technology - Posted On:2021-03-02 05:14:58 Source: slashdot

Google Finance now has a dedicated "crypto" field for bitcoin, ether, litecoin and bitcoin cash. CoinDesk reports: Right at the top of the page, where users can "compare markets," crypto is listed among the five default markets, which also includes U.S., Europe, Asia and "Currencies." At the moment, it appears Google Finance only tracks a limited number of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash are displayed by default when clicking the crypto tab. A search for Cardano's ADA, Polkadot's DOT, Stellar's XLM tokens return no results -- for either the protocol or the token's ticker. XRP returned a result for the Ripple XRP Liquid Index, which trades on Nasdaq. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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science - Posted On:2021-03-02 02:14:58 Source: slashdot

Rocket Lab has unveiled plans for a larger rocket that can carry bigger payloads than its current reusable trooper, the Electron. It's called the Neutron and will be capable of carrying 8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit compared to the Electron's 660 lbs capacity. Engadget reports: The Neutron will also have a fully reusable first stage that can land on an ocean platform, in the same vein as SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Rocket Lab is looking to fast-track the rocket's first flight to 2024 by using the existing launch pad at Virginia's Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport located at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility. It's also scouting sites across the US to build a new factory where the Neutron will be assembled at scale. The new rocket is designed with an eye to the future of mega-satellite constellations. Its larger payload means it can take multiple small satellites in batches to specific orbital planes, creating a "a more targeted approach to building out" the massive projects, said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and CEO. Demand for the constellations is growing, with the satellite networks enabling better navigation and providing communications in rural areas back here on Earth. The Neutron's lift capacity also means it should be able to transport 98 percent of all satellites forecast to launch through 2029. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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technology - Posted On:2021-03-01 22:44:58 Source: slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Forty percent of Americans don't trust Facebook and TikTok and Google appears to be winning the trust wars, according to a survey from SeoClarity. SeoClarity surveyed 1,057 American residents to gauge trust in tech companies and found a majority of US citizens think social media companies need more regulation. The findings are notable due to how tech companies are stacking up on trust. Google tops Amazon, Microsoft and Apple on the trustworthy scores. Meanwhile, Facebook and TikTok were the most distrusted. SeoClarity also found that half of Americans think that Websites can control where they land in Google searches. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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news - Posted On:2021-03-01 21:14:59 Source: slashdot

In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million. Reuters reports: The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work. It's a new type of digital asset - known as a non-fungible token (NFT) - that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online. Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced. The computer-generated video sold by Rodriguez-Fraile shows what appears to be a giant Donald Trump collapsed on the ground, his body covered in slogans, in an otherwise idyllic setting. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biz & IT - Posted On:2021-03-01 20:29:59 Source: arstechnica

The founder of the far-right social media platform Gab said that the private account of former President Donald Trump was among the data stolen and publicly released by hackers who recently breached the site.

In a statement on Sunday, founder Andrew Torba used a transphobic slur to refer to Emma Best, the co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets. The statement confirmed claims the WikiLeaks-style group made on Monday that it obtained 70GB of passwords, private posts, and more from Gab and was making them available to select researchers and journalists. The data, Best said, was provided by an unidentified hacker who breached Gab by exploiting a SQL-injection vulnerability in its code.

"My account and Trump's account were compromised, of course as Trump is about to go on stage and speak," Torba wrote on Sunday as Trump was about to speak at the CPAC conference in Florida. "The entire company is all hands investigating what happened and working to trace and patch the problem."

