SUNDAY, 25 AUGUST 2019, 02:07
“Another coder and I are exploring the possibility of having a video-processing algorithm written in C turned into an ASIC (“Application Specific Integrated Circuit”) hardware chip that could go inside various consumer electronics devices,” writes Slashdot reader dryriver.
The problem? There seems to be very little good information on how much a 20Kb, or 50Kb or indeed a 150Kb algorithm written...
Python’s End-of-Life date is 129 days away, warns the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). “There will be no more bug fixes, or security updates, from Python’s core developers.”
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
The UK’s cyber-security agency warned developers Thursday to consider moving Python 2.x codebases to the newer 3.x branch due to the looming end-of-life of Python 2, scheduled for...
bobstreo tipped us off to an interesting story. The BBC reports that NASA “is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space.”
Anne McClain acknowledges accessing the account from the ISS but denies any wrongdoing, the New York Times...
“As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilising the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade,” reports the New York Times:
The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as...
Long-time Slashdot reader rinka shares an article about “the place where the Sun will be re-born on Earth”:
The world’s best scientists are trying to create a ‘miniature Sun’ on Earth to tap its fusion energy, costing over €20 billion… [G]lobally ITER is the most expensive science project on Earth ever to be undertaken in the 21st century. The total weight of the ITER reactor will be about...
DevNull127 writes: The 77th World Science Fiction Convention announced the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards at a ceremony Sunday night.
Here’s some of the highlights. At least two of these stories can be read (for free) online:
BEST NOVELETTE: “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,” by Zen Cho. The entire text is availabe online in the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, where it was...
ZDNet reports:
Facebook has awarded a $100,000 prize to a team of academics from Germany for developing a new code isolation technique that can be used to safeguard sensitive data while it’s being processed inside a computer. The award is named the Internet Defense Prize, and is a $100,000 cash reward that Facebook has been giving out yearly since 2014 to the most innovative research presented...
Long-time Slashdot reader William Robinson writes: An unmanned spacecraft, Chandrayaan 2, India launched last month has begun orbiting the moon before it lands on the far side to search for water. The spacecraft is in orbit of 114 km x 18072 km and will continue circling the moon in a tighter orbit until reaching a distance of about 100 km x 30 km from the moon’s surface. “The lander will then...
Using supercomputers to explain life, the universe and everything takes us into territory previously only laughed at
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes...
AmiMoJo quote the Verge:
At least three smart June Ovens have turned on in the middle of the night and heated up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. The ovens’ owners aren’t sure why this happened, and June tells The Verge that user error is at fault…
The June Oven debuted in 2015 as a $1,495 countertop oven that uses a camera and computer vision to identify food that’s been placed inside....
“A rash of supply chain attacks hitting open source software over the past year shows few signs of abating, following the discovery this week of two separate backdoors slipped into a dozen libraries downloaded by hundreds of thousands of server administrators,” reports Ars Technica:
The compromises of Webmin and the RubyGems libraries are only the latest supply chain attacks to hit open source...
Many sportspeople have good oral health but are at greater risk of decay and acid erosion
British Olympic and professional athletes regular use of sports drinks, energy bars and gels could be damaging their teeth, according to a study.
Researchers from University College London surveyed 352 female and male athletes across 11 sports, including cycling, swimming, rugby, football, rowing, hockey,...
Having survived a decade of drink and drugs as a young woman, Professor Judith Grisel focused all her determination on writing a book about addiction
When Professor Judith Grisel sat down to write her book Never Enough (a guide to the neuroscience of addiction that has been her life’s work), she didn’t expect to share so much of her own story. Nevertheless the resulting chapters are a...
You can’t beat space telescopes for an unencumbered view of the cosmos.
The paper being presented suggested that the two researchers had a method to quickly find large semiprime numbers and essentially break RSA-2048 and any other semiprime-based encryption.
Roslin Institute scientists create a flock to mimic human gene that causes Batten disorder
Scientists have created a flock of sheep that carry the gene for a lethal inherited brain disorder in humans. The condition, Batten disease, usually starts in childhood and is invariably fatal, often within a few years of diagnosis.
The project, which is designed to test treatments for the disease, is...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Shabir Barzanjeh at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and a few colleagues have used entangled microwaves to create the world’s first quantum radar. Their device, which can detect objects at a distance using only a few photons, raises the prospect of stealthy radar systems that emit little detectable electromagnetic...
Xbox eavesdropping, email scammers, and more of the week’s top security news.
“Colossal,” “A Monster Calls,” and “I Kill Giants” are terrific sci-fi films with weird, big themes. They all failed to connect with audiences.
Dust off that waffle iron and enter a world of cooking that goes way beyond breakfast.
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they’re missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging.