By manishs from
Slashdot's another-day,-another-hack department:
Sam Pudwell, writing for IT Pro Portal: Taiwanese hardware and electronics giant Acer has announced that it has suffered a data breach via its e-commerce site, and is preparing to inform those customers affected. Due to unauthorised access by a third-party, anyone who accessed the online store between 12 May, 2015 and 28 April, 2016 could have had their personal information compromised. Acer revealed that names, addresses, payment card numbers, card expiration dates and card security codes may have been accessed by the hackers but, following investigations by internal and external professionals, believes login details were not compromised.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's how-to-do-web-browsing-201 department:
Firefox web browser has a new experimental feature that allows a user to segregate their online identities and sign in into multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers. From a TechCrunch report: This new "container tab" feature, which is now available in the unstable Nightly Firefox release channel, provides you with four default identities (personal, work, shopping, and banking) with their own stores for cookies, IndexedDB data store, local storage and caches. In practice, this means you can surf Amazon without ads for products you may have looked at following you around the web when you switch over to your work persona. As the Firefox team notes, the idea behind this feature isn't new, but nobody has figured out how to best present this new tool to users.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's pee-in-a-cup department:
Press2ToContinue writes from a report via The Guardian: "The [tax] benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1% [of taxpayers]," Congresswoman Gwen Moore says. "It's a drop in the bucket." Many states implement drug-testing programs to qualify for benefit programs so that states feel they are not wasting the value they dole out. However, seven states who implemented drug testing for tax benefit program recipients spent $1 million on drug testing from the inception of their programs through 2014. But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average -- around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population -- meaning there's been little cost savings from the drug testing program. Why? "Probably because they can't afford it," says Moore. "We might really save some money by drug-testing folks on Wall Street, who might have a little cocaine before they get their deal done," she said, and proposes a bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000. "We spend $81bn on everything -- everything -- that you could consider a poverty program," she explained. But just by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income, a bit of the tax code far more likely to benefit the rich than the poor, "that's a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains," she added. Why not drug-test the rich to ensure they won't waste their tax benefits? She is "sick and tired of the criminalization of poverty." And, she added: "We're not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off Snap. But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let's start on the other end of the income spectrum."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's how-it's-made department:
MarkWhittington quotes a report from Examiner: Ever since the EmDrive entered the news about a year or so ago, it has sparked considerable controversy. The device is alleged to work by using microwaves that produce, in some fashion as yet unknown to science, thrust. Many scientists suggest that the EM drive is impossible as it violates known physics. However, a number of tests conducted in Great Britain, Germany, China, and at NASA's Eagleworks at the Johnson Spaceflight Center have resulted in thrust that cannot, as yet, be explained by experimental error. The International Business Times reported that a Finnish scientist has published an article in a peer-reviewed science journal with a possible explanation as to how the drive works. International Business Times writes, "A new peer-reviewed paper on the EmDrive from Finaland states that the controversial electromagnetic space propulsion technology does work due to microwaves fed into the device converting photons that leak out of the closed cavity, producing an exhaust. The research, entitled "On the exhaust of electromagnetic drive," is published in the journal AIP Advances 6 and is the brainchild of Dr Arto Annila, a physics professor at the University of Helsinki; Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyvaskyla; and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's save-your-pennies department:
An anonymous reader writes: Rolls-Royce has unveiled its first driverless vehicle dubbed The Vision Next 100. It is an autonomous vehicle aimed at "the most discerning and powerful patrons in the world." There's no steering wheel but there is a silk "throne" where passengers can sit and stare out the window. Rolls-Royce said the zero-emission model, codenamed 103EX, showed the company "rejects the notion of anonymous, utilitarian and bland future modes of mobility." The owner will be "encircled by the most modern handcrafted fine-line Macassar wood panelling" as they gaze at a "generous" high-definition television display. In addition to the "finest one-off deep-pile ivory wool carpet," the vehicle features a virtual assistant named Eleanor, inspired after the actor Eleanor Thornton. It will be able to remind users about meetings; it will even bring the car around to the front of the owner's house at the start of a journey. "As the Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100 gracefully comes to a halt, something magnificent occurs," the company said. The glass roof rises to allow the occupant to stand, while a step emerges from below the running board and a red light is projected, "carpet-like" to announce their arrival. Rolls-Royce did not say how the vehicle would be powered or how much it costs, but it did say it's due to hit the streets in the 2040s. You can watch a 360-degree video of the 103EX the company posted on YouTube.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's flagged-for-offensive-content department:
An anonymous reader writes: Reynaldo Gonzalez is suing Twitter, Facebook and Google for facilitating the spread of "extremist propaganda" after alleging the three companies "knowingly permitted" ISIS to recruit, raise money and spread its message across each of the respective platforms. His daughter, Nohemi, was among the 130 killed when religious extremists attacked Paris last year. In the court documents, Gonzalez goes on to say that religious extremists would not have the infrastructure to get their message to the masses without the three companies and their social networks. While each company does have moderators that review content, The Next Web notes that it's a statistical impossibility to maintain that any company of such a size can review, or even find, all instances of offensive content. Google is also being faced with a lawsuit from the Space Data Corporation of Chandler, Arizona, which claims the tech giant stole the idea behind its Wi-Fi-emitting balloon network, Project Loon.
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By manishs from
Slashdot's meet-in-the-middle department:
The FCC proposed rules to force pay-TV providers to make video programming -- and the right to record video -- available to the makers of third-party apps and devices. Under this model, third-party app and equipment makers would be able to create their own interfaces through which cable TV subscribers could access their programming. On Thursday, cable companies noted that they still cannot fully comply with FCC's attempt to open up the set-top box market, but have resigned themselves to accepting some form of regulation. From an Ars Technica report: Cable companies still aren't giving up on the apps approach, but now they say they would agree to rules that make it mandatory for large operators to build apps providing access to all the video customers subscribe to on a wide range of devices. Pay-TV companies with at least 1 million subscribers would have to follow the mandate. Industry representatives told the FCC that they are open to the commission "enforcing an industry-wide commitment to develop and deploy video 'apps' that all large MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] would build to open HTML5 Web standards," they said in an ex parte filing released today. The filing describes meetings with FCC officials involving the cable industry's top lobbyist, National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) CEO Michael Powell, representatives of Comcast and AT&T/DirecTV, and reps from cable networks Vme TV, Revolt TV, and TV One.
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