In the most brand synergistic accomplishment of all time, convenience chain 7-Eleven has completed 77 drone deliveries during month one of its commercial service in Reno, Nevada. Yes, that’s Triple 7s in America’s Other Big Gambling Town. The drone service is operated by Flirtey, a commercial drone service provider startup that started working with 7-Eleven on a commercial launch… Read More
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7-Eleven delivers 77 packages via drone in first month of routine service
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine mile route once a week. After the program gets approval from the French aviation regulatory authority, the federal postal service will be the first to ever use drone delivery on a regular route. The drones used in the French postal service experiment have the capacity to fly up to 12 miles carrying about two pounds maximum, going around 19 miles per hour. They are also equipped with parachutes for safe emergency landing in case something disrupts the flight. The eventual goal is to reach rural or mountainous regions that are otherwise difficult and expensive to get to using cars. The drone mail delivery program has been a project of the DPDgroup, Europe’s second largest international parcel delivery network, operating as a subsidiary under the French national postal service. The DPDgroup had been working on this program with Atechsys, a French drone company, since 2014 in the south of France. “The first commercial line represents a new step in the program, ” DPDgroup said in a press release. With the testing phase now over, the experimentation phase is all set to begin. Currently, those participating in the experiment to receive parcels are non-residential, including over ten tech companies. The done routes stretch over the southeastern region of Provence, going between Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and Pourrieres. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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France Becomes First Federal Postal Service To Use Drones To Deliver Mail
Russian hackers have used fake websites and bots to steal millions of dollars from advertisers. According to researchers, the fraud has siphoned more than $180 million from the online ad industry. CNNMoney reports: Dubbed “Methbot, ” it is a new twist in an increasingly complex world of online crime, according to White Ops, the cybersecurity firm that discovered the operation. Methbot, so nicknamed because the fake browser refers to itself as the “methbrowser, ” operates as a sham intermediary advertising ring: Companies would pay millions to run expensive video ads. Then they would deliver those ads to what appeared to be major websites. In reality, criminals had created more than 250, 000 counterfeit web pages no real person was visiting. White Ops first spotted the criminal operation in October, and it is making up to $5 million per day — by generating up to 300 million fake “video impressions” daily. According to White Ops, criminals acquired massive blocks of IP addresses — 500, 000 of them — from two of the world’s five major internet registries. Then they configured them so that they appeared to be located all over the United States. They built custom software so that computers (at those legitimate data centers) acted like real people viewing those ads. These “people” even appeared to have Facebook accounts (they didn’t), so that premium ads were served. Hackers fooled ad fraud blockers because they figured out how to build software that mimicked a real person who only surfed during the daytime — using the Google Chrome web browser on a Macbook laptop. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russian Hackers Stole $5 Million Per Day From Advertisers With Bots and Fake Websites
Enlarge / EnviroGreen’s homepage. Just because a website has pictures of a lush forest doesn’t mean it represents a company that does good things for the environment. (credit: EnviroGreen) According to an indictment filed in Chicago federal court (PDF) late last week, 45-year-old Brian Brundage cut some serious corners while running his e-recycling businesses. He was arrested on Monday on charges of income tax evasion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Brundage is the former owner of Chicago-based Intercon Solutions and the current owner of EnviroGreen Processing, based in Gary, Indiana. Both recycling companies purported to sell e-recycling services to companies and government organizations that needed to get rid of old electronics. Brundage promised his clients that their old computers, TV monitors, and various other devices would be broken down into their component parts and recycled in keeping with federal guidelines. Instead, feds allege that Brundage shipped some of those electronics for illegal disposal in landfills overseas. Those electronics included Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) from old computer and TV monitors, which contained “hazardous amounts of lead,” as well as batteries. The electronics that weren’t shipped to Asia were destroyed inappropriately on the premises of his businesses or stockpiled indefinitely in warehouses, which is forbidden by federal guidelines. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Feds say Chicago e-recycler faked tear-downs, then sent CRTs to Hong Kong
