feed on feeds - 2016/01/09 - items 0 to 15

An anonymous reader writes with a lnk to this article at Boy Genius Report about a software upgrade now hitting Tesla owners, which begins: Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its software to Model S and Model X owners and, suffice it to say, it's a doozy of a software update. While we'll get to the full changelog shortly, we first wanted to highlight a feature called Summon which enables users to park their cars without having to be inside it. Conversely, it also lets Tesla owners summon their cars that already happen to be parked.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sri Lanka's government begins work on new constitution, as its president marks one year in office.

I just watched a bit of a Trump speech and was struck how it's pretty much standup comedy without the jokes.

You could do what he does with a comedian like Louis CK or Sarah Silverman doing a standup routine, only say nasty things about different nationalities and religions. That's Trump. Pretty simple formula.

I think basically Trump supporters are saying they want Presidential politics to hold their interest. That's something comedians are very good at.

I'm sure there was some of that with Obama.

Alternate theory: It's the obnoxiousness, dummy.

I want to share ideas that have some meaning to them, a way of creating value.

Think of it as deliberate metadata creation on a personal scale.

For example, I'd like to have a notepad where when I binge-watch a new series, something I don't do that often, I make a note about whether I liked it or not, and possibly what I did or didn't like about it. Usually it would have to do with the story. That's what gets me sucked in. I think that's also true for most people.

Then with a good set of reviews attached to my person, I could share this info with my friends, and they could find good ideas for new things to watch. Right now there is no organized way to do this. I think it's our destiny as a species to figure this out, and have a very high level of confidence that the recommendations would work. And of course somehow this data would be available to the people who create the entertainment so they know what to create more of. Perhaps. It might just give them ideas.

Same with lots of things.

You know the data is in our brains. It's a pain in the butt to get it out of there and on to the net. That's the hard part.

Today social networks are good at grunts and snorts. Hi here I am. I am going there. Who I am with now. That's good, I think we have that mastered. The trick is to learn new dances. Only so much can be done with a chat app.

Tents in camps are collapsing under the weight of rain and some children have only slippers to wear in freezing cold.

itwbennett writes: Since June, researchers have found and reported several dozen serious flaws in antivirus products from vendors such as Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Avast, AVG Technologies, Intel Security (formerly McAfee) and Malwarebytes. Many of those vulnerabilities would have allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers, to abuse the functionality of the antivirus products themselves, to gain higher privileges on compromised systems and even to defeat the anti-exploitation defenses of third-party applications. And evidence suggests that attacks against antivirus products are both possible and likely. Some researchers believe that such attacks have already occurred, even though antivirus vendors might not be aware of them because of the very small number of victims. Among the emails leaked last year from Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team there is a document with exploits offered for sale by an outfit called Vulnerabilities Brokerage International. The document lists various privilege escalation, information disclosure and detection bypassing exploits for multiple antivirus products, and also a remote code execution exploit for ESET NOD32 Antivirus with the status 'sold.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A simple lightweight implementation of Google's reCAPTCHA for perl

Dochazka REST server

Hard-coded replacements for perl-core/ dependencies and dependencies with odd names in Gentoo

Get elevation data from the USGS

Perl extension for dumping Siebel Components data

hypnosec writes: In a first kind of discovery in decades, researchers have created a new class of hybrid sound waves that are gentle enough to be used in biomedical devices. Known as "surface reflected bulk waves", the new class of sound waves are a hybrid of bulk waves and surface waves and have been created by a team at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. According to the team the new class of sound waves have already proved their worth in delivering vaccines and other drugs directly to the lung and are hopeful that their creation could lead to a revolution in stem cell therapy. As Dr Amgad Rezk, from RMIT's Micro/Nano Research Laboratory, explains, they have already dramatically improved the efficiency of an innovative new "nebuliser" that could deliver vaccines and other drugs directly to the lung in as little as 30 seconds [study abstract]. Researchers are hopeful that their work opens up the possibility of using stem cells more efficiently for treating lung disease enabling them to nebulise stem cells straight into a specific site within the lung to repair damaged tissue and this could be a real game changer for stem cell treatment in lungs as well as other organs.