A buggy update for Nokia 9 PureView handsets has apparently impacted the smartphone model's in-screen fingerprint scanner, which can now be bypassed using unregistered fingerprints or even with something as banal as a pack of gum. From a report: Multiple users have complained about this problem over the weekend, after installing an OS update (v4.22) released on April 18. The update was meant to improve the phone's in-screen fingerprint scanner module -- so that users won't have to press their fingers too hard on the screen before the phone unlocks -- yet it had the exact opposite effect the co[...]
Samsung Electronics is delaying the expected Friday rollout of its Galaxy Fold smartphone [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] until at least next month, WSJ reported Monday citing people familiar with the matter, the latest fallout from a product headache that began with tech reviewers reporting their test devices had malfunctioned. From the report: The Galaxy Fold phone -- priced at nearly $2,000 and the industry's first mainstream foldable-screen device -- was slated to hit shelves this week in the U.S. But problems with phones being used by reviewers have changed [...]
As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon's cloud, CNBC reported Monday, citing citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Apple's cloud expenditure reflects the company's determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so. [...] In a February job posting, Apple said it was looking for someone who could "lead and architect our growing AWS footprint." Indee[...]
The European Parliament voted last week to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a gigantic, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. From a report: This new database will be known as the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and is set to unify records on over 350 million people. Per its design, CIR will aggregate both identity records (names, dates of birth, passport numbers, and other identification details) and biometrics (fingerprints and facial scans), and make its data available to all border and law enforcement author[...]
elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) shares an article from The Next Web:
Scientists from Cornell University have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with incredibly life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die.
That sure sounds a lot like life, but Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, who worked on the research, says otherwise. He told The Stanford Chronicle, "We ar[...]
"I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I'm not doing it anymore," said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.
The New York Times reports on a "rebellion" that started in Kansas against an online "personalized learning" program funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, and developed by Facebook engineers -- including a classroom walk-out, a sit-in, and parent protests at public school board meetings.
Read the Times' pay-walled original article or this free alternate version. Some highlights:
Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-[...]
CNN tells the story of 24-year-old "social media influencer" Rossi Lorathio Adams II who'd wanted his domain to be the slogan of his social media sites (which at one point had over a million followers on Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter). Unfortunately, that domain was already owned by another man in Iowa -- but Adams came up with a solution:
In June 2017, Adams enlisted his cousin to break into the domain owner's home and force him to transfer it. The cousin drove to the domain owner's house and provided a demand note [which contained "a series of directions on how to change an Internet dom[...]
Fast Company shares an essay from an anthropologist who researches human agency, algorithms, AI, and automation in the context of social systems:
With the advent of computational tools for quantitative measurement and metrics, and the development of machine learning based on the big data developed by those metrics, organizations, Amazon among them, started to transition through a period of what I refer to as "extreme data analysis," whereby anything and anyone that can be measured, is. This is a problem. Using counting, metrics, and implementation of outcomes from extreme data analysis to i[...]
Alex Gaynor is a software engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox, after previously serving as a director of both the Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation.
In a new blog post today, he argues that memory unsafe languages, "principally C and C++," induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities, and that the industry needs to migrate to memory-safe languages like Rust and Swift by default.
One of the responses I frequently receive is that the problem isn't C and C++ themselves, developers are simply holding them wrong. In particular, I often receive defense[...]
An anonymous reader quotes The Next Web:
As stunning and ground-breaking as it is, the EHT project is not just about taking on a challenge. It's an unprecedented test of whether Einstein's ideas about the very nature of space and time hold up in extreme circumstances, and looks closer than ever before at the role of black holes in the universe. To cut a long story short: Einstein was right....
His general theory of relativity has passed two serious tests from the universe's most extreme conditions in the last few years. Here, Einstein's theory predicted the observations from M87 with uner[...]