slow motion dance

7,000 Developers Report Their Top Languages: Java, JavaScript, and Python Published on June 17, 2019 at 04:04PM "JetBrains released its State of Developer Ecosystem 2019 report, which found while Java is still the most popular primary language and JavaScript is the most used overall, Python is gaining speed," reports SD Times: The report surveyed about 7,000 developers worldwide, and revealed Python is the most studied programming language, the most loved language, and the third top primary programming language developers are using... The top use cases developers are using Python for include data analysis, web development, machine learning and writing automation scripts, according to the JetBrains report. More developers are also beginning to move over to Python 3, with 9 out of 10 developers using the current version. The JetBrains report also found while Go is still a young language, it is the most promising programming language. "Go started out with a share of 8% in 2...

Slashdot Asks: Does Anyone Still Like Godzilla? Published on June 17, 2019 at 01:04PM There's now a new $175 million remake of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I loved it, Msmash walked out of it, and BeauHD didn't bother to go see it. The movie performed poorly at the box office, but I'm not the only person who still likes Godzilla. There's also a new anime version on Netflix. And critic Matt Zoller Seitz (once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism) is calling the new film "a frequently astounding movie... its imperfections are compensated by magnificence." For all its crash-and-bash action, this is a real science fiction movie that goes to the trouble of not merely creating a world, but thinking about the implications of its images and predicaments. It cares what the people in it must feel and think about their situation, and how it might weigh on them every day even when they aren't talking about it amongst themselves. It's also suffused wit...

Why New York's Subway Still Uses OS/2 Published on June 17, 2019 at 10:04AM Every day 5.7 million people ride the subway in New York City -- and are subjected to both "the whims of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the unheard-of reliability of a marginally successful operating system from the early 1990s." martiniturbide shared this report from Tedium: OS/2 and MTA consultant Neil Waldhauer said in an email, "For a few years, you could bet your career on OS/2." To understand why, you need to understand the timing. Waldhauer continues, "The design is from a time before either Linux or Windows was around. OS/2 would have seemed like a secure choice for the future." So for a lack of options, the MTA went with its best one. And it's worked out for decades, as one of the key software components of a quite complex system... Despite the failure of OS/2 in the consumer market, it was hilariously robust, leading to a long life in industrial and enterp...

Upgrade Your Memory With A Surgically Implanted Brain Chip Published on June 17, 2019 at 07:31AM Bloomberg reports on a five-year, $77 million project by America's Department of Defense to create an implantable brain device that restores memory-generation capacity for people with traumatic brain injuries. A device has now been developed by Michael Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the medical technology company Medtronic Plc, and successfully tested with funding from America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Connected to the left temporal cortex, it monitors the brain's electrical activity and forecasts whether a lasting memory will be created. "Just like meteorologists predict the weather by putting sensors in the environment that measure humidity and wind speed and temperature, we put sensors in the brain and measure electrical signals," Kahana says. If brain activity is suboptimal, the device provides a ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Gary Woodland holds off Brooks Koepka to win US Open 06/16/19 6:35 PM

Twitch Sues Troll Streamers Who Flooded Site With Violent Videos and Pornography Published on June 17, 2019 at 05:31AM An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Twitch Interactive, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon.com, has sued anonymous trolls who flooded the site last month with pornography, violent content and copyrighted movies and television shows... Twitch says it works to remove offensive posts and ban the accounts of the users who post them, but that the videos quickly reappear, apparently posted by bots, while other bots work to drive users to the impermissible content. Twitch temporarily suspended new creators from streaming after a May 25 attack by trolls. The company said that if it learns the identities of the anonymous streamers who have abused its terms of service -- named in the lawsuit as "John and Jane Does 1-100" -- it will ask the court to prohibit their using the platform and order them to pay restitution and damages. Read more of this story at S...

A New Hidden Way of Web Browser Profiling, Identification and Tracking Published on June 17, 2019 at 04:35AM Researchers from Austria's Graz University of Technology "have devised an automated system for browser profiling using two new side channel attacks that can help expose information about software and hardware," reports The Register. The researchers recently presented a paper titled "JavaScript Template Attacks: Automatically Inferring Host Information for Targeted Exploits," which The Register says "calls into question the effectiveness of anonymized browsing and browser privacy extensions... " Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shared their report: One of the side-channel attacks developed for JavaScript Template Attacks involve measuring runtime differences between two code snippets to infer the underlying instruction set architecture through variations in JIT compiler behavior. The other involves measuring timing differences in the ...

Researcher Publishers 7 Million (Still Public) Venmo Transactions on GitHub Published on June 17, 2019 at 03:14AM Remember the outrage last year when a researcher discovered that for Venmo's 40 million users, all transactions are "public" by default and broadcast on Venmo's API? More than a year later, computer science student Dan Salmon has demonstrated that it's still incredibly easy to download millions of transactions through Venmo's developer API without obtaining user permissions (without even using the Venmo app). He proved this by downloading 7 million of them," TechCrunch reports: Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private... Using that data, anyone can look at an entire user's public transaction history, who they shared money with, when, and in some cases for what reason -- including illicit goods and substances. "There's truly n...

'Genius' Site Said It Used Morse Code To Catch Google Stealing Song Lyrics Published on June 17, 2019 at 02:24AM "Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site," reports the Wall Street Journal: Google denies doing anything nefarious. Still, Genius's complaints offer a window into the challenges small tech companies can face when the unit of Alphabet Inc. starts offering competing services on its platform... Genius said it notified Google as far back as 2017, and again in an April letter, that copied transcriptions appear on Google's website. The April letter, a copy of which was viewed by the Journal, warned that reuse of Genius's transcriptions breaks the Genius.com terms of service and violates antitrust law. "Over the last two years, we've shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are dis...

Google's Login Chief: Apple's Sign-In Button Is Better Than Using Passwords Published on June 17, 2019 at 01:04AM After Apple announced a single sign-on tool last week, The Verge interviewed Google product management director Mark Risher. Though Google offers its own single sign-on tool, The Verge found him "surprisingly sunny about having a new button to compete with. While the login buttons are relatively simple, they're much more resistant to common attacks like phishing, making them much stronger than the average password -- provided you trust the network offering them." RISHER: I honestly do think this technology will be better for the internet and will make people much, much safer. Even if they're clicking our competitor's button when they're logging into sites, that's still way better than typing in a bespoke username and password, or more commonly, a recycled username and password... Usually with passwords they recommend the capital letters...

Michigan Town Approves Fiber Internet Despite Intense Lobbying Published on June 17, 2019 at 12:04AM Long-time Slashdot reader Proudrooster writes: Fiber Internet is coming to Traverse City, Michigan in the hopes of attracting high tech startups and helping the city become a high-tech hub. Even in the face of intense lobbying by [commercial high-speed internet provider] Charter, The Mackinaw Center for Public Policy, and a barrage of pop up ads opposing it, the project is moving ahead into phase one. It was more than apparent that Charter did everything it could to try and sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt to try and kill this project as other incumbent providers have done across the USA. [Citation needed -- though Traverse City officials did report high-powered anonymous lobbying.] Kudos to the board of Traverse City Light and Power and the residents of Traverse City for being brave and making this investment in their community. Even though the decision is not finalized, the network ma...

America Planted Malware In Russia's Power Grid, Says NYT Published on June 16, 2019 at 11:04PM "The U.S. military's Cyber Command has gotten more aggressive than ever against Russia in the past year, placing 'potentially crippling malware' in systems that control the country's electrical grid," according to CNET, citing a report in the New York Times: Made possible by little-noticed legal authority granted last summer by Congress, Cyber Command's strategy shift from a defensive to offensive posture is meant in part as a warning shot, but it's also designed to enable paralysing cyberattacks in the event of a conflict, The New York Times said Saturday, quoting unnamed officials... [T]he recent moves appear to have taken place under a military authorization bill Congress passed in 2018 that gives the go-ahead for "clandestine military activity" in cyberspace to "deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities aga...

Why 'Ambient Computing' Is Just A Marketing Buzzword -- For Now Published on June 16, 2019 at 10:04PM An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan: Ambient computing is real. It's the next megatrend in computing.... To interact in an "ambient computing" context means to not care and not even necessarily know where exactly the devices are that you're interacting with. When IoT devices and sensors are all around us, and artificial intelligence can understand human contexts for what's happening and act accordingly and in our interests, then ambient computing will have arrived... As with many technology revolutions, including augmented reality and AI, the buzzword ambient will precede the actual technology by many years. In fact, the marketing buzzword is suddenly here in full force. The actual technologies? Not so much. Instead, we're on the brink of a revolution in what you might call "semi-ambient computing...." Rumors are cir...

