Non-IT News Thread
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Cyclone Idai: How the storm tore into southern Africa
Aid agencies are scrambling to reach survivors of Cyclone Idai, which swept through Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe last week, destroying towns and villages in its path.
Hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more have been affected by what the UN says could be "one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to hit the southern hemisphere".
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Google tries to reassure gamers about Stadia speed and latency concerns
Harrison cites data center "innovations... not visible to the outside world."
While the company set a threshold of 25mbps for its beta testing late last year, Harrison told Ars that "in actual fact, we only use an average of 20mbps; it obviously bounces up and down depending on the scene." Since that beta, Harrison said infrastructure and codec improvements "now allow us to get up to 4K resolution [at 60 frames per second] within about 30mbps. So we saw a dramatic increase in quality between then and now without a significant increase in bandwidth."
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Harrison cites data center "innovations... not visible to the outside world."
And that fixes our WAN issues... how?
This sounds way more like Google is incompetent or thinks we are idiots.
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
While the company set a threshold of 25mbps for its beta testing late last year, Harrison told Ars that "in actual fact, we only use an average of 20mbps;
Given that the concerns are latency, not bandwidth, this makes Google look incredibly foolish.
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A dev trained robots to generate “garbage” slot machine games—and made $50K
In 2013, duo walked away from a game-jam experiment, discovered it was up to $200/week.
This year's Game Developers Conference saw two game makers emerge with a possible chapter in a future dystopian sci-fi novel: the story of making money by letting robots do the work. In their case, that work was the procedural generation of smartphone games.
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
A dev trained robots to generate “garbage” slot machine games—and made $50K
In 2013, duo walked away from a game-jam experiment, discovered it was up to $200/week.
This year's Game Developers Conference saw two game makers emerge with a possible chapter in a future dystopian sci-fi novel: the story of making money by letting robots do the work. In their case, that work was the procedural generation of smartphone games.
Interesting
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Half the species in a new Cambrian fossil site are completely new to us
We're edging closer to understanding entire Cambrian ecologies.
The first signs of complex animal life begin in the Ediacaran Period, which started more than 600 million years ago. But it's difficult to understand how those organisms relate to the life we see around us today. Part of this issue is that those fossils are rare, as many rocks of that period appear to have been wiped off the Earth by a globe-spanning glaciation. But another problem is that the organisms we do see from this period aren't clearly related to anything that came after them.
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@mlnews wow
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BBC News - Millions of Facebook passwords exposed internally
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47653656 -
BBC News - Nicaragua agrees to free all opposition prisoners
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-47648088 -
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
BBC News - Millions of Facebook passwords exposed internally
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47653656all plain text, how mad is that!
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Earth is (always has been) round, so why have the flat-out wrong become so lively?
Every fringe theorist needs an amplifier—used to be the penny press; today it's the Web.
Until the 17th century, the Fens—a broad, flat swath of marshland in eastern England—were home only to game-hunters and fishermen. Eventually, though, their value as potential agricultural land became too enticing to ignore, and the Earl of Bedford, along with a number of “gentlemen adventurers,” signed contracts with Charles I to drain the area, beginning in the 1630s. A series of drainage channels were cut, criss-crossing the wetlands of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. The plan was a qualified success; a vast area was now farmable, though wind-powered pumps were needed to keep the water at bay.
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To rival Amazon, UPS enters healthcare—with doorstep nurse delivery
A test is set to launch this year, but UPS mum on which vaccines it will deliver.
A test for the new service is scheduled for later this year, but UPS didn’t name where it will take place or which vaccine it will offer, only saying that it would be an immunization for adults against a viral illness. Vaccine-maker Merck & Co is reportedly considering partnering with UPS on the service.
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@StuartJordan said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
BBC News - Millions of Facebook passwords exposed internally
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47653656all plain text, how mad is that!
But hey if they were to find a low level company doing the same with that they will get fined.
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Nintendo planning two new Switch models
One would come with a power increase, the other with cut features/costs.
One model would be a higher-end system with enhanced hardware akin to the Xbox One X or PS4 Pro, though not as powerful as either, according to the report. The other would be a "cheaper option" intended to replace the aging Nintendo DS, whose sales have finally started to collapse.
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Massive Ebola outbreak continues to rage; case count surpasses 1,000
Responders have vaccinated thousands, but disease spread continues.
The outbreak has been raging since August in the country’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces, which sit on the eastern side of the country, bordering South Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda. The World Health Organization reported 1,009 cases (944 confirmed, 65 probable), including 629 deaths (564 confirmed, 65 probable) on Saturday, March 23.
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Hijacked ASUS software updates installed backdoor on at least 0.5 million PCs
"ShadowHammer" used ASUS' own digital certificate and update system to infect systems worldwide.
An attack on the update system for ASUS personal computers running Microsoft Windows allowed attackers to inject backdoor malware into thousands of computers, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs. The attack, reported today on Motherboard by Kim Zetter, took place last year and dropped malicious software signed with ASUS’ own digital certificate—making the software look like a legitimate update. Kaspersky analysts told Zetter that the backdoor malware was pushed to ASUS customers for at least five months before it was discovered and shut down.
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Hijacked ASUS software updates installed backdoor on at least 0.5 million PCs
"ShadowHammer" used ASUS' own digital certificate and update system to infect systems worldwide.
An attack on the update system for ASUS personal computers running Microsoft Windows allowed attackers to inject backdoor malware into thousands of computers, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs. The attack, reported today on Motherboard by Kim Zetter, took place last year and dropped malicious software signed with ASUS’ own digital certificate—making the software look like a legitimate update. Kaspersky analysts told Zetter that the backdoor malware was pushed to ASUS customers for at least five months before it was discovered and shut down.
So Asus was breached? Just confirming - is that right?
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Hijacked ASUS software updates installed backdoor on at least 0.5 million PCs
"ShadowHammer" used ASUS' own digital certificate and update system to infect systems worldwide.
An attack on the update system for ASUS personal computers running Microsoft Windows allowed attackers to inject backdoor malware into thousands of computers, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs. The attack, reported today on Motherboard by Kim Zetter, took place last year and dropped malicious software signed with ASUS’ own digital certificate—making the software look like a legitimate update. Kaspersky analysts told Zetter that the backdoor malware was pushed to ASUS customers for at least five months before it was discovered and shut down.
Thank goodness for Linux!
