The US Secret Service is tasked with keeping the President and members of his family safe. But newly released documents show that the agency has had trouble keeping tabs on its own equipment. Since 2001, the agency has lost at least 1, 024 computers, 736 mobile phones, and 121 guns. Read more…
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The Secret Service Has Lost 1,024 Computers Since 2001
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After losing mobile gaming to iOS and Android, Facebook is making a big push into playing on PC with today’s developer launch of its Gameroom Windows desktop gaming platform. After months of name changes, beta tests and dev solicitation, Facebook opened up the beta build for all developers and officially named it Gameroom. The app is openly available for users to download on Windows 7 and up. Gameroom let users play web, ported mobile and native Gameroom games in a dedicated PC app free from the distractions of the News Feed. Gameroom will have to fight a steep uphill battle again Valve’s Steam platform, which has well over 125 million active users, with millions actually playing at any given moment. Facebook will need to convince developers that Gameroom will share its social network’s massive reach and is therefore worth their while. Then it will have to persuade gamers that a more social experience is worth diving into a new platform. If Facebook succeeds, there are plenty of potential benefits to owning a gaming destination. Facebook announced the launch and name change from “Facebook Games Arcade” today at Unity’s game development platform conference. Unity 5.6 shipping next year will allow devs to export their games directly to Facebook Gameroom, as well as to the WebGL standard. Facebook’s director of global games platform, Leo Olebe, touted how Facebook will feature new games in the Gameroom to give developers a leg up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Officially Announces Gameroom, Its PC Steam Competitor
Okian Warrior writes: Martin Gottesfeld of Anonymous was arrested in connection with the Spring 2014 attacks on a number of healthcare and treatment facilities in the Boston area. The attacks were in response/defense of a patient there named Justina Pelletier. Gottesfeld now explains why he did what he did, in a statement provided to The Huffington Post. Here’s an excerpt from his statement: [Why I Knocked Boston Children’s Hospital Off The Internet] The answer is simpler than you might think: The defense of an innocent, learning disabled, 15-year-old girl. In the criminal complaint, she’s called ‘Patient A, ‘ but to me, she has a name, Justina Pelletier. Boston Children’s Hospital disagreed with her diagnosis. They said her symptoms were psychological. They made misleading statement on an affidavit, went to court, and had Justina’s parents stripped of custody. They stopped her painkillers, leaving her in agony. They stopped her heart medication, leaving her tachycardic. They said she was a danger to herself, and locked her in a psych ward. They said her family was part of the problem, so they limited, monitored, and censored her contact with them…” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Anonymous Hacker Explains His Attack On Boston Children’s Hospital
In the world of music streaming, numbers mean everything. Major players have come and go, but Spotify and Apple are the two companies who largely dominate the market. After Tim Cook kicked off last week’s iPhone 7 event with confirmation that Apple Music now has 17 million paying subscribers , Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has fired back with an impressive figure of his own: 40 million people are now paying to access his service. The last time Spotify updated us on its paid stats was back in March, when it eclipsed 30 million Premium users . The company hasn’t confirmed just how many total users it has today, but it did note that it had 100 million people on its books back in June . Signups may have been driven by Spotify’s decision to extend Family plans to six members , cutting the price to $15/£15 in the process. To lure in subscribers, Spotify operates a free tier, which many other streaming services have shied away from. Instead of requiring a monthly payment, the company attempts to recoup some of those streaming costs by dropping in adverts between tracks. The fact that it continues to convert users into paying customers is encouraging, especially given the competition, but the company still has a long way to go to prove that streaming music can be a decently profitable business . 40 is the new 30. Million.
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Spotify now has 40 million paid subscribers
In a vote carried out on Friday night, Univision executives voted to remove six posts published by former Gawker Media properties that are involved in ongoing litigation. The vote took place just hours before the close of Univision’s purchase of Gawker Media’s assets, and was carried out under a provision in Gawker’s existing collective bargaining agreement. That provision states that “once a story has been posted it can only be removed by a majority vote of the Executive Editor, the CEO, and the General Counsel, unless required by law.” Read more…
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Univision Executives Vote to Delete Six Gawker Media Posts
Marcel Lazar, better known as Guccifer, the hacker who terrorized politicians in 2013, pled guilty to various computer crimes in May. Today, he was sentenced to 52 months in prison. Read more…
Your standard inkjet printer can mostly handle paper, occasionally transparencies, and maybe even blank DVDs while they were still a thing. But Xerox just revealed a towering machine it calls the Direct to Object Inkjet Printer because that’s exactly what it does—it prints on almost any 3D object. Read more…
Tom Mendelsohn, reporting for Ars Technica: Some smartphone users of Facebook are reporting that they’re no longer able to access their messages from the mobile site, and that they’re being directed towards the free content ad network’s dedicated Messenger app. Users of the regular Facebook mobile app were shunted over to Facebook Messenger to access their chats a while ago. Now, folk who access the service on their phone’s Web browsers, or via third-party apps such as Tinfoil or Metal, are beginning to find that they can no longer view their messages. Complaints are popping up from users who are being told by Facebook that “your conversations are moving to Messenger.” Some Android users are even finding themselves automatically redirected to the download link on the Google Play store when they try and view their messages on the mobile site. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Nixes Access To Chats Outside Of Messenger Walled Garden
To help alleviate long lines at Atlanta’s airport, Delta spent more than a million dollars to install a pair of new high-tech security lanes that can handle more passengers simultaneously. When even the airlines, who are happy to charge passengers extra to sit next to their family members , thinks the TSA is doing a bad job, you know there’s a problem. Read more…
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The TSA Is So Bad That Delta Has Had to Install Its Own Ultra-Efficient Security Checkpoints
An anonymous reader writes: IMAX is getting into the virtual reality business. Tthe company has announced that it is teaming up with Google to build cinema-quality virtual reality video cameras. It is also planning to launch virtual reality “locations.” The cinemas will be opened in shopping malls, much like traditional movie theatres. There are six reportedly planned for this year, including in Los Angeles and China. From the Verge report: IMAX chief executive Richard Gelfond told The WSJ that he imagined that the VR content would be tied to existing movie franchises, that they would last around 10 minutes and cost between $7 and $10. The idea, suggests Gelfond, is to create a VR experience that’s better than what you can get at home — the same way that a movie theater is better than your living room TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IMAX Embraces Virtual Reality, To Open Six VR Theaters This Year