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linux - Posted On:2021-03-01 20:29:59 Source: slashdot

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel. The Register reports: "As you can tell, I didn't do that," he said in his State of The Kernel update that announced release candidate one of the new kernel cut. "To a large part because people were actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I got things merged up ok." It wasn't just penguinistas behaving well that helped. Torvalds said this version of the kernel has received around 10,000 commits. That's rather fewer than the 12,000 or 13,000 he usually sees. In case anyone was inconvenienced by blackout-induced inability to merge, Torvalds said he's open to help any kernel devs for whom his unavailability caused problems but is not open to all late pulls. Torvalds rated the new release as offering "a fair amount of historical cleanup" on account of "removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the "perf" interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense." Among the big inclusions in 5.12 are Clang Link-Time Optimizations, which make for better compiler performance, and support for Intel's eASIC NX5 silicon that aims to offer an alternative to FPGAs in edge and cloud applications. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G SoC also gains support. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Policy - Posted On:2021-03-01 19:59:59 Source: arstechnica

On Friday, the Biden administration announced it had fulfilled the requirements of one of the executive orders issued on the very first day of his presidency: determining what's called the "social cost of carbon." This figure tries to capture the cumulative economic value achieved by investing in limiting carbon emissions now. As such, carbon's social cost plays a key role in informing the cost/benefit analysis of any government policy or regulation that influences carbon emissions.

The government is required to attach a value to the social cost of carbon, which typically requires the consideration of extensive economic and climate research. But the Trump administration had ended the process of updating the value after having chosen an artificially low one. Given a 30-day deadline to come up with a new one, the Biden administration has chosen to adjust the last pre-Trump value for inflation and use that until it can do a more detailed analysis of how the research landscape has changed over the last four years.

The net result is a dramatically higher price on carbon that will enable far more aggressive regulatory action for at least the next four years.

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news - Posted On:2021-03-01 19:59:59 Source: slashdot

quonset writes: "The Korean Fusion Cafe 'Spoon by H' had the ingredients to become an L.A. success story but is the epitome of a small business, with owner and chef Yoonjin Hwang working 15-hour days to run the restaurant with her mother and brother," reports CBS News. "'We have no staff. We have no cooks. I have to do everything by myself,' said Hwang. 'Like so many other small businesses we were hit hard by the pandemic. All we could do was just like take it day by day and do whatever we could to stay afloat.'" One day she received an order for $700. The person came in and picked up the order. A week later the same person disputed the charge. Hwang had to pay back the money, and this same situation kept occurring time and again. Hwang was the victim of "friendly fraud" or "chargebacks." "In the scam, a customer orders food, often through a delivery service, then receives their meal, but disputes the charge with their credit card company to get a refund," reports CBS News. "According to the Los Angeles Times, a growing number of the city's restaurants have struggled as scammers take advantage of internet ordering to use fraudulent credit cards or request refunds, claiming they never received part or all of an order." "I just felt so incredibly helpless and frustrated. We just couldn't keep running our business like this," Hwang said. As a result, she decided to close the restaurant for good. Patrons helped raise more than $60,000 on a GoFundMe page, which Hwang plans to use to pay off her debt. She says she may consider opening a new business someday with the earnings, but she doesn't know when, or what type of business. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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technology - Posted On:2021-03-01 19:14:59 Source: slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Tattoos are usually considered a form of personal expression, but a team of researchers in Europe have created what they're calling the world's first light-emitting tattoo based on OLED screen technology that, besides presumably looking kind of cool, could also serve as a visible warning about potential health concerns. In a recently published paper in the Advanced Electronic Materials journal, "Ultrathin, UltraConformable, and FreeStanding Tattooable Organic LightEmitting Diodes," scientists from the University College London in the UK and the Italian Institute of Technology detail how their new approach to tattoos relies on the same organic light-emitting diode technology featured in devices like more recent iPhones, as well as the recent crop of mobile devices featuring folding screens. The flexibility of an OLED display is important for this application given human skin is so pliable and flexes and folds as the body moves. The actual electronics of the light-emitting tattoos, made from an extremely thin layer of an electroluminescent polymer that glows when a charge is applied, measure in at just 2.3-micrometers thick, which, according to the researchers, is about one-third the diameter of a red blood cell. The polymer layer is then sandwiched between a pair of electrodes and sits atop an insulating layer, which is bonded to temporary tattoo paper through a printing process that isn't prohibitively expensive. The tattoos can be easily applied to surfaces using the same wet transfer process that temporary tattoos designed for kids use, and can be easily washed off when no longer needed or wanted using soap and water. With a current applied the OLED tattoos in their current form simply glow green, but eventually could produce any color using the same RGB approach that OLED screens use. However, while the researchers acknowledge that the potential for glowing tattoos is there, taking that art in a whole new direction, they also see even more potential for them as a medical tool. When combined with other wearable technologies the light-emitting tattoos could start flashing when an athlete needs to rehydrate, or change color when applied to foods providing obvious warnings when expiration dates have passed. The researchers note that the OLEDs polymers can quickly degrade when exposed to the air, and "there's an even bigger issue of finding a way to power them using tiny batteries or supercapacitors, as so far in the lab they've been wired to an external power source," adds Gizmodo. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biz & IT - Posted On:2021-03-01 18:29:59 Source: arstechnica

