Linux fréttir

Meanwhile, the only pro-privacy proposal gets quietly pulled

Analysis The right for Californians to control the private data that tech companies hold on them may be undermined today at a critical committee hearing in Sacramento.…

Alphabet's Wing Aviation unit on Tuesday got the okay to start delivering goods by drone in Virginia later this year, making the sister unit of search engine Google the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification, the Federal Aviation Administration said. From a report: This means Wing can begin a commercial service delivering goods from local businesses to homes, which includes flights beyond visual line of site and over people, the FAA and Wing said. Wing Aviation plans to start commercial package delivery in Blacksburg, Virginia later this year. Wing partnered with the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership and Virginia Tech, as one of the participants in the Transportation Department's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TLS 1.3, speedups, reduced memory overhead, and more

Node.js, the popular JavaScript runtime that relies on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, hit version 12 on Tuesday, bringing with a handful of potentially useful features and capabilities.…

There's a key culprit in the battle against sitting. Time spent watching TV and videos has remained consistently high in the United States over the past 15 years, but time sitting at a computer has increased dramatically, new research finds. From a report: Leisure-time computer use increased between 4.8% and 38% for various age groups between 2001 and 2016, said Yin Cao, senior author of the new study and an assistant professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Overall, up to 43% of the US population used a computer for two or more hours a day and up to 25% used a computer for three or more hours each day in 2016. The result of these increases: Teens spent about 8.2 hours a day sitting while adults sat for 6.4 hours a day. Both groups saw a one-hour increase over the decade ending in 2016, Cao said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is now conducting repairs of MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro keyboards on-site at its stores, and it's promising a next-day turnaround for pickup in many cases. From a report: The company previously sent machines out to its repair depot, but it's now telling its Genius Bar employees to handle "most" keyboard-related repairs at the store "until further notice." The company wrote in a service memo that "additional service parts have been shipped to stores to support the increased volume." Apple's attempt to expedite the keyboard repair process is just the latest development in the ongoing saga of the much-maligned butterfly keyboards that are found on all modern Mac laptops. The keys are vulnerable to sudden failure and unpredictable behavior if dust or outside debris makes its way into the mechanism.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yes, converged infrastructure model is still a thing

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed the dark pact under which the two collaborated on converged infrastructure (CI) products for a decade.…

ASUS was not the only company targeted by supply-chain attacksduring the ShadowHammer hacking operation as discovered by Kaspersky, with at least six other organizations having been infiltrated by the attackers. From a report: As further found out by Kaspersky's security researchers, ASUS' supply chain was successfully compromised by trojanizing one of the company's notebook software updaters named ASUS Live Updater which eventually was downloaded and installed on the computers of tens of thousands of customers according to experts' estimations. The tampered with binaries were signed using a legitimate certificate which helped the attackers avoid breaking the digital signature and having the malicious updater flagged. Among the similarities, they discovered that the ASUS samples and the newly found ones were both using very similar algorithms to calculate API function hashes, while the IPHLPAPI.dll was heavily used within all malware samples for various reasons. As in the ASUS case, the samples were using digitally signed binaries from three other Asian vendors: Electronics Extreme, authors of the zombie survival game called Infestation: Survivor Stories. Innovative Extremist, a company that provides Web and IT infrastructure services but also used to work in game development. Zepetto, the South Korean company that developed the video game Point Blank. Besides these three Asian gaming companies, Kaspersky was also able to find three other organizations which were successfully compromised, "another video gaming company, a conglomerate holding company and a pharmaceutical company, all in South Korea."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft had been planning to remove its popular Paint app from Windows 10, but the company has now reversed course. From a report: The software maker had been warning Windows 10 users for months that Paint would be removed, and those warnings vanished in the latest May 2019 Update (1903). "Yes, MSPaint will be included in 1903," says Brandon LeBlanc, a senior program manager for Windows at Microsoft. "It'll remain included in Windows 10 for now." LeBlanc didn't reveal why Microsoft had removed its warnings, but it's clear Paint will no longer be removed from Windows 10 in the immediate future. Microsoft previously marked Paint as "deprecated," meaning it wasn't in active development and could be removed in future releases of Windows.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is it a nerd? Is it a control plane? No, it's... SuperSSD

Israeli NVMe/TCP pioneer Lightbits finally showed up to the all-flash array market today with an Ethernet-attached SSD appliance – the imaginatively named SuperSSD.…

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank Group, made a huge personal bet on bitcoin just as prices for the digital currency peaked, losing more than $130 million when he sold out, WSJ (paywalled) reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report (alternative source): Mr. Son, who launched the world's biggest venture-capital fund on the strength of his long-term investing acumen, made the investment at the recommendation of a well-known bitcoin booster, whose investment firm SoftBank bought in 2017, the people said. The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn't be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA schedules walloped, Cynus launches, and Owen Garriott's final voyage

