Tag: management

FTC Goes After Scammers Who Blasted Millions of Text Messages

coondoggie writes “The Federal Trade Commission today said it has filed eight court cases to stop companies who have sent over 180 million illegal or deceptive text messages to all manner of mobile users in the past year. The messages — of which the FTC said it had received some 20,000 complaints in 2012 — promised consumers free gifts or prizes, including gift cards worth $1,000 to major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart and Target.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FTC Goes After Scammers Who Blasted Millions of Text Messages

UK Court Orders Block of Three Torrent Sites

angry tapir writes “A court in the U.K. has ordered key Internet service providers in the country to block three torrent sites on a complaint from music labels including EMI Records and Sony Music. The High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, ordered six ISPs including Virgin Media, British Telecommunications and British Sky Broadcasting to block H33t, Kickass Torrents and Fenopy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UK Court Orders Block of Three Torrent Sites

Steam For Linux: A Respectable Showing

An anonymous reader writes “Valve has just released its February, 2013 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, and the results are absolutely mind blowing. Linux is now standing strong as a legitimate gaming platform. It now represents 2.02% of all active Steam users.” That’s in keeping with what new submitter lars_doucet found. Lars writes: “I’m an independent game developer lucky enough to be on Steam. Recently, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale. The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including our cross-platform game Defender’s Quest. …. Bottom line: during the sale we saw nearly 3 times as many Linux sales of the game as Mac (Windows still dominated overall).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Steam For Linux: A Respectable Showing

Australian Tax Office Stores Passwords In Clear Text

mask.of.sanity writes “The passwords of thousands of Australian businesses are being stored in clear readable text by the country’s tax office. Storing passwords in readable text is a bad idea for a lot of reasons: they could be read by staff with ill intent, or, in the event of a data breach, could be tested against other web service accounts to further compromise users. In the case of the tax office, the clear text passwords accessed a subsection of the site. But many users would have reused them to access the main tax submission services. If attackers gained access to those areas, they would have access to the personal, financial and taxpayer information of almost every working Australian. Admins should use a strong hash like bcrypt to minimize or prevent password exposure. Users should never reuse passwords for important accounts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australian Tax Office Stores Passwords In Clear Text

3-D Printed Car Nears Production

An anonymous reader writes “An article at Wired shows just how close we are to a 3-D printed car. Jim Kor’s ‘Urbee 2’ design is a lightweight teardrop shape with three wheels. The engine, chassis, and wheels aren’t printed, of course, but much of the car is formed layer-by-layer out of ABS plastic. It takes about 2,500 hours of printer time to create the whole thing. Assembly is easier, though, since many different parts can be consolidated into just a few. ‘To negotiate the inevitable obstacles presented by a potentially incredulous NHSTA and DOT, the answer is easy. “In many states and many countries, Urbee will be technically registered as a motorcycle,” Kor says. It makes sense. With three wheels and a curb weight of less than 1,200 pounds, it’s more motorcycle than passenger car. No matter what, the bumpers will be just as strong as their sheet-metal equivalents. “We’re planning on making a matrix that will be stronger than FDM,” says Kor. He admits that yes, “There is a danger in breaking one piece and have to recreate the whole thing.” The safety decisions that’ll determine the car’s construction lie ahead. Kor and his team have been tweaking the safety by using crash simulation software, but the full spectrum of testing will have to wait for an influx of investment cash.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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3-D Printed Car Nears Production

The Copyright Alert System: How the New “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Program Works

This week marks the rollout of the long delayed “Copyright Alert System” aka the six strike anti-piracy program. It’s a bit confusing at a glance, but it’s not nearly as powerful as you’d think. Here’s how the system works, how it’ll affect you, and everything else you need to know. More »

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The Copyright Alert System: How the New “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Program Works

New Technology Produces Cheaper Tantalum and Titanium

Billy the Mountain writes “A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold. According to this piece in The Economist: A tantalising prospect, the key is a technique similar to smelting aluminum with a new twist: The metallic oxides are not melted as with aluminum but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte. This technology is known as the FFC Cambridge Process. Other metals include Neodymium, Tungsten, and Vanadium.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Technology Produces Cheaper Tantalum and Titanium

Human Rights Watch: Petition Against Robots On the Battle Field

First time accepted submitter KublaCant writes “‘At this very moment, researchers around the world – including in the United States – are working to develop fully autonomous war machines: killer robots. This is not science fiction. It is a real and powerful threat to humanity.’ These are the first words of a Human Rights Watch Petition to Presdient Obama to keep robots from the battlefield. The argument is that robots possess neither common sense, ‘real’ reason, any sense of mercy nor — most important — the option to not obey illegal commands. What with the fast-spreading use of drones et al. , we are allegedly a long way off from Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics being implanted in autonomous fighting machines, or into any ( semi- ) autonomous robot. A ‘Stop the Killer Robots’ campaign will also be launched in April at the British House of Commons and includes many of the groups that successfully campaigned to have international action taken against cluster bombs and landmines. They hope to get a similar global treaty against autonomous weapons. The Guardian has more about this, including quotes from well-known robotics researcher Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Human Rights Watch: Petition Against Robots On the Battle Field

Six of Hanford’s Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly

SchrodingerZ writes “A recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are leaking badly. Estimations say each tank is leaking ‘anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year.’ Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, said in a statement on Friday, ‘Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford’s tanks.’ The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but ‘there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,’ and they are just five miles from the Colombia River.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Six of Hanford’s Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly

Google Releases Chrome 25 With Voice Recognition Support

An anonymous reader writes “Google on Thursday released Chrome version 25 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. While Chrome 24 was largely a stability release, Chrome 25 is all about features, including voice recognition support via the newly added Web Speech API and the blocking of silent extension installation. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.” But if you’re more interested in the growing raft of Google-branded hardware than running Google OSes, some good news (via Liliputing) about the newly released Pixel: Bill Richardson of Google posted on Thursday that the Pixel can boot Linux Mint, and explained how users can follow his example, by taking advantage of new support for a user-provided bootloader. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Releases Chrome 25 With Voice Recognition Support