The founder of the far-right social media platform Gab said that the private account of former President Donald Trump was among the data stolen and publicly released by hackers who recently breached the site.

In a statement on Sunday, founder Andrew Torba used a transphobic slur to refer to Emma Best, the co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets. The statement confirmed claims the WikiLeaks-style group made on Monday that it obtained 70GB of passwords, private posts, and more from Gab and was making them available to select researchers and journalists. The data, Best said, was provided by an unidentified hacker who breached Gab by exploiting a SQL-injection vulnerability in its code.

"My account and Trump's account were compromised, of course as Trump is about to go on stage and speak," Torba wrote on Sunday as Trump was about to speak at the CPAC conference in Florida. "The entire company is all hands investigating what happened and working to trace and patch the problem."

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it - Posted On:2021-03-01 18:29:59 Source: slashdot

The far-right social media platform Gab says a trove of its contents has been stolen in a security breach -- including passwords and private communications. Wired reports: On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab's public posts and profiles -- with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site -- but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. "It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content," Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. "It's another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6." DDoSecrets says it's not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. According to DDoSecrets' Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab's data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site�"a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn't differentiate between a user's input and commands in the site's code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker's reference to an "Anonymous Revival Project," they're not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do "want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists." The company's CEO, Andrew Torba, responded in a public statement on the company's blog that "reporters, who write for a publication that has written many hit pieces on Gab in the past, are in direct contact with the hacker and are essentially assisting the hacker in his efforts to smear our business and hurt you, our users." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Security - Posted On:2021-03-01 18:14:59 Source: bleepingcomputer

Working exploits targeting Linux and Windows systems not patched against a three-year-old vulnerability dubbed Spectre were found by security researcher Julien Voisin on VirusTotal. [...]

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Security - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:45:00 Source: bleepingcomputer

A Dutch e-Ticketing platform has suffered a data breach after a database was stolen from an unsecured staging server. [...]

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Policy - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:45:00 Source: arstechnica

Even though we've had more good vaccine news lately, COVID-19 in the US is still very much a widespread concern. We're still going to need masks for many months to come. So why, a year into the pandemic, are good ones still so hard to find?

The New York Times reports that there are dozens of small, US-based businesses that have pivoted to making medical-grade masks, but they can't sell them to consumers because of policies put in place to protect supply chains at the beginning of the pandemic.

Facebook and Instagram will be happy to show you ads for cute, fashion-forward fabric masks (in adult and children's sizes)—but not ads for actual medical-grade, government-approved N95 masks. The social network explained to the NYT that its policies are meant both to preserve supplies for workers in the health care field who need them the most and also to cut down on sales of counterfeits.

