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Cellphones

Teens Would Rather Text Their Friends Than Talk To Them In Person, Poll Shows (nypost.com) 142

A new poll of 1,141 teenagers shows that teenagers prefer to text their friends than talk in person. The findings come from Common Sense Media's 2018 Social Media, Social Life survey. Fortune reports: Only 15% of teens said Facebook was their main social media site, down from 68% in 2012. Snapchat is now the main site for 41% of teenagers, followed by Instagram at 22%. In addition, this year's survey saw texting (35%) surpass in-person (32%) as teens' favorite way to communicate with friends. In 2012, 49% preferred to communicate in person, versus 33% who preferred texting.

[M]ore teens said that social media had a positive effect on their levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety than those who said it had a negative one, but it seems to have the opposite effect on teens who score low on the authors' social-emotional well-being scale. Of those, 70% said they sometimes feel left out when using social media, 43% feel bad if no one likes or comments on their posts, and 35% said they had been cyberbullied. They were also more likely to say that social media was "extremely" or "every" important, compared to their peers who score high on the scale.

The Almighty Buck

Amazon is Stuffing Its Search Results Pages With Ads (recode.net) 158

If it feels like Amazon's site is increasingly stuffed with ads, that's because it is. And it looks like that's working -- at least for brands that are willing to fork over ad dollars as part of their strategy to sell on Amazon. From a report: Amazon-sponsored product ads have been around since 2012. But lately, as the company has invested in growing its advertising business, they've become more aggressive. See, for example, our search below for "cereal." The first three results, which take up the whole screen above the fold -- everything visible before you scroll -- are sponsored placements that appear as search results: Ads for Kellogg's Special K, Quaker Life and Cap'n Crunch. (It's similarly dramatic on mobile, where it takes up the entire first screen.) This is followed by a section featuring Amazon's own brand, 365 Everyday Value, which was part of its Whole Foods acquisition. Not until scrolling down halfway on the next browser "page" do organic search results -- non-paid, non-Amazon brands -- come up: Post's Honey Bunches of Oats and Kellogg's Frosted Mini-Wheats and Frosted Flakes.
Botnet

Researchers Discover Large Twitter Botnet Pushing Ethereum Scam (techcrunch.com) 43

Trailrunner7 writes: Twitter has something of a bot problem. Anyone who uses the platform on even an occasional basis likely could point out automated accounts without much trouble. But detecting bots at scale is a much more complex problem, one that a pair of security researchers decided to tackle by building their own classifier and analyzing the characteristics and behavior of 88 million Twitter accounts. Using a machine learning model with a set of 20 distinct characteristics such as the number of tweets relative to the age of the account and the speed of replies and retweets, the classifier is able to detect bots with about 98 percent accuracy. The tool outputs a probability that a given account is a bot, with anything above 50 percent likely being a bot.

During their research, conducted from May through July, Jordan Wright and Olabode Anise of Duo Security discovered an organized network of more than 15,000 bots that was being used to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet, which is still partially active, spoofs many legitimate accounts and even took over some verified accounts as part of a scheme designed to trick victims into sending small amounts of the cryptocurrency Ethereum to a specific address. Unlike most botnets, the Ethereum network has a hierarchical structure, with a division of labor among the bots. Usually, each bot in a network performs the same task, whether that's launching a DDoS attack or mining Bitcoin on a compromised machine. But the Ethereum botnet had clusters of bots with a three-tier organization. Some of the bots published the scam tweets, while others amplified those tweets or served as hub accounts for others to follow. Wright and Anise mapped the social media connections between the various accounts and looked at which accounts followed which others to create a better picture of the network. Anise and Wright will discuss the results of their research during a talk at the Black Hat USA conference on Wednesday and will release their detection tool as an open source project that day, too.

Comment WSUS (Score 0) 78

Stand up 2 WSUS servers, one on a connected network, one on the disconnected network. Download all products and classifications that you need on the connected one, sneakernet them over to the disconnected one and import them. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechnet.microsoft.com%2F... If you're going to need to patch custom applications, then you're going to need to look into something like Configuration Manager with SCUP if you want to have compliance data for the installation, otherwise you can just create a software distribution package.

