies that can place and solder components on your printed circuit board, the process is far too expensive for small companies, let alone individual makers. That's where the FirePick Delta comes in. Timothy Lord got the details from creator Neil Jansen at OSCON. Watch the Video>>   How long ago did you last assemble a computer? Within the past year 1 - 2 years ago 2 - 3 years ago 3 - 4 years ago 4 - 6 years ago 6 - 8 years ago More than 8 years ago Uhh.. when did Quake 3 come out? Cast Your Vote>>    The Risks of DIY Disaster Recovery In the last five years, many companies considered in-house disaster recovery management. But without the proper resources in place, managing disaster recovery yourself can put a strain on your budget, your staff and your disaster preparedness. Learn about the critical components that make a disaster recovery strategy successful, and the key questions you need to ask before bringing disaster recovery in-house. Learn More>> Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.