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technology - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:44:59 Source: slashdot

Companies that sell refrigerators, washers, hairdryers, or TVs in the European Union will need to ensure those appliances can be repaired for up to 10 years, to help reduce the vast mountain of electrical waste that piles up each year on the continent. Euronews reports: The "right to repair," as it is sometimes called, comes into force across the 27-nation bloc on Monday. It is part of a broader effort to cut the environmental footprint of manufactured goods by making them more durable and energy-efficient. Lack of spare parts is another problem, campaigners say. Sometimes a single broken tooth on a tiny plastic sprocket can throw a proverbial wrench in the works. Under the new EU rules, manufacturers will have to ensure parts are available for up to a decade, though some will only be provided to professional repair companies to ensure they are installed correctly. New devices will also have to come with repair manuals and be made in such a way that they can be dismantled using conventional tools when they really can't be fixed anymore, to improve recycling. German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said that the next step should see manufacturers forced to state how long a product is expected to work for and repair it if it breaks down earlier. This would encourage companies to build more durable products, she said. In a next step, environmentalists and consumer rights groups want the "right to repair" expanded to include smartphones, laptops and other small electrical devices. The bloc's ecological design directive -- of which the right to repair requirement is a part -- will also revise existing energy labels that describe how much electricity washers and other household devices consume. The new seven-step scale from A to G will be complemented by a QR code that provides consumers with further information, such as how loud the devices are. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Policy - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:30:00 Source: arstechnica

T-Mobile has cut at least 5,000 jobs since completing its acquisition of Sprint despite promising that the merged company would start creating new jobs "from day one."

As noted by Light Reading today, a T-Mobile filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week said, "As of December 31, 2020, we employed approximately 75,000 full-time and part-time employees, including network, retail, administrative, and customer support functions." That's 5,000 fewer than the number T-Mobile gave on previous occasions, including a press release on December 8, 2020 that said there are "more than 80,000 employees at the post-merger T-Mobile." The 80,000 figure was probably off by at least a few thousand employees by the time it was repeated in that press release, given that T-Mobile had 5,000 fewer employees just a few weeks later.

The US government didn't impose any hiring requirements in the merger conditions that allowed T-Mobile to complete its acquisition of Sprint in April 2020. But T-Mobile and then-CEO John Legere made jobs a key part of their lobbying for the merger. In April 2019, Legere published a blog post titled "Just the Facts on Jobs: The New T‑Mobile Will Create Jobs From Day One."

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Policy - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:14:59 Source: arstechnica

T-Mobile has cut at least 5,000 jobs since completing its acquisition of Sprint despite promising that the merged company would start creating new jobs "from day one."

As noted by Light Reading today, a T-Mobile filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week said, "As of December 31, 2020, we employed approximately 75,000 full-time and part-time employees, including network, retail, administrative, and customer support functions." That's 5,000 fewer than the number T-Mobile gave on previous occasions, including a press release on December 8, 2020, that said there are "more than 80,000 employees at the post-merger T-Mobile." The 80,000 figure was probably off by at least a few thousand employees by the time it was repeated in that press release, given that T-Mobile had 5,000 fewer employees just a few weeks later.

The US government didn't impose any hiring requirements in the merger conditions that allowed T-Mobile to complete its acquisition of Sprint in April 2020. But T-Mobile and then-CEO John Legere made jobs a key part of their lobbying for the merger. In April 2019, Legere published a blog post titled, "Just the Facts on Jobs: The New T‑Mobile Will Create Jobs From Day One."