Comment So how rare is this occurance? (Score 0) 83

So the question I have is, does the fact we have a large moon also the reason we still have our protective magnetic field? I've always kind of assumed the answer is yes without researching it. Wouldn't the relationship of our earth moon magnetic fields interacting each other creates some sort of signature that we can look for? That seems like it could be a potentially noisy event.

Comment Spoken quest text? (Score -1) 133

One of the major talking points about this game is the fact that every quest in the game has spoken quest text. The amount of work it’s taken to accomplish this is a massive expense. The fatal flaw here is... Who ever said that games wanted to HEAR every single quest that’s in the game? What happens if there is a bug in one of the quests and you have to change the text? 1) you have to keep a LIVE production studio to make sure you can record any changes to the quests which may arise 2) you now have a LOT more data to transmit to the clients for any patches as opposed to pure quest text. Oh you've also increased the amount of data required for any new content you want to develop and distribute after release by a factor of 1000. It is nice to release new or additional content after release.. I know there are a lot of RPers out there who love quests and read and savor every single word, but most players are simply barely skim the text, hit accept and then want to move on to the next one so they can be done quickly and move on to the next one. IMO this feature of spoken quest is why costs are so high on this project and will wind up killing it.

Comment Re:Not a long term solution for mobile robotics (Score 0) 83

I can think of numerous applications which would make a revolutoinary product and only require one of these devices. The primary one being an intelligent vacuum which can actively avoid obsticales, empty its own waste bin, and recharge itself. Now that there are also 10+ million of these devices out there, and a large number of them are being used for robotics hobbiest/engineers/etc, and are actively working on resolving this issue. I suspect the kinect 2 or some other future product will have a genuine solution to this shortcoming. In the meantime, i am eagerly awaiting my robotic vacuum cleaner.
Government

Compromised Government and Military Sites For Sale 51

Khopesh writes "Imperva blogged today about the sale of compromised .gov, .mil, and .edu sites, illustrating that cyber-criminals are getting bolder. Krebs on Security has an unredacted view of the site list. Perhaps the biggest threat is yet to come; if an industrious criminal can break into top government and military sites, so too can government-backed teams, proving that GhostNet and Stuxnet are just the beginning."
NASA

Curious NASA Pre-Announcement 286

CrtxReavr was one of a small avalanche of readers to let us know about a press conference NASA scheduled for Thursday at 2pm to discuss an "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." I've heard rumors ranging from "proof of life on Titan" to "first contact," depending on how optimistic/crazy you are.

Comment Re:X-Wing marketing conspiracy (Score 0) 104

I have a funny story about X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. I was at E3 in Atlanta in 1998? (the one year they had it there), One evening I was at the bar at my hotel close to the convention center. I was trying to pick up a woman who was sitting at the bar, and talking to her about video games in general. During my ramblings, I made a few comments about xwing vs tie fighter and some guy walks up to me and says "OK tell me what you don't like about X wing vs Tie fighter". I said "oh, you must work for lucasarts".. he's like .. yup, So I gave him both barrels my true feelings on the game. I had been a big fan of the X-Wing and Tie fighter games and considered myself a 'skilled' player. When I played XW/TF it was a very very steep learning curve, even the training missions were super difficult, and made the single player very unpleasant because you never felt like you were able to accomplish anything. I said a few other negative things and could tell I had really rattled his cage. All he shot back was.. "Well have you tried the multi player?" I told him I hadn't (ironically this game was torn apart because of its horrible multi player later, in fact there was a documented post mortem in trade magazines on how poorly it was developed) he said, "Well the multiplayer is great!" I assured him he was probably right and that I'd check it out ^rolls eyes^. I then said that I was a big fan of a lot of their other products and asked if he wanted to swap business cards. He said "Oh you mean like a business contact?" I said yeah, and we traded cards and I didn't even look at it, just put it in my wallet, bid him a nice evening and continued my conversation with the woman I was trying to bed. The next day I looked at the card, It was from Jack Sorenson, the president of Lucasarts.. I still have that card around somewhere. I never did call him up. I wonder if he would have remembered me.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 0) 876

You can also offer to dispose of his broken "hard drive" and either salvage all the parts, or just slap a new or used HDD in it and you've got a new computer! Of course then, you'll have to come up with some clever excuse when he comes over and sees you using his broken hard drive.

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