Tag: journal

Pokemon Go Becomes Biggest Mobile Game In US History

An anonymous reader writes: Pokemon Go is now the biggest mobile game of all time in the U.S. Not only has it surpassed Twitter’s daily users, but it is seeing people spend more time in its app than in Facebook. An earlier report from SimilarWeb says Pokemon Go has surpassed Tinder in terms of installations — the app surpassed Tinder on July 7th. Today, the tracking firm says Pokemon Go has managed to surpass Twitter in terms of daily active users on Monday. It says almost 6% of the entire U.S. Android population is engaging with the app on a daily basis. A new report from SurveyMonkey intelligence indicated that Pokemon Go has claimed the title “biggest mobile game in U.S. history.” The game saw just under 21 million daily active users in the U.S. on Monday. It’s reportedly closing in on Snapchat on Android, and could surpass Google Maps on Android as well. According to app store intelligence firm SensorTower, the average iPhone user on iOS spent 33 minutes catching Pokemon, which is more than any other apps it analyzed, including Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Slither.io. The app with the second-most average usage at 22 minutes, 8 seconds, was Facebook. SurveyMonkey did note that Pokemon Go still falls short of other games when it comes to time spent in games. Game of War sees nearly 2 hours of total daily usage for the average user, while Candy Crush Saga sees daily usage of about 43 minutes. In just two days, Pokemon Go brought Nintendo’s market value to $7.5 billion. It’s worth noting that it remains to be seen whether or not the game will continue to break records or turn into a ghost town like Nintendo’s first mobile game, Miitomo. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pokemon Go Becomes Biggest Mobile Game In US History

Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “This is one of the coolest tickets I’ve seen on GitHub, ” writes Ubuntu developer Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, adding “this kind of surreal compatibility between platforms is now enabled…the fact that you can execute and use Linux window managers there, without virtual machines, is simply mind-blowing.” “The Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming in August includes an unusual feature aimed at developers: an Ubuntu sub-system that lets you run Linux software using a command-line interface, ” explains Liliputing.com “Preview versions have been available since April, and while Microsoft and Canonical worked together to bring support for the Bash terminal to Windows 10, it didn’t take long for some users to figure out that they could get some desktop Linux apps to run in Windows. Now it looks like you can even load Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment, making windows 10 look like Ubuntu. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

MRI Software Bugs Could Upend Years Of Research

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register: A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data. The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters. When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software. Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives. In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40, 000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MRI Software Bugs Could Upend Years Of Research

American Cities Are Installing DHS-Funded Audio Surveillance

“Audio surveillance is increasingly being used on parts of urban mass transit systems, ” reports the Christian Science Monitor. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes “It was first reported in April that New Jersey had been using audio surveillance on some of its light rail lines, raising questions of privacy. This week, New Jersey Transit ended the program following revelations that the agency ‘didn’t have policies governing storage and who had access to data.'” From the article: New Jersey isn’t the only state where you now have even more reason to want to ride in the quiet car. The Baltimore Sun reported in March that the Maryland Transit Administration has used audio recording on some of its mass transit vehicles since 2012. It is now used on 65 percent of buses, and 82 percent of subway trains have audio recording capability, but don’t use it yet, according to the Sun. And cities in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Oregon and California have either installed systems or moved to procure them, in many cases with funding from the federal Department of Homeland Security. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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American Cities Are Installing DHS-Funded Audio Surveillance

DMCA Notices Remove 8,268 Projects On Github In 2015

An anonymous reader writes: Github’s transparency report for 2015 shows that the site received many DMCA notices that removed more than 8, 200 projects. “In 2015, we received significantly more takedown notices, and took down significantly more content, than we did in 2014, ” Github reports. For comparison, the company received only 258 DMCA notices in 2014, 17 of which responded with a counter-notice or retraction. In 2015, they received 505 takedown notices, 62 of which were the subject of counters or withdrawals. TorrentFreak reports: “Copyright holders are not limited to reporting one URL or location per DMCA notice. In fact, each notice filed can target tens, hundreds, or even thousands of allegedly infringing locations.” September was a particularly active month as it took down nearly 5, 834 projects. “Usually, the DMCA reports we receive are from people or organizations reporting a single potentially infringing repository. However, every now and then we receive a single notice asking us to take down many repositories, ” Github explains. They are called ‘Mass Removals’ when more than 100 repositories are asked to be removed. “In all, fewer than twenty individual notice senders requested removal of over 90% of the content GitHub took down in 2015.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DMCA Notices Remove 8,268 Projects On Github In 2015

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

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

Axiom Plans A New Private-Sector Outpost in Space

A seed-funded company named Axiom wants to build a private-sector outpost in orbit by launching a new module for the International Space Station, according to an article on Space News. Once on the station, Axiom Space would use it for commercial purposes, ranging from research to tourism. [Former space station manager] Suffredini said that it would also be available for use by NASA when the company is not using it, helping the process of transitioning research done on the International Space Station to future private stations. Research hardware elsewhere in the station could eventually be moved to this module to allow its continued use after the station’s retirement. Slashdot reader MarkWhittington shares an article from Blasting News: In the meantime, Nanoracks, a company that is already handling some of the logistics for the ISS, is proposing a commercial airlock for the ISS. The development of commercial space stations, as well as commercial spacecraft such as the SpaceX Dragon and the Boeing Starliner, constitutes NASA’s long-term strategy of handing off low-Earth orbit to the private sector while it concentrates on deep space exploration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Axiom Plans A New Private-Sector Outpost in Space

Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer

An anonymous reader writes: The EFF reports that a federal court in Virginia today ruled that a criminal defendant has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in his personal computer (PDF), located inside his home. The court says the federal government does not need a warrant to hack into an individual’s computer. EFF reports: “The implications for the decision, if upheld, are staggering: law enforcement would be free to remotely search and seize information from your computer, without a warrant, without probable cause, or without any suspicion at all. To say the least, the decision is bad news for privacy. But it’s also incorrect as a matter of law, and we expect there is little chance it would hold up on appeal. (It also was not the central component of the judge’s decision, which also diminishes the likelihood that it will become reliable precedent.) But the decision underscores a broader trend in these cases: courts across the country, faced with unfamiliar technology and unsympathetic defendants, are issuing decisions that threaten everyone’s rights. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer