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Amazon Introduces Mayday, A Unique And Amazingly Useful Live Tech Support System For Kindle

Live support has always been a dream for major retailers. While chat solutions already exist, today Amazon announced a new support service available on Kindle HD products called Mayday. It is a single-click, hardware-support solution that lets users work with a remote tech support representative to solve problems with their tablets. The service allows you to see the remote tech support person in a small window on your screen and also displays your screen on the support person’s computer where they can watch what you’re doing online, annotate the screen, and even tap through the interface. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said it’s like “actually very similar to having someone standing next to you” and offering tech support. The service is unique to Amazon, and the company built a full infrastructure to support it at their HQ in Seattle and on board the hardware. By compressing the video signals, they are able to send more data to the devices from tech support and allow tech support to see the data remotely. Amazon’s goal is a 15-second response time, and they will ramp up staffing around major holidays when Kindles are flying fast and furious under the Easter tree. While some may be concerned about privacy, rest assured the support person will not be able to see out of your camera, and you can mute your audio at any time. Bezos equated the experience to going into a store for tech support. “If you went to some physical store location to ask for help for your device, they’re going to see everything, ” said Bezos. More important, however, is how many people the service will help. “Are we in charge of our devices or our devices in charge of us? Getting good tech support isn’t easy, but it’s important, ” he said. The service will be available on the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets. You can read more about the service at Amazon’s Mayday page .

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Amazon Introduces Mayday, A Unique And Amazingly Useful Live Tech Support System For Kindle

Brooklyn Yogurt Shop Sting Snares Fake Reviewers For NY Attorney General

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Reuters reports that nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General and will pay $350, 000 in penalties. The Attorney General’s office set up a fake yogurt shop in Brooklyn, New York, and sought help from firms that specialize in boosting online search results to combat negative reviews. Search optimization companies offered to post fake reviews of the yogurt shop, created online profiles, and paid as little as $1 per review to freelance writers in the Philippines, Bangladesh and Eastern Europe. To avoid detection the companies used ‘advanced IP spoofing techniques’ to hide their true identities. ‘This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution, ‘ said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. ‘More than 100 million visitors come to Yelp each month, making it critical that Yelp protect the integrity of its content, ‘ said Aaron Schur, Yelp’s Senior Litigation Counsel.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Brooklyn Yogurt Shop Sting Snares Fake Reviewers For NY Attorney General

Software Glitch Means Loss of NASA’s Deep Impact Comet Probe

Taco Cowboy writes “‘NASA is calling off attempts to find its Deep Impact comet probe after a suspected software glitch shut down radio communications in August, officials said on Friday.’ Last month, engineers lost contact with Deep Impact and unsuccessfully tried to regain communications. The cause of the failure was unknown, but NASA suspects the spacecraft lost control, causing its antenna and solar panels to be pointed in the wrong direction. NASA had hoped Deep Impact would play a key role in observations of the approaching Comet ISON, a suspected first-time visitor to the inner solar system that was discovered in September 2012 by two Russian astronomers. The comet is heading toward a close encounter with the sun in November, a brush that it may not survive.” Deep Impact has had a pretty good run, though: from its original mission to launch a copper slug at a comet (hence the name), to looking for Earth-sized planets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Software Glitch Means Loss of NASA’s Deep Impact Comet Probe

Linus Torvalds Admits He’s Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux

darthcamaro writes “At the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans today, Linus Torvalds joined fellow kernel developers in answering a barrage of questions about Linux development. One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux. Torvalds responded ‘no’ while shaking his head ‘yes, ‘ as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter. Torvalds also admitted that while he as a full life outside of Linux he couldn’t imagine his life without it. ‘I don’t see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux, ‘ Torvalds said. ‘I couldn’t imagine filling the void in my life if I didn’t have Linux.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linus Torvalds Admits He’s Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux

GTA V Makes $800 Million In 24 Hours

An anonymous reader writes “The highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto V was released at midnight yesterday, and to no surprise has managed to break the record for highest sales in 24 hours. Distributors Take-Two Interactive have announced that the game has managed to achieve a staggering $800m (£490m) worth of sales within the first day, and is certainly going to break the forecasted $1 billion within the week. The record was previous held by Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops which made $500m within 24 hours in 2009. The game also holds the title for the quickest entertainment product to achieve $1 billion in sales as they hit the mark by day 15.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GTA V Makes $800 Million In 24 Hours

Can GM Challenge Tesla With a Long-Range Electric Car?

cartechboy writes “GM may sell the Chevy Volt, but it’s not a sexy electric car like Tesla Model S. It’s a plug-in hybrid with muddled marketing (whose owners love it even though they burn gasoline sometimes). Product exec Doug Parks says GM is developing an electric car that does 200 miles on one charge, with a price around $30, 000. But he wouldn’t say when, falling back on the old excuse: ‘Electric car batteries are really, really expensive!’ Tesla’s still the only maker to offer an electric car with more than 200 miles of range, so it will be interesting to see whether GM can really build a true Tesla rival. If so, the marketing must be better than the Volt’s. Otherwise, it won’t matter how good the car is.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Can GM Challenge Tesla With a Long-Range Electric Car?

California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students’ Social Media

An anonymous reader writes “A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It’s paying a company to snoop on students’ social media pages. ‘The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40, 500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14, 000 middle and high school students’ posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5, 000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9, 000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student “who was speaking of ending his life” on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students’ Social Media

Japan Controls Rocket Launch With Just 8 People and 2 Laptops

SpaceGhost writes “Sky News reports that the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) has launched an orbital telescope on a new generation rocket from the Uchinoura Space Centre in Kagoshima, in southwestern Japan. The Epsilon rocket uses an onboard AI for autonomous launch checks by the rocket itself (launch video). A product of renewed focus on reducing costs, the new vehicle required two laptops and a launch team of eight, compared to the 150 people needed to launch the previous platform, the M-5. Because of the reduced launch team and ease of construction, production and launch costs of the Epsilon are roughly half that of the M-5. The payload, a SPRINT-A telescope, is designed for planetary observation.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Japan Controls Rocket Launch With Just 8 People and 2 Laptops

Majority of Enterprise Customers Finally ‘Migrating Away From Windows XP’

New submitter TinTops writes “Speaking in a keynote at Intel’s Developer Forum, Microsoft’s vice president of marketing, Tami Reller, said the firm has ‘now seen about three quarters of Windows enterprises moving to modern desktops’ from Windows XP, with the last leg of Windows XP migrations being spurred by the imminent availability of Windows 8.1. However, Reller did not offer a breakdown of the enterprise uptake of Windows 8 compared to Windows 7, both of which are counted by Microsoft as modern desktops.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Majority of Enterprise Customers Finally ‘Migrating Away From Windows XP’

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

MikeatWired writes “It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack