Linux fréttir

The American Mathematical Society has announced the passing of Ronald Graham, a leader in discrete mathematics and a former president of both the AMS and the MAA. He died July 6th at the age of 84. From the report: Graham published more than 350 papers and books with many collaborators, including more than 90 with his wife, Fan Chung, and more than 30 with Paul ErdÅ's. In addition to writing articles with Paul ErdÅ's, Graham had a room in his house reserved for ErdÅ's's frequent visits, he administered the cash prizes that ErdÅ's created for various problems, and he created the ErdÅ's number, which is the collaboration distance between a mathematician and ErdÅ's. He also created Graham's number in a 1971 paper on Ramsey theory written with Bruce Rothschild, which was for a time the largest number used in a proof. Graham received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 under the direction of D.H. Lehmer. He worked at Bell Laboratories until 1999, starting as director of information sciences and ending his tenure there as chief scientist. Graham then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego and later became chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint operation between the university and the University of California, Irvine. [...] Graham was an AMS member since 1961. For more information, see his "special page," these video interviews by the Simons Foundation, an audio interview about the mathematics of juggling, and his page at the MacTutor website. Graham's most recent appearance on Slashdot was in 2016, when a trio of researchers used a supercomputer to generate the largest math proof ever at 200 terabytes in size. The math problem has been named the boolean Pythagorean Triples problem and was first proposed back in the 1980's by mathematician Ronald Graham.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Authorities in Germany have seized a server used by the organization that published a trove of US police internal documents commonly known as BlueLeaks, according to the organization's founder. On Tuesday, Emma Best, the founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets or DDoSecrets, a WikiLeaks-like website that has published the police data, said that prosecutors in the German town of Zwickau seized the organization's "primary public download server." "We are working to obtain additional information, but presume it is [regarding] #BlueLeaks," Best added on Twitter. "The server was used ONLY to distribute data to the public. It had no contact with sources and was involved in nothing more than enlightening the public through journalistic publishing." Best shared a screenshot of the email they received from DDoSecrets' hosting provider informing of the server seizure. "Your server has been confiscated," the email reads. "Until now we were not allowed to inform you accordingly." The email then notes that the seizing authority was the Department of Public Prosecution Zwickau. "We're gonna get set up with a new data host and move up our plans to evolve some of our infrastructure," Best told Motherboard. "It's the perfect time for it to fall apart because we were rebuilding it anyway. It's a huge headache and a violates the ideal of press freedom, but we'll survive, even if we have to close Hunter for a time. The equivalent system they mention is blank and unconfigured, and obviously we can't rely on it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The last thing America needs right now is a brain drain

Science and tech leaders, and immigration lawyers, have reacted with alarm to a Trump administration diktat that foreign university students in the US must return to their home countries if their college course is online-only mid-pandemic.…

Marko Saric, a digital marketing consultant and blogger, conducted his own experiment to find out how many visitors would engage with a GDPR banner and grant GDPR consent to their information being collected and shared. For his study, Saric used Metomic for his GDPR consent banner and tested it on two different websites during June. "Site 1 was a site about a tech topic with the majority of visitors coming from Google organic search (60%) and browsing from laptop or desktop devices (60%)," writes Saric. "Site 2 was on a lifestyle topic with the majority of visitors coming from organic social media (70%) and browsing with mobile devices (70%)." Here's what he found: I assumed that having a GDPR compliant consent banner carries a very high risk of visitor refusal as most people don't care enough to engage with your banner and those who do mostly do it to get rid of it. And if you give them an easy way to ignore your banner or to say no to be tracked, most of them will simply do that. With almost 19,000 unique visitors between those two websites, 48% engaged with the banner. 19% of those who engaged with the banner gave their consent which means that 9% of total visitors gave their consent to be tracked. A higher percentage of visitors engaged with the banner on a mobile device (59% versus 40%) with a lower percentage of them giving consent (16% versus 22%). An obvious explanation is that the banner is more prominent and takes a larger percentage of a mobile screen than a desktop screen so the visitor interacts with the banner to remove it from their mobile screen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeepers, Keeper

The payment-card-skimming Magecart malware has turned up on yet more websites, this time 570 spanning 55 countries, it emerged this week.…