Massive Electrical Failure Cuts Power To Nearly All Of Argentina On Election Day -- and Uruguay Published on June 16, 2019 at 09:04PM Iwastheone quotes the BBC: A massive electrical failure has left almost all of Argentina and Uruguay without power, according to a major Argentine electricity provider. Authorities say the cause of the blackout is still unclear. Argentine media said the power cut occurred shortly after 07:00 [03:00 PST, 11:00 BST], causing trains to be halted and failures with traffic signalling. It came as people in parts of Argentina were preparing to go to the polls for local elections. "A massive failure in the electrical interconnection system left all of Argentina and Uruguay without power," electricity supply company Edesur said in a tweet. Alejandra Martinez, a spokeswoman for the company, described the power cut as unprecedented. "This is the first time something like this has happened across the entire country." Argentina's energy secret...

Facebook's Photorealistic Simulator For AI Runs At 10,000 FPS Published on June 16, 2019 at 08:04PM malachiorion writes: Facebook just open sourced a simulator for testing and training embodied AI systems -- like virtual robots. They worked with AR/VR researchers to release the simulator along with what they say are the most photorealistic 3D reconstructions of real world places available. [Facebook Reality Labs have named this "the Replica data set".] The crazy part: Because more frames are always better for training computer vision in simulators, it can run at 10,000 FPS! The simulator's ability to hit 10K frames per second prompted an interesting follow-up on the original submission. "It's a totally useless framerate for humans -- just absolute overkill for our brains/eyeballs -- but it's apparently a benefit for AI systems." "As more researchers adopt the platform, we can collectively develop embodied AI techniques more quickly," explai...

Uber's Plan To Deliver McDonald's Hamburgers By Drone Published on June 16, 2019 at 07:04PM An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: The company's new initiative -- a collaborative effort between its Uber Eats and Uber Elevate divisions -- began with tests in San Diego using fast food meals from McDonald's, but could expand to include a local fine-dining restaurant called Juniper and Ivy, the company said. Uber intends to roll out commercial food delivery using drones in the same city this summer, with a fee structure that mimics Uber Eats current pricing, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, which first reported the company's plan... "We've been working closely with the FAA to ensure that we're meeting requirements and prioritizing safety," Uber Elevate's Luke Fischer, the company's head of flight operations, said in a statement. "From there, our goal is to expand Uber Eats drone delivery so we can provide more options to more ...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Biden leads 2020 Dem rivals, tops Trump by 10 points 06/16/19 5:57 AM

Do Google and Facebook Threaten Our 'Ambient Privacy'? Published on June 16, 2019 at 05:04PM This week Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski (also a web developer and social critic) asked readers of his blog to consider an emerging threat to ambient privacy. He defines it as "the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered." Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life. Recording something for posterity required making special arrangements, and most of our shared experience of the past was filtered through the attenuating haze of human memory. Even police states like East Germany, where one in seven citizens was an informer, were not able to keep tabs on their entire population. Today computers have given us that power. Authoritarian states like China and Saudi Arabia are using this newfound capacity as a...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Wife of Benjamin Netanyahu pleads guilty to misuse of funds 06/16/19 2:57 AM

'How Close Are We to Self-Driving Cars, Really?' Published on June 16, 2019 at 01:04PM Chris Urmson helped pioneer self-driving car technology at Google before founding Aurora (which sells self-driving car software to automakers, and this week announced a new partnership with Chrysler and a new round of investment by Hyundai). In a new interview, Urmson "says he expects that in about five to 10 years, Americans will start seeing robots cruising down the road in a handful of cities and towns across the country," reports Slate. "It will be about 30 to 50 years, he says, until they're everywhere. " I think within the next five years we'll see small-scale deployment. That'll be a few hundred or a few thousand vehicles. Really this is the, it's Silicon Valley speak, this is the zero-to-one moment of proving that the technology actually works, understanding how customers want to use it, convincing ourselves that -- and when I say ourselves, I mean ...