Tech news

Facebook at one time considered charging companies for access to its user data, according to a report based on three pages of unredacted material from a document showing portions of some internal Facebook emails, mainly from 2012 to 2014. The documents are linked to a lawsuit, Six4Three LLC v. Facebook Inc. , filed in California Superior Court. Six4Three, the developer of Pikini, a now-defunct app for locating photos of users' friends in swimsuits, filed a complaint in 2015 alleging that Facebook's data policies were anticompetitive. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2TYbdlM

Void Linux offers an unusual alternative to many of the traditional Linux distros affiliated with a larger Linux family such as Debian or Ubuntu or Arch. Void Linux is an independently developed, rolling-release, general-purpose operating system. That means that its software is either homegrown or plain-vanilla compiled. Some of Void Linux's under-the-hood specifics include its own package management system, dubbed "XBPS," for X-binary Package System, an initialization system called "runit," and integration of LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2rdLl8w

Amazon has announced Amazon Comprehend Medical, a language processing service that lets users gather information -- such as a patient's medical condition and medication dosage, strength and frequency -- from sources including doctors' notes, clinical trial reports, hospital admission notes and patient health records. Most health and patient data -- such as medical notes, prescriptions, audio interview transcripts, and pathology and radiology reports -- currently is stored as unstructured medical text. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2zy4h6u

Smart home and consumer IoT solutions promise significant opportunities for the insurance industry to reduce costs, alleviate risks, deepen customer engagement, and create new services and revenue streams. There are many barriers ahead, but given the tremendous upside, insurance companies have begun attacking these challenges with a multi-tiered strategy. The currency of these opportunities is data, and the level of integration required to realize the insurtech vision and enhance aspects of the insurance business is a huge undertaking. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2BEAHxC

I'm a longtime Jaguar fan. I've owned a ton of them over the years, and I've had both good and bad experiences with the cars. Currently I own two -- a 1970 XKE and a 2014 F-Type -- and they are about to get a sibling. I've ordered a new Jaguar I-Pace, which is the first legitimate challenger to Tesla, which surprised the automotive industry much like Apple surprised the mobile phone industry. Tesla was first to build a decent electric car for this century. Not only that -- its Model S set records in terms of safety and reliability. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2TJApwx

Leaders from Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic have issued a dire warning that nations around the world haven't been doing enough to ban the development of autonomous weapons -- so-called "killer robots." The groups issued a joint report that calls for a complete ban on these systems before such weapons begin to make their way to military arsenals and it becomes too late to act. Other groups, including Amnesty International, joined in those urgent calls for a treaty to ban such weapons systems. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2zkZyFc

Several years ago, my wife and I invested in a project called "Sanctuary Belize" and, like many of the investors, we were incredibly excited about the prospect of retiring in paradise. After a time, things just weren't adding up. The company supposedly put controls in place to reverse course, but we exited the project. As it turned out, those controls either were not put in place or failed. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week announced that it had shut the thing down, and highlighted it as one of the largest scams in its history. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2OSED0U

Amazon recently disclosed its 2015 decision to scrap a recruitment tool used to hire talent, after finding that it had a bias against women. While this story has been covered sufficiently, there is a much greater story still to tell: A substantial amount of the artificial intelligence technology that currently is used for recruitment and human resources purposes has been acting independently, without any form of regulation, for some time. Before exploring this, it will be helpful to understand why this happened with Amazon's software. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2zdGNTR

The LF Deep Learning Foundation has announced the availability of the first software from the Acumos AI Project. Dubbed "Athena," it supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. The goal is to make critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere. Launched earlier this year, Acumos is part of a Linux Foundation umbrella organization, the LF Deep Learning Foundation, that supports and sustains open source innovation in AI, ML and DL. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2FoHmji

After taking the popular Battlefield series to "the beginning" with the First World War-based Battlefield 1 , developers have returned the action to its World War II roots with Battlefield V . Anyone who's not familiar with this first-person shooter need know only that the original game, introduced in 2002 as Battlefield 1942 , offers players the chance to control vehicles as well as soldiers. At the time of its introduction, that was a novel twist for the traditional FPS, and it helped propel the series to success. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2zUOKgk

An apparent prefix leak from an errant router misconfiguration caused Google to lose control of several million of its IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday. During the event, Internet traffic was misrouted to China and Russia from Nigeria. The incident initially sparked concerns that it might have been a malicious hijacking attempt. The mishap made Google's search and other services unavailable to many users intermittently. It caused problems for Spotify, Google cloud customers, G-Suite users and Youtube viewers, among others. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2OJtPCi

Google has announced support for a range of new Android tools for application developers, chief among them the creation of a new support category for foldable devices. After years of speculation, it finally looks as though foldable screen smartphones are headed to market. Google's dev announcement followed closely on the heels of Samsung's announcement of a folding phone/tablet prototype. The Android tools will take advantage of the new display technology, which literally bends and folds, noted Google's Stephanie Cuthbertson. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2qMN30p

