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Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: FarmBot is an open-source gantry-crane-style outdoor robot for tending a garden bed. The project is crowdfunding a first production run and has raised US$561, 486 of their US$100, 000 goal — with one day left to go… The onboard control system is based around a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and an Arduino Mega 2560 Microcontroller. Many of the parts are 3D printable. Two years ago Slashdot covered the genesis of this project, describing its goal as simply “to increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A company called Andromium is attempting to harness the processing power of your Android smartphone and turn it into a full fledged computer. The ‘Superbook’ consists of a 11.6-inch laptop shell, which you connect to your phone via a USB Micro-B or Type-C cable, and run the Andromium OS application (currently in beta, but available in the Play Store)… The leader of the project and Company co-founder Gordon Zheng, previously worked at Google and pitched the idea to them… They refused so he quit his job and founded Andromium Inc. In December 2014 the company had introduced their first product which was a dock which used the MHL standard to output to external monitor. That campaign failed, however their newest creation, the Superbook smashed their Kickstarter goal in just over 20 minutes. And within their first 38 hours, they’d crowdfunded $500, 000. In an intriguing side note, Andromium “says it’ll open its SDK so developers can tailor their apps for Andromium, too, though how much support that gets remains to be seen, ” reports Tech Insider. But more importantly, “Andromium says its prototypes are finished, and that it hopes to ship the Superbook to backers by February 2017.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

It’s no secret that ransomware hackers are in the business to make money. But a new business arrangement hitting the news today may surprise many. Vice’s Motherboard, citing research and investigation (PDF) from security firm F-Secure, is reporting that a Fortune 500 company, the name of which hasn’t been unveiled, hired a ransomware gang to hack its competitors. From the article: In an exchange with a security researcher pretending to be a victim, one ransomware agent claimed they were working for a Fortune 500 company. “We are hired by [a] corporation to cyber disrupt day-to-day business of their competition, ” the customer support agent of a ransomware known as Jigsaw said, according to a new report by security firm F-Secure. “The purpose was just to lock files to delay a corporation’s production time to allow our clients to introduce a similar product into the market first.”In a statement to Motherboard, Mikko Hypponen said, “If this indeed was a case where ransomware was used on purpose to disrupt a competitor’s operation, it’s the only case we know of.” F-Secure adds that the consumer representative noted that “politicians, governments, husbands, wives — people from all walks of life contract [them] to hack computers, cell phones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fortune 500 Company Hires Ransomware Gang To Hack the Competition

Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls

Speaking of instant messaging and VoIP call apps, Facebook announced on Wednesday that Facebook Messenger has hit the 1 billion monthly active users milestone. The company adds that Messenger is just more than a text messenger — in addition to the ambitious bot gamble, a digital assistant, and the ability to send money to friends — Messenger now accounts for 10 percent of all VoIP calls made globally. Messenger’s tremendous growth also underscores Facebook’s mammoth capture of the world. The social network is used by more than 1.6 billion people actively every month. WhatsApp, the chat client it owns, is also used by more than one billion people. TechCrunch has a brilliant story on the growth of Messenger from the scratch. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Facebook Messenger Hits 1B Monthly Active Users, Accounts For 10 Percent Of All VoIP Calls

Encrypted DNA Storage Investigated by DOE Researchers

Biological engineers at a Department of Energy lab “are experimenting with encrypted DNA storage for archival applications.” Slashdot reader ancientribe shares an article from Dark Reading: Using this method, the researchers could theoretically store 2.2 petabytes of information in one gram of DNA. That’s 200 times the printed material at the Library of Congress… Instead of needing a 15, 000 square-foot building to store 35, 000 boxes of inactive records and archival documents, Sandia National Laboratories can potentially store information on much less paper, in powder form, in test tubes or petri dishes, or even as a bacterial cell… “Hard drives fail and very often the data can’t be recovered, ” explains Bachand. “With DNA, it’s possible to recover strands that are 10, 000 to 20, 000 years old… even if someone sneezes and the powder is lost, it’s possible to recover all the information by just recovering one DNA molecule.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Encrypted DNA Storage Investigated by DOE Researchers

Ubuntu Linux Forums Hacked — IP Address, Username, Email of 2M Accounts Compromised

Canonical announced on Friday that Ubuntu forums have been hacked. The company adds that data such as IP address, username, and email address of over two million users have been compromised. BetaNews reports: Keep in mind, this does not mean that the operating system has experienced a vulnerability or weakness. The only thing affected are the online forums that people use to discuss the OS. Still, such a hack is embarrassing as it happened due to Canonical’s failure to install a patch.In a blog post, Jane Silber, Chief Executive Officer, Canonical said, “after some initial investigation, we were able to confirm there had been an exposure of data and shut down the Forums as a precautionary measure. Deeper investigation revealed that there was a known SQL injection vulnerability in the Forumrunner add-on in the Forums which had not yet been patched.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Linux Forums Hacked — IP Address, Username, Email of 2M Accounts Compromised

Programming Bug Costs Citigroup $7M After Legit Transactions Mistaken For Test Data For 15 Years

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register:A programming blunder in its reporting software has led to Citigroup being fined $7m. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete “blue sheet” information for a remarkable 15 years — from May 1999 to April 2014. The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on. That team quickly noticed that some branches’ trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn’t until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.The glitch resided in new alphanumeric branch codes that the bank had introduced in the mid-1990s. The program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes. The report adds, “But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Programming Bug Costs Citigroup $7M After Legit Transactions Mistaken For Test Data For 15 Years

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

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

Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’ Released, Supports Generic GTK X-Apps

Slashdot reader Type44Q writes: The Linux Mint team announced the immediate availability of their latest release, Mint 18 “Sarah, ” in Cinnamon and MATE flavors. These follow on the heels of their respective beta versions, which have been out for nearly a month. “Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021, ” the team announces on MATE’s “new features” page, adding they’ve improved their update manager, included support for the Debian syntax of “apt”, and are working on the “X-Apps” project to “produce generic applications for traditional GTK desktop environments…to replace applications which no longer integrate properly outside of a particular environment.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’ Released, Supports Generic GTK X-Apps