Boston Dynamics' creation is starting to sniff out its role in the workforce: as a helpful canine that still sometimes needs you to hold its paw. From a report: This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market -- for a select few early adopters, at least. BD's people would be the first to tell you that they don't fully know what the hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites, sure. But Spot is so different than robots that have come before it that company execs are, in part, relying on customers to demonstrate how the machine might actually be useful. After a few months on the job, Spot is beginning to show how it'll fit in the workforce. BD's researchers have kept close tabs on the 75 or so Spots now working at places like construction companies and mining outfits. (Oh, and one's with MythBuster Adam Savage for the next year.) They're seeing hints of a new kind of cooperation between humans and machines, and even machines and other machines. Starting today, you can even customize Spot to your liking -- the software development kit is now publicly available on GitHub. The robot is not included, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two New York state senators proposed two bills last week to ban local municipalities and other government entities from using taxpayer money for paying ransomware demands. From a report: The first bill (S7246) was proposed by Republican NY Senator Phil Boyle on January 14. The second bill (S7289) was introduced by Democrat NY Senator David Carlucci, two days later, on January 16. Both bills are under discussion in committee, and is unclear which will move forward to a vote on the Senate floor. Both S7246 and S7289 have similar texts. The only difference between the two is that S7246 also proposes the creation of a state fund to help local municipalities improve their cyber-security posture. "The Cyber Security Enhancement Fund that will make available grants and financial assistance to villages, towns, and cities with a population of one million or less for the purpose of upgrading the cyber security of their local government," the text of the S746 bill reads.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it's undeniably hard to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making the problem harder to solve, even though it should have learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, when the government admitted to underreporting cases in the initial stages. Nearly 800 people died in that epidemic, which saw desperate people emptying shops for Chinese herbal medicines and vinegar that would turn out to be ineffective. That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate information and rumors because of a vacuum in top-down communication. The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China's political system made "conceal as many as possible and keep it at the local level" a natural immediate response to a crisis like this. That approach to information might work on other kinds of issues, but not when it comes to a potential epidemic. Trying to control information in that case becomes a kind of shackle in the face of something that can progress and change swiftly beyond one's control. Of course, there is one thing that's different than 17 years ago: WeChat. A tool connecting more than a billion users in China should be one the government can use to help keep the public up-to-date, and to debunk false information. Yet it too has become a hotbed for both rumors and information suppression amid China's broader regime of online censorship honed over the past decade. Already, a focus of social media discussion about the current virus crisis has been on how hard it's been to get correct information, and whether officials were slow to respond in the early stages, at least in Wuhan. While some international public health experts have commended China's information sharing as superior to 2003 in the face of a quickly evolving situation, others have expressed doubt that the country is being as transparent as it should be.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a great Bloomberg ad about Trump and the military. If the Dems had run ads like this in 2016, Trump would be a Fox News analyst today, like Sarah Palin.

Just days after EA announced that its mobile Tetris games will shut down on April 21st, new Tetris developer N3twork released an officially licensed version of the popular puzzle game for both Android and iOS. From a report: The new N3twork app isn't the 100-player Tetris Royale app that the developer is also working on; rather, it's an extremely basic mobile Tetris game. "We're launching Tetris with a traditional solo gameplay mode, but we want fans to know that we've got so much more in store for them, and this is just the foundation of an incredible Tetris app experience we're building at N3twork," commented CEO Neil Young. Unlike EA's old app, there's a single mode (for classic Tetris) and a handful of alternative skins. There are also ads, although a single-time $4.99 purchase will remove those. It's not exactly a groundbreaking iteration of the series, but if you just want to play some Tetris on your commute, it'll get the job done.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shift from radar to GPS should make tracking faster and more accurate, allowing more planes in the air. From a report: Since World War II, air-traffic controllers have used radar to keep track of aircraft. But as of Jan. 1, most planes and helicopters flying in the U.S. must be equipped with transponders that allow their movements to be traced with GPS coordinates. The deadline caused a flurry of upgrades last year as operators who hadn't yet complied with the mandate rushed to equip their aircraft in time. Now, more than 100,000 commercial and general aviation aircraft have the transponders, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, including nearly all commercial aircraft and an estimated 60% of general aviation aircraft that need it. "If you're flying an antique plane in the middle of Ohio, you don't have to have it," said John Zimmerman, vice president of Sporty's Pilot Shop, an Ohio retailer and flight school. The U.S. controls 29.4 million square miles of airspace, including all of the U.S., large portions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The FAA mandate primarily applies to Class A airspace, which is 18,000 feet or more above sea level; Class B airspace, the areas surrounding the nation's busiest airports; Class C airspace, the areas around smaller regional airports; and above 10,000 feet in Class E, the most common airspace. LaGuardia Airport in New York is Class B. Richmond International Airport in Virginia is Class C.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We, as a world, should build one great venue for summer olympics and one for winter. Why? Mostly symbolic. To say to the world, to ourselves, decisively, that we can work together, and compromise, for the benefit of humanity and the planet.

