Geek News

The #ReleaseTheMemo social media campaign swelled last week as many, including Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, called for the memo to be released to the public. Now, two members of Congress are asking Twitter and Facebook to look into a potential Russian role in the viral spread of the hashtag campaign. The memo in question is one written by Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican on the House Intelligence committee, that alleges the intelligence community committed abuses that impact the president. The memo claims to be based on top secret intelligence shared to a small group of Congressional leaders by the FBI. However, Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat on the committee who was also present at the meeting with the FBI, has said that the memo is "a misleading set of talking points attacking the FBI." Democrats have said that the memo is only meant to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into collusion between the Trump administration and Rus...

Today, Tesla announced a new compensation structor for its superstar CEO Elon Musk. It's a 10-year plan that involves achieving market and operational milestones to increase Tesla's values. This isn't about Musk getting even more money, though that's certainly important. It's that he's receiving no guaranteed compensation (no salary, in other words) -- everything is incentive based. And to maximize his earnings, he has to stay with Tesla for the next 10 years and ensure that the company reaches certain goals. The milestones are divided into market cap and operational milestones. The first market cap goal involves increasing the market value of the company's outstanding shares by $100 billion. The following 11 milestones involve additional increases of $50 billion each, for a total of $650 billion. The operational milestones are a series of escalating targets designed to maximize Tesla's market cap growth. The company must meet all these goals in orde...

Today, Apple finally announced a shipping date for its smart speaker, the HomePod. And something about the launch of this Apple music device reminds me of the launch of that other Apple music device, the iPod. “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame,” said Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda on Slashdot on October 1st, 2001 . (The Nomad, if you’re wondering, was a pre-iPod MP3 player that was the size and shape of a Sony Discman in its early incarnations. So.) At the time, Slashdot was the most important online community for talking about tech. And at the time, tech news meant for discussion (a lot of Linux) was posted with brief news snippets submitted by readers, snarky one-liners from the people who posted, and even snarkier tags. The iPod came... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2n4lfTA"

A man at an electronics store in China decided to give a smartphone battery his own litmus test by biting it. The battery ruptured and caused a small explosion. The spectacle, captured by the store’s CCTV security cameras, was uploaded to Miaopai , a Chinese video sharing platform similar to the now-defunct Vine. It has since garnered 4.69 million views. According to Taiwan News , the man was in the store on January 19th to replace his iPhone battery. It’s not clear which store he was in, but the side of the shop has big characters that read “Professional screen change.” The man began to look closely at the battery and, to check if it was real, decided to bite down on it, triggering the explosion. Despite the fact that the blast was inches... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2n4o4UQ"

Google has announced that it’s now selling audiobooks on the Google Play Store, filling out its offerings of movies, music, TV, and ebooks. The new titles are available on Android, iOS, and the web. They’re also available via the Google Assistant, the company’s biggest product push right now , meaning you can play an audiobook on your home smart speaker, continue it in your car, and keep listening on your phone. To go along with the launch, Google is offering very deep discounts on lots of audiobook titles. Ready Player One is $6.99, Fire and Fury is $8.99, and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is $7.77. (Don’t ask why it’s that nonstandard price, or Neil deGrasse Tyson will probably Twittersplain it to you.) Google is also offering 50... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2n4NOjc"

The Google Play Store has sold just about every media type for years now, but there's one more category the company is getting into as of today: audiobooks. As a leaked image revealed a few days ago, audiobooks are now on sale from Google Play in 45 countries and nine languages. As with most other Google services, audiobooks are available on pretty much any device you would want to use: Android, iOS, the web and Google Home speakers. To play a book on your phone, you'll need to download the Google Play Books app, which until now has focused on text-only options. If you're a fan of using the Google Assistant, you can simply say "Hey Google, read my book" and your phone or speaker will continue reading the most recent book you were listening to. And your location in the book will sync across devices, so you won't have to try and find your place when listening across multiple devices. Aside from the expected ubiquity across devices and platforms, audiobooks ...

