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Facebook's user numbers declined for the first time in its history last quarter.Facebook's parent company Meta reported daily active user numbers of 1.929 billion over the last three months of 2021. In Q3 of 2021, it reported an average of 1.93 billion active users. This means it lost roughly 1 million users over that period.Facebook stock plunged 22% in premarket trading following its Q4 earnings.CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company's earnings call that the company's social-media business is facing stiff competition.

Carly Fiorina left the Republican debate Wednesday night with her head held high. Rapid reaction resulted in high praise for the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but not all the news was positive. During one portion of the debate, Fiorina and Republican front runner Donald Trump spared over their business records. Trump hit Fiorina hard, citing a recent editorial by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, of the Yale School of Management , who referred to her as one of the worst CEOs in recent memory. While how bad Fiorina was as CEO of HP is up for debate, a recent report by Bloomberg points...

A 19-year-old hacker claims to have taken over more than 20 Tesla vehicles in 10 countries through a software vulnerability. David Colombo, who is based in Germany, shared the feat on Twitter saying the fault does not fall on the Elon Musk-founded company, but on owners of the Teslas. The flaw is said to have been found in third-party software that allowed Colombo to unlock doors and windows, start the cars without keys and disable security systems. He also tweeted the vulnerability lets him use the internal Tesla cameras to spy on the driver. Colombo told DailyMail.com that ‘it is...

Broken keyboard keys are quite a common occurrence on laptops and netbooks. Although it’s not a terrible problem if the keypress still registers without the key, it is quite difficult if a common key doesn’t work at all. Maybe there’s keys you keep hitting by mistake such as Caps Lock, or would just like a certain key to be in a more convenient location. Or, there might be a key on your keyboard you never seem to use or need.In all those situations, a simple solution would be to change the keyboard keys to do something else...or run a shortcut/hotkey...

Massive data breaches have become so common that we’ve gotten numb to reports detailing another hack or 0-day exploit. That doesn’t reduce the risk of such events happening, as the cat-and-mouse game between security experts and hackers continues. As some vulnerabilities get fixed, others pop up requiring attention from product and service providers. The newest one has a name that will not mean anything to most people. They call the hack Log4Shell in security briefings, which doesn’t sound very scary. But the new 0-day attack is so significant that some people see it as the worst internet hack in history.......

The US is starved for computer chips. In response, TI is building a new chip plant in Sherman, TX, and Samsung has announced a chip plant in Taylor, TX, which is a suburb of Austin. It will take a while to get the plants up and running, but it is a great sign of companies seeing that it is no longer profitable to rely on an Asian provider of products.

Cisco has updated its COVID-19 vaccination policy for US staff to make the jabs mandatory – even for those who work remotely. The new policy, a copy of which was obtained by The Register, requires "all US-based employees (including US Territories), regardless of whether you work remotely or in a Cisco facility, be fully vaccinated … or have an approved medical or religious accommodation, by December 8, 2021." Staff were informed of the policy in an email sent late last week. They have until November 5 to apply for medical or religious accommodations. Workers who don't qualify for those accommodations...

The great computer chip shortage of 2021 will likely get worse before it gets better. This conclusion was reached following brief study and anecdotal review. Moreover, while COVID lockdowns may have initially triggered the shortage, several decades of shortsighted decisions and simmering geopolitical tensions make it much more than a matter of fixing a few broken links in the supply chain. Here’s why… The world’s top two leading chip companies are Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. These two Asian firms, combined, control more than 70 percent of the semiconductor manufacturing market. The U.S., which was once a leader,...

KAUST researchers have found a way to significantly increase the speed of training. Large machine learning models can be trained significantly faster by observing how frequently zero results are produced in distributed machine learning that use large training datasets.AI models develop their “intelligence” by being trained on datasets that have been labelled to tell the model how to differentiate between different inputs and then respond accordingly. The more labelled data that goes in, the better the model becomes at performing whatever task it has been assigned to do. For complex deep learning applications, such as self-driving vehicles, this requires enormous...

The Dirty Ticking Time Bomb of Computing is About to Come Out!The Disk Manufacturers all know it. The Operating System producers have all known it. But for decades the Dirty Ticking Time Bomb of Computing is about to come out.It does not matter whether you are on a Laptop, Desktop, Smartphone or even a mainframe, the Ticking Time Bomb is on your system and you probably never knew it.It is under the heading of SPARES. Specifically when your drive runs out of them.And a couple of areas on your system disk. Sector 0. If sector 0 is bad, typically it's...