Mae Jemison recently shared some illuminating recollections of her experiences as an astronaut, but they were neither the starting point nor the ending point of our conversation. This extraordinary woman's career is too packed with present and future endeavors to dwell very long on her stellar past. She currently leads 100 Year Starship, a nonprofit that aims to make interstellar travel a reality within the next hundred years. Jemison also leads Look Up, a movement that encourages people to connect with the sky above us on one day each year. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2PSFWSm

Startups have been creating employee hell in Silicon Valley. That was on my mind as I read the book Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us . I think this book should be required reading for anybody who thinks working for a startup in Silicon Valley would be fun. Unless you are into humiliation and abuse you probably should avoid these startups like the plague. Yes, you could get rich, but you also could end up with a ruined life -- broke, divorced, homeless, or maybe even dead by your own hand. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2DiVzMb

Mozilla has launched the first full edition of its Internet Health Report. The report is "an open source effort to explore the state of human life on the Internet," said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman. It consists of research and analysis compiled by researchers, engineers, data scientists, policy analysts and artists in Mozilla's extended community. The digital rights, open source, and Internet freedom movements hold that it is possible to build a digital world that is open, accessible and welcoming to all, according to Mozilla. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2SZT0UH

IBM's deal to acquire Red Hat caught everyone by surprise when it was announced less than two weeks ago. While concerns spread quickly about what it would mean for the largest enterprise Linux platform, IBM and Red Hat executives assured employees and customers that Red Hat would continue to operate independently -- at least for now. Intel made a similar acquisition of Wind River, the leader in embedded operating systems, in 2009. In a similar manner, that deal could have been viewed negatively by competitors. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2PJo64b

GalliumOS is a Chromebook-specific Linux variant. It lets you put a real Linux distro on a Chromebook. My recent review of a new Chromebook feature -- the ability to run Linux apps on some Chromebook models -- sparked my interest in other technologies that run complete Linux distros on some Chromebooks without using ChromeOS. GalliumOS is not a perfect solution. It requires making a physical adjustment inside the hardware and flashing new firmware before the GalliumOS installation ISO will boot. However, it can be a handy workaround. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2QuDDSz

Hackers planted malware on StatCounter to steal bitcoin revenue from Gate.io account holders, according to Eset researcher Matthieu Faou, who discovered the breach. The malicious code was added to StatCounter's site-tracking script last weekend, he reported. The malicious code hijacks any bitcoin transactions made through the Web interface of the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange. The malicious code secretly can replace any bitcoin address that users enter on the page with one controlled by the attacker. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2F8rqBO

A recent episode of a Linux news podcast I keep up with featured an interview with a journalist who had written a piece for a non-Linux audience about giving it a try. It was surprisingly widely read. The writer's experience with some of the more popular desktop distributions had been overwhelmingly positive, and he said as much in his piece and during the interview. However, when the show's host asked whether he had tried Arch Linux, the journalist immediately and unequivocally dismissed the idea, as if it were obviously preposterous. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2PhqYWf

Do you take your online privacy seriously? Most people don't. They have an ideal scenario of just how private their online activities should be, but they rarely do anything to actually achieve it. The problem is that bad actors know and rely on this fact, and that's why there's been a steady rise in identity theft cases from 2013 to 2017. The victims of these cases often suffer a loss of reputation or financial woes. If you take your online privacy seriously, follow this 10-step guide to protect it. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2JORtN6

We rely on our phones to process and store reams of personal digital data. Our digital activities -- from checking bank balances to paying for a product with a tap of the screen, to sending friends and family messages over social media, to accessing work emails remotely -- have turned our phones into a goldmine of personal information. It's likely that by 2020, there will be more than 6 billion smartphone users in the world. How secure is your mobile device? It's easy to forget that your mobile phone is essentially a pocket-sized computer. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2SSnGXY

Tomorrow a minority of those who are eligible will take time off, drive through traffic, and wait in lines to take part in one of the most artificially annoying obligations of U.S. citizenship: voting. Many who make that inconvenient trek will treat the process like a multiple choice test they haven't studied for, either voting the party line or guessing at the right answers. The smarter citizens will use absentee ballots, take their time, study the initiatives, and pick those they vote for based on qualifications. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2JH23FJ

The line between journalism and public relations can be fuzzy, and news organizations have wrestled with that problem for some time. However, that line recently has become more blurred than ever, with some publications enlisting armies of nonprofessional scribes to satisfy an insatiable appetite for content. It's easy to understand why the problem has mushroomed. Demand for copy has gone up. The number of people to produce it and the revenue it generates have gone down. The result has been the rise of dubious business models. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2PFG5IG

In my career as an IT resume writer, I've seen a lot of IT resumes cross my desk, and I'd like to share some common of the most common formatting problems that I see regularly. Of course, an IT resume requires more than great formatting. It requires well-written, targeted content, and a clear story of career progression. It needs to communicate your unique brand and value proposition. Still, if the formatting is off, that can derail the rest of the document and prevent your story being read by the hiring authority. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2CTsJ4K