Miscellaneous Tech News
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Facebook's New Portal Device Lets You Place Video Calls on the TV
Facebook is refreshing its Portal smart displays and introducing a new model to hook up to your TV. The latter lets you make video calls on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and stream TV shows from video-streaming services.
Facebook is moving deeper into the smart home space by refreshing its Portal products, and introducing a new device that can hook up to your TV. The social network is marketing Portal TV as a camera peripheral that can enable video phone calls via Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp on your television screen. But it's also a streaming device with access to Amazon Prime Video, CBS All Access, and Showtime, in addition to Facebook Watch, the company's YouTube-like service. Other unnamed partnerships are slated to follow. It arrives Nov. 5 for $149. -
VOIP.ms adds TOTP
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@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@black3dynamite said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Fedora 31 Beta
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-the-release-of-fedora-31-beta/
About time
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Moving Firefox to a faster 4-week release cycle
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/moving-firefox-to-a-faster-4-week-release-cycle/ -
Call me crazy, but Windows 11 could run on Linux
Desktop Windows has had so many problems, desperate measures may be needed.
With Microsoft embracing Linux ever more tightly, might it do the heretofore unthinkable and dump the NT kernel in favor of the Linux kernel? No, I’m not ready for the funny farm. As it prepares Windows 11, Microsoft has been laying the groundwork for such a radical release. I’ve long toyed with the idea that Microsoft could release a desktop Linux. Now I’ve started taking that idea more seriously — with a twist. Microsoft could replace Windows’ innards, the NT kernel, with a Linux kernel. It would still look like Windows. For most users, it would still work like Windows. But the engine running it all would be Linux. -
@mlnews seems just incredibly obvious, really. Many of us have felt MS was on this path for a very long time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews seems just incredibly obvious, really. Many of us have felt MS was on this path for a very long time.
Only since maybe Balmer left.
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Facebook and Google have ad trackers on your streaming TV, studies find
You just can't get away from the big ad tech companies, it seems.
Modern TV, coming to you over the Internet instead of through cable or over the air, has a modern problem: all of your Internet-connected streaming devices are watching you back and feeding your data to advertisers. Two independent sets of researchers this week released papers that measure the extent of the surveillance your TV is conducting on you. They also sort out who exactly is benefiting from the massive amounts of consumer data that is taken with or without consumer knowledge. The first study (PDF), conducted by researchers at Princeton and the University of Chicago, looked specifically at Roku and Amazon set-top devices. A review of more than 2,000 channels across the two platforms found trackers on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire TV channels. -
@mlnews My Pi-hole sure does show a lot of blocked telemetry sites (Roku, Amazon, Google, etc). I hope some or most of that traffic is those nasty tracking bits.
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This article makes for very interesting reading about Oracle and a lawsuit against them: https://www.itassetmanagement.net/2019/09/19/oracle-cloud-class-action-lawsuit-a-deep-dive/?mc_cid=56118f9508&mc_eid=474a74bd76. It will be interesting to see if this affects their audit practices with Java.
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@RojoLoco said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@mlnews My Pi-hole sure does show a lot of blocked telemetry sites (Roku, Amazon, Google, etc). I hope some or most of that traffic is those nasty tracking bits.
y block percentage is low. not sure why.
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In How To: XKCD author offers absurd advice for ordinary tasks
Review: A book of deliberately, hilariously, wrong advice—with explainers and diagrams
Any time physicists gets together, one of them will tell a very old joke about a farmer who wants to make their farm more efficient. In the joke, a list of inappropriate professionals offer the farmer reasonable suggestions. The punchline comes from the physicist who responds "Well, let's assume that cows are spheres... " The actual punchline isn't in the joke itself—it's what happens next: one of the physicists listening to the joke will lecture the rest on how the approximation isn't that bad really. They will end with a list of all the things you can learn about the world from spherical cows. The joke only ends when the bar closes. Physicists: ruining jokes, cows, farming, and most of biology since 1687. Randall Munroe's new book, How To, is the spherical cows joke relentlessly replicated and explained without—and this is the important part—removing the humor. Munroe has, as the subtitle Absurd Advice for Real-World Problems explains, produced a book of absurd scientific advice. It is, essentially, a "how you shouldn't" manual. With that in mind, you should not read How To as you would an ordinary book -
Paper leaks showing a quantum computer doing something a supercomputer can’t
Google's system generates quantum statistics that we just can't simulate.
Mathematically, it's easy to demonstrate that a working general purpose quantum computer can easily outperform classical computers on some problems. Demonstrating it with an actual quantum computer, however, has been another issue entirely. Most of the quantum computers we've made don't have enough qubits to handle the complex calculations where they'd clearly outperform a traditional computer. And scaling up the number of qubits has been complicated by issues of noise, crosstalk, and the tendency of qubits to lose their entanglement with their neighbors. All of which raised questions as to whether the theoretical supremacy of quantum computing can actually make a difference in the real world. -
Iranian Government Hackers Target US Veterans
'Tortoiseshell' discovered hosting a phony military-hiring website that drops a Trojan backdoor on visitors.
A nation-state hacking group recently found attacking IT provider networks in Saudi Arabia as a stepping stone to its ultimate targets has been spotted hosting a fake website, called "Hire Military Heroes," that drops spying tools and other malicious code onto victims' systems.
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https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/25/cloudflares-warp-vpn-is-now-available-to-all-a-first-look/
My app is still showing me on the wait list. Anyone actually get the warp vpn working?
Edit: NVM. It's now working after an app update
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No, it wasn’t a virus; it was Chrome that stopped Macs from booting
Google pulls Chrome update that kept some Macs from booting.
On Monday night, Variety reported that film editors around Los Angeles who had Avid Media Composer software installed were suddenly finding that their Macs were unable to reboot. The publication speculated that malware may have been the cause. On Wednesday, Google disclosed the real cause—a Chrome browser update. Specifically, it was a new version of Chrome's Keystone updater that caused so many Macs to stop rebooting, according to this Chrome open bug post. When the update was installed on Macs that had disabled a security feature known as system integrity prevention and met several other conditions, a crucial part of the Mac system file was damaged, a Google employee said in the forum. -
@mlnews oops
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
No, it wasn’t a virus; it was Chrome that stopped Macs from booting
Google pulls Chrome update that kept some Macs from booting.
On Monday night, Variety reported that film editors around Los Angeles who had Avid Media Composer software installed were suddenly finding that their Macs were unable to reboot. The publication speculated that malware may have been the cause. On Wednesday, Google disclosed the real cause—a Chrome browser update. Specifically, it was a new version of Chrome's Keystone updater that caused so many Macs to stop rebooting, according to this Chrome open bug post. When the update was installed on Macs that had disabled a security feature known as system integrity prevention and met several other conditions, a crucial part of the Mac system file was damaged, a Google employee said in the forum.So they were performing a public service?
