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In the future, Facebook won't be a social-media site. Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny and pressure at the moment. It's accused of helping foreign actors to subvert elections by using ads and fake accounts to spread lies—in the US, for example—and of acting as a conduit for terrorism in New Zealand and elsewhere. There are calls to break up the company or at least to rein it in. In an evident attempt to head off those moves, and to limit the damage that recent events have caused to Facebook's reputation, Mark Zuckerberg has been publishing some long, philosophical...

he team moves through a dark, narrow hallway, emerging into a room crammed with an odd sort of contraband: toner and ink cartridges stacked almost to the ceiling. Authorities question a woman who deflects at first before finally admitting that all of them are counterfeits. The video, shot in India and shared with me by Hewlett-Packard (HP Inc), illustrates the raids local authorities have conducted hundreds of times around the world to try and stem the flow of counterfeit ink and toner cartridges. It’s reminiscent of a drug bust, and the economic stakes are nearly as high. According to the...

[A] bit of heat production from resistance is a desirable characteristic in metallic thin films for spintronic applications such as solid-state computer memory. Similarly, while defects are often undesirable in materials science, they can be used to control creation of magnetic quasi-particles known as skyrmions. In separate papers published this month in the journals Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, researchers in the group of MIT Professor Geoffrey S.D. Beach and colleagues in California, Germany, Switzerland, and Korea, showed that they can generate stable and fast moving skyrmions in specially formulated layered materials at room temperature, setting world records for size...

We spent more than 150 hours on in-depth testing to identify the top inkjet and laser printers you can buy. And our favorite overall printer is the Canon Pixma TS9120, which offers best-in-class print speeds and high-quality output for both text and graphics. For a printer that won't break the bank, Epson's WorkForce WF-2760 inkjet packs in features like an automatic document feeder and duplexing, while also turning in fast print and copy times. What All-in-One Printers Cost All-in-one printers sell for as little as $60 (£45/AU$90) for inkjet models, and $150 (£170/AU$200) for laser printers, with high-end models ranging...

Reuters reporter Joseph Menn exclusively revealed on Friday that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke belonged to one of the best-known groups of computer hackers as a teenager. Within minutes, his special report was the most popular story on Reuters.com here and was picked up by other news outlets. But the origin of the story goes back more than two years. Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the...

A function of Intel's processors dealing with speculative execution has another vulnerability that affects all Intel-based computers including Apple's Mac, researchers have revealed, with "Spoiler" potentially allowing an attacker the ability to view the layout of memory, and in turn potentially access sensitive data stored in those locations. The speculative execution function of Intel's processors, used to increase the performance of a CPU by predicting paths an instruction will go through before the branch is completed, is a useful function but one that has caused Intel issues in the past. A new report from security researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute...

What VPN do lots of freepers recommend? I want to use it at places like Starbucks. Will use of a VPN slow me down..? I don't simply want to get the one Rush advertizes, though I love Rush.

All your activity are belong to us Updated A feature introduced in the April 2018 Update of Windows 10 may have set off a privacy landmine within the bowels of Redmond as users have discovered that their data was still flowing into the intestines of the Windows giant, even with the thing apparently turned off.In what is likely to be more cock-up than conspiracy, it appears that Microsoft is continuing to collect data on recent user activities even when the user has explicitly said NO, DAMMIT!First noted in an increasingly shouty thread over on Reddit, the issue is related to...

The reality of quantum computing could be just three years away Quantum computing has moved out of the realm of theoretical physics and into the real world, but its potential and promise are still years away. Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a powerhouse in the world of quantum research and a young upstart in the field presented visions for the future of the industry that illustrated both how far the industry has come and how far the technology has to go. For both Dario Gil, the chief operating officer of IBM Research and the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence...

Dive Brief: • Amazon is the latest big tech company to help graduate students with the skills that employers want, training some experts say private firms can most easily and effectively provide, according to the Los Angeles Times. • Amazon Web Services is partnering with a group of community colleges in the Los Angeles region to offer a 15-credit certification in the broadening field of cloud computing program. Planners expect the program will be expanded to a two-year degree program soon. • A pilot program was offered last year through a local high school and Santa Monica College, which helped...

