The U.S. Postal Service today started a two-week test transporting mail across three Southwestern states using self-driving trucks, a step forward in the effort to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology for hauling freight. From a report: San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might…
Tag: service
TikTok Maker Set To Take on Spotify With Free New Music Streaming App
Does the overcrowded and cut-throat music streaming business have room for an additional player? The world’s most valuable startup certainly thinks so. From a report: Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, valued at more than $75 billion, is working on a music streaming service, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions with music…
Apple Tweaks Its Troubled MacBook Keyboard Design Yet Again, Expands Repair Program
Apple is announcing an update to its keyboard repair program today. All MacBooks with the so-called “butterfly mechanism” (that’s pretty much all modern MacBooks) will now be fully eligible for Apple’s Keyboard Service Program. From a report: The expansion means that a few newer models that weren’t previously covered will be able to get repairs. Unfortunately, Apple is not extending how…
FCC Chairman Backs T-Mobile, Sprint Merger With New Conditions
T-Mobile and Sprint submitted a new plan for their proposed $26 billion merger to the FCC — including enhanced 5G buildout commitments and an agreement to spin off Sprint’s Boost Mobile — which got the nod from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. From a report: T-Mobile and Sprint first announced their plans to merge in April 2018, looking to combine…
Huawei Responds To Android Ban With Service and Security Guarantees, But Its Future Remains Unclear
Huawei has finally gone on the record about a ban on its use of Android, but the company’s long-term strategy on mobile still remains unclear. From a report: In an effort to appease its worried customer base, the embattled Chinese company said today that it will continue to provide security updates and after-sales support to its existing lineup of smartphones, but…
Hundreds Are Alreadying Using Waymo’s Driver-less Taxis In Arizona
The commercial rollout of Waymo’s driver-less taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix with a population of 260,000 people, has more than a thousand customers already signed up — including the mayor, reports Forbes: Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel. But that may be more about public…
Group Seeks Investigation of Deep Packet Inspection Use By ISPs
wiredmikey writes: European Digital Rights (EDRi), together with 45 NGOs, academics and companies across 15 countries, has sent an open letter to European policymakers and regulators, warning about widespread and potentially growing use of deep packet inspection (DPI) by internet service providers (ISPs). DPI is far more than is required by the ISP to perform its basic purpose, and by its…
Who Killed America’s Demo Scene?
Jason Koebler shares Vice’s analysis of demoparties — “gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition” — starting with a visit to New York’s Synchrony.
I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless, who was…
Salesforce Triggers 15-Hour Shutdown After Faulty Script Starts Granting View/Modify Access
Friday Salesforce “was forced to shut down large chunks of its infrastructure,” ZDNet reports, calling it one of the company’s biggest outages ever:
At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files. According to reports on Reddit, users…
Severe Linux Kernel Flaw Found In RDS
jwhyche (Slashdot reader #6,192) shared this article from Sophos:
Linux systems running kernels prior to 5.0.8 require patching after news emerged of a high-severity flaw that could be remotely exploited. According to the NIST advisory, CVE-2019-1181 is a race condition affecting the kernel’s rds_tcp_kill_sock in net/rds/tcp.c “leading to a use-after-free, related to net namespace cleanup.” The RDS bit refers to systems running…