Roundup It has been an eventful past seven days in space what with SpaceX making a big cloud o' orange smoke, Cygnus docking, and veteran astronaut Owen Garriott taking his final journey into the black.…

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA has launched a new family of more budget friendly Turing graphics chips for gaming laptops, called the GeForce GTX 1650, GeForce GTX 1660, and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The new GPUs will power roughly 80 different OEM mainstream gaming notebook designs, starting in the $799 price range. Compared to a 4-year-old gaming laptop with a GeForce GTX 960M, NVIDIA says that a modern counterpart equipped with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti can deliver 4x the performance in today's battle royale-style games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, and PUBG. As for the GeForce GTX 1650, NVIDIA is promising a 2.5x performance advantage compared to the GTX 950M and a 1.7x advantage compared to the previous generation GTX 1050. Gamers should expect consistent 60 fps performance in the above-mentioned gaming titles at 1080p, though the company didn't specifically mention GTX 1660 vs 1060 performance comparisons. According to NVIDIA, every major OEM will be releasing GeForce GTX 16 Series laptops, including well-known brands like ASUS, Dell/Alienware, Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo (among others).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel debuted six new 9th-gen mobile H-series Core chips on Tuesday -- with its fastest, the Core i9-9980HK, soaring to a new high-water mark: 8 cores, 16 threads, and a whopping 5GHz clock speed, after boost. From a report: After launching its 9th-generation Core chips for desktop PCs last October, Intel has now brought that same capability to notebooks. Intel executives said systems based upon the 9th-gen chips are expected to debut shortly. All the chips are based on the "Coffee Lake Refresh" (Coffee Lake-R) architecture, and all are fabricated on a 14nm process. Last year's 8th-gen mobile Core chips topped out at 4.8GHz, and offered only 6 cores. Though theoretically anyone can benefit from the increased performance, Intel is aiming at two particular segments: professional content creators and gamers. Intel said it expects its 9th-gen Core i9-9980HK (8 cores/16 threads, 2.4GHz/5GHz turbo) to deliver up to 18 percent higher frames per second in games and 28 percent faster 4K video editing than the 8th-gen Core i9-8950HK (6 cores/12 threads, 2.9GHz/4.8GHz turbo). When performing general office tasks and web browsing, the chips can run in a low-power mode, with an "aspirational goal" of ten hours of battery life, or just an hour while gaming, executives said. Price, performance, and power are the old battlefronts, though. Further reading: All the Desktop and Mobile 45W CPUs Announced (AnandTech).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ministers can't tell Ofcom to ignore the law after all

UK comms regulator Ofcom can't be ordered to ignore its legal duties, the High Court has ruled, paving the way for GSM gateway operators to claim compensation after Home Office ministers and mandarins destroyed their businesses.…

AmiMoJo writes: The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge will impersonate other browsers depending on the site being visited. This is may be done for compatibility reasons, like properly rendering pages or how video will be streamed and played back. When the new Microsoft Edge starts, it will connect to config.edge.skype.com and download a JSON configuration for the browser. One section of the JSON configuration file is called EdgeDomainActions and is a series of rules that specify what browser Microsoft Edge should impersonate when visiting a particular site.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 'E' is for 'Ersatz'

US network operators Sprint and AT&T remain coy about the details of a 5G ceasefire they have just agreed.…

"CNN reports on CCTV footage from China showing a parked Model S bursting violently into flames," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. From the report: Tesla is investigating after one of its vehicles appeared to explode in China. A short video of surveillance footage posted on Chinese social media site Weibo (WB) showed white smoke emerging from what looks like a white Tesla car parked at a lot in Shanghai. After a few seconds, the electric vehicle bursts into flames and the clip ends soon afterward. The video, which was filmed just after 8:15 pm local time on April 21, appears to show a Tesla Model S sedan. It was posted on Chinese social media a couple of hours later and has since been shared widely. The clip attracted a mix of derision and outrage on Weibo. "Us car owners demand an explanation," wrote user Miao Hongyang. "Jeopardizing our safety in a moment's instant and the fact it ignited so quickly is something we will not tolerate." Another Weibo user registered under the name Your Dad, added: "One thing I've learned from this incident: from now on, don't ever park next to a Tesla.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Residents' scheme flags up scourge of lazy dog owners

Is there anything more triumphantly British than fields strewn with dog toffee? Well, there is now: fields strewn with dog toffee with Union Jacks proudly planted in them.…

iPhone maker set to feed competitor even more dollars over the next five years

Apple has been identified as the largest customer of Amazon Web Services, splashing tens of millions of dollars each month on public cloud infrastructure supplied by its rival.…

Plus: Windows 10 May 2019 Update on MSDN, Surface Hub 2S has a trolley

Roundup Last week was all about Windows as Surface Hub 2 crept closer to availability and Windows 10 arrived on MSDN. But the Easter Bunny didn't deliver Sets this year.…