Dorian is forecast to be near hurricane strength as it moves towards Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Dorian is forecast to be near hurricane strength as it moves towards Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Wi-Fi 6, the consumer-friendly new name for the tech standard actually called 802.11ax, won't just boost data-transfer speeds -- though it'll do that, by a factor of three or so. It'll also reach into corners of our house farther away from network gear, better handle the crush of people at airports and stadiums, and sidestep interference from your neighbors' noisy network. On your phone or laptop, it should save your battery life, too. From a report: No wonder wireless chip designer Qualcomm is betting big on Wi-Fi 6. The company on Tuesday showed off a quartet of processors that'll bring Wi-Fi 6 to a new range of network equipment -- and a number of partnerships designed to telegraph its clout with the technology. "Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and widely accepted," said Rahul Patel, leader of Qualcomm's Wi-Fi chip division in an exclusive interview with CNET ahead of Qualcomm's Wi-Fi event. But with more devices in our houses, and activities like gaming and streaming video putting new demands on networks, there's a network traffic jam, he said. "Cord cutting is real. What was typically one TV in the average home is now five or six different screens," Patel said. "There's a tremendous amount of content sourced through the home that wasn't before. There's a congestion problem." One of Wi-Fi 6's biggest advances is OFDMA -- orthogonal frequency division multiple access, if you must know -- an efficiency-boosting technology purloined from mobile networks. Another is MU MIMO, short for multiple user, multiple input, multiple output. And then there's 1024 QAM -- quadrature amplitude modulation -- which bumps up data rates by 30%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indigenous groups decry Brazilian government's policy towards land demarcation and exploration of their territory.

Tanzanian and Burundian officials announce deal but UNHCR says Burundi conditions are not conducive to promote returns.

In blocking the law as it plays out in court, judge says the state's legislation will likely be found unconstitutional.

Viorica Dancila's Social Democrats-led government loses majority after junior coalition partner ALDE withdraws backing.

Countries agree to impose a near-total ban on sending African elephants captured from the wild to zoos.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a plan to move the country's capital from Jakarta to a new location in Borneo. The reason? Jakarta is bursting at the seams -- and sinking. Different sections of the city -- home to 10 million people within an urban area of 30 million -- are subsiding at different rates, but most fall in the range of 3 to 10 centimeters every year. Over the years, that has added up to as much as four meters of surface elevation change. This has wreaked havoc on building foundations and other infrastructure. And as Jakarta sits on the coast, where a number of small rivers meet the sea, the flooding hazard is also real. (The fact that sea level is rising doesn't help.) That includes high-tide seawater flooding but also stormwater flooding as rain captured by the sprawling city's pavement struggles to drain seaward. Indonesia's plan is to start a new capital city in an undeveloped portion of the East Kalimantan province of Borneo. Reuters reports that President Widodo's goal is to begin relocating the 1.5 million civil servants working in Jakarta in 2024 -- an endeavor that would cost around US$33 billion overall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a plan to move the country's capital from Jakarta to a new location in Borneo. The reason? Jakarta is bursting at the seams -- and sinking. Different sections of the city -- home to 10 million people within an urban area of 30 million -- are subsiding at different rates, but most fall in the range of 3 to 10 centimeters every year. Over the years, that has added up to as much as four meters of surface elevation change. This has wreaked havoc on building foundations and other infrastructure. And as Jakarta sits on the coast, where a number of small rivers meet the sea, the flooding hazard is also real. (The fact that sea level is rising doesn't help.) That includes high-tide seawater flooding but also stormwater flooding as rain captured by the sprawling city's pavement struggles to drain seaward. Indonesia's plan is to start a new capital city in an undeveloped portion of the East Kalimantan province of Borneo. Reuters reports that President Widodo's goal is to begin relocating the 1.5 million civil servants working in Jakarta in 2024 -- an endeavor that would cost around US$33 billion overall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts. From a report: It's a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same streets and patronizing the same coffee shops and generally making it easy for a simulation, should one exist, to anticipate where you will be at any given time. Randonauts hope to use this tedium to their advantage, by introducing unpredictability. They argue that by devising methods that force us to diverge from our daily routines and instead send us to truly random locations we'd otherwise never think twice about, it just might be possible to cross over into somebody else's reality. "New information and causality can pull you out of the filter-bubble and change your life," writes The Fatum Project, the online team responsible for the technological and philosophical framework of the movement. Even if you don't buy into the dense thicket of theoretical quantum physics underpinning the logic of it all, going on a Randonaut-style adventure can be a lovely way to spend an afternoon. According to the The Fatum Project, there's hard science behind all this. Building on research conducted by Princeton University's Engineering Anomalies Research Lab into whether human thought could influence real-world events, they hope that Randonauts will be able to leave their "reality tunnels" and discover new contexts, appreciate daily life in fresh ways, or even venture into parallel iterations of their own realities. Getting started is easy. Log into the Telegram messaging app and send the command "/getattractor" along with your location to @shangrila_bot (formerly, you could also message @Randonaut_bot). The bot will plot out thousands of nearby geolocation points using a quantum random number generator, and spit out the area with the highest concentration of points near you. Conversely, if computer-determined desolation is more your style, you can send the command "/getvoid" and through a similar process, the bot will send you a location where there are no randomly plotted points. On Reddit, Randonauts have reported finding things like an upside-down airplane; a llama, standing totally still; three identical black cats; a family of horses in a public park; and a bird that also refused to move. Under the auspices of "/getvoid," users have reported finding derelict locales, creepy signage, and other marks of decay. Think of it as geocaching by way of Marianne Williamson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Court of Human Rights orders Moscow to pay Sergei Magnitsky's widow and mother almost $38,000 in damages.

As Israel prepares for its second election of the year, Palestinian parties reunite in a bid to boost turnout.

Rights group says Beirut deported nearly 2,500 Syrians in 'a clear violation of Lebanon's non-refoulement obligation'.

Kenya is conducting yet another population count, which is expected to shift political boundaries and shape elections.