Tag: open source

California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP: All 800 police departments in California must begin using a new online tool launched Thursday to report and help track every time officers use force that causes serious injuries… The tool, named URSUS for the bear on California’s flag, includes fields for the race of those injured and the officers involved, how their interaction began and why force was deemed necessary. “It’s sort of like TurboTax for use-of-force incidents, ” said Justin Erlich, a special assistant attorney general overseeing the data collection and analysis. Departments must report the data under a new state law passed last November. Though some departments already tracked such data on their own, many did not… “As a country, we must engage in an honest, transparent, and data-driven conversation about police use of force, ” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a news release. It’s an open source tool developed by Bayes Impact, and California plans to share the code with other interested law enforcement agencies across the country. Only three other states currently require their police departments to track data about use-of-force incidents, “but their systems aren’t digital, and in Colorado’s case, only capture shootings.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Launches Mandatory Data Collection For Police Use-of-Force

People Are Drilling Holes Into Their iPhone 7 To ‘Make a Headphone Jack’

TechRax — a popular YouTuber who destroys technology for fame and riches — has uploaded a video where he drills a hole into an iPhone 7, claiming it to be a “secret hack” to reinstall a headphone jack in the device. The only problem is that he didn’t tell people it was a joke, and of course, some people fell for it. Crave Online reports: The YouTube video has amassed over 7.5 million views since being posted online last week, with it attracting 81, 000 dislikes in the process. The comments section is currently torn between people who are in on the joke, people who criticize TechRax for damaging his iPhone 7, and most unfortunately, people who have tried the “hack” out for themselves. Although this is YouTube so you can never be quite sure of whether or not these folks are trolling, parsing the comments section reveals some pretty convincing complaints lobbed in TechRax’s direction. It’s also firmly believable that there are people dumb enough to attempt drilling a hole into their iPhone 7, which is unfortunate but that’s the way the world is in 2016. You can read the comments under the YouTube video for more “convincing complaints.” But as if the report didn’t make it clear enough already, the video is a joke. Apple removed the headphone jack and there’s no way to get it back, unless you use an adapter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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People Are Drilling Holes Into Their iPhone 7 To ‘Make a Headphone Jack’

Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over 7km of Cable

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Quantum teleportation just moved out of the lab and into the real world, with two independent teams of scientists successfully sending quantum information across several kilometers of optical fiber networks in Calgary, Canada, and Hefei, China. Quantum teleportation relies on a strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Basically, quantum entanglement means that two particles are inextricably linked, so that measuring the state of one immediately affects the state of the other, no matter how far apart the two are — which led Einstein to call entanglement “spooky action at a distance.” In the latest experiments, both published in Nature Photonics (here and here), the teams had slightly different set-ups and results. But what they both had in common is the fact that they teleported their information across existing optical fiber networks — which is important if we ever want to build useable quantum communication systems. To understand the experiments, Anil Ananthaswamy over at New Scientist nicely breaks it down like this: picture three people involved — Alice, Bob, and Charlie. Alice and Bob want to share cryptographic keys, and to do that, they need Charlie’s help. Alice sends a particle to Charlie, while Bob entangles two particles and sends just one of them to Charlie. Charlie then measures the two particles he’s received from each of them, so that they can no longer be differentiated — and that results in the quantum state of Alice’s particle being transferred to Bob’s entangled particle. So basically, the quantum state of Alice’s particle eventually ends up in Bob’s particle, via a way station in the form of Charlie. The Canadian experiment followed this same process, and was able to send quantum information over 6.2 km of Calgary’s fiber optic network that’s not regularly in use. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over 7km of Cable

Samsung’s 960 Pro and 960 Evo SSDs Marry Crazy-Fast Speeds With Roomy Capacity

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung is following up its NVMe successes from 2015 with some fresh blazing-fast M.2 SSDs for storage geeks. The company just announced the Samsung 960 Pro and 960 Evo during this year’s Samsung SSD Global Summit. As with 2015’s 950 Pro NVMe SSDs, the new 960 series marries stacked V-NAND density with the Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) specification. They also use a 4-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, just like the 950 Pro. The 960 Evo and Pro will roll out in October with prices starting at $130 and $330, respectively. The 960 Evo will be available in 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB capacities, while the Pro offers 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB versions. The Evo utilizes cheaper and more tightly packed TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, while the Pro sports speedier MLC (multi-level cell) NAND. That 2TB maximum is double the top capacity Samsung offered with the 950 Pro in 2015, and in another age would’ve earned the moniker “jaw dropping” for packing that much storage into an M.2 SSD. But this is the age of the 1TB SDXC card, so maybe sheer capacity increases aren’t as impressive as they used to be. Seagate also announced a 2TB M.2 storage option for enterprises in July.BetaNews has more details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung’s 960 Pro and 960 Evo SSDs Marry Crazy-Fast Speeds With Roomy Capacity

