Birds have a strong ability to learn and mimic sounds. So, Benn Jordan converted a PNG image into a spectrogram and then played the resulting sound to a starling, a bird known for its mimicking. The starling was able to copy the sound, thus demonstrating an ability to store data in its song. Let’s just Read more about Storing PNG image data in a bird’s song[…]
Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues. The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a Read more about Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in ‘near miss’ due to really atrocious UI[…]
Satirical news publication The Onion has bought Infowars, the media organisation headed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for an undisclosed price at a court-ordered auction. The Onion said that the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit Read more about The Onion buys Alex Jones’s Infowars at auction[…]
Police officers in Portland, Oregon, stopped a car Tuesday night when they noticed a bag inside that said “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. It, in fact, was – full of drugs: 79 blue fentanyl pills, three fake oxycodone tablets and 230g of methamphetamine, to be exact. […] Source: Oregon police find bag full Read more about Oregon police find bag full of drugs marked ‘definitely not a bag full of drugs’[…]
Businesses worldwide grappled with an ongoing major IT outage Friday, as financial services and doctors’ offices were disrupted, while some TV broadcasters went offline. Air travel has been hit particularly hard, with planes grounded, services delayed and airports issuing advice to passengers. The outage came as cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike experienced a major disruption early Friday Read more about So that Global Microsoft IT outage – turns out a Crowdstrike update borked your PC. Here’s some memes to make you feel better.[…]
Physicists may have found a solution for the rage-inducing tangles that crop up in everything from electronics cords to necklaces: to free a single thread from a tangle of many, you must shake it not too fast and not too slow but with just the right frequency. Ishant Tiwari at the Georgia Institute of Technology Read more about How to unsnarl a tangle of threads, according to physics[…]
At the beginning of February, SIDN was in the news after announcing that it wanted to outsource part of its services to Amazon Web Services, the American web giant. According to SIDN, the reason for the outsourcing was that implementation on its own servers had become too expensive and too labor-intensive. Van Eeten: ‘SIDN has Read more about ‘No one understands outsourcing the management of .nl domains to Amazon’[…]
The mysterious attacks began on July 11. “Strange beings,” locals said, visiting an isolated Indigenous community in rural Peru at night, harassing its inhabitants and attempting to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. […] News of the alleged extraterrestrial attackers quickly spread online as believers, skeptics, and internet sleuths around the world analyzed grainy videos posted by Read more about ‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Peruvian Village Are Actually Illegal Miners With Jetpacks[…]
Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the Read more about Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill[…]
[…] Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has weaponized computer generated voices. Known as “Torswats” on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling Read more about A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America[…]
[…] Jan Erik, sound muddled, he tells the caller he has already lost one million Swedish Krona (about £80,000) in trading scams. But the caller already knows this. And he knows it makes the pensioner a good target for a follow-up “recovery scam”. He tells Jan Erik that if he hands over his card details Read more about On the hunt for the businessmen behind a billion-dollar scam[…]
The Florence museum that houses Michelangelo’s statue of David has invited teachers and students from a Florida school to visit, after an uproar over an art lesson. The school’s principal quit after a complaint about a sixth-grade art class that included an image of the statue. A parent had complained the image was pornographic. Cecilie Read more about Italian art experts (and rest of world) astonished by David statue uproar in Florida[…]
At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile. There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with Read more about Dow said it was recycling Singaporean shoes. Reuters found them in Indonesia[…]
The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) has no board, no CEO, has sometimes been close to not being able to pay its staff, could fail, and other regional internet registries have therefore expressed interest in funding its ongoing activities, according to John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). Curran Read more about Africa’s internet registry could fail, warns head of ARIN – dodgy fellah scheming involved[…]
The U.K. press watchdog has launched an investigation into a British tabloid column by former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson that attracted around 25,100 complaints. On Thursday, the Independent Press Standards Organization confirmed it will probe the Dec. 17, 2022 article in The Sun where Clarkson wrote that Prince Harry was being “controlled” by Meghan Markle, and Read more about Jeremy Clarkson Meghan Markle Column to be Investigated by Regulator after tweeting self righteous idiots decide to cancel him[…]
Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct. In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF Read more about 3 Native Americans ask Apache foundation to change name, hope to cancel a culture bigger than Native Americans have ever been[…]
Nobody is immune to being scammed online—not even the people running the scams. Cybercriminals using hacking forums to buy software exploits and stolen login details keep falling for cons and are getting ripped off thousands of dollars at a time, a new analysis has revealed. And what’s more, when the criminals complain that they are being Read more about Scammers Are Scamming Other Scammers Out of Millions of Dollars[…]
Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It’s a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Read more about Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash[…]
On Monday, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, issued a decree [PDF, not secure] naming Snowden (#53), among others, as being granted the boon of Russian citizenship. […] While Snowden’s status as a whistleblower is disputed by the US government, the surveillance apparatus he exposed – the bulk collection of US phone records – Read more about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship[…]
[…] On July 31st, Étienne Klein, the director of France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, shared an image he claimed the JWST captured of Proxima Centauri, the nearest-known star to the sun. “It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope,” Klein told his more than 91,000 Twitter followers. “This level of detail… A Read more about Physicist pranks with James Webb Space Telescope photo of a chorizo sausage – some people really have no sense of humor any more[…]
This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours. It is inspired by the great Direkt Bahn Guru. The data is based off of this site, which sources it from the Deutsch Bahn. Hover your mouse over a station to see the isochrones from that Read more about map: How far can you go by train in 5h?[…]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in West Virginia vs. EPA in favor of plaintiffs who argued that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants—the country’s second-largest source of CO2 emissions—without input from Congress. The ruling almost completely disrupts any major plans to fight climate change Read more about Supreme Court Rules Environmental Protection Agency can’t protect Environment In West Virginia v EPA lawsuit[…]
Atlassian has published an account of what went wrong at the company to make the data of 400 customers vanish in a puff of cloudy vapor. And goodness, it makes for knuckle-chewing reading. The restoration of customer data is still ongoing. Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath wrote that approximately 45 percent of those afflicted had had Read more about Atlassian comes clean on script data-deleting 400 customers behind weeks long outage[…]
[…] OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it’s a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized. The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular Read more about More Than 80% of NFTs Created for Free on OpenSea Are Fraud or Spam, Company Says[…]
The High Court’s ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers’ stories in 2016. The question before the High Read more about Australia: Facebook Users Liable for Comments Under Their Posts[…]