technology – Page 198

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

Spam Hits Its Highest Level Since 2010

Long-time Slashdot reader coondoggie quotes Network World: Spam is back in a big way — levels that have not been seen since 2010 in fact. That’s according to a blog post from Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet… “Many of the host IPs sending Necurs’ spam have been infected for more than two years. “To help keep the full scope of the botnet hidden, Necurs will only send spam from a subset of its minions… This greatly complicates the job of security personnel who respond to spam attacks, because while they may believe the offending host was subsequently found and cleaned up, the reality is that the miscreants behind Necurs are just biding their time, and suddenly the spam starts all over again.” Before this year, the SpamCop Block List was under 200, 000 IP addresses, but surged to over 450, 000 addresses by the end of August. Interestingly, Proofpoint reported that between June and July, Donald Trump’s name appeared in 169 times more spam emails than Hillary Clinton’s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Street Fighter V will roll back request for kernel access on Windows [Updated]

Enlarge / No, not really, Capcom. (credit: Aurich Lawson) On Thursday, Street Fighter V ‘s first “season” concluded with a downloadable update that included the game’s 22nd fighting character. (If you’re curious: the new guy is Urien, a tall fellow who first appeared in Street Fighter III wearing only a thong.) But the download updated more than just the game’s roster. It also brought apparent sweeping changes to the PC version—which now demands kernel access from players before every single boot of the game. Windows’ User Account Control (UAC) system warns computer users when an application wants to write or delete sensitive files, and, in the case of PC games, you typically only see these warnings during installations. SFV’s Thursday patch, however, apparently includes “an updated anti-crack solution” that Capcom insists is “not DRM” but rather an anti-cheating protocol. The anti-crack solution is causing a UAC prompt to pop up for the PC version’s users. (Our own Aurich Lawson confirmed the news by booting the latest patched version; his Windows prompt appears above.) Unfortunately, Capcom’s public-facing messages about PC version “hacks” have not been about cheats but about players finding workarounds to unlocking in-game content. In July, Capcom issued a stern warning to any PC player who found alternate ways to unlock Street Fighter ‘s alternate costumes, which normally require grinding through the game’s lengthy “survival” modes. Capcom producers also condemned PC players who used characters hidden in that game’s version before they were officially released. Thursday’s patch notes mentioned that the new anti-crack solution is particularly targeted at “illicitly obtaining in-game currency and other entitlements” (so it’s, you know, DRM). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Street Fighter V will roll back request for kernel access on Windows [Updated]

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’

This Drone Can Fly Forver Without a Battery

Want a drone to fly longer and farther? Give it a bigger battery. But that adds weight, which in turn reduces the drone’s flight time. It’s quite a conundrum. It seems like an unresolvable catch-twenty-two, except that someone has finally found a way to use wireless power to keep a drone flying . Read more…

Reddit Brings Down North Korea’s Entire Internet

After a North Korean system administrator misconfigured its nameserver allowing anyone to query it and get the list of the domains that exist for .kp, it was revealed that the secretive country only has 28 websites. That’s 28 websites for a country with nearly 25 million people. Naturally, the story was published all across the web, including on Reddit, which resulted in a high number of users visiting North Korea’s websites. Mirror.co.uk reports: When a list of North Korea’s available websites was posted on Reddit, the surge of visitors to the reclusive state’s online offering overloaded the servers. North Korea runs a completely locked-down version of the internet that consists of only 28 “websites” that the population is allowed to view. However, a technical slip-up allowed a GitHub user to work their way into the country’s computer network and view the websites from the outside. As the GitHub user puts it: “One of North Korea’s top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global [Domain Name System] transfers. This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer request] to the country’s ns2.kptc.kp name server to get a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data.” Pretty soon, links to all the websites were posted on Reddit, where thousands of visitors took the opportunity to see what the web looks like from Pyongyang. Reddit’s surge of traffic isn’t the first time North Korea’s internet has been knocked out. In 2014, the country suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that was believed to have originated from the U.S. Redditor BaconBakin points out that while North Korea has 28 websites, GTA V has 83 websites. They added, “I think it’s safe to say that San Andreas is more technologically advanced than North Korea.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

Bleach those bits away. (credit: Adina Firestone ) A system administrator with Platte River Networks, the company that took over hosting Hillary Clinton’s mail server after it was moved out of her basement in Chappaqua, has been the target of a crowdsourced investigation on Reddit into whether he took part in a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s e-mails. Paul Combetta, an employee of Platte River Networks who was granted immunity from prosecution by the Justice Department in exchange for cooperation with the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s e-mails, apparently went to Reddit for help with a sticky problem related to the e-mail investigation by the House Select Committee on Benghazi—scrubbing the e-mails of Clinton’s personal address. While the post doesn’t provide evidence that Clinton herself instructed Combetta to erase her e-mails, it does suggest that his staff wanted to excise her private e-mail address from the archives to be turned over to the State Department—ånd in turn, to the House Select Committee. The later destruction of the e-mails during the continuing investigation was apparently, as Combetta told investigators, an “oh-shit moment.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

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

China Confirms Its Space Station Is Falling Back to Earth

The Tiangong-1, China’s prototype space station which was launched in September 2011, is no longer under the control of China. PopularMechanics reports: China’s Tiangong-1 space station has been orbiting the planet for about 5 years now, but recently it was decommissioned and the Chinese astronauts returned to the surface. In a press conference, China announced that the space station would be falling back to earth at some point in late 2017. Normally, a decommissioned satellite or space station would be retired by forcing it to burn up in the atmosphere. This type of burn is controlled, and most satellite re-entries are scheduled to burn up over the ocean to avoid endangering people. However, it seems that China’s space agency is not sure exactly when Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere, which implies that the station has been damaged somehow and China is no longer able to control it. This is important because it means Tiangong-1 won’t be able to burn up in a controlled manner. All we know is it will burn up at some point in late 2017, but it is impossible to predict exactly when or where. This means that there is a chance debris from the falling spacecraft could strike a populated area. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Confirms Its Space Station Is Falling Back to Earth

Ken May

Tag: technology