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news - Posted On:2021-03-01 17:14:59 Source: slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Bitcoin rose nearly 7% on Monday as risk assets rallied after last week's bond rout cooled, with Citi saying the most popular cryptocurrency was at a "tipping point" and could become the preferred currency for international trade. With the recent embrace of the likes of Tesla and Mastercard, bitcoin could be at the start of a "massive transformation" into the mainstream, the investment bank said. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, has restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk and will begin dealing bitcoin futures and non-deliverable forwards for clients next week, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Bitcoin, which hit a record high of $58,354 in February, could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a "speculative implosion," Citi said. "There are a host of risks and obstacles that stand in the way of bitcoin progress," Citi's analysts wrote. "But weighing these potential hurdles against the opportunities leads to the conclusion that bitcoin is at a tipping point." Bitcoin's recent performance has come with the growing involvement of institutional investors in recent years, contrasting with its heavy retail investor focus for most of the past decade, Citi said. If businesses and individuals gain access via digital wallets to planned central bank digital cash and so-called stablecoins, bitcoin's global reach, traceability and potential for quick payments would see it "optimally positioned" to become the preferred currency for international trade, Citi added. Such a dramatic transformation to the de facto currency of world trade -- a status currently held by the dollar -- would depend on changes to bitcoin's market to allow wider institutional participation and closer oversight by financial regulators, Citi said. Still, shifts in the macroeconomic environment could also make the demand for bitcoin less pressing, it added. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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entertainment - Posted On:2021-03-01 16:44:59 Source: slashdot

An anonymous reader shares a report: When French telecommunications company Altice acquired U.S. cable companies Cablevision and Suddenlink, Chairman Patrick Drahi made a bold statement: Altice USA would rival Comcast and Charter in size, becoming one of the three dominant U.S. cable operators. Fast forward nearly six years, and Altice USA has about 5 million customer relationships, compared with about 31 million each for Comcast and Charter. (Altice USA did announce a $310 million acquisition of Morris Broadband on Monday, which will give it about 36,000 more customers.) CEO Dexter Goei explained to CNBC what prevented Altice USA's rapid expansion, why he thinks cable and wireless will eventually merge in the U.S., and why it's only a matter of time before cable TV becomes extinct. CNBC: So let me ask that question in a slightly different way. Do you envision a day where cable TV, as we know it, simply no longer exists? Goei: Yes. For sure. Everything is going to be IP-based, and then the question is because everything is IP based, and you have so many different choices...what the cable bundle is doing today is putting together everything that's available in the OTT world and providing it to you in a good format for you to be able to guide yourself through lots of different options in the way you watch television. As technology and integration technology continues to get better and better, you're going to be able to aggregate that on your OTT platforms, your smart TV. Your Samsung TV today already has, say, 20 apps, 30, 40 apps already there. The pain of it is you're always clicking between the apps, all the time. Once you can get the whole aggregation together and make it look very similar to what you do in a cable environment, then that interactivity becomes second nature and doesn't really matter who's doing the bundle. It could just be your set-box provider, your smart TV provider. CNBC:: So this idea that some media executives have that there's going to be a floor at 50 million subscribers, that's ultimately fantasy? Goei: I think so, because name me one person under 30 years old who has a cable video connection. I can't. So it's just a question of time. People grow up in a certain way. I tell my kids all day long, how could you spend 10 hours a day on your iPhone? And they're like, "Daddy, that's our life. We didn't go out in the woods and build bricks and castles and stuff like you. That stuff is boring. My whole life is on my phone." So, there's an evolution of technology and habits and the way people consume content that�(TM)s changed dramatically over the last ten years, and it's going to continue to change. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tech - Posted On:2021-03-01 16:15:00 Source: arstechnica

Earlier this month, we teased the announcement of a new model of mini-PC from specialty vendor Minisforum. Today, we're taking a look at the results of some hands-on testing of the Minisforum U850, configured with a Comet Lake i5 CPU, 16GiB RAM, and a 256GB Kingston NVMe SSD.

The U850 is an aggressively generalist mini-PC, and it can tackle most roles—its dual network interfaces make it a good candidate for a high-performance router, and its combination of tons of USB ports, HDMI and DisplayPort video out, and surprisingly fast storage make it an excellent little desktop PC.

The only role the U850 might play that we'd advise some caution with is home theater PC (HTPC)—although it's powerful enough to do the job, its fan noise when under load is enough that it might annoy the sorts of people who tend to want a small, unobtrusive HTPC in the first place.

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