I was remembering today the big Y2K scare we had during the late 1990s. Does anybody remember that? All the computers in the world were to shut down at midnight January 1, 2000 because apparently the computers would not be able to recognize "2000" as a valid year and go haywire, thinking it was 1900 instead. As with many conspiracies, there was a grain of truth to this. There were many software programs at the time that had to be re-programmed to accept 2000 as a valid year. My wife was a COBOL programmer at the time and she had...

Amazon originally started out many years ago selling books online. But owner Jeff Bezos has aggressively led it to now selling everything online, making Bezos one of the richest men in world history. Bezos's corporate empire includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leading pioneer of cloud computing services. Cloud computing enables anyone in an organization worldwide to access the organization’s documents and data online. That enables the organization’s employees to collaborate and communicate online, from anywhere in the world. America’s Defense Department is now trying to catch up to the world’s leading multinational companies to adopt cloud computing for America’s...

A group of researchers at the University of Missouri have developed a new battery breakthrough that could have a big impact on runtimes for the gadgets. The researchers have developed new material that can address the two chief complaints of batteries used in electronic devices now: relatively runtimes life and unwanted heat production. The team has applied for a patent for a magnetic material that has a unique honeycomb lattice structure that offers distinct electronical properties. “Semiconductor diodes and amplifiers, which often are made of silicon or germanium, are key elements in modern electronic devices,” said Deepak K. Singh, head...

If your Mac seems to be running at high fan rates or you’re seeing reduced battery-life for no apparent reason, you may want to check for some Mac malware that seems to be going around … A couple of support threads have described people finding a process called mshelper using a lot of CPU usage.From the little that’s known about it so far, it seems this is either adware or a cryptocurrency miner. Despite the heading in the Reddit thread, there’s no evidence that it’s a virus, so the most likely explanation for its spread is a sketchy download...

This article is on a jury decision about Apple infringing four patents that the patent office has already ruled are invalid. . . but that are being appealed to the appellate court which allowed this trial to go ahead anyway "because it was so far along." Link Only because of Bloomberg: Read the Article here.

If at first you don't succeed, you're Redmond Microsoft today issued an emergency security update to correct a security update it issued earlier this month to correct a security update it issued in January and February.In January and February, Redmond emitted fixes for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 machines to counter the Meltdown chip-level vulnerability in modern Intel x64 processors. Unfortunately, those patches blew a gaping hole in the operating systems: normal applications and logged-in users could now access and modify any part of physical RAM, and gain complete control over a box, with the updates installed.Rather than stop...

Where else would the pretty 20-year-old Annabella Milbanke meet her future husband, the poet Lord Byron, than at Lady Caroline Lamb’s morning waltzing party? That was the kind of entertainment laid on for this provincial heiress, one of the most courted girls in London, during her third London Season in 1812. In her first two Seasons, Annabella had rejected several nice, eligible suitors. As Miranda Seymour writes in this gripping saga of a double-biography, ‘her heart was obstinately set upon the reformation of a rake’. (As I read that, I heard my mother’s warning: ‘Darling, never marry someone in the...

I installed AdBlock Plus a year or more ago and have had no problem with pop ups on my iPad. All of a sudden I am getting a ton of pop ups that take over the page that I am working on, despite having updated the blocking software.......Any suggestions for the latest and greatest ad block programs? ...Thanks in advance.

With the digital revolution, we have seen impressive growth of global connectivity initiatives, the opening of new markets and the creation of a global community driving innovation that is fundamentally changing the business landscape. Unfortunately, with the good has come the bad and itÂ’s estimated that cybercrime costs the Australian economy over $4.5 billion annually. Beyond criminals and hacktivist groups, cybercrime has become an increasingly instrumental tool in geopolitics and conflicts. Nation states are leveraging their cyber capabilities to gain a disproportionate advantage to defend or advance their national interests and the lines between the state, criminal and hacktivist have...

The quest for "quantum supremacy" – unambiguous proof that a quantum computer does something faster than an ordinary computer – has paradoxically led to a boom in quasi-quantum classical algorithms.For Cristian Calude, doubt began with a puzzle so simple, he said, that “even a child can understand it.” Here it is: Suppose you have a mysterious box that takes one of two possible inputs — you can press a red button or a blue button, say — and gives back one of two possible outputs — a red ball or a blue ball. If the box always returns the same...