Firefox 49 Arrives With Improvements

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 49 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes expanded multi-process support, improvements to Reader Mode, and offline page viewing on Android. The built-in voice and video calling feature Firefox Hello, meanwhile, has been removed from the browser. First up, Firefox 49 brings two improvements to Reader Mode. You can now adjust the text (width and line spacing), fonts, and even change the theme from light to dark. There is also a new Narrate option that reads the content of the page aloud. Next is the Mozilla’s crusade to enable multi-process support, a feature that has been in development for years as part of the Electrolysis project. With the release of Firefox 48, Mozilla enabled multi-process support for 1 percent of users, slowly ramping up to nearly half of the Firefox Release channel. Initial tests showed a 400 percent improvement in overall responsiveness.Mozilla says at least “half a billion people around the world” use its Firefox browser. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 49 Arrives With Improvements

GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

GoDaddy has announced “an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers, ” called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity, ” according to the announcement, “streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms.” GoDaddy’s submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is “out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment.” “GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process, ” the site reports, “by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, WordPress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries… in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they’ve done it all correctly.” Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy’s implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering “said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

Lyft Says Robots Will Drive Most Of Its Cars in Five Years

A week after its rival Uber began rolling out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, Lyft has said it also expects to roll out its self-driving by next year. Its president John Zimmer outlined a “three-phase” plan for the company, noting that self-driving cars will be made available to Lyft users in the first phase. But in this phase, it only plans to roll out self-driving cars that can “drive along fixed routes” and that the “technology is guaranteed to be able to navigate.” Recode adds: In the second phase, the self-driving cars in the fleet will navigate more than just the fixed routes, but will only drive up to 25 miles per hour. As the technology matures and the software encounters more complex environments, Zimmer wrote, cars will get faster. The third phase, expected to happen sometime in 2021 or 2022, will be when all Lyft rides will be completed by a fully autonomous car. Shortly after that phase begins, car ownership will see a steep drop-off, according to Zimmer. Zimmer, who has long been a vocal proponent of ending car ownership, set a date for the death of the personally owned car in major U.S. cities: 2025. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lyft Says Robots Will Drive Most Of Its Cars in Five Years

Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700, 000-year-old horse in Canada’s Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia…extinct horses, rhinos, and deer, This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species…should we? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells

The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House

This week the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed “The Ham Radio Parity Act” — a huge victory for grass-roots advocates of amateur radio. Slashdot reader bobbied reports: This will allow for the reasonable accommodation of amateur radio antennas in many places where they are currently prohibited by homeowner associations or private land use restrictions… If this bill passes the Senate, we will be one step closer to allowing amateur radio operators, who provide emergency communications services, the right to erect reasonable antenna structures in places where they cannot do so now. The national ham radio association is now urging supporters to contact their Senators through a special web page. “This is not just a feel-good bill, ” said representative Joe Courtney, remembering how Hurricane Sandy brought down the power grid, and “we saw all the advanced communications we take for granted…completely fall by the wayside.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Ham Radio Parity Act Unanimously Passed By US House

Air Force Grounds $400 Billion F-35s Because of ‘Peeling and Crumbling’ Insulation

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the Washington Post: Less than two months after declaring the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, the Air Force on Friday announced that it was temporarily grounding 15 of the jets after it discovered that insulation was “peeling and crumbling” inside the fuel tanks. The setback is the latest for the $400 billion system, the most expensive in the history of the Pentagon. The problem comes as the program, which for years faced billions of dollars in cost overruns and significant schedule delays, had begun to make strides. The insulation problem affects a total of 57 aircraft, the Air Force said, 42 of which are still in production… In a statement, Lockheed Martin said that “the issue is confined to one supplier source and one batch of parts.” It emphasized that “this is not a technical or design issue; it is a supply chain manufacturing quality issue…” It is unclear how long the aircraft would be grounded, how long the problem would take to fix or what the larger affect on the program would be. âoeWhile nearing completion, the F-35 is still in development, and challenges are to be expected, ” said an Air Force spokeswoman, adding “The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise, and we’re confident we’ll continue to do so.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Air Force Grounds $400 Billion F-35s Because of ‘Peeling and Crumbling’ Insulation