You can buy your pretty new iPhone 6 with somewhat of a clearer conscience this fall. Apple announced today that they’re eliminating two known toxins—benzene and n-hexane—from the production of iPhone and iPads. Read more…
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Apple Is Banning Two Hazardous Chemicals From iPhone Production
Answering “I need to hide a body” used to be one of Siri’s little jokes. She used to give suggestions. She doesn’t anymore. Why? We can’t be sure, but it miiight have something to do with an accused murderer who asked the question apparently in earnest . Read more…
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Yep, a Murder Suspect Actually Asked Siri Where to Hide the Body
The FBI’s facial recognition initiative is big and getting bigger . And it’s just proved that it works too, by helping capture a fugitive who’s been on the run for 14 years, during testing in Asia. Read more…
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FBI Facial Recognition Caught a Fugitive on the Run For 14 Years
I don’t know why you would use the official Facebook app on the iPhone — Paper’s fabulous — but just in case you do, you’ll be happy to know that Facebook has squashed a pretty major bug that reduces crash rates by 50%. Read more…
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Facebook Will Now Crash 50% Less On iOS
An anonymous reader writes Facebook today revealed details about Autoscale, a system for power-efficient load balancing that has been rolled out to production clusters in its data centers. The company says it has “demonstrated significant energy savings.” or those who don’t know, load balancing refers to distributing workloads across multiple computing resources, in this case servers. The goal is to optimize resource use, which can mean different things depending on the task at hand. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing
The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700, 000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion, ” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions
itwbennett writes: “In June 2012, Ricky Joe Mitchell of Charleston, West Virginia, found out he was going to be fired from oil and gas company EnerVest and in response he decided to reset the company’s servers to their original factory settings. He also disabled cooling equipment for EnerVest’s systems and disabled a data-replication process. After pleading guilty in January, Mitchell has been sentenced to four years in federal prison.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IT Pro Gets Prison Time For Sabotaging Ex-Employer’s System
Nate the greatest writes “Guilford County Schools’ headline grabbing tablet program is back in the news again. The program came to an abrupt end last Friday when the school district announced that they were recalling all of the Amplify tablets. GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year) for its middle school students, but decided to recall the tablets just one month into the school year after some 1500 students reported a broken screen. Around two thousand complained of improperly fitting cases, and there were also 175 reports of malfunctioning power supplies. There’s currently no explanation for the cases or power supplies, but GCS has stated that the tablets broke because they lacked a layer of Gorilla Glass. This was listed in the contract, but the school district did not confirm the condition of the tablets before accepting them. This program was the poster child for News Corp.’s entry into the educational market. It was the single largest program to use the Amplify tablet, and its failure represents a serious setback. The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NC School District Recalls Its Amplify Tablets After 10% Break In Under a Month
An anonymous reader writes “HBO programming president Michael Lombardo not only says that illegal downloading of Game of Thrones isn’t hurting the show, but goes far as to say it’s ‘a compliment’ and worries about the image quality of pirated copies” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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HBO Says Game of Thrones Piracy Is “a Compliment”