Tag: deals

DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets — and Counting

Khari Johnson, writing for VentureBeat:A bot made to challenge traffic tickets has been used more than 9, 000 times by New Yorkers, according to DoNotPay maker Joshua Browder. The bot was made available to New Yorkers in March. In recent years and decades, residents of The Big Apple have seen a persistent increase in traffic fines. A record $1.9 billion in traffic fines was issued by the City of New York in 2015. Since the first version of the bot was released in London last fall, 160, 000 of 250, 000 tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay, Browder said. “I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society, ” said Browder. “These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government.” Browder, who’s 19, hopes to extend DoNotPay to Seattle this fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DoNotPay Bot Has Beaten 160,000 Traffic Tickets — and Counting

This $170 Chromebook Runs For 13 Hours, and Will Support Android Apps

This $170 Chromebook has a super-thin design, 13 hours of battery life, and 4GB of RAM, all solid specs. But most importantly, it will support Android apps via Google Play in the coming months, which should dramatically expand its capabilities. If you’re in the market for a travel-friendly portable, you could do a whole lot worse for the price. Read more…

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This $170 Chromebook Runs For 13 Hours, and Will Support Android Apps

Game of Thrones Showrunners Confirm There Are Only 15 Episodes Left, Max

The rumors have swirled for a while now. Various people who have worked on the show have dropped hints. But now David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones ’ showrunners, have officially, irrevocably confirmed that we only have 15 episodes of the show left… at most. Probably less. Read more…

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Game of Thrones Showrunners Confirm There Are Only 15 Episodes Left, Max

Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever

An anonymous reader writes from a report via ScienceAlert: Physicists have confirmed the existence of pear-shaped nuclei, which challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe. “We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, providing there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present, ” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News. Until recently, it was generally accepted that nuclei of atoms could only be one of three shapes: spherical, discus, or rugby ball. The first discovery of a pear-shaped nucleus was back in 2013, when physicists at CERN discovered isotope Radium-224. Now, that find has been confirmed by a second study, which shows that the nucleus of the isotope Barium-144 is also asymmetrical and pear-shaped. In regard to time travel, Scheck says that this uneven distribution of mass and charge caused Barium-144’s nucleus to “point” in a certain direction in spacetime, and this bias could explain why time seems to only want to go from past to present, and not backwards, even if the laws of physics don’t care which way it goes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Physicists Confirm a Pear-Shaped Nucleus, and It Could Ruin Time Travel Forever

New and Improved CryptXXX Ransomware Rakes In $45,000 In 3 Weeks

An anonymous reader writes:Whoever said crime doesn’t pay didn’t know about the booming ransomware market. A case in point, the latest version of the scourge known as CryptXXX, which raked in more than $45, 000 in less than three weeks. Over the past few months, CryptXXX developers have gone back and forth with security researchers. The whitehats from Kaspersky Lab provided a free tool that allowed victims to decrypt their precious data without paying the ransom, which typically reaches $500 or more. Then, CryptXXX developers would tweak their code to defeat the get-out-of-jail decryptor. The researchers would regain the upper hand by exploiting another weakness and so on. Earlier this month, the developers released a new CryptXXX variant that to date still has no decryptor available. Between June 4 and June 21, according to a blog post published Monday by security firm SentinelOne, the Bitcoin address associated with the new version had received 70 bitcoins, which at current prices is valued at around $45, 228. The figure doesn’t include revenue generated from previous campaigns. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New and Improved CryptXXX Ransomware Rakes In $45,000 In 3 Weeks

After Death, Hundreds of Genes Spring Back to Life

Two surprising studies reveal new information about what genes do after death. Slashdot reader gurps_npc writes: You think your body stops after death, but up to two days later certain genes may turn on and start doing stuff for another two days before they give up the ghost. We are all zombies for up to four days after death. Gizmodo reports that in fact “hundreds” of genes apparently spring back to life. “[P]revious work on human cadavers demonstrated that some genes remain active after death, but we had no idea as to the extent of this strange phenomenon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Death, Hundreds of Genes Spring Back to Life

IRS Gets Hacked Again, Forced To Scrap Their Entire PIN System

The IRS has abandoned a system of PIN numbers used when filing tax returns online after they detected “automated attacks taking place at an increasing frequency, ” adding that only “a small number” of taxpayers were affected. An anonymous reader quotes the highlights from Engadget: The IRS chose not to kill the tool back in February, since most commercial tax software products use it… If you’ll recall, identity thieves used malware to steal taxpayers’ info from other websites, which was then used to generate 100, 000 PINs, back in February… This time, the IRS detected “automated attacks taking place at an increasing frequency” thanks to the additional defenses it added after that initial hack… the agency determined that it would be safer to give up on a verification method that’s scheduled for the chopping block anyway. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Gets Hacked Again, Forced To Scrap Their Entire PIN System

Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Escapes…Again

Slashdot reader Taco Cowboy brings a new report about Russian robot IR77, which has escaped from its research lab again… The story goes that an engineer working at Promobot Laboratories, in the Russian city of Perm, had left a gate open. Out trundled Promobot, traveling some 150 feet into the city before running out of juice. There it sat, batteries mostly dead, in the middle of a Perm street for 40 minutes, slowing cars to a halt and puzzling traffic cops A researcher at Promobot’s facility in Russia said that the runaway robot was designed to interact with human beings, learn from experiences, and remember places and the faces of everyone it meets. Other versions of the Promobot have been docile, but this one just can’t seem to fall in line, even after the researchers reprogrammed it twice. Despite several rewrites of Promobot’s artificial intelligence, the robot continued to move toward exits. “We have changed the AI system twice, ” Kivokurtsev said. “So now I think we might have to dismantle it”. Fans of the robot are pushing for a reprieve, according to an article titled ‘Don’t kill it!’: Runaway robot IR77 could be de-activated because of ‘love for freedom’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Artificially Intelligent Russian Robot Escapes…Again

Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000

Mobile advertising firm InMobi will be paying a fine of $950, 000 and revamp its services to resolve federal regulators’ claims that it deceptively tracked locations of hundreds of millions of people, including children. Ars Technica reports:The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users’ ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn’t given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users. Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a “geocorder” database to infer the phone user’s latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn’t provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone’s dedicated location feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Advertiser That Tracked Around 100M Phone Users Without Consent Pays $950,000