The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Attackers can cause potentially harmful hard drive and operating system crashes by playing sounds over low-cost speakers embedded in computers or sold in stores, a team of researchers demonstrated last week.

The Intercept[^]:

Lockport, New York, school district have purchased face recognition technology as part of a purported effort to prevent school shootings.

The Verge[^]:

Google is drawing up a set of guidelines that will steer its involvement in developing AI tools for the military, according to reports from The New York Times and Defense One.

Ars Technica[^]:

A couple of Gartner analysts have recently claimed that Windows is "collapsing"—that it's too big, too sprawling, and too old to allow rapid development and significant new features.

Piekniewski's blog[^]:

Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to the world of wonders of technological singularity

Microsoft DevOps Blog[^]:

The Git community has disclosed an industry-wide security vulnerability in Git that can lead to arbitrary code execution when a user operates in a malicious repository.

BleepingComputer[^]:

Users of the NPM JavaScript package manager were greeted by a weird error yesterday evening, as their consoles and applications spewed a message of "ERR! 418 I'm a teapot" whenever they tried to update or install a new JavaScript/Node.js package.

Engadget[^]:

The Wall Street Journal has learned that the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating claims that Intel's large-scale layoffs discriminated against older employees.

Motherboard[^]:

If these companies are making bank off of our data and aren’t even managing to keep it safe, shouldn’t we at least get a small cut of the action? 26-year old Londoner Oli Frost thinks so, which is why he put all of his Facebook data up for sale on eBay last weekend.

null program[^]:

The most surprising result of the benchmark is that LuaJIT’s FFI is substantially faster than C. It’s about 25% faster than a native C function call to a shared object function.

TechCrunch[^]:

Data brokers in Vermont will now have to register as such with the state; they must take standard security measures and notify authorities of security breaches (no, they weren’t before); and using their data for criminal purposes like fraud is now its own actionable offense.

Probably Dance[^]:

Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table.

AnandTech[^]:

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has dramatically changed the development opportunities on Windows, and has become very popular.

The Verge[^]:

Here’s a casualty of the cashless society you might not have previously thought of: the humble street performer.