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Staxel is Now Available on Steam Early Access! Grow your farm, meet the villagers, and join your friends online in building your world. via Steam RSS News Feed "http://ift.tt/2rt6Ogs"

IBM's Computational Psychiatry and Neuroimaging research team has been working on a way to use machine learning to predict the risk of developing psychosis and it just published a second study that shows AI might be a valuable tool when it comes to mental health assessment . Building off of work published in 2015 , the team used AI to analyze the speech patterns of 59 individuals who had participated in a separate study . Transcripts of an interview the participants took part in were broken down into parts of speech and were scored on how coherent the sentences were. Then, the machine learning model determined, based on those speech patterns, who was at risk of developing psychosis and who wasn't. Of those participants, 19 developed a psychotic disorder within two years while 40 did not and the model was able to predict that with 83 percent accuracy. It was also able to differentiate speech patterns of patients who had recently developed psychosis from those of healthy pati...

SOS is Now Available on Steam Early Access! SOS is an interactive game show where 16 entertaining performers are dropped onto La Cuna Island with one simple goal – get off La Cuna Island. Players must find a relic, signal for extraction, and grab a spot on the rescue chopper while out-thinking opponents and fending off monster hordes. Survivors will be rewarded with fame and fortune, not to mention their lives. via Steam RSS News Feed "http://ift.tt/2n3DVSB"

Tesla has announced a new compensation plan for Elon Musk: he’ll only get paid if he reaches certain exorbitant milestones, including a Tesla market valuation of $650 billion. The company’s market valuation goals start at $100 billion and go up in $50 billion increments. (They climb to $150 billion, and so on until the $650 billion mark.) Tesla has a dozen market valuation goals and a dozen revenue and adjusted profit targets. The profit goals are designed to ensure that the company is “also executing well on both a top-line and bottom-line basis” as the company grows in valuation. For hitting these goals, Musk would receive 1.69 million shares of the company (about 1 percent). If Tesla were valued at $650 billion, that would make it... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2F51FgK"

When skiers and snowboarders prepare for a competition, they often have incredibly limited access to their race routes ahead of time. But the US ski and snowboard team is doing things a little differently than it has in the past, using VR to review routes multiple times before competing. It's working with a company called STRIVR , which has developed VR training programs for professional sports teams , college sports teams and even companies like Walmart, Visa and Lowe's. Now, STRIVR is helping US Ski & Snowboard prepare for competitions like the World Cup and the upcoming Olympic Games by letting the team relive particular routes in VR. "One of the rules of thumb I use for VR is that the technology is especially useful for teachable moments that are rare in the physical world. Getting mere minutes to prepare on the ski race course is the definition of rare," Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, said in a state...

Today, the security firm Checkmarx released troubling information about two vulnerabilities within Tinder , the popular dating app. The issues are present in both the iOS and Android app and allow a user on the same network to monitor what a person is doing on Tinder. Additionally, an attacker could control the pictures a user sees on Tinder; it's possible to swap them out for malicious content. It's important to note that what a hacker could do through these flaws is relatively narrow, but it does allow a person to gain access to sensitive personal information. The issue is due to a lack of HTTPS encryption on photos; other elements of the app that do require this kind of encryption still leaked enough information to be able to monitor a user's actions. In order to exploit these vulnerabilities, Checkmarx built a tool called TinderDrift. Once it was connected to the same network of someone using Tinder, the team was able to intercept images sent without HTTPS. Addition...

Last week, right-wing circles were buzzing over a secret memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), ostensibly detailing corruption in FBI surveillance practices. It’s unclear how much is in the memo itself — even the FBI hasn’t seen it — but it didn’t stop skeptics from rallying behind the cause, launching #releasethememo into trending topics on both Twitter and Facebook. Now, that campaign has come under investigation for Russian interference. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey , Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) called for Twitter and Facebook to conduct an investigation into whether Russian troll accounts had fueled the rise of the hashtag as part of a broader campaign. The Alliance for Securing... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2BmGVPl"