Linux fréttir

Suicide and homicide rates have increased in recent years among young people in the U.S., according to a new federal report. From a report: The suicide rate among people ages 10 to 24 years old climbed 56% between 2007 and 2017, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of homicide deaths decreased by 23% from 2007 to 2014 but then increased by 18% through 2017. Violent death, including homicide and suicide, is a major cause of premature death for the age group. Around 2010, the death rate of suicides among adolescents and young adults surpassed the rate of homicide deaths, according to the report. "The chances of a person in this age range dying by suicide is greater than homicide, when it used to be the reverse," said Sally Curtin, a statistician at the CDC and an author of the report. "When a leading cause of death among our youth is increasing, it behooves all of us to pay attention and figure out what's going on." Some mental-health experts suggest that social-media use among teens might be fueling the increase in mental-health conditions and leading to greater suicide risk, and some early studies have linked smartphone use to anxiety, depression and sleep deprivation among adolescents. The recent visibility of suicide in the media and online might also increase suicide death rates, experts say.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A flaw that means any fingerprint can unlock a Galaxy S10 phone has been acknowledged by Samsung. From a report: It promised a software patch that would fix the problem. The issue was spotted by a British woman whose husband was able to unlock her phone with his thumbprint just by adding a cheap screen protector. When the S10 was launched, in March, Samsung described the fingerprint authentication system as "revolutionary." The scanner sends ultrasounds to detect 3D ridges of fingerprints in order to recognize users. Samsung said it was "aware of the case of S10's malfunctioning fingerprint recognition and will soon issue a software patch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Note 10 has same ultrasonic tech for 'vault-like security'

Samsung is investigating a critical issue with its Galaxy S10 and Note 10 smartphones after reports that it fails to discriminate between different fingerprints if a screen protector is fitted.…

This year, nearly 40% of U.S. taxpayers filed online and some 40 million of them did so with TurboTax, far more than with any other product. But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens. From a report: For more than 20 years, Intuit -- the developer of TurboTax, has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company's motto should actually be "compromise without integrity." Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting "encroachment," Intuit's catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier -- such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people's returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. "For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped," reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company's 2014-15 plan included manufacturing "3rd-party grass roots" support. "Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media," one internal PowerPoint slide states. The centerpiece of Intuit's anti-encroachment strategy has been the Free File program, hatched 17 years ago in a moment of crisis for the company. Under the terms of an agreement with the federal government, Intuit and other commercial tax prep companies promised to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS pledged not to create a government-run system. Since Free File's launch, Intuit has done everything it could to limit the program's reach while making sure the government stuck to its end of the deal. As ProPublica has reported, Intuit added code to the Free File landing page of TurboTax that hid it from search engines like Google, making it harder for would-be users to find.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers reckon they've cracked a Washington embassy and more

The hacker crew behind the US Democratic National Committee breach are still at it and have infiltrated an EU country's embassy in Washington DC, according to infosec biz Eset.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Berkeley has become the third city in California and the fourth city in the United States to ban the use of face recognition technology by the government. After an outpouring of support from the community, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to adopt the ordinance introduced by Councilmember Kate Harrison earlier this year. Berkeley joins other Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, which also banned government use of face recognition. In July 2019, Somerville, Massachusetts became the first city on the East Coast to ban the government's use of face recognition. The passage of the ordinance also follows the signing of A.B. 1215, a California state law that places a three-year moratorium on police use of face recognition on body-worn cameras, beginning on January 1, 2020. As EFF's Associate Director of Community Organizing Nathan Sheard told the California Assembly, using face recognition technology "in connection with police body cameras would force Californians to decide between actively avoiding interaction and cooperation with law enforcement, or having their images collected, analyzed, and stored as perpetual candidates for suspicion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ordnance Survey map app update left some users lost, but they're really sorry, m'kay?

