An Anonymous Coward writes:Do you want your government tracking you by your mobile phone in the fight against COVID-19? In Australia members of Parliament have refused to install the COVID Trace app to track COVID-19 transmission. The code for the app, due to be released in a few weeks, will be open sourced and the government promises to not keep any data longer than required for the current pandemic emergency.After the complete screwup of the last census, the debacle that is eHealth, data leakage from credit card transactions, and dismal state of privacy today how can anyone have any confidence in this type of 'help'?Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
lentilla writes:The Australian federal government has decided to force Internetgiants to pay for content they collect from local publishers.Treasurer Mr Frydenberg says "It's only fair that those that generatecontent get paid for it".According to thisarticle appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald: 'The ACCC[Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] will be asked todraft a new industry approach for consultation in July with adefinition of the "news content" to be covered by the mandatory code,with the expectation the search and social media giants will have topay for content.'Students of history will recall that German publishers triedsomething similar in 2013.Google responded by removing links to these articles rather than paythe publishers for the privilege of linking. The result:"visitors from web search fell 40 percent; from Google News, they fell80 percent". Two weeks laterand the group of publishers decided to give search engines a freelicence to index their content.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
The Mighty Buzzard writes:So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
An Anonymous Coward writes:Smart toilet gadget recognises users by their 'anal print' and analyses deposits to detect early warning signs of cancer, heart disease and diabetes
martyb writes:With all of the Pandemic precautions that have been put into effect, many people are turning to "free" on-line conferencing services. As the saying goes, "If you are not paying for the service, you are the product". And, even if paid for (by yourself or by an employer), that does not mean freedom from having your information mined for advertising or other purposes.I've not used any of the following, so please forgive me if I got the product names incorrect. Here are some of the big "free" services that I've seen mentioned: Zoom (whose security issues have been cited many times on SoylentNews), Apple (Group Facetime), Google (Hangouts), Facebook (Facebook Live) and Microsoft (Teams).I suspect many Soylentils have now acquired some experience with on-line conferencing. I am hoping to draw upon your experience. Better still, I would love to see development and proliferation of alternatives to the "Big Names". Solutions that are self-hosted and as free as reasonably possible from the prying eyes of the big, data-warehousing corporations. Open source — free as in beer and libre — would be good, tooRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
[Ed Note: I debated whether or not to run this submission. This could be perceived as a relatively innocuous change. But what's next? Back in 1982 there was a huge outcry when National Geographic "moved" the Great Pyramids closer together. Back then, technological advances increased the ease by which images couldbe manipulated without detection. Technology has continued marching forward. Now, the same manipulations are starting to appear with video. What's next? What are the limits. Where does it end? I saw an opportunity for discussion and decided to run the story.]An Anonymous Coward writes:With great digital platforms comes great digital enhancements? Following on from changes to Star Wars no one asked for (Who shot first?) comes Disney+ hilariously censors nudity in classic movie Splash:
We received three different submissions pertaining to the effects of smoking on COVID-19. One study suggests that those who smoke have a reduced likelihood of hospitalization. The comingling of separate data for male and female patients and analysis based on that data seems unusual to me. The second report is not restricted to hospitalizations, but only to those who tested positive for the virus. Their results also suggested a lessened number of self-identified smokers than smoking rates in the general public would suggest. The third and final story submission introduced vaping to the discussion, and comes to the opposite conclusion in suggesting that smoking or vaping may increase the risk of contracting COVID-19.Confounding these analyses is that all reports of smoking are self-reported. I can well imagine if someone had tried to quit smoking, and had convinced their spouse they had indeed stayed stopped, they would be reluctant to reveal in their spouse's presence that they were a smoker. If anything, though, would that not run counter to the possibility of a protective effect? As with most things pertaining to the virus, it is likely too early to tell for certain, but it does add another dimension to the discussion. Assuming that smoking does have a preventative effect, what could be the cause? Increased residue in the lungs makes it harder for the virus to latch onto the lung's cells and infect? Could it be that chemicals in the smoke serve to impair the virus's ability to survive in the lungs and cause an infection?Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
An Anonymous Coward writes:SMR hard drive encoding is generally higher density but slower than traditional perpendicular recording.Seagate 'submarines' SMR into 3 Barracuda drives and a Desktop HDD – Blocks and Files
bradley13 writes:Stephen Wolfram thinks he may have found the theory that unifies physics: it's basically automata theory. According to his theory, the universe is basically an automaton running a simple set of computational rules. The link leads to his layman's summary of the work.Even if this isn't how things work, it lends a completely new perspective: based on a relatively simple analysis of his idea, he derives the basics of relativity and quantum mechanics. His article makes for a mind-bending and fascinating read, but it's already a summary, and trying to do a summary of a summary here makes little sense. If you're into physics, mathematics or cosmology, have a look!Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
martyb writes:It was before I was scheduled to have my wisdom teeth extracted, when my dad suggested I "should prepare by staying up late and getting some good books to read because afterwards all I'll want to do is sleep or read." I stopped by the bookstore and looking around came upon Dune. It had a couple sequels and seemed to be well recommended, so I bought all three. It was the weekend with the surgery scheduled for Monday. I made the mistake of reading the dust cover and before I knew it, had finished reading the first book before having the operation!With all the stories on the COVID-19 virus, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the first half of Dune is being newly brought to the screen. Vanity Fair presents an exclusive first glimpse into its actors, history, and production. Though the film is currently scheduled for release on December 18, 2020 I thought others might like a little distraction, as well. If so, read on!Necessarily, there will be spoilers. So, if by chance you're unfamiliar with the story, consider yourself warned and stop here.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Oracle's April 2020 Critical Patch Update Brings 397 Security Fixesupstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:Oracle's April 2020 Critical Patch Update Brings 397 Security Fixes:
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