CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Guide: The Blog That Will Not Die

The CDC published a blog post about zombies 10 years ago and news outlets simply will not shut up about it.Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7vg8q/cdcs-zombie-apocalypse-preparedness-guide-the-blog-that-will-not-die…

Apple Is Going To Make It Harder to Hack iPhones With Zero-Click Attacks

Apple is going to make one of the most powerful types of attacks on iPhones much harder to pull off in an upcoming update of iOS. From a report: The company quietly made a new change in the way it secures the code running in its mobile operating system. The change is in the beta version of the next iOS version,…

Machines Are Inventing New Math We’ve Never Seen

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] group of researchers from the Technion in Israel and Google in Tel Aviv presented an automated conjecturing system that they call the Ramanujan Machine, named after the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who developed thousands of innovative formulas in number theory with almost no formal training. The software system has already conjectured several original…

Cops Are Playing Music While Citizens Are Filming To Trigger Copyright Filters

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned. Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt…

Phone Numbers For 533 Million Facebook Users Were Being Sold On Telegram

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. “The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in…

10 Years After Its Discontinuation, Some Fans Still Love Microsoft’s Zune Mp3 Player

“It was weird to own a Zune in 2005,” remembers a new article in the Verge. “It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table.”
They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that…

Ajit Pai is Officially Out of the FCC

Ajit Pai, the man who killed net neutrality, enacted a series of industry-friendly deregulatory moves for big telecom, and drank from a gigantic mug, is no longer around to terrorize the internet. The FCC confirmed to Motherboard that Pai is officially gone: “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today concluded his four years as Chairman, eight years as a Commissioner, and…

Thousands of Users Unknowingly Joined Signal Because of a 12-Year-Old’s App

“At least 10,000 Signal users can be attributed to a 12-year-old kid in India who created a somewhat popular clone of the encrypted chat app,” reports Motherboard: Dev Sharma, a Signal user from Melbourne, Australia, found the Signal clone when he encountered an unusual thing: Signal displayed a pop-up showing that their friend had just joined the app. Sharma messaged their…

DoorDash Is Hiking Customer Fees To Pay For a Law It Helped Write

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the months since a coalition of app-based gig companies successfully passed Prop 22 in California, exempting themselves from reclassifying their workers as employees, DoorDash has been silently passing costs onto consumers. The company-funded Yes on Prop 22 campaign claimed that not passing the ballot initiative would result in higher prices for consumers,…

A Successful Experiment Gets Us One Step Closer To a Quantum Internet

Earlier this week, a team of researchers announced that they successfully teleported qubits of photons across approximately 27 miles of fiber-optic cable. Engadget reports: While other scientists have worked on similar projects, this group is the first to beam quantum information across such a great distance. What’s more, they did so across two separate networks and with a fidelity greater than…