Long-time Slashdot reader emil writes about how ADUPS, an Android “firmware provisioning” company specializing in both big data collection of Android usage and hostile app installation and/or firmware control, has been found pre-loaded on Barnes and Noble’s new $50 tablet: ADUPS was recently responsible for data theft on BLU phones and an unsafe version of the ADUPS agent is pre-loaded on the Barnes and Noble BNTV450. ADUPS’ press releases claim that Version 5.5 of their agent is safe, but the BNTV450 is running 5.2. The agent is capable of extracting contacts, listing installed apps, and installing new apps with elevated privilege. Azzedine Benameur, director of research at Kryptowire, claims that “owners can expect zero privacy or control while using it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Barnes & Noble’s Latest Tablet Is Running Spyware From Shanghai
The Algerian town of Ain Sefra is known as the Gateway to the Sahara, and it’s not the kind of place that gets associated with winter weather. So imagine the surprise of amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata when he awoke to see his picturesque town and the surrounding sand dunes covered in a blanket of snow. Thankfully for us, he grabbed his camera. Read more…
Image: De Agostini Picture Library via Getty Beneath eighteen hundred miles of crust and mantle flows a molten iron hell river whose satanic secrets the European Space Agency has unleashed. Cool! Read more…
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An Iron Hell River Is Flowing Beneath The Earth
An international team of astronomers have released two petabytes of data from the Pan-STARRS project that’s also known as the “world’s largest digital sky survey.” Two petabytes of data, according to the team, is equivalent to any of the following: a billion selfies, one hundred Wikipedias or 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with single-spaced text. The scientists spent four years observing three-fourths of the night sky through their 1.8 meter telescope at Haleakala Observatories on Maui, Hawaii, scanning three billion objects in the Milky Way 12 times in five different filters. Those objects included stars, galaxies, asteroids and other celestial bodies. According to Thomas Henning, director of the Planet and Star Formation Department of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: “Based on Pan-Starrs, researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example white dwarfs. This will expand the census of almost all objects in the solar neighbourhood to distances of about 300 light-years. The Pan Starrs data will also allow a much better characterization of low-mass star formation in stellar clusters. Furthermore, we gathered about 4 million stellar light curves to identify Jupiter-like planets in close orbits around cool dwarf stars in order to constrain the fraction of such extrasolar planetary systems.” While the immensity of two petabytes of data is already hard to grasp, that isn’t the extent of the team’s observations. The astronomers are rolling out their research in two steps: this one called the “Static Sky” is the average of each individual scan. See the image above? That’s the result of half a million 45-second exposures taken over four years. They’re releasing even more detailed images and data in 2017 — for now, you can check out what the team released to the public on the official Pan-STARRS website. Via: TechCrunch Source: Queen’s University Belfast , Pan-STARRS , Physorg
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Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars
EzInKy writes: The BBC and others are reporting the results of a study that women’s brains do in fact change during pregnancy. BBC reports: “Pregnancy reduces grey matter in specific parts of a woman’s brain, helping her bond with her baby and prepare for the demands of motherhood. Scans of 25 first-time mums showed these structural brain changes lasted for at least two years after giving birth. European researchers said the scale of brain changes during pregnancy were akin to those seen during adolescence. But they found no evidence of women’s memory deteriorating. This study, from researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Leiden University and published in Nature Neuroscience, looked at the brain scans of women before they became pregnant, soon after they gave birth, and two years later, to see how the brain changed. And they compared these women’s brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth. The researchers found ‘substantial’ reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of first-time mothers. The grey matter changes occurred in areas of the brain involved in social interactions used for attributing thoughts and feelings to other people — known as ‘theory-of-mind’ tasks. The researchers thought this would give new mothers an advantage in various ways – help them recognize the needs of their child, be more aware of potential social threats and become more attached to their baby.” Thanks Mom! As for first-time fathers, the researchers found no changes in their grey matter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pregnancy Alters Woman’s Brains ‘For At Least Two Years’
According to a report from The Information (Warning: paywalled), Uber has lost more than $800 million in the third quarter. CNBC reports: The results, The Information reported, put Uber on pace to record an 25 percent steeper operating loss than last year, of at least $2.8 billion in 2016, before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. Despite steep results from one of the world’s most valuable start-ups, these results would have been worse if not for a one-time windfall thanks to the sale of Uber’s China business to Didi Chuxing, The Information reported. On the bright side, Uber’s revenue is skyrocketing, and its rate of losses slowed from the prior quarter, The Information said. Still, the report comes as Uber’s multi-billion dollar valuation has come under scrutiny from those who say its business model depends on subsidies and faces looming battles over regulation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Uber Lost $800 Million In Third Quarter