All is not well in the corridors of respected Blighty institution the Ordnance Survey as a borked app update left users, in a very real sense, flailing in the wilderness.…

Nuggets from Nicky Morgan's grilling by select committee

Culture secretary Nicky Morgan has hinted that the TV licence fee could be replaced with a Netflix-style subscription, defended Boris Johnson's involvement with Hacker House, and toed the government line on halting end-to-end encryption.…

Out today: Experimental ZFS on root, diminished compatibility with 32-bit applications

Canonical has released Ubuntu 19.10, codenamed Eoan Ermine for some reason.…

Phone, wallet, keys... and foldy PC

Canalys Channels Forum Life for ThinkPad fanatics looks to be getting a lot more flexible in the near future with a premium Windows-based foldable PC set to start shipping from next summer.…

Once they find out how much data their devices devour

Special report The Glass Room, a conceptual art and educational exhibit that opened Wednesday in a storefront on Market Street in San Francisco, provides visitors with a glimpse of how technology companies use personal data in the hope of prompting questions about the consequences of information technology.…

CNN has a story about a Chinese prototype helicopter that looks like a UFO. Slashdot reader ClickOnThis shares the report: China has been unveiling a lot of new weaponry lately, but one of their latest reveals looks really, well, out of this world. Called the "Super Great White Shark" by Chinese media, the aircraft conjures up images of 1950s sci-fi movies more than 21st century technology. But China says the "armed helicopter" was designed for the "future digital information battlefield." State-tabloid the Global Times published an image gallery of the aircraft, calling it a fusion of modern, proven helicopter designs -- such as the American AH-64 Apache and CH-53 Sea Stallion as well as the Russian Ka-52 and Mi-26 copters. It also has the blended-wing design employed by stealth aircraft, including the US B-2 bomber. [...] The prototype was displayed last week at the China Helicopter Exposition in Tianjin. It was a static display only. The aircraft is landbound -- at least for now.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First 123-Reg, now prominent Brit telco. Who's next?

Three UK has suffered a nine-hour outage and counting, affecting 3G and 4G calls across the entire British Isles.…

Staying safe in Musk's brave new world

Space – the final frontier, a place for pioneers to carve out their destiny and their fortunes, free from pencil-neck officials telling them what they can't do. Right? Wrong.…

Get a proper closeup look at an underground rail tunnel? Yes please

Feature Descending down the entry ramp and stepping over the Mail Rail tracks for the first time, you start to see London's underground heritage from – quite literally – a whole new angle.…

Build a full-stack solution that makes the best of all available resources

Webcast As equipment manufacturers in industries from healthcare and transportation to security and communications well know, the future is going to be software-defined and maybe a little bit cloudy.…

The Paris Zoological Park on Wednesday showcased a mysterious new organism, dubbed the "blob," that has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it. The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half. Reuters reports: "The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature's mysteries," said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part. "It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (...) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other," David added. The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town. "We know for sure it is not a plant but we don't really if it's an animal or a fungus," said David. "It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom (...) it has the behavior of an animal, it is able to learn."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Open Application Model isn't a standard, but it could be

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud revealed "an open standard for developing and operating applications on Kubernetes and other platforms," that isn't yet a standard and looks rather redundant in light of similar projects.…

Everyone knows the Ramans do everything in threes

Pic Astroboffins have released images taken by the Hubble telescope of the second-ever interstellar object and the first-ever verified comet to enter our Solar System from the depths of the universe.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: New research shows that psilocybin might be an effective treatment for diseases such as depression and addiction. While the work is still in its early stages, there are signs that psilocybin might help addicts shake the habit by causing the brain to talk with itself in different ways. "These brain changes lead to, oftentimes, a sense of unity," says Matthew Johnson, an experimental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. It all may sound a little "woo-woo," he admits, but it seems to be working. Early results suggest that psilocybin, coupled with therapy, may be far more effective than other treatments for smoking, such as the nicotine patch. Psilocybin seems to work because it temporarily rewires the brain, according to Johnson. Sections that don't normally talk to each other appear to communicate more, and parts of the brain that normally do talk to each other talk less. Johnson's small initial psilocybin study was extremely promising. So now he is doing a larger, more rigorous trial comparing the nicotine patch to psilocybin. Results are still coming in, but right now, half of the people who took psilocybin are smoke-free after a year. That's about twice as effective as the patch. Nutt, who's now conducting his own follow-up trials on depression treatments, is impressed with Johnson's work. Nutt believes psilocybin potentially also could be used to treat other addictions, such as alcohol and opioids. But there are some reasons to be cautious. First of all, the amount of psilocybin Johnson administers in his trials is considered a high dose, and it's paired with months of counseling. Bad trips can be common for those using the drug for treatment of diseases, and memories and experiences brought up by the drug can be challenging and disturbing. Second, the treatment is really expensive and the whole process takes months. Finally, not everybody should use psilocybin. People with predispositions for schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses may be harmed by taking the drug.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.