Think about it this way, we don't build a new United Nations every four years.

Further, no more spectacular displays of carbon consumption. Those made sense 127 years ago, at the dawn of electricity tech. Now it's rubbing salt in the wound. And it makes clear that we can and will sacrifice for our survival.

Specifically, no more Christmas trees. And turn down the lights in Times Square. You can't air condition the outdoors. (In NYC amazingly, there are places that do.)

Symbolism first, change the way people think, shock people out of their sense of normalcy, then rebuild our civilization around the new low-carbon-emission ethos. You can tell your children and grandchildren that you remember a day when we built a new temporary city every two years for a two week athletic competition, and never used it again.

Google's latest design change to its search results received blowback from some who said it blurred the lines between search ads and regular search results. On Friday, Google responded, saying it will be experimenting with different designs, some that will not include the icons that make ads look similar to those organic search results. From a report: As part of a recent redesign to desktop search results, the company made paid links look more like the unpaid search results users see. The word "Ad" in bold text appears next to the advertisements, which typically appear as the first few results in a search and are therefore more likely to be clicked on and generate ad revenue for Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My least favorite thing is people explaining why they unsub from your feed. I don't care. I have a motto. "Don't slam the door on the way out." That way you know you really are going in peace, vs the passive-aggressive control freakery you're actually practicing.

Credit-scoring company Fair Isaac is making changes that will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Changes in how the most widely used credit score in the U.S. is calculated will likely make it harder for many Americans to get loans. Fair Isaac, creator of FICO scores, will soon start scoring consumers with rising debt levels and those who fall behind on loan payments more harshly. It will also flag certain consumers who sign up for personal loans, a category of unsecured debt that has surged in recent years. The changes will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks, the company says. Consumers with already-high FICO scores of about 680 or higher who continue to manage loans well will likely get a higher score than under previous FICO versions. Those with already-low scores below 600 who continue to miss payments or accumulate other black marks will experience bigger score declines than under previous models. Millions of consumers could see their scores rise or fall as a result of the changes, the company said. The changes are an about-face from recent years, when FICO and credit-reporting companies made changes that helped increase scores for some consumers, such as removing some negative information, including civil judgments, from credit reports. Credit scoring and reporting companies also recently started factoring in such information as bank account balances and utilities payments to help give consumers with limited credit histories a better shot at getting loans. Those recent moves can help revenue-hungry lenders identify more creditworthy consumers and make it easier for them to be approved for loans. Average FICO scores have been rising steadily following some of these changes and an improving economy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Krebs: If you're running a business online, few things can be as disruptive or destructive to your brand as someone stealing your company's domain name and doing whatever they wish with it. Even so, most major Web site owners aren't taking full advantage of the security tools available to protect their domains from being hijacked. Here's the story of one recent victim who was doing almost everything possible to avoid such a situation and still had a key domain stolen by scammers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

couchslug writes: Potential hardware damage alert. As reported by Notebookcheck and later posted to a Lenovo support page, the USB-C firmware issue affects more than a dozen ThinkPad models including the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (5th Gen to 7th Gen), X1 Yoga (2nd Gen to 4th Gen), and P-series ThinkPads. It turns out that a firmware update issued in August 2019 corrupted the software controlling the port. " couchslug adds: Anyone with more information on this expensive problem please post. It's already taken out many system boards. The problem affects enough models that class action suit may be appropriate because failures due to the defect have occurred outside the warranty window. Users on Reddit suggest the situation is even worse. The "critical firmware update" is only a mitigation for the hardware failure -- keeping the machine going until the warranty expires." CNET adds: If your laptop is one of the models affected, Lenovo recommends to immediately update your system with new driver and firmware packages that are designed to resolve any USB-C problem. If the updates don't work out, Lenovo urges ThinkPad owners to reach out to Technical Support.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Commerce Department's efforts to tighten the noose on Huawei Technologies Co. is facing a formidable obstacle: the Pentagon. From a report:Commerce officials have withdrawn proposed regulations making it harder for U.S. companies to sell to Huawei [the link may be paywalled] from their overseas facilities following objections from the Defense Department as well as the Treasury Department, people familiar with the matter told WSJ. The Pentagon is concerned that if U.S. companies can't continue to ship to Huawei, they will lose a key source of revenue -- depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge, the people said. The Treasury Department wanted to make sure that Secretary Steven Mnuchin had a chance to weigh in, said one of the people. Cabinet officials are expected to meet on Huawei and other China issues in the coming weeks. The splits within the Trump administration on how to deal with Huawei show the difficulty of confronting China on technology without harming U.S. companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

A private company tracing methane emissions is building a global map of the gas in Earth's atmosphere.