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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Legendary games company Atari has accused a Register reporter of making stuff up and acting unprofessionally following an interview earlier this year in San Francisco at the launch of its new games console, the Atari VCS. In that article, we were critical of the fact that the machine did not work, and that its chief operating officer Michael Arzt, whom we spoke to, appeared unable to answer even the most basic questions about the product. We were shown "engineering design models" that were said to be "real" yet turned out did not work, and pointed out as much. In the article, we wrote: "What happens if we plug this into our laptop, we ask Mike. I don't know, he says. Will it work? I don't know. If we plug it into a different games machine, will it work? No. So it's custom hardware and software? I don't know about that." Presumably this is where Atari feels that the reporter "wrote what he wanted instead of what was discussed with him." Which makes this clip tough to explain -- and we'll give you a clue: your humble Reg hack is the one with the British accent... This is a clip of Atari having no idea about its own controller. The Register goes on to provide more examples of how Atari "is so full of crap..." The accusations started via the company's Facebook page, where a potential buyer of an Atari VCS posted a link to the Reg article and asked the company to explain it. The full interview between the journalist and Atari can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Exploit kits, once a preferred choice of attackers to invade a victim's browser and find way to their computer, are increasingly diminishing in their effectiveness. If you have an updated browser, chances are it packs adequate resources to fight such attacks. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Exploit kits (EK) have been around on the criminal underground for more than a decade and were once pretty advanced, often being a place where researchers found zero-days on a regular basis. But as browsers got more secure in recent years, exploit kits started to die out in 2016-2017. Most operators were arrested, moved to other things, and nobody developed new exploits to add to the arsenal of EK left on the market, which slowly began falling behind when it came to their effectiveness to infect new victims. A Palo Alto Networks report published yesterday details statistics about the vulnerabilities used by current exploit kits in the first three months of the year (Q1 2018). According to the gathered data, researchers found 1,583 malicious URLs across 496 different domains, leading to landing pages (URLs) where an EK attempted to run exploits only for only a meager eight vulnerabilities. All eight were old and known bugs, with the newest dating back to 2016. Seven of the eight vulnerabilities targeted Internet Explorer, meaning that using a more modern browser like Chrome and Firefox is a simple, yet effective way of avoiding falling victim to exploit kits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Bergen reports via Bloomberg: Earlier this year, a group of influential software engineers in Google's cloud division surprised their superiors by refusing to work on a cutting-edge security feature. Known as "air gap," the technology would have helped Google win sensitive military contracts. The coders weren't persuaded their employer should be using its technological might to help the government wage war, according to four current and former employees. After hearing the engineers' objections, Urs Holzle, Google's top technical executive, said the air gap feature would be postponed, one of the people said. Another person familiar with the situation said the group was able to reduce the scope of the feature. The act of rebellion ricocheted around the company, fueling a growing resistance among employees with a dim view of Google's yen for multi-million-dollar government contracts. The engineers became known as the "Group of Nine" and were lionized by like-minded staff. The current and former employees say the engineers' work boycott was a catalyst for larger protests that convulsed the company's Mountain View, California, campus and ultimately forced executives to let a lucrative Pentagon contract called Project Maven expire without renewal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MakeTechEasier: If you need to process text based on certain conditions, awk will almost always get the job done quickly.

tecmint: Netdata is a free open source, scalable, adaptive, customizable, extensible, and powerful real-time performance and health monitoring tool for Linux system

TechRepublic
Linux: The new frontier of enterprise in the cloud
TechRepublic
TechRepublic's Dan Patterson spoke with with Brian Gracely, director of cloud strategy at Red Hat OpenShift, about Linux and the cloud. Patterson: Linux, is the next frontier, the bold next frontier of the enterprise... Red Hat has been around for years.

One of the greatest struggles of creating an entirely new OS, especially today, is the chicken-and-egg problem. Without good apps, why would consumers buy a product? And conversely, with no consumers, why would developers make apps? We've looked, time and time again, at the possibility of Fuchsia getting Android compatibility, but what if it didn't stop there? If Fuchsia is to be a full-fledged laptop/desktop OS, shouldn't it also have some compatibility with apps for a traditional OS? This is where the 'Guest' app becomes relevant. Guest allows you to boot up a virtual OS, inside of Fuchsia. Officially, Guest supports Zircon (Fuchsia) and Linux-based OSes (including Debian), but there’s also evidence that suggests it's being tested to work with Chrome OS. At the time of writing, I've only been able to successfully test Guest with a simple version of Linux. Fuchsia is clearly so much more than just a research operating system. There's also a slightly older article from a few months ago looking at the various layers that make up Fuchsia, as well as various other articles about Google's new operating system.

'Machina' brings support for running Linux on top of Fuchsia
OS News
One of the greatest struggles of creating an entirely new OS, especially today, is the chicken-and-egg problem. Without good apps, why would consumers buy a product? And conversely, with no consumers, why would developers make apps? We've looked ...

This is an article written 20 years ago by Mark Russinovich, which compares VMS and Windows NT. When Microsoft released the first version of Windows NT in April 1993, the company's marketing and public relations campaign heavily emphasized the NT (i.e., New Technology) in the operating system's (OS's) name. Microsoft promoted NT as a cutting-edge OS that included all the features users expected in an OS for workstations and small to midsized servers. Although NT was a new OS in 1993, with a new API (i.e., Win32) and new user and systems-management tools, the roots of NT's core architecture and implementation extend back to the mid-1970s. And now... The rest of the story: I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release. Great read.

Toni Wilen has released a massive new update of WinUAE. This major new release hosts a wealth of new features and bugfixes. Also check out Worthy's release trailer, a new commercial game by Pixelglass for the Amiga 500, which is also available as digital download for use in UAE.

There are a lot of great smartphone options available at any given moment, so it can be a challenge to sort through them all if you're trying to choose the absolute best one. The stakes here can't be understated: your smartphone is the most important gadget in your life, and you ll probably be living with the one you buy for at least a year, if not two or three. Most of the time, there's a phone that stands out from the pack in all the areas that matter: performance, value, camera, and support. But this year, depending on who you