There is a lot of attention being paid to continuously updating servers to patch security vulnerabilities on Linux servers running in data centers – a basic step underpinning technology infrastructure in every industry. Yet, staff resources to deal with maintaining servers are not sufficient to meet the workload, said 55% of respondents in a worldwide survey by CloudLinux. Dealing with insufficient staff resources with automationThe survey finds 76% are deploying automated patching procedures and that live patching to fix vulnerabilities is commonly used (47%) to avoid downtime that is normally associated with patching. This is not surprising given the volume...

There are hundreds of Linux distributions. Some are for general purpose usage, while some are specifically tailored for education, robotics, hacking, gaming and what not.You’ll notice that most of them originate from Debian/Ubuntu, Arch and Red Hat/Fedora. If you like distrohopping and experiment with a range of distributions, you may soon get ‘bored’ out of it. Most Linux distributions would feel too similar after a point and apart from a few visual changes here and there, you won’t get a different experience.Does that sound familiar? If yes, let me list some advanced, independent, Linux distributions to test your expertise.Advanced Linux...

Although Chinese laws forbid kids to play video games at night, minors have been using different tricks to bypass these restrictions. However, they probably won’t be able to do it anymore with the deployment of Tencent’s new facial recognition system. According to the Chinese website Sixth Tone, Tencent has officially launched its controversial facial recognition system on July 6. The initiative, which was previously dubbed “Midnight Patrol,” uses AI and big data to detect kids who try to bypass the restrictions. “We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain...

I tried every trick known to me to speed up my Dell laptop, from defragmenting hard drive to updating drivers. Nothing helped.

Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford’s F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking, are becoming standard. Additional safety features...

At least 60 members of Congress from both parties have been unable to access data for weeks in the latest ransomware attack to strike the United States. The target was iConstituent, a tech vendor that provides constituent outreach services to dozens of House offices, including a newsletter service that allows lawmakers to communicate with residents in their districts and a service to track constituent casework. It's the latest cyber attack after a series of hacks against the US executive branch and American companies have left many institutions feeling vulnerable and the Biden administration struggling to deal with the situation. The...

The Colonial Pipeline is reportedly facing more issues. A Reuters reporter wrote the company is "experiencing network issues impacting customers' ability to enter and update nominations." "Our internal IT department is aware of the issue and working to resolve as quickly as possible," Reuters' Devika Krishna Kumar quoted the company as saying on her Twitter account on Friday. Colonial also reported said communication from its systems to Transport4 may also be affected. Transport4 is a business utility used by the pipeline industry to enter, manage and track shipments. Colonial is the largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the...

RISC-V is a processor architecture and instruction set developed at UC Berkeley. It's attracted huge interest from everyone from startups to tech giants because it's entirely free and open source. Most current processors come with license agreements and are proprietary intellectual property, but anyone can manufacture a RISC-V chip, or design their own new processor. Big companies like Western Digital are already announcing a switch to RISC-V, and others like Google and Nvidia have partnered with them.There's a lot of ways this project could fail, but it also has the potential to make custom processor design available to a lot...

SiFive, a company established by researchers who invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture in the University of California Berkeley several years ago, has this week announced two platforms which could be used to design semi-custom SoCs based on RISC-V cores. SiFive is the world’s first and yet the only company developing chips featuring the RISC-V ISA and it already has initial customers interested in designing SoCs for machine learning, storage, embedded, IoT and wearable applications. SiFive: World’s First Developer of Commercial RISC-V Chips RISC-V is an open-source microprocessor architecture developed by researchers in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and...

Chinese security outfit Qihoo 360 Netlab on Wednesday said it has identified Linux backdoor malware that has remained undetected for a number of years.The firm said its bot monitoring system spotted on March 25 a suspicious ELF program that interacted with four command-and-control (C2) domains over the TCP HTTPS port 443 even though the protocol used isn't actually TLS/SSL."A close look at the sample revealed it to be a backdoor targeting Linux X64 systems, a family that has been around for at least three years," Netlab researchers Alex Turing and Hui Wang said in an advisory.An MD5 signature for the...