Geek News

Little Planet Soyuz Engines blazing , a large rocket bids farewell to this little planet. Of course, the little planet is really planet Earth and the large rocket is a Soyuz-FG rocket. Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on June 6 it carried a Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft into orbit. On board were International Space Station Expedition 56-57 crew members Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos, Serena Aunon-Chancellor of NASA and Alexander Gerst of ESA. Their spacecraft successfully docked with humanity's orbiting outpost just two days later. The little planet projection is the digitally warped and stitched mosaic of images covering 360 by 180 degree s, captured during the 2018 Star Trek car expedition . June 15, 2018 via NASA https://ift.tt/2JQphs3 Manage this Applet ...

If you're going to create virtually unbreakable quantum networks , you need to create quantum entanglement so that particles, and thus pieces of data, are intertwined at long distances. There hasn't been a reliable way to make that happen, however, until now. Scientists at TU Delft have produced the first entanglement on demand -- that is, they can reliably trigger the quantum pairing effect and make it last long enough to be meaningful. The effect only worked across two nodes and a modest d istance of about 6.6 feet, but it raises the possibility of a quantum internet that's far more secure than what you see today. The breakthrough started with a new entanglement method that ensnares particles in diamond chips at 40 times per second -- about 1,000 times faster than before. Previous approaches were slow enough to lose the entanglement more quickly t...

Last year, Boeing announced the GoFly Prize , a new competition that will award one winner $1 million for a successful personal flying device prototype. It has to take off and land vertically, carry a human 20 miles without the need for refueling or recharging and be quiet, safe and compact, but otherwise, the design is completely up to those building it. Phase I of the competition just wrapped up and GoFly has announced the top 10 designs, each of which will be awarded $20,000. GoFly says over 600 innovators from more than 30 countries submitted designs for Phase I and 97 experts selected the top 10. The winning teams come from Latvia, the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Japan and their submissions include an incredibly wide range of designs. Aeroxo LV from Latvia describes its device as a "tilt rotor aerial vehicle type that combines VTOL capabilities of helico...

Google released its annual diversity report today, and among the data is a new section detailing attrition rates — that is, how often employees leave the company. And it points to a key problem that Google has in creating a more diverse and representative workforce: black and Latinx employees leave more often than white and Asian employees. That's particularly problematic, because black employees make up just 2.5 percent of Google's US workforce, and Latinx employees are just a point higher, at 3.6 percent. For comparison, the US Census Bureau says these groups make up 13.3 percent and 17.8 percent of the overall population (not including people who reported two or more races). White employees, meanwhile, make up 53.1 percent of Google's... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2LQV2lz ...

Moderate severity Lazy FP restore flaw affects Intel Core-based microprocessors. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2JCAxfH If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

After a judge ruled in favor of the acquisition , AT&T has officially swallowed up Time Warner. Now Warner Bros., HBO and Turner are a part of the company's media business, which is one of four segments: AT&T Communications provides mobile, broadband, video and other communications services to U.S.-based consumers and nearly 3.5 million companies – from the smallest business to nearly all the Fortune 1000 – with highly secure, smart solutions. Revenues from these services totaled more than $150 billion in 2017. AT&T's media business consists of HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. Together, these businesses had revenues of more than $31 billion in 2017. A new name for this business will be announced later. AT&T International provides mobile services in Mexico to consumers and businesses, plus pay-TV service across 11 countries in South America an...

AT&T has completed its acquisition of Time Warner, just two days after a federal judge ruled the merger could clear despite the objections of the Justice Department and just hours after the Justice Department said it would allow the deal to close . The $85 billion deal puts the many massive media properties owned by Time Warner — including HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN — under the ownership of one of America's largest internet, TV, and phone service providers. It creates a whole mess of potential conflicts of interest when it comes to content favoritism, with opponents of the deal drawing concern around AT&T's ability to promote its own shows and movies over those of other companies. AT&T initially signed a deal to buy Time Warner in October... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2tb7zsc ...

AI is becoming so common that it's almost boring. While we're seeing some surprising new projects using AI, including detecting movement through walls and predicting that Brazil will be the winner of this year's World Cup, other companies are using the tech for more pedestrian applications, like improving translation and photo retouching . Now, Microsoft has an AI-powered system that decides which Windows 10 devices should get an Update first. The company says that it is "seeing higher satisfaction numbers, fewer known issues, and lower support call volumes compared to previous Windows 10 releases." Microsoft piloted the program during last Fall's Creator's Update rollout, gathering data on the types of Windows 10 devices that had good update experiences. It then trained its AI model to recognize those types of devices and target them f...

Cast your memory back to the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election and remember the hubbub around then-candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. FBI director at the time James Comey didn't advise charges against Clinton, then reopened scrutiny in late October days before the election. Whether or not that converted fence-sitters into casting ballots for Trump, his campaign capitalized on the FBI's attention. But according to a report ( PDF ) by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, Comey himself used a personal Gmail account while operating as director of the agency after the election. The report criticized Comey for using his personal email account for unclassified FBI business, which is understandably inconsistent with DOJ policy, according to CNBC . "I wasn't do...

Naughty Dog's E3 trailer for The Last of Us: Part II gave us a good idea what combat as lead character Ellie would be like, but the story is still largely a mystery. But during a panel earlier this week, game director Neil Druckmann dropped a tantalizing hint about how the game might be structured. It sounds like it won't be the totally linear affair found in the first game. Instead, the narrative may move between two different times, much the way that Left Behind (a three-hour, Ellie-focused add-on to The Last of Us ) jumped between two points in time. Speaking at the E3 Coliseum on Tuesday, game director Neil Druckmann referenced Left Behind , saying that "we had two timelines that we were playing with [in Left Behind ] and that's something that's an intriguing way to tell a story." He then went on to drop the vaguest of details about ho...