An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix:Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Plat … | Continue reading
While YouTube has publicly said that it's working on addressing problems that are making its website ever so addictive to users, a new paper from Google, which owns YouTube, seems to tell a different story. From a report: It proposes an update to the platform's algorithm that is … | Continue reading
On Thursday, Richard Stallman reminded the GNU Project mailing list that "On September 16 I resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation, but the GNU Project and the FSF are not the same. I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to conti … | Continue reading
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Square has lent $5 billion to small businesses and consumers and applied for a banking license. It operates a nationwide mobile money-transfer business that serves 15 million Americans. But Square says it isn't a f … | Continue reading
Richard Stallman posted a new update today on his personal site. "I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein."The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements. Headlines say that I defended E … | Continue reading
"Linux frontman Linus Torvalds thinks he's 'more self-aware' these days and is 'trying to be less forceful' after his brief absence from directing Linux kernel developers because of his abusive language on the Linux kernel mailing list," reports ZDNet. "But true to his word, he's … | Continue reading
PC Magazine interviewed Neal Stephenson about his new upcoming book Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell, as well as "the digital afterlife, and why social media is a doomsday machine." [Possible spoilers ahead]: The hybrid sci-fi/fantasy novel begins in the present day with Richard "Dodge" … | Continue reading
Firefox's former VP accused Google of sabotaging Firefox -- for example, when Gmail and Google Docs "started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox" and demo sites "would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'... There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds m … | Continue reading
As America's government faces its longest-ever shutdown over the president's demands for border wall funding, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested "possible alternatives to a physical wall," according to one Silicon Valley newspaper:Among the president's justifications for a … | Continue reading
The Federal Communications Commission will suspend most operations in the middle of the day January 3 if the partial government shutdown continues, the agency has announced [PDF]. In a statement, it said: In the event of a continued partial lapse in federal government funding, th … | Continue reading
The CBC is marking the 20th anniversary of the notorious Hampsterdance web site with a 10,000-word oral history by arts reporter Leah Collins, promising "the twisted true story of one of the world's first memes." An anonymous reader writes:Deidre LaCarte, a Canadian martial arts … | Continue reading
"The working poor are spilling into Bay Area streets for lack of safe, affordable shelter," report two Silicon Valley newspapers describing a "pop-up neighborhood" that's now banding together, "a small community of blue collar RV dwellers...fighting for the only place they can ca … | Continue reading
Facebook is working on making a cryptocurrency that will let users transfer money on its WhatsApp messaging app, focusing first on the remittances market in India, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The company is developing a stablecoin -- a type of digital currency pegged to t … | Continue reading
A notorious millennial dating practice is starting to creep into the workplace: ghosting. Employers are noticing with increasing frequency that workers are leaving their jobs by simply not showing up and cutting off contact with their companies [Editor's note: the link may be pay … | Continue reading
dan moore writes "Students at Caltech and Harvard have developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns. It then channels its knowledge into generating streams of music that the people themselves would like to listen to. Intuitive, accurate, and … | Continue reading
YouTube's "Movies & Shows" page added a "Free to Watch" section last month. They're trying to compete with free ad-supported online movie offerings from Roku, Walmart, and Tubi, while "Amazon is rumored to be working on something similar," reports TechCrunch:Before, YouTube … | Continue reading
The Register reports that a new security bug in systemd "can be exploited over the network to, at best, potentially crash a vulnerable Linux machine, or, at worst, execute malicious code on the box" by a malicious host on the same network segment as the victim. According to one … | Continue reading
DevNull127 writes: In a remarkable odyssey, documentary-maker Cary McClelland interviewed more than 150 San Francisco residents — including a tattoo artist, a longshoreman, a venture capitalist, and a pawnshop owner — to capture the real voices of a changing city, in … | Continue reading
An anonymous reader writes:This October will see the fifth annual Hacktoberfest, "a month-long celebration of open source software run by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio." Basically you sign up any time in October, then submit five quality pull requests to pub … | Continue reading
California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last week that bans automated accounts, more commonly known as bots, from pretending to be real people in pursuit of selling products or influencing elections. From a report: Automated accounts can still interact with Californians, ac … | Continue reading
The Weather Channel's 3-D, room-encompassing depiction of the Hurricane Florence storm surge took many by surprise on Friday (Second video). It doesn't tell, it shows, more bracingly than you'd think would be possible on a meteorological update, writes Wired. Here's how they did … | Continue reading
Capitalism as we know it is over, an anonymous reader writes. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. From a report: The main reason? We're transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our incr … | Continue reading
AmiMoJo quotes the Verge:The 2018 Hugo Awards were held Sunday night at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California. The Hugo award, voted on by members of the fan community, is considered the highest honour for science fiction and fantasy literature... N.K. Jemi … | Continue reading
Netflix has confirmed that it will start airing video ads for other Netflix series between episodes. These ads will reportedly only be for Netflix content, not outside products or content, and will, at least for now, only appear for a "segment" of Netflix's user base. Ars Technic … | Continue reading
Recently the Palm Beach Post noted that 20% of the academic credit awarded at Florida Atlantic University is for online courses. So how can they stop cheaters?Where once it was enough for a professor to roam the aisles of a classroom, checking for cheat sheets and keeping an eye … | Continue reading
An anonymous reader quotes CBS MoneyWatch:The number of people residing in campers and other vehicles surged 46 percent over the past year, a recent homeless census in Seattle's King County, Washington found. The problem is "exploding" in cities with expensive housing markets, in … | Continue reading
You asked questions, we've got the answers! Christine Peterson is a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986. One of her favorite tasks has been contacting the winners of the institute's annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology … | Continue reading
According to thousands of users, Instagram website and app are facing technical issues. Users attempting to visit the website are seeing a "5xx Server Error", while on the app, they are getting "Couldn't refresh feed." According to DownDetector, a service which monitors outages o … | Continue reading
"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics." An anonymous reader quotes their report:[Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect w … | Continue reading
Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. pointed us to this an excerpt from the new book Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Portland-based investigator reporter Corey Pein. The author shares what he realized at a job recruitment fair seeking … | Continue reading