CDC Warns of Increasingly Aggressive Rodents Looking For New Food Sources

New submitter Way Smarter Than You shares a report from The Seattle Times: Humans aren’t the only ones hankering for the days they could dine out at their cities’ restaurants: Some rats that miss feasting on the scraps are becoming increasingly brazen to find new food sources, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday. Amid stay-home restrictions set across…

AT&T’s Randall Stephenson To Retire As CEO

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said he will retire at the end of June (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), handing leadership of one of the world’s largest media and telecommunications companies to longtime deputy John Stankey. The Wall Street Journal reports: Mr. Stephenson, who turned 60 this week, has spent most of his 13 years as chairman and CEO piecing together…

Vint Cerf Explains Why the Internet is Holding Up

In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet’s 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, “with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice.” “Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design,” explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google…

Printing’s Not Dead: The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges

America’s onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money. From a report: The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by…

Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

An anonymous reader shares a article: Anna Wiener, author of memoir “Uncanny Valley”, writes especially well — with both fluency and astonishment — about the verbal habits of her peers: “People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and…

Linus Torvalds Calls Blogger’s Linux Scheduler Tests ‘Pure Garbage’

On Wednesday Phoronix cited a blog post by C++ game developer Malte Skarupke claiming his spinlocks experiments had discovered the Linux kernel had a scheduler issue affecting developers bringing games to Linux for Google Stadia. Linus Torvalds has now responded:
The whole post seems to be just wrong, and is measuring something completely different than what the author thinks and claims it…

The Missing 99%: Why Can’t We Find the Vast Majority of Ocean Plastic?

What scientists can see and measure, in the garbage patches and on beaches, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total plastic entering the water. From a report: Every year, 8m tons of plastic enters the ocean. Images of common household waste swirling in vast garbage patches in the open sea, or tangled up with whales and seabirds, have turned…

How Amazon Sacrifices Safety For Speed For Its Delivery Network

An anonymous reader shares a report: The speed and convenience of Amazon’s own delivery network has regularly come at the price of safety, as detailed in an extensive report by BuzzFeed News and ProPublica — including the death of Joy Covey, Amazon’s first CFO, who died when a van delivering Amazon packages turned left in front of her while she was…

Google Adds Spam Detection and Verified Business SMS To Messages

Businesses often send one-time passwords, account alerts and appointment confirmations via text. But if you’ve ever received one of those, you know they tend to come from a random number, and bad actors can take advantage of that by disguising phishing scams as one of those messages. To protect users, Google will soon verify SMS messages from registered businesses. From a…