“It’s taken over 50 years, but the solution to the Zodiac Killer’s cipher has been found,” writes Slashdot reader quonset. CNN reports: Dubbed the “340 cipher,” the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers — David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician. The Zodiac Killer is…
Tag: killings
Australia Demands Apology From China After Fake Image of Soldier Posted On Social Media
hackingbear writes: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded an apology after a senior Chinese official posted a “fake image” of an Australian soldier holding a knife with blood on it to the throat of an Afghan child, calling it “truly repugnant” and demanding it be taken down. The Australian government has asked Twitter to remove the image, posted on Monday by…
YouTube Bans Thousands of Chinese Accounts To Combat ‘Coordinated Influence Operations’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today; 2,596 accounts from China alone were taken down from April to June, compared with 277 in the first three months of 2020. “These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content,…
Tech Firms Hire ‘Red Teams.’ Scientists Should, Too
The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today’s fights over cancel culture. From a report: First, the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn, both because they’d been “careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data”…
Mobilewalla Used Cellphone Data To Estimate the Demographics of Protesters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and…
2009 Crash of Boeing 737 NG Now Receiving New Scrutiny
Slashdot reader JoeyRox shares a disturbing story about a Boeing 737 NG flight carrying 128 passengers that crashed in 2009, killings its three pilots, another crew member and five passengers. But “the Dutch investigators focused blame on the pilots for failing to react properly when an automated system malfunctioned and caused the plane to plummet into a field,” the New York…
Pentagrams painted on sheep in occult killings
A spate of unsolved animal killings involving occult symbolism have been reported in the south of England. The strangeness began on November 19th when… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/332591/pentagrams-painted-on-sheep-in-occult-killings…
China Covers Up Killing Of Prisoners To Continue Harvesting Organs For Transplant: New Report
“Despite repeated denials, China stands accused of a systematic cover-up to hide the continuing practice of forced organ harvesting and murder,” reports Forbes’ cybersecurity writer Zak Doffman: The practice, described as “state-run mass murder” and valued at $1 billion each year, has supposedly been outlawed in the country. But a new report, published on November 14 in the BMC Medical Ethics…
Ex-Google Engineer Says That Robot Weapons May Cause Accidental Mass Killings
“A former Google engineer who worked on the company’s infamous military drone project has sounded a warning against the building of killer robots,” reports Business Insider. Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger quotes their report: Laura Nolan had been working at Google four years when she was recruited to its collaboration with the US Department of Defense, known as Project Maven, in 2017,…
Edward Snowden Wants To Come Home: ‘I’m Not Asking For a Pass. What I’m Asking For is a Fair Trial’
Edward Snowden, who has been living in exile in Russia after leaking American intelligence secrets in 2013 and was sued by the U.S. government over his new book this week, says that he would like to return to the United States if he is guaranteed a fair trial. He said: I would like to return to the United States. That is…