Tag: funny

Two Major ISPs Are Suffering Outages, Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now

Freshly Exhumed writes: Two major backbone internet service providers — Level 3 and Cogent — appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to ISP monitoring service Downdetector. Users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. are apparently being hit the hardest. Comcast is also said to be affected to a lesser degree. “Backbone internet service providers work directly with large internet platforms like Netflix to deliver large amounts of data across networks, and also work behind the scenes of consumer-facing ISPs, ” reports Slate. “Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires, disruptions with Level 3 and Cogent could impact service for Comcast and Verizon users in turn.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Two Major ISPs Are Suffering Outages, Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now

Power Outage Strands Thousands at US Airport. 600 Flights Cancelled

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: A power outage at the world’s busiest airport left thousands of passengers stranded in dark terminals and in planes sitting on the tarmac, amid a nationwide ground stop. Incoming and outgoing flights at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were halted indefinitely as crews worked to restore power, leading to hundreds of flight delays and cancellations. Atlanta is the heart of the US air transport system, and what happens there has the potential to ripple through the country. More than 600 flights to and from Atlanta have been canceled, including 350 departures, according to Flightradar24… Flights headed to Atlanta are being held on the ground at their departure airport. Inbound flights to Atlanta are being diverted, US Customs and Border Protection said. Departures from the airport are delayed because electronic equipment is not working in the terminals, the FAA said. The cause of the incident is under investigation. Some people stranded in the dark terminals used their cellphones as flashlights, one passenger told CNN. “There were a few emergency lights on, but it was really dark — felt totally apocalyptic.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Power Outage Strands Thousands at US Airport. 600 Flights Cancelled

Bitcoin Jumps Another 10% in 24 Hours, Sets New Record at $19,000

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Bitcoin’s price set a new record on Saturday as the virtual currency rose above $19, 000 for the first time on the Bitstamp exchange. The gains came just hours after the currency crossed the $18, 000 mark. Bitcoin’s value has doubled over the last three weeks, and it’s up more than 20-fold over the last year. Bitcoin’s value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin’s rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency’s value was justified. Another survey reported by The Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin’s price was an unsustainable bubble. Less than a month ago, Bitcoin was selling for $8, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Jumps Another 10% in 24 Hours, Sets New Record at $19,000

Chrome 64 Beta Adds Sitewide Audio Muting, Pop-Up Blocker, Windows 10 HDR Video

Chrome 64 is now in beta and it has several new features over version 63. In addition to a stronger pop-up blocker and support for HDR video playback when Windows 10 is in HDR mode, Chrome 64 features sitewide audio muting to block sound when navigating to other pages within a site. 9to5Google reports: An improved pop-up blocker in Chrome 64 prevents sites with abusive experiences — like disguising links as play buttons and site controls, or transparent overlays — from opening new tabs or windows. Meanwhile, as announced in November, other security measures in Chrome will prevent malicious auto-redirects. Beginning in version 64, the browser will counter surprise redirects from third-party content embedded into pages. The browser now blocks third-party iframes unless a user has directly interacted with it. When a redirect attempt occurs, users will remain on their current page with an infobar popping up to detail the block. This version also adds a new sitewide audio muting setting. It will be accessible from the permissions dropdown by tapping the info icon or green lock in the URL bar. This version also brings support for HDR video playback when Windows 10 is in HDR mode. It requires the Windows 10 Fall Creator Update, HDR-compatible graphics card, and display. Meanwhile, on Windows, Google is currently prototyping support for an operating system’s native notification center. Other features include a new “Split view” feature available on Chrome OS. Developers will also be able to take advantage of the Resize Observer API to build responsive sites with “finger control to observe changes to sizes of elements on a page.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chrome 64 Beta Adds Sitewide Audio Muting, Pop-Up Blocker, Windows 10 HDR Video

T-Mobile Is Becoming a Cable Company

T-Mobile has revealed that it’s launching a TV service in 2018, and that is has acquired Layer3 TV (a company that integrates TV, streaming and social networking) to make this happen. The company thinks people are ditching cable due to the providers, not TV itself. Engadget reports: It claims that it can “uncarrier” TV the way it did with wireless service, and has already targeted a few areas it thinks it can fix: it doesn’t like the years-long contracts, bloated bundles, outdated tech and poor customer service that are staples of TV service in the U.S. T-Mobile hasn’t gone into detail about the functionality of the service yet. How will it be delivered? How much will it cost? Where will it be available? And will this affect the company’s free Netflix offer? This is more a declaration of intent than a concrete roadmap, so it’s far from certain that the company will live up to its promises. Ultimately, the move represents a big bet on T-Mobile’s part: that people like TV and are cutting the cord based on a disdain for the companies, not the service. There’s a degree of truth to that when many Americans are all too familiar with paying ever-increasing rates to get hundreds of channels they don’t watch. However, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work in an era when many people (particularly younger people) are more likely to use Netflix, YouTube or a streaming TV service like Sling TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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T-Mobile Is Becoming a Cable Company

AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Screwed

New submitter samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video. The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together. It’s not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn’t track correctly and there’s an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It’s especially striking considering that it’s allegedly the work of one person — a Redditor who goes by the name ‘deepfakes’ — not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rouge One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning. Anyone could do it, and that should make everyone nervous. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Screwed

AMD Quietly Made Some Radeon RX 560 Graphics Cards Worse

Brad Chacos: When the Radeon RX 560 launched in April it was the only RX 500-series card with a meaningful under-the-hood tech boost compared to the RX 400-series. The graphics processor in the older RX 460 cards packed 14 compute units and 896 stream processors; the upgraded Radeon RX 560 bumped that to 16 CUs and 1, 024 SPs. Now, some — but not all — of the Radeon RX 560s you’ll find online have specs that match the older 460 cards, and sometimes run at lower clock speeds to boot. AMD’s Radeon RX 560 page was also quietly altered to include the new configurations at some point, Heise.de discovered. The last snapshot of the page by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine occurred on July 7 and only lists the full-fat 16 CU version of the card, so the introduction of the nerfed 896 SP model likely occurred some time after that. Sifting through all of the available Radeon RX 560s on Newegg this morning reveals a fairly even split between the two configurations, all of which are being sold under the same RX 560 name. In a statement, AMD acknowledged the existence of 14 Compute Unit (896 stream processors) and 16 Compute Unit (1024 stream processor) versions of the Radeon RX 560. “We introduced the 14CU version this summer to provide AIBs and the market with more RX 500 series options. It’s come to our attention that on certain AIB and etail websites there’s no clear delineation between the two variants. We’re taking immediate steps to remedy this: we’re working with all AIB and channel partners to make sure the product descriptions and names clarify the CU count, so that gamers and consumers know exactly what they’re buying. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Quietly Made Some Radeon RX 560 Graphics Cards Worse

Keylogger Found On Nearly 5,500 WordPress Sites

An anonymous reader writes: Nearly 5, 500 WordPress sites are infected with a malicious script that logs keystrokes and sometimes loads an in-browser cryptocurrency miner. The malicious script is being loaded from the “cloudflare.solutions” domain, which is not affiliated with Cloudflare in any way, and logs anything that users type inside form fields as soon as the user switches away from an input field. The script is included on both the sites’ frontends and backends, meaning it can steal both admin account credentials and credit card data from WP sites running e-commerce stores. According to site source code search engine PublicWWW, there are 5, 496 sites running this keylogger. The attacker has been active since April. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Keylogger Found On Nearly 5,500 WordPress Sites

Zimbabwe’s Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor.

Zimbabweans lost internet access en masse on Tuesday when a tractor reportedly cut through key fiber-optic cables in South Africa and another internet provider experienced simultaneous issues with its primary internet conduits. From a report: The outage began shortly before noon local time and persisted for more than five hours, affecting not only citizens’ day-to-day internet usage but businesses that rely upon web access. And while five internet-free hours might sound unfathomable to those of us accustomed to having the web constantly at our fingertips, large-scale internet outages — from inadvertent lapses caused by ship anchors to government-calculated blackouts designed to showcase political power — do happen, and maybe more frequently than you’d thought. According to local news sources, a tractor in South Africa damaged cables belonging to Liquid Telecom, which has an 81.5 percent market share of Zimbabwe’s international-equipped internet bandwidth as of the second quarter of 2017 and leases capacity to other internet providers. In a bad coincidence, city council employees in Kuwadzana, a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capitol city of Harare, cut an additional TelOne cable around the same time. (According to NewsDay Zimbabwe, it was an accident. The company blamed “faults that occurred on our main links through South Africa and Botswana” in a statement.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Zimbabwe’s Internet Went Down for About Five Hours. The Culprit Was Reportedly a Tractor.

‘Watershed’ Medical Trial Proves Type 2 Diabetes Can Be Reversed

dryriver writes: For those suffering from type 2 diabetes, there is good news. Nearly half of the participants in a watershed trial of a new diabetes treatment were able to reverse their affliction. The method is quite simple — an all liquid diet that causes participants to lose a lot of weight, followed by a carefully controlled diet of real solid foods. Four times a day, a sachet of powder is stirred in water to make a soup or shake. They contain about 200 calories, but also the right balance of nutrients. If the patient can keep away from other foods long enough, there is a chance of reversing type 2 diabetes completely. Prof Roy Taylor, from Newcastle University, told the BBC: “It’s a real watershed moment. Before we started this line of work, doctors and specialists regarded type 2 as irreversible. But if we grasp the nettle and get people out of their dangerous state (being overweight), they can get remission of diabetes.” However, doctors are not calling this a cure. If the weight goes back on, then the diabetes will return. The trial only looked at people diagnosed with diabetes in the last six years. Doctors believe — but do not know with absolute certainty yet — that in people who have had the affliction much longer than that, there may be too much permanent damage to make remission possible. The trial results have been published in the Lancet medical journal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Watershed’ Medical Trial Proves Type 2 Diabetes Can Be Reversed