ISIL holds pockets of territory in the deserts of eastern Syria and maintains its ability to strike inside Iraq.

A user on Medium named "Punch a Server" says you should not use Google Cloud due to the "'no-warnings-given, abrupt way' they pull the plug on your entire system if they (or the machines) believe something is wrong." The user has a project running in production on Google Cloud (GCP) that is used to monitor hundreds of wind turbines and scores of solar plants scattered across 8 countries. When their project goes down, money is lost. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares the report: Early today morning (June 28, 2018) I receive an alert from Uptime Robot telling me my entire site is down. I receive a barrage of emails from Google saying there is some "potential suspicious activity" and all my systems have been turned off. EVERYTHING IS OFF. THE MACHINE HAS PULLED THE PLUG WITH NO WARNING. The site is down, app engine, databases are unreachable, multiple Firebases say I've been downgraded and therefore exceeded limits. Customer service chat is off. There's no phone to call. I have an email asking me to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo id of the card holder. Great, let's wake up the CFO who happens to be the card holder. What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything -- years of work -- millions of dollars in lost revenue. I fill in the form with the details and thankfully within 20 minutes all the services started coming alive. The first time this happened, we were down for a few hours. In all we lost everything for about an hour. An automated email arrives apologizing for "inconvenience" caused. Unfortunately The Machine has no understanding of the "quantum of inconvenience" caused.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security fears are high in Zimbabwe after attack on President Mnangagwa's rally as country prepares to vote in July.

China's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, BYD, is opening a new battery factory that it claims will be the "largest in the world." Electrek reports: The factory is located in the western province of Qinghai and while it was "opened" this week, it is still under construction and BYD aims to complete it by the end of next year. BYD President and Chairman Wang Chuanfu said at the opening ceremony (via NDTV): "Electrification is a done deal as several countries have announced a deadline for the sale of internal combustion engine cars to end. Electric vehicles are on the cusp of another boom." With a capacity of 24 GWh, this new battery factory should enable them to significantly increase production with a total battery production capacity of 60 GWh. BYD focuses on the production of prismatic LiFePO4 battery cells, different from most of the auto industry's NCA and NMC battery cells.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plan to lift the pension age has drawn widespread criticism with the opposition leader Alexei Navalny calling for mass protests.

World powers signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons 50 years ago.

Authorities hope separation of household waste for recycling will help solve landfill crisis in country's largest city.

Leader of Merkel's Bavarian allies says he sees no alternative to turning migrants back at border, party sources say.

AT&T has been fined $5.25 million for an outage last year that resulted in 12,000 callers not being able to reach 911. The FCC's Enforcement Bureau made the announcement on Thursday, stating that "such preventable outages are unacceptable." Gizmodo reports: Aside from the fine -- which is really a drop in the bucket for the billion-dollar behemoth -- AT&T must also make changes and enhancements to its systems to mitigate and soften the blow of future outages, as well as "regularly file compliance reports with the FCC." According to FCC rules, AT&T was required to "transmit all wireless 911 calls" as well as let emergency call centers know about outages if they last longer than 30 minutes. The two AT&T 911 outages investigated by the FCC, which occurred on March 8 and May 1 of 2017, lasted about five hours and 47 minutes, respectively. Around 12,600 users were unable to complete 911 calls during the March outage, with 2,600 failed 911 calls during the May outage.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Poll: Batman or Jesus, who would win?

Dear blog friends --

Here's an art show in your web browser.

http://artshow.scripting.com/

Leave it open for a bit, every ten seconds there's a new work of art.

I'm grabbing the art from the @artpicschannel Twitter feed. I loved having it on Twitter, I wondered what it would be like on its own. I love it even more.

I have an app running on my server that generates a JSON file that the app runs off. So you're not calling Twitter from that page, that's why you don't have to log on.

Dave

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSPoweruser: Today, Microsoft announced that it is releasing 124 Million building footprints in the United States to the OpenStreetMap community. Bing Maps team used Microsoft's CNTK Unified Toolkit to apply its Deep Neural Networks and the ResNet34 with RefineNet up-sampling layers to detect building footprints from the Bing imagery. OpenStreetMap currently has 30,567,953 building footprints in the U.S., thanks to editor contributions and various city or county wide imports. Using DNNs and Bing Imagery, Microsoft has extracted 124,885,597 footprints in the United States and making it available for download free of charge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Attack underscores fragile security situation in the West African nation as it prepares to go to the polls on July 29.

Some adult content creators on crowdfunding site Patreon are being suspended due to the suggestive material they produce. The platform said that they are increasing efforts to review content, due to payment processor pressure. Motherboard reports: In late 2017, Patreon expanded its adult content guidelines, to include stricter guidelines for "bestiality, incest, sexual depiction of minors, and suggestive sexual violence." At the time, it resulted in suspensions and bans of many adult content creators whose work Patreon previously permitted, but no longer fell in line with new guidelines. Now, many more adult content creators are reporting that they're experiencing a renewed wave of suspensions on the platform. Patreon's guidelines for adult content state that "all public content on your page be appropriate for all audiences," and "content with mature themes must be marked as a patron-only post." For several of these reports, Patreon warned that "implied nudity" was the reason for the suspension, where it appeared in public areas or publicly-visible patron tiers and banners. "You can't use Patreon to raise funds in order to produce pornographic material such as maintaining a website, funding the production of movies, or providing a private webcam session," the guidelines state.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Policeman killed, 22 people wounded after suicide attacker blows up car outside storage facility, security sources say.