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Chrome OS Will Finally Run Android Apps in the Background

An anonymous reader shares a report: While it’s no longer a novelty to run Android apps on your Chromebook, that doesn’t mean they run well. To date, most of those apps pause when you switch away — fine for a phone, but not what you’d expect on a computer with a multi-window interface. However, they’re about to become far more functional. Chrome Unboxed has learned that the Chrome OS 64 beta introduces Android Parallel Tasks, which lets Android apps run at full bore regardless of what you’re doing. You could watch a video in a mobile app while you’re surfing the web, or take a break from a mobile game without jarring transitions. There’s no guarantee that Android Parallel Tasks will reach the stable Chrome OS 64, so you might not want to plan a purchase around the feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chrome OS Will Finally Run Android Apps in the Background

How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America’s Metric System

If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald’s 113-Grammer, John Henry’s 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos. NPR explores: One reason this country never adopted the metric system might be pirates. Here’s what happened: In 1793, the brand new United States of America needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems. “For example, in New York, they were using Dutch systems, and in New England, they were using English systems, ” says Keith Martin, of the research library at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This made interstate commerce difficult. The secretary of state at the time was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew about a new French system and thought it was just what America needed. He wrote to his pals in France, and the French sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey off to Jefferson carrying a small copper cylinder with a little handle on top. It was about 3 inches tall and about the same wide. This object was intended to be a standard for weighing things, part of a weights and measure system being developed in France, now known as the metric system. The object’s weight was 1 kilogram. Crossing the Atlantic, Dombey ran into a giant storm. “It blew his ship quite far south into the Caribbean Sea, ” says Martin. And you know who was lurking in Caribbean waters in the late 1700s? Pirates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America’s Metric System

65% of Washington DC’s Outdoor Surveillance Cameras Infiltrated by Romanian Hackers

An anonymous reader quotes The Hill: Two Romanian hackers stand accused of hacking more than 100 outdoor police security cameras in the D.C. area during the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, according to a court document obtained by CNN. According to an affidavit from Secret Service agent James Graham, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru are accused of hacking and disabling 123 out of 187 of the city’s cameras between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15… Isvanca and Cismaru are also accused in the affidavit of spreading ransomware. In a possibly-related story, the Washington Post reports: Five Romanian hackers were arrested over the past week as part of an international investigation into computer ransomware, officials in the United States and Europe said Wednesday. In six houses across Romania, law enforcement operatives from Romania, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands seized hard drives, laptops, external storage devices and documents related to malicious software called CTB-Locker or Critroini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017

An anonymous reader shares a report: The number of births in Japan this year has fallen to is lowest since records began more than a century ago with about 941, 000 new babies, the health ministry said on Friday, proof if any were needed that it faces an ageing and shrinking population. The number of births will be about 4 percent lower than last year and the lowest since the government started compiling data in 1899, the ministry said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017

Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem

An anonymous reader writes: Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well. This issue appears to stem from the Intel SPI driver in the 17.10’s Linux 4.13 kernel corrupting the BIOS for a select number of laptop motherboards. Canonical is aware of this issue and is planning to disable the Intel SPI drivers in their kernel builds. Canonical’s hardware enablement team has already verified this works around the problem, but doesn’t provide any benefit if your BIOS is already corrupted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coinbase Adds Support For Bitcoin Cash

Popular digital exchange Coinbase has announced support for Bitcoin Cash. “Bitcoin Cash was created by a fork on August 1st, 2017, ” a blog post reads. “All customers who held a Bitcoin balance on Coinbase at the time of the fork will now see an equal balance of Bitcoin Cash available in their Coinbase account. Your Bitcoin Cash balance will reflect your Bitcoin balance at the time of the Bitcoin Cash Fork, which occurred at 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017.” The recent announcement has disrupted the markets. Bitcoin has dropped 12 percent, with the other two cryptocurrencies supported via Coinbase not faring too well either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Coinbase Adds Support For Bitcoin Cash

