A trial is underway to restore damaged coral on the Great Barrier Reef using electricity. From a report: The reef has been severely assaulted in recent years by cyclones and back-to-back heatwaves. Nathan Cook at conservation group Reef Ecologic and his colleagues are attempting to regrow surviving coral fragments on steel frames. The frames are placed on damaged parts of the reef and stimulated with electricity to accelerate the coral's growth. Electrified metal frames have previously been used to encourage coral growth on reefs in South-East Asia, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. They have been shown to attract mineral deposits that help corals grow 3 to 4 times faster than normal. The technique is being trialed at a section of the reef 100 kilometres north of Cairns that was badly affected by the 2016 and 2017 mass coral bleaching events. Some coral is starting to grow back naturally, but it will take at least a decade for even the fastest-growing species to fully recover.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Huawei, which recently surpassed Apple to become the world's second largest smartphone player, can't stop taking shots at the iPhone maker. From a report: After the iPhone XS was unveiled with little new, Huawei tweeted "Thank you for letting us be the real hero of the year," a tease for their upcoming Mate 20 Pro unveiling next month. Now Huawei's taking another shot -- by handing out battery packs to people waiting in line for the iPhone XS and XS Max in Singapore. The packaging says "You'll need it", which is actually a valid boast: Anandtech found that Huawei's P20 and P20 Pro had better battery life than the iPhone 8 and X.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said 'concrete frontiers' of the demilitarised zone set to help stop attacks.

Magic Leap, a US-based startup valued at north of $6 billion and which counts Google, Alibaba, Warner Bros, AT&T, and several top Silicon Valley venture capital firms as its investors, is pushing to land a contract with the U.S. Army to build augmented-reality devices for soldiers to use on combat missions, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing government documents and interviews with people familiar with the process. From the report: The contract, which could eventually lead to the military purchasing over 100,000 headsets as part of a program whose total cost could exceed $500 million, is intended to "increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy," according to an Army description of the program. A large government contract could alter the course of the highest-profile startup working on augmented reality, at a time when prospects to produce a consumer device remain uncertain. Building tools to make soldiers more deadly is a far cry from the nascent consumer market for augmented reality. But the army's program has also drawn interest from Microsoft, whose HoloLens is Magic Leap's main rival. The commercial-grade versions of both devices still face significant technological hurdles, and its not clear the companies can fulfil the army's technical requirements. If recent history is any guide, a large military contract is also sure to be controversial within the companies. Last month, Magic Leap unveiled its much-hyped AR device to the press and select developers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter has started notifying developers today about an API bug that accidentally shared direct messages (private messages) or protected tweets from a Twitter business account with other developers. From a report: According to a support page published today, Twitter said the bug only manifested for Twitter business accounts where the account owner used the Account Activity API (AAAPI) to allow other developers access to that account's data. Because of the bug, the AAAPI sent DMs and protected tweets to the wrong person instead of the authorized developer. Twitter said it discovered the bug on September 10, and fixed it the same day. They also said the bug was active between May 2017 and September 2018, for almost 16 months. The bug represents a serious privacy issue, especially for Twitter business accounts that use DMs to handle customer complaints that in some cases may include private user information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Saudi-led military coalition has been accused of bombing multiple civilian targets, including hospitals.

gosand writes: The Register reports that "a Romanian woman has admitted running a ransomware operation from infected Washington DC's CCTV systems just days before President Trump was sworn into office in the US capital." The US DOJ stated that "this case was of the highest priority due to its impact on the Secret Service's protective mission and its potential effect on the security plan for the 2017 Presidential Inauguration." She could face a maximum of 25 years if convicted. She and her cohort (who is still jailed in Romania) made the classic hacker mistake of using their personal gmail accounts for the campaign, even accessing them from one of the compromised PCs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google bosses have forced employees to delete a confidential memo circulating inside the company that revealed explosive details about a plan to launch a censored search engine in China, The Intercept has learned. From the report: The memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, code-named Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location -- and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have "unilateral access" to the data. The memo was shared earlier this month among a group of Google employees who have been organizing internal protests over the censored search system, which has been designed to remove content that China's authoritarian Communist Party regime views as sensitive, such as information about democracy, human rights and peaceful protest. According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have accessed or saved copies of the memo and ordered them to immediately delete it from their computers. Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained âoepixel trackersâ that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tekla S. Perry, writing for IEEE Spectrum: David Patterson -- University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer -- says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect. That's because Moore's Law really is over, he says : "We are now a factor of 15 behind where we should be if Moore's Law were still operative. We are in the post -- Moore's Law era." This means, Patterson told engineers attending the 2018 @Scale Conference held in San Jose last week, that "we're at the end of the performance scaling that we are used to. When performance doubled every 18 months, people would throw out their desktop computers that were working fine because a friend's new computer was so much faster." But last year, he said, "single program performance only grew 3 percent, so it's doubling every 20 years. If you are just sitting there waiting for chips to get faster, you are going to have to wait a long time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another 30 were wounded in the early morning crash in Bakwa district of Farah province.

What is Alzheimer's? What are the signs? And how can families cope with a disease that can affect all aspects of life?

Theresa May faced headlines on Friday detailing her 'humiliation' at an EU summit in Salzburg over her Brexit proposal.

Quarrying operations suspended in parts of Philippines after a new landslide kills dozens in Mangkhut's wake.

Erik Solheim is criticised for risking the UN's reputation by extensive use of expensive air travel.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Warmer weather conditions in western Greece have led to the eerie spectacle of a 300m-long spiderweb in Aitoliko. A vast area of greenery has been covered by the web, reports the Daily Hellas. Experts say it is a seasonal phenomenon, caused by Tetragnatha spiders, which can build large nests for mating. An increase in the mosquito population is also thought to have contributed to the rise in the number of spiders. Maria Chatzaki, professor of molecular biology and genetics at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece said high temperatures, sufficient humidity and food created the ideal conditions for the species to reproduce in large numbers. She told Newsit.gr: "It's as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party. They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation. "These spiders are not dangerous for humans and will not cause any damage to the area's flora. The spiders will have their party and will soon die."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.