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Everything's fine, says Department of Energy report

A wasp nest positively glowing with radiation was found at a Cold War-era nuclear weapons site near Aiken, South Carolina.…

Criminals used undocumented techniques and well-placed insiders to remotely withdraw money

A ring of cybercriminals managed to physically implant a Raspberry Pi on a bank's network to steal cash from an Indonesian ATM.…

Reddit wants to become a full-fledged search engine, leveraging its vast repository of human-generated content and expanding its AI-powered Reddit Answers tool. In its latest note (PDF) to investors, CEO Steve Huffman says the company is "concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs," including "making Reddit a go-to search engine." The Verge reports: Huffman says that "every week, hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit looking for advice, and we're turning more of that intent into active users of Reddit's native search." Reddit's core search has more than 70 million weekly active unique users -- Reddit overall averages 416.4 million weekly active unique users -- and Reddit Answers, the platform's AI search tool that it launched in December, has 6 million weekly users, up from 1 million weekly users in the first quarter of this year. To continue to build out search, Reddit is "expanding Reddit Answers globally, integrating it more deeply into the core search experience, and making search a central feature across Reddit," Huffman says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From one platform to rule them all to a carousel of half-baked visions

Comment It is July 2015. Microsoft has just released Windows 10. Developers, weary from the false trail of Windows 8 and being urged to make "Metro style" apps, are now being pitched a new vision from Microsoft: the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).…

Unix boxes needed a hotfix to survive early morning cold boots

On Call Mornings are hard, and Friday mornings doubly so. Which is why The Register gives readers a little kick along on the last day of the working week in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support treachery and triumph.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers have created a microphone that listens with light instead of sound. Unlike traditional microphones, this visual microphone captures tiny vibrations on the surfaces of objects caused by sound waves and turns them into audible signals. In the journal Optics Express, the researchers describe the new approach, which applies single-pixel imaging to sound detection for the first time. Using an optical setup without any expensive components, they demonstrate that the technique can recover sound by using the vibrations on the surfaces of everyday objects such as leaves and pieces of paper. [...] To demonstrate the new visual microphone, the researchers tested its ability to reconstruct Chinese and English pronunciations of numbers as well as a segment from Beethoven's Fur Elise. They used a paper card and a leaf as vibration targets, placing them 0.5 meters away from the objects while a nearby speaker played the audio. The system was able to successfully reconstruct clear and intelligible audio, with the paper card producing better results than the leaf. Low-frequency sounds (1 kHz) showed slight distortion that improved when a signal processing filter was applied. Tests of the system's data rate showed it produced 4 MB/s, a rate sufficiently low to minimize storage demands and allow for long-term recording. "Currently, this technology still only exists in the laboratory and can be used in special scenarios where traditional microphones fail to work," said research team leader Xu-Ri Yao from Beijing Institute of Technology in China. "We aim to expand the system into other vibration measurement applications, including human pulse and heart rate detection, leveraging its multifunctional information sensing capabilities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Workers on joint US/UK/Australia nuclear submarine program are painting a target on themselves

The Director-General of Security at the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) has lamented the fact that many people list their work in the intelligence community or on sensitive military projects in their LinkedIn profiles.…