Nokia has become the first major telecom equipment maker to commit to adding open interfaces in its products that will allow mobile operators to build networks that are not tied to a vendor. Reuters reports: The new technology, dubbed Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), aims to reduce reliance on any one vendor by making every part of a telecom network interoperable and allowing operators to choose different suppliers for different components. Currently, Nokia along with Ericsson and Huawei supplies most of the equipment for building telecom networks and mobile operators can only pick one for each part of their network. As part of the implementation plan, Nokia plans to deploy Open RAN interfaces in its baseband and radio units, a spokesman said. An initial set of Open RAN functionalities will become available this year, while the full suite of interfaces is expected to be available in 2021, the company said. Nokia, unlike other vendors, had been promising to participate in the development of open RAN technology and have joined several industry alliances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leaders from four of the organizations spearheading the #StopHateforProfit campaign sat down with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox today to discuss the demands of a large advertiser boycott that now includes hundreds of brands. According to Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, the chat was an unequivocal disappointment. "Today we saw little and heard just about nothing," said Greenblatt, adding that Facebook fails to apply "energy and urgency" to issues like hate and misinformation that it brings to scaling its massively successful online ad platform. TechCrunch reports: Color of Change President Rashad Robinson criticized Facebook for "expecting an A for attendance" for participating in the meeting. Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. Gonzalez also expressed that she was "deeply disappointed" in the company. NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson dismissed the company's efforts as well, accusing Facebook of being "more interested in dialogue than action." The group also critiques Facebook's incentive structure for content on its platform and how the company's political relationships, like that with the Trump administration. "Facebook is a company of incredible resources," the boycott's organizers wrote. "We hope that they finally understand that society wants them to put more of those resources into doing the hard work of transforming the potential of the largest communication platform in human history into a force for good." While the group doesn't believe that other tech platforms are blameless, it focused efforts on Facebook due to the company's sheer scale and outsized impact on discourse both on and off the platform. "The size and the scope of it simply has no point of comparison," Greenblatt said, citing the social network's 2.6 billion users. "We're tired of the dialogue, because the stakes are so incredibly high for our communities," Gonzalez said, referring to the pandemic's disproportionate negative health outcomes for people and color and the ongoing civil rights uprising following the killing of George Floyd. Gonzalez also mentioned that Facebook profits from political ads "dehumanizing" brown and Black people in the U.S. [...] "We come together in the backdrop of George Floyd" Johnson said of the group's campaign against Facebook, noting that communities are rightfully moving to hold companies to higher standards on issues of race and race-based hate. "We are simply saying, keep society safe. Keep your employees safe. And help us protect this democracy," Johnson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is forming a team internally under the Microsoft Devices division that will handle the development of the Android OS for Surface Duo going forward. Windows Central: According to my sources, up until now, Microsoft had contracted the OS work out to third-party vendors such as Movial, who had the expertise required to bring Android to life on Surface Duo. Movial is a software, services, and design engineering company that was working closely with Microsoft on Surface Duo during its prototype and development stages. Microsoft has now acquired the local operations of Movial in Romania, Taiwan, and the USA, and is bringing on-board all the Movial employees that were working on the Surface Duo as full-time employees at Microsoft. Microsoft is not acquiring Movial as a whole. Movial will continue to operate as a standalone company, with employees at its headquarters in Finland remaining at Movial. SeeNews reports that Movial's Iasi office will become Microsoft Romania's fourth research and development center, as it on-boards 60 employees from Movial in that location.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exec fingered after racist tirade at family in restaurant

Another day and another racist rant in America has gone viral. This time the perpetrator appears to be a British founder of a cloud computing consulting company based in San Francisco.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a senior administration official confirmed Tuesday, breaking ties with a global public health body in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. has submitted its withdrawal notification to the United Nations secretary-general, the official said. Withdrawal requires a year's notice, so it will not go into effect until July 6, 2021, raising the possibility the decision could be reversed. The formal notification of withdrawal concludes months of threats from the Trump administration to pull the United States out of the WHO, which is affiliated with the United Nations. President Trump has repeatedly assailed the organization for alleged bias toward China and its slow response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. But public health experts and Democrats have raised alarms that the decision may be short-sighted and could undercut the global response to the pandemic, which has infected 11.6 million people worldwide. The U.S. has the highest number of reported cases in the world at nearly 3 million. They have also argued that some of the WHO's initial missteps can be attributed to China's lack of transparency in the early stages of the outbreak.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A seventh former eBay employee is now facing federal charges in connection with a cyberstalking campaign that allegedly targeted a Natick couple who wrote critical content about the company in its newsletter. From a report: Philip Cooke, 55, of San Jose, Calif. is charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. Cooke, who was a former Santa Clara police captain and was supervisor of security operations at eBay's European and Asian offices, is expected to be appear in Boston federal court at a later date. James Baugh, 45, of San Jose, California, eBay's former director of safety and security and former eBay director of global resiliency David Harville, 48, of New York City, was among the first six charged.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microprocessor core designer says it just wants to focus on designing microprocessor cores