China’s most popular game is about to launch in the US

You might not have even heard of Arena of Valor (outside of a Twitch tourney ), but it’s all-consuming in its native China, with 200 million registered players and over 80 million daily active users. Tencent’s mobile-only MOBA game, known as Honor of Kings in its original form, is so popular in its homeland that tournaments are everywhere and the game has time limits to prevent kids from playing too long. And now, Tencent wants it to become a household name in the rest of the world. In a confirmation of some earlier rumors , the tech giant is formally launching Arena of Valor worldwide on December 19th, with users in North and South America getting their first crack at the Android and iOS hit. Watch Arena of Valor MAJOR Announcement & Giveaways! from ArenaofValor on www.twitch.tv Arena sticks to Honor’s core MOBA formula, where teams of five distinctive heroes clash in a bid to take over each other’s bases. The largest change is a cultural one: Arena drops Chinese legends in favor of Western fantasy tropes, and it switches to Facebook for connecting friends instead of WeChat. The game has been available in Europe since August, and has had at least some success with more than 2 million downloads. The problem, as The Verge notes, is that Chinese companies have historically had problems translating the success of their domestic games to an international audience. The titles rarely have any name recognition outside of China, and there are differences in gaming habits that make success difficult. Where limited access to games has led to MOBAs becoming wildly popular on phones in China, there’s a stigma against mobile gaming in North America. Tencent is creating an eSports league to boost competitive play and is partnering with livestreamers to drum up hype, but there’s no guarantee of success — certainly not when it has to take on established titles like Vainglory . However, it’s the attempt that matters. Chinese behemoths like Tencent know they’ll have to move beyond their home turf to keep growing, and that means doing more than acquiring foreign companies (Tencent owns League of Legends ‘ Riot Games and a piece of Activision Blizzard) to ride on their successes. Source: The Verge , Twitch

CDC Director Says No Words Are Actually Banned At the CDC

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald on Sunday addressed a report that President Donald Trump’s administration had banned the CDC from using seven words or phrases in next year’s budget documents. The terms are “fetus, ” “transgender, ” “vulnerable, ” “entitlement, ” “diversity, ” “evidence-based” and “science-based, ” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post. But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday said there are “no banned words, ” while emphasizing the agency’s commitment to data-driven science. “CDC has a long-standing history of making public health and budget decisions that are based on the best available science and data and for the benefit of all people — and we will continue to do so, ” she said. A group of the agency’s policy analysts said senior officials at the CDC informed them about the banned words on Thursday, according to the Post’s report. In some cases, the analysts were reportedly given replacement phrases to use instead. But in follow-up reporting, The New York Times cited “a few” CDC officials who suggested the move was not meant as an outright ban, but rather, a technique to help secure Republican approval of the 2019 budget by eliminating certain words and phrases. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, said the reported decree on banned words was a misrepresentation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CDC Director Says No Words Are Actually Banned At the CDC

Microsoft Disables Word DDE Feature To Prevent Further Malware Attacks

An anonymous reader writes: As part of the December 2017 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has shipped an Office update that disables the DDE feature in Word applications, after several malware campaigns have abused this feature to install malware. DDE stands for Dynamic Data Exchange, and this is an Office feature that allows an Office application to load data from other Office applications. For example, a Word file can update a table by pulling data from an Excel file every time the Word file is opened. DDE is an old feature, which Microsoft has superseded via the newer Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) toolkit, but DDE is still supported by Office applications. The December Patch Tuesday disables DDE only in Word, but not Excel or Outlook. The reason is that several cybercrime and spam groups have jumped on this technique, which is much more effective at running malicious code when compared to macros or OLE objects, as it requires minimal interaction with a UI popup that many users do not associate with malware. For Outlook and Excel, Microsoft has published instructions on how users can disable DDE on their own, if they don’t want this feature enabled. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Disables Word DDE Feature To Prevent Further Malware Attacks

Opera Software Changes Name To Otello Corporation

Opera Software has changed its name to Otello Corporation, it said in a statement on Monday. From a report: Otello owns companies that develop software for advertising, telecoms, games and other online business. The name changes does not affect Opera Software AS or the Opera and Opera Mini internet browsers, all of which Otello sold in 2016, Opera Software AS said in a separate statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Opera Software Changes Name To Otello Corporation