wirelessduck writes:Visionary tech pioneer and philanthropist Dame Stephanie Shirley has died at the age of 91.The boundary-breaking entrepreneur arrived in London at the age of five, just weeks before the outbreak of World War Two, and went on to become a computer industry and women's rights pioneer in the 1950s and 1960s.She founded the software company Freelance Programmers in 1962, which shook up the tech industry by almost exclusively hiring women, and in later life donated almost 70m to help those with autism and to IT projects.She was very smart and truly formidable, even adopting the name "Steve" to help her in a male-dominated tech world.She died on 9 August, her family said in an Instagram post on Monday.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
fliptop writes:Americans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit's Chaotic UK Age Verification RolloutAge verification has officially arrived in the UK thanks to the Online Safety Act (OSA), a UK law requiring online platforms to check that all UK-based users are at least eighteen years old before allowing them to access broad categories of "harmful" content that go far beyond graphic sexual content. EFF has extensively criticized the OSA for eroding privacy, chilling speech, and undermining the safety of the children it aims to protect. Now that it's gone into effect, these countless problems have begun to reveal themselves, and the absurd, disastrous outcome illustrates why we must work to avoid this age-verified future at all costs:
mcgrew writes:James Lovell, one of the original Apollo astronauts in the infant NASA under President Eisenhower, died yesterday (August 9) at age 97. And here I thought outer space was supposed to be bad for you!He flew on Gemini 7 and 12. Lovell, along with Commander Frank Borman and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders, were the first people to ever orbit the moon. Commander Lovell was to return to the moon, slated to walk on it this time on Apollo 13, but an oxygen tank exploded. They were incredibly lucky to return alive. It was chronicled in Lovell's book Lost Moon (with co-writer Jeffery Kruger) and the "based on a true story" movie Apollo 13.The mishap happened a couple weeks after my eighteenth birthday. The news of the accident and their miraculous news outdid all other news, even the Vietnam war and the protests against it.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
jelizondo writes:The BBC is running a very interesting story about Perrier and other "natural" waters not being quite what they claim to be. While some might see it as only a technicality on what "natural" means, some aspects of it point to larger, and more frightening problems:
fliptop writes:China's biggest solar firms shed nearly one-third of their workforces last year, company filings show, as one of the industries hand-picked by Beijing to drive economic growth grapples with falling prices and steep losses:
canopic jug writes:Some billing changes caused AWS to delete the entirety of developer Seuros' account rather than roll back to the old billing account on record. He has written an annotated timeline and analysis of how AWS came to not just delete a 10-year old, paid up account without warning but also give him quite a run around.
fliptop writes:Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most potent force multipliers the criminal underground has ever seen. Generative models that write immaculate prose, mimic voices, and chain exploits together have lowered the cost of sophisticated attacks to almost nothing:
hubie writes:Seventeenth-century science was so competitive that Christiaan Huygens used a cipher to conceal his Saturn observations when sharing them with interlocutors:
An Anonymous Coward writes:Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) In Person and Virtual Tickets Being SoldHackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 16 is scheduled for August 15-17 2025. In Person as well as Virtual tickets are on sale now.
fliptop writes:This week, an app for women called "Tea" became the #1 downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Unfortunately for the women, the app also required them to give the developer a picture of their ID and location details for verification. Today, someone hacked it and put nearly 60 gigabytes of private data on 4chan: