A Syrian resident of Saudi Arabia has died from his wounds in an attack on Abha airport on Sunday, Riyadh says.

A Syrian resident of Saudi Arabia has died from his wounds in an attack on Abha airport on Sunday, Riyadh says.

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy shares news of a recent report from cybersecurity company Forcepoint's X-Lab, examining how cybersecurity decision-making is affected by six common biases: For instance, Forcepoint found that older generations are typically characterized by information security professionals as "riskier users based on their supposed lack of familiarity with new technologies." However, studies have found the opposite to be true: younger people are far more likely to engage in risky behavior like sharing their passwords to streaming services. The presumption that older workers pose more of a risk than younger workers is an example of so-called "aggregate bias," in which subjects make inferences about an individual based on a population trend. Biases like this misinform security professionals by directing their focus to individual users based on their supposed group membership. In turn, analysts wrongly direct their focus to the wrong individuals as sources of security issues. Availability bias may influence cybersecurity analysts' decision-making in favor of hot topics in the news, which ultimately cloud other information they may know but are not so frequently exposed to; leading them to make less well-rounded decisions. People encounter "confirmation bias" most frequently during research. By neglecting the bigger picture, assumptions are made and research is specifically tailored to confirm those assumptions. When looking for issues, analysts can often find themselves looking for confirmation of what they already believe to be the cause as opposed to searching for all possible causes. The fundamental attribution error also plays a significant role in misleading security analysts, Forcepoint found. This is manifested when information security analysts or software developers place blame on users being inept instead of considering that their technology may be faulty or that internal factors contributed to a security lapse. The report also cites what it calls the framing effect. "Security problems are often aggressively worded, and use negative framing strategies to emphasize the potential for loss."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy shares news of a recent report from cybersecurity company Forcepoint's X-Lab, examining how cybersecurity decision-making is affected by six common biases: For instance, Forcepoint found that older generations are typically characterized by information security professionals as "riskier users based on their supposed lack of familiarity with new technologies." However, studies have found the opposite to be true: younger people are far more likely to engage in risky behavior like sharing their passwords to streaming services. The presumption that older workers pose more of a risk than younger workers is an example of so-called "aggregate bias," in which subjects make inferences about an individual based on a population trend. Biases like this misinform security professionals by directing their focus to individual users based on their supposed group membership. In turn, analysts wrongly direct their focus to the wrong individuals as sources of security issues. Availability bias may influence cybersecurity analysts' decision-making in favor of hot topics in the news, which ultimately cloud other information they may know but are not so frequently exposed to; leading them to make less well-rounded decisions. People encounter "confirmation bias" most frequently during research. By neglecting the bigger picture, assumptions are made and research is specifically tailored to confirm those assumptions. When looking for issues, analysts can often find themselves looking for confirmation of what they already believe to be the cause as opposed to searching for all possible causes. The fundamental attribution error also plays a significant role in misleading security analysts, Forcepoint found. This is manifested when information security analysts or software developers place blame on users being inept instead of considering that their technology may be faulty or that internal factors contributed to a security lapse. The report also cites what it calls the framing effect. "Security problems are often aggressively worded, and use negative framing strategies to emphasize the potential for loss."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States is imposing more sanctions on Iran after it shot down a US military drone.

US president declines to commit to ordering the FBI to probe the journalist's murder.

On Princeton's "Freedom to Tinker" site, the founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project summarizes 20 years of its research, remembering the "incredible acts of computing innovation during and just after WWII" that "established the foundation of modern computing and programming." Commissioned in 1942, and launched in 1946, the ENIAC computer, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was the world's very first modern computer (all-electronic, programmable, and general-purpose). "Key technologists of the time, of course, told the Army that the ENIAC would never work." Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Cory Doctorow: The ENIAC programmers had to invent programming as we know it, working without programming codes (these were invented a few years later for UNIVAC by Betty Holberton): they "broke down the differential calculus ballistics trajectory program" into small steps the computer could handle, then literally wired together the program by affixing cables and flicking the machine's 3,000 switches in the correct sequences. To capture it all, they created meticulous flowcharts that described the program's workings. From the site: Gunners needed to know what angle to shoot their artillery to hit a target 8 to 10 miles away.... The Army's Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) located women math graduates from schools nearby [who] worked day and night, six days a week, calculating thousands of ballistics trajectories which were compiled into artillery firing tables and sent to soldiers in the battlefields. It was a tremendous effort. Second, the Army and BRL agreed to commission a highly-experimental machine... [Six] women studied ENIAC's wiring and logical diagrams and taught themselves how to program it... After the war, the Army asked all six ENIAC Programmers to continue their work -- no solider returning home from the battlefield could program ENIAC... Others made other pivotal contributions: Jean Bartik led the team that converted ENIAC to one of the world's first stored program computer and her best friend Betty Holberton joined Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and wrote critical new programming tools for UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer, including the C-10 instruction code (predecessor to programming languages). You can still find its original operating manual online. ("Do not open d-c fuse cabinet with the d-c power turned on. This not only exposes a person to voltage differences of around 1500 volts but the person may be burned by flying pieces of molten fuse wire in case a fuse should blow.") It performed calculations that helped design the world's first hydrogen bomb.

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More than 220 asylum seekers are being hosted in the city of Portland, Maine, where locals hope the new faces will help create a better future for everyone.

An assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University criticizes the argument that technology "is quickly displacing a large number of workers, and the pace will only increase as automation and other forms of artificial intelligence become more advanced," specifically calling out Universal Basic Income proponents Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and YCombinator Chairman Sam Altman: The problem is, there's no indication that automation is going to make human workers redundant anytime soon. Technologists probably tend to believe in automation-induced job loss because they're familiar with the inventions that are constantly forcing people to change what they do for a living. But even as these new technologies have been rolled out, the fraction of Americans with jobs has remained about the same over time. Meanwhile, evidence that automation causes job losses throughout the economy is slim... [Some studies] fail to say how many new jobs will be created in the process, so they don't give any picture of technology's overall impact on the labor market. Thus, when UBI proponents make the dubious claim that basic income is necessary to save people from the rise of the robots, they undermine their case. They also send the message that they think a huge percent of American workers are simply too useless to be gainfully employed in the future -- hardly an appealing message. The second dubious reason to support UBI is the idea that it can replace traditional forms of welfare spending, like food stamps and housing vouchers. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman supported a negative income tax for this reason, and modern-day libertarians often espouse this view as well. But there are reasons UBI will never be a one-size-fits-all solution. First, it's expensive. Giving all Americans $12,000 a year costs a lot more than giving money to poor people only. He ultimately calls UBI programs "an interesting idea worthy of more attention and more experiments," but argues that the current "flawed" justifications for UBI "serve to distract the public from the simplest, most reasonable case for UBI... [T[hey should simply emphasize the idea's simplicity and fairness."

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US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban confirm the next round of US-Taliban talks will begin in Doha on June 29.

Bill Gates "clearly hasn't got over his biggest mistake," writes Inc. columnist Chris Matyszczyk. Speaking at a recent VC firm event, Gates told the audience: The greatest mistake ever is... whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard phone platform -- non-Apple form -- phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win... There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M. "You see? He couldn't even utter the word Google," quips Inc's columnist. "That's how much it hurts him." The column also notes that Google "didn't create Android. It bought it in 2005," and "being open-source meant that Google could offer it to so many phone manufacturers around the world.... Would Microsoft have been so generous of spirit?"

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Government candidate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani wins 51.9 percent with nearly all votes counted, provisional results show.