In-Person DEF CON 28 Event Is Canceled

Annual Las Vegas hacker gathering DEF CON has officially called off its physical conference for this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Register reports: In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the organizing team today said the in-person event would not be held in 2020. It had been slated to take place in August. This comes after the more…

Coronavirus: NHS Reveals Source Code Behind Contact-Tracing App

The NHS has released the source code behind its coronavirus contact-tracing app. The BBC reports: The NHS Covid-19 app is designed to use people’s smartphones to keep track of when they come close to each other and for how long, by sending wireless Bluetooth signals. More than 40,000 people have installed the smartphone software so far. NHSX, the health service’s digital…

How a Facebook Bug Took Down Your Favorite iOS Apps

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little after 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the system started blinking red for iOS developer Clay Jones. Like many devs, Jones uses a Google product called Crashlytics to keep tabs on when his app stops working. Out of nowhere, it registered tens of thousands of crashes. It also pointed to the cause:…

What’s new on Coursera for Business – April 2020

By Adam Lewis, Skills Transformation Consultant As we continue to adapt to the new norm, here are 114 new courses and projects to pick out what’s important to you.  You can try out Yale’s latest insights on why your Facebook friend is wrong about the stats they’re sharing. Or find your purpose with Michigan’s course […]
The post What’s new on Coursera…

An Adult Cam Site Exposed 10.88 Billion Records

CAM4, a popular adult platform that advertises “free live sex cams,” misconfigured an ElasticSearch production database so that it was easy to find and view heaps of personally identifiable information, as well as corporate details like fraud and spam detection logs. According to Wired, the database exposed 7 terabytes of names, sexual orientations, payment logs, and email and chat transcripts –…

Judge Orders FCC to Hand Over IP Addresses Linked to Fake Net Neutrality Comments

Before it rolled back net neutrality protections in 2017, America’s Federal Communications Commission requested public comments online. But they’re still facing criticism over how they handled them, Gizmodo reports: A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs that may provide new insight into the allegations of fraud stemming from agency’s 2017…

LinkedIn’s AI Generates Candidate Screening Questions From Job Postings

LinkedIn is using AI and machine learning to generate screening questions for active job postings. From a report: In a paper [PDF] published this week on the preprint server Arxiv.org, coauthors describe Job2Questions, a model deployed that helps recruiters quickly find applicants by reducing the need for manual screening. This isn’t just theoretical research — Job2Questions was briefly tested across millions…

HD 38170 is a magnetic B-type star, observations suggest

An international team of astronomers has conducted spectropolarimetric observations of four stars identified by the MOBSTER (Magnetic OB[A] Stars with TESS: probing their Evolutionary and Rotational properties) project. The study found that one of the investigated objects is a magnetic B-type star. The finding is detailed in a paper published April 21 on the arXiv pre-print server. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-04-hd-magnetic-b-type-star.html…

Facing Criticism, Germany Switches to Google/Apple’s Decentralized Contact Tracing

“Germany changed course on Sunday over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use to trace coronavirus infections,” reports Reuters, “backing an approach supported by Apple and Google along with a growing number of other European countries.” Chancellery Minister Helge Braun and Health Minister Jens Spahn said in a joint statement that Berlin would adopt a “decentralised” approach to digital…

New CPU Performance Testing Concludes AMD Beats Intel

An anonymous reader quote Hot Hardware:
If you’re looking for the best gaming CPU or the best CPU for desktop applications, there are only two choices to pick from: AMD and Intel. That fact has spawned an almost religious following for both camps, and the resulting flamewars, that make it tricky to get unbiased advice about the best choice for your next…