Linux fréttir

merbs writes: Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon -- but it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that's not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management -- in fact, it's very often not. Sometimes it's a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern. In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.

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Unshackle your data from slow disks

eBook Promo If you are trying to find the best way to boost the performance of your top-tier applications, look no further than Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a fully-managed document database service, building the Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) to support existing MongoDB workloads. The cloud giant said developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they currently do to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB uses an SSD-based storage layer, with 6x replication across three separate Availability Zones. This means that Amazon DocumentDB can failover from a primary to a replica within 30 seconds, and supports MongoDB replica set emulation so applications can handle failover quickly. Each MongoDB database contains a set of collections -- similar to a relational database table -- with each collection containing a set of documents in BSON format. Amazon DocumentDB is compatible with version 3.6 of MongoDB and storage can be scaled from 10 GB up to 64 TB in increments of 10 GB. The new offering implements the MongoDB 3.6 API that allows customers to use their existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB. In a separate report, TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois says AWS is "giving open source the middle finger" by "taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities." "The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license," Frederic writes. "Since then, others have followed." "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB's document model," MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. "However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market."

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It's dangerous to go alone, take these WSL tweaks too

Microsoft dropped a fresh Windows 10 Insider Build last night, which brought some welcome tweaks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux and enabled Reserved Storage.…

Top court receives advice paraphrasing M People

European Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF) rulings should not apply globally, but block results across all EU states, the bloc's top court has been told.…

What Captain Cook can do next

Comment Like a comedy sketch Lord Nelson, Apple CEO Tim Cook held the telescope to his eyepatch this week and told investors he couldn't see any enemy ships.…

brindafella writes: The jaw bone of a woman who died around 1000-1200 AD has specks of precious lapis lazuli (mineral) in the plaque of her teeth. This indicates that this woman would have licked the brush used in preparing precious illuminated manuscripts at the women's monastery in Dalheim in western Germany. The study by researchers from German-based Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and Britain's University of York showed that women, as well as men, were part of the production of the valuable manuscripts. "The researchers said this challenged long-held beliefs that women had played little role in the European Middle Ages in producing literary and written texts which came largely from religious institutions," reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Researcher Christina Warinner said this finding from the 11th century was unprecedented in showing more women were literate, educated and encouraged to read at that time."

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Happy New Year from the Gin Palace

Juniper Networks has had its first big bug day in months, with 19 patches announced covering everything from third-party package catchups to critical errors in password handling.…

Donald's wall tantrum has out-of-this-world consequences

The Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA’s beloved Hubble Space Telescope is right now out of order due to a hardware glitch, the space agency confirmed this week.…

Global Energy Transmission (GET) co-founder William Kallamn says his wireless tech company has found a way to create a "power cloud" that can charge a drone while it's in flight. "The system comprises a ground-based power station with a frame of wires positioned in a roughly circular shape," reports Futurism. "When turned on, this creates an electromagnetic field in the air near the station. A drone equipped with a special antennae charges by flying into the range of the power cloud." From the report: Eight minutes of charge time translates to 30 minutes of flight. One of GET's power stations and two customized drones, each capable of carrying 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds), currently costs $120,000. It's hard to overstate the potential for drones to change our world, but for seemingly every positive use for the machines (package delivery, search and rescue operations), there's a negative one to consider (military weaponry, citizen surveillance). So, sure, a drone that never needs to land would be amazingly beneficial for moviemaking and sports coverage -- two uses Kallman notes in [an interview with entertainment vlogger David Fordham] -- but it's hard to imagine military or government officials wouldn't be highly interested in GET's drone charging tech as well.

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Patches pending for distros to deal with threat of local privilege escalation to root

Security biz Qualys has revealed three vulnerabilities in a component of systemd, a system and service manager used in most major Linux distributions.…

Plod hope to snare DHL blackmailer with a penchant for homemade explosives

German police investigating a blackmailer's parcel bombing campaign reckon they know the MAC address of a device used by the scumbag, and hope network logs can help unmask the perp.…

Canada CHIMES into search with new 'scope and lots of iron

Canada's new radio telescope, built to explore the early universe, has turned out to be a handy hunter for the mysterious phenomena called Fast Radio Bursts (FRB).…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Older Americans are disproportionately more likely to share fake news on Facebook, according to a new analysis by researchers at New York and Princeton Universities. Older users shared more fake news than younger ones regardless of education, sex, race, income, or how many links they shared. In fact, age predicted their behavior better than any other characteristic -- including party affiliation. Today's study, published in Science Advances, examined user behavior in the months before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2016, the academics started working with research firm YouGov to assemble a panel of 3,500 people, which included both Facebook users and non-users. On November 16th, just after the election, they asked Facebook users on the panel to install an application that allowed them to share data including public profile fields, religious and political views, posts to their own timelines, and the pages that they followed. Users could opt in or out of sharing individual categories of data, and researchers did not have access to the News Feeds or data about their friends. About 49 percent of study participants who used Facebook agreed to share their profile data. Researchers then checked links posted to their timelines against a list of web domains that have historically shared fake news, as compiled by BuzzFeed reporter Craig Silverman. Later, they checked the links against four other lists of fake news stories and domains to see whether the results would be consistent. Across all age categories, sharing fake news was a relatively rare category. Only 8.5 percent of users in the study shared at least one link from a fake news site. Users who identified as conservative were more likely than users who identified as liberal to share fake news: 18 percent of Republicans shared links to fake news sites, compared to less than 4 percent of Democrats. The researchers attributed this finding largely to studies showing that in 2016, fake news overwhelmingly served to promote Trump's candidacy. But older users skewed the findings: 11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 did. Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29). As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.