Arm today said it hopes to transfer its Internet-of-Things management cloud to its owner Softbank so that the chip designer can focus on its primarily function – designing chips.…

The US Environmental Protection Agency has approved two Lysol products as effective against the novel coronavirus when used on hard, non-porous surfaces. From a report: Lysol Disinfectant Spray and Lysol Disinfectant Max Cover Mist meet the EPA's criteria for use against the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the ongoing pandemic, based on laboratory testing that found both products kill the virus two minutes after contact, the agency announced in a statement. While there are more than 420 products on the list of disinfectants that the EPA says are strong enough to ward off "harder-to-kill" viruses than the novel coronavirus, the two Lysol products are the first to have been tested directly against the virus and proved effective. [...] The news comes one month after a CDC survey found that people said they were cleaning more frequently because of the pandemic, but only about half said that they really knew how to clean and disinfect their home safely. Of those people who were surveyed that acknowledged that they used high-risk cleaning practices to prevent the spread of Covid-19, more were likely to report health problems related to cleaning.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft seems to be getting a kick out seeing users struggle to find Windows 10 features these days. After moving the Fresh Start feature in the latest version, 2004, and reducing the number of days Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education users can manually delay updates, the company is now experimenting with moving key Control Panel features, including System information, to Settings, Windows Latest blog spotted. From a report: It's a change that some long-time Windows users might not take to easily. If you're like me and have been using the Control Panel for decades, getting accustomed to this feature will be as arduous as unlearning a bad habit. To be fair, it's a bit redundant to have information on your system's specs located in three different places, not to mention all three don't show the exact same information. Currently, Windows 10 users can access hardware information about their PC in several places, but the main ways are: Control Panel > System and Security > System, and Settings > System > About, or by typing 'system information' into the search bar. System and About show nearly the same info, what processor you have and how much RAM you have installed, for instance, except About will show you what version of Windows you have. System Information shows more detailed information about your PC, including your motherboard, GPU, and other hardware. Microsoft is trying to centralize this information, and moving forward, it seems likely that Control Panel will be killed off entirely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon may have a 15-year head start, but Walmart is close to finally unveiling its own membership program that it hopes will eventually become an alternative to Amazon Prime. From a report: Walmart plans to launch a new subscription service later this month called Walmart+ that will cost $98 a year. It will include perks like same-day delivery of groceries and general merchandise, discounts on fuel at Walmart gas stations, and early access to product deals, multiple sources told Recode. Walmart originally planned to unveil Walmart+ in late March or April, Recode reported in February, but the retailer pushed back the launch date after the Covid-19 pandemic began sweeping across the US in March. It's unclear whether the program will launch nationally, or first on a regional level, later this month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some days seem to pass very slowly while some weeks, and even months, fly by. A set of simple perception tests illustrate some factors that can distort our sense of time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enterprise edition ahoy as project tries to puzzle out its business model

The LibreOffice community has protested at the appearance of a "personal edition" label in the forthcoming version 7.0 of the hitherto free office suite, and the suggestion that paid-for enterprise editions are in the pipeline.…

theodp writes: Code.org's $10+ million "Diamond" supporters include Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Infosys. Its $3+ million "Platinum" supporters include Google, the Gates Foundation, and the Ballmer Group. And its $1+ million "Gold" supporters include Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, the world's two richest men. So, it was somewhat surprising to see the nonprofit -- which is dedicated to pushing CS into K-12 classrooms -- pop up on the list of Seattle-area tech companies that received a PPP loan from the federal government. According to Paycheck Protection Program data released by the SBA and Treasury, Code.org was approved on April 15th for a loan between $1-2 million to retain 81 jobs due to the pandemic. Khan Academy, another pet nonprofit of Gates and other billionaires, received approval for a $2-5 million PPP loan to retain 185 jobs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. is "looking at" banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News. From a report: His comments come amid rising tensions between the U.S. and China and as scrutiny on TikTok and Chinese technology firms continues to grow. When asked in a Fox News interview if the U.S. should be looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, Pompeo said: "We are taking this very seriously. We are certainly looking at it. We have worked on this very issue for a long time," he said. "Whether it was the problems of having Huawei technology in your infrastructure we've gone all over the world and we're making real progress getting that out. We declared ZTE a danger to American national security," Pompeo added, citing the two Chinese teleommunications networking companies. The remark comes days after India banned TikTok and 58 other apps and services developed by Chinese firms citing cybersecurity concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First 'affordable' 5G phone for the budget blower brand

Motorola today whipped the sheets off its first mid-tier 5G blower: the Moto G 5G Plus.…