Geek News

If you're attending Saint Louis University this semester, you'll find more in your dorm room than the usual tiny furnishings. The school has unveiled plans to provide all 2,300 student residences on campus (both dorms and apartments) with Echo Dots by the time classes begin in late August. To no one's surprise, they're not just there for asking about the weather. They'll have access to an SLU Alexa skill that provides answers to "more than 100" common questions, whether it's the location of a building, event timing or library hours. The university said it was the first such institution to put smart speakers in every residence. Other schools either placed them only in specific living spaces (say, rec areas) or only made them available on request. These Echos don't carry an extra cost. SLU promises that it didn't hike t...

Parker vs Perseid The brief flash of a bright Perseid meteor streaks across the upper right in this composited series of exposures made early Sunday morning near the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Set up about two miles from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the photographer also captured the four minute long trail of a Delta IV Heavy rocket carrying the Parker Solar Probe into the dark morning sky. Perseid meteors aren't slow. The grains of dust from periodic comet Swift-Tuttle vaporize as they plow through Earth's upper atmosphere at about 60 kilometers per second (133,000 mph). On its way to seven gravity-assist flybys of Venus over its seven year mission, the Parker Solar Probe's closest approach to the Sun will steadily decrease, finally reaching a distance of 6.1 million kilometers (3.8 million miles). That's about 1/8 th...

The employee Tesla is suing for theft of proprietary information has tweeted photos and other details, perhaps in an attempt to back up some of the claims he made against the automaker. Two of the photos Martin Tripp has tweeted out show what he says are punctured battery cells used in Model 3 vehicles before and after they're "reworked." Tripp has also released a lengthy list of Vehicle Identity Numbers. He says the cars in the list use punctured, dented or damaged battery modules. Here's what many of your M3 modules look like before and after, because they are generally reworked! Aren't they beautiful? pic.twitter.com/QyoM0K2ozf — Martin Tripp (@trippedover) August 15, 2018 Are any of these VIN's YOUR car? If so, you have a module(s) that IS punctured/dented/damaged. #TSLA #TSLAQ @elonmusk (Subsidy Fraud-Boy) pic.twitter....

A typical Overwatch match is hectic and fast-paced. You can't exactly consult strategy guides in the middle of a manic team fight to figure out the best course of action, so you've probably had to rely on your own experience and knowledge of the game. Your Overwatch decision making might be about to get a boost though, as an AI analytics service called Visor could help you improve at the team-based shooter by analyzing what's happening in real time and providing in-game contextual tips. The service is now in open beta and Visor just raised $4.7 million in a Series A round to spur its growth -- there will be support for more games down the line, for instance. The app isn't really geared towards helping Overwatch League pros sharpen their skills. Instead, its creators told VentureBeat they hope players at all skill levels can use it to improve, one...

It's not just sitting politicians that have faced cyberattacks ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Former California congressional primary candidate Dr. Hans Keirstead has reported to Rolling Stone that his campaign faced hacking attempts for roughly a year, starting in August 2017. They began with phishing emails sent to Keirstead's address at his biomedical company in a briefly successful attempt to obtain his login details. By December, the intruders started direct attempts to hack Keirstead's campaign, including over 130,000 "brute force" login attempts, attempts to hijack his Twitter account and short-lived hacks against his company. Campaign manager Kyle Quinn-Quesada didn't belive the hacks affected the primary results, where Keirstead placed a close third. The manager also claimed that Keirstead's problems weren't uni...

Both adult and kid hackers demonstrated at DEF CON how the hackable voting machine may be the least of our worries in the 2018 elections. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2KW7G1I If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

A new side-channel speculative execution vulnerability takes aim at a different part of the CPU architecture than similar vulnerabilities that came before it. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2MkNpZd If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

In the months leading up to the US midterm elections, the big online sites that inadvertently hosted the worst manipulation back in 2016, like Facebook and Twitter , have adopted new advertising policies to enforce transparency. So has Google , which has fo llowed Facebook in preparing another resource for the public: An archive of ads. Today, the company published a database of all the US political advertisements that have appeared on its platforms. Called the Ad Library , it serves as a living archive with lots of search functions, which range from the general (by state, ad spend, impression volume) to the specific (top advertiser, top keyword, etc). Per the site's FAQ , the database will be updated every Tuesday to include more advertisements; Its timeline, however, doesn't track before May 31st, 2018, so campaigns spanning before then will list that as ...

Science The change between 2011 and 2018 is stark. Over the last few years, fracking operations have gotten more efficient at removing oil and natural gas from the ground—this according to a new study published today in… via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2PaqbTn"

Technology Capturing thrill seekers through the ages. Photographing people on roller coasters has existed almost as long as the rides themselves. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2PagkNs"

US entrepreneur and cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin is suing AT&T for negligence and fraud that he claims resulted in millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency tokens being stolen from his account. Terpin says AT&T was his mobile carrier when criminals accessed his cellphone account by carrying out SIM swap fraud. They then stole the tokens and allegedly transferred his account to an international criminal gang. Terpin is suing for the $23.8 million and an additional $200 million in punitive damages. AT&T told Reuters in a statement that it disputed these allegations. SIM hijacking occurs when a phone number is transferred to a different SIM card than the account owner's without authorization or approval. Having access to a... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2w8xPFk ...

T-Mobile has one of the fastest mobile networks around, according to a recent study , and it's eager for more people to check out its service. To give potential customers a taste of the network, T-Mobile is offering a free 30-day trial in Atlanta, Boston and Austin. The offer starts Thursday and runs through the end of the year. If you sign up, T-Mobile will send you a WiFi hotspot and SIM via two-day shipping. You'll be able to connect pretty much whichever phone you like to the hotspot to see how well the T-Mobile network performs, but it might be annoying to cart around an extra device for a month. If you gobble up 30GB of data before the 30 days are up, your trial will end at that point. There's a limit on video too, as it typically streams at a maximum resolution of 480p. You also get a measly 200MB of roaming data. The company has run similar ...