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During a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company doesn't have any plans to resurrect the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year. "Shield TV is still unquestionably the best Android TV in the world," he said. "We have updated the software now over 30 times. People are blown away by how much we continue to enhance it." And more (unspecified) enhancements are coming, he said. TechCrunch reports: On the mobile side, though, the days of the Shield Tablet are very much over, especially now that the Nintendo Switch, which uses Nvidia's Tegra chips, has really captured that market. "We are really committed to [Shield TV], but on mobile devices, we don't think it's necessary," Huang said. "We would only build things not to gain market share. Nvidia is not a "take somebody else's market share company.' I think that's really angry. It's an angry way to run a business. Creating new markets, expanding the horizon, creating things that the world doesn't have, that's a loving way to build a business." He added that this is the way to inspire employees, too. Just copying competitors and maybe selling a product cheaper, though, does nothing to motivate employees and is not what Nvidia is interested in. Of course, Huang left the door open to a future tablet if it made sense -- though he clearly doesn't think it does today. He'd only do so, "if the world needs it. But at the moment, I just don't see it. I think Nintendo did such a great job."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding across the globe starting on July 9, 2019. As with last year's initial ad blocker rollout, the date is not tied to a specific Chrome version. Chrome 76 is currently scheduled to arrive on May 30 and Chrome 77 is slated to launch on July 25, meaning Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers. In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."

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With signs that the New York trial of notorious Mexican drug lord and alleged mass murderer Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is entering its end phase, prosecutors on Tuesday played copies of what they said were audio recordings of Guzman the FBI obtained "after they infiltrated his encrypted messaging system" with the help of Colombian and former cartel systems engineer Cristian Rodriguez, Reuters reported. Gizmodo reports: As has been previously reported by Vice, Colombian drug lord Jorge Cifuentes testified that Rodriguez had forgot to renew a license key critical to the communications network of Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel in September 2010, forcing cartel leaders to temporarily rely on conventional cell phones. Cifuentes told the court he considered Rodriguez "an irresponsible person" who had compromised their security, with a terse phone call played by prosecutors showing Cifuentes warned the subordinate he was in "charge of the system always working." But on Tuesday it was revealed that the FBI had lured Rodriguez into a meeting with an agent posing as a potential customer much earlier, in February 2010, according to a report in the New York Times. Later, they flipped Rodriguez, having him transfer servers from Canada to the Netherlands in a move masked as an upgrade. During that process, Rodriguez slipped investigators the network's encryption keys. The communications system ran over Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), with only cartel members able to access it. Getting through its encryption gave authorities access to roughly 1,500 of Guzman's and other cartel members' calls from April 2011 to January 2012, the Times wrote, with FBI agents able to identify ones placed by the drug lord by "comparing the high-pitched, nasal voice on the calls with other recordings of the kingpin, including a video interview he gave to Rolling Stone in October 2015."

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And we're only halfway through the week

CES 2019 It's this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week – and you know what that means……

Process data, crash, restart, process data, crash, restart...

Cisco's security team's holiday season has ended with a bang: 18 patches, but thankfully only one of them rated “critical”.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Tuesday, Motherboard revealed that major American telcos T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are selling customer location data of users in an unregulated market that trickles down to bounty hunters and people not authorized to handle such information. In our investigation, we purchased the real-time location of a cell phone from a bail industry source for $300, pinpointing it to a specific part of Queens, New York. The issue potentially impacts hundreds of millions of cell phone users in the United States, with customers likely unaware that their location data is being sold and resold through multiple companies, with even the telcos sometimes having little idea where it ends up and how it is used. Now, Senators and a commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have urged government bodies to investigate, with some calling for regulation that would ensure customers are properly made aware of how their data is being sold. "The American people have an absolute right to the privacy of their data, which is why I'm extraordinarily troubled by reports of this system of repackaging and reselling location data to unregulated third party services for potentially nefarious purposes. If true, this practice represents a legitimate threat to our personal and national security," Senator Kamala Harris told Motherboard in a statement. Harris explicitly called on the FCC to investigate the issue. "The FCC needs to immediately investigate these serious security concerns and take the necessary steps to protect the privacy of American consumers," she said. On Tuesday, FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel tweeted: "The FCC needs to investigate. Stat." "It shouldn't be that you pay a few hundred dollars to a bounty hunter and then they can tell you in real time where a phone is within a few hundred meters. That's not right. This entire ecosystem needs some oversight," she added on MSNBC's Velshi & Ruhle show on Wednesday. "I think we've got to get to this fast." Senators Mark Warner and Ron Wyden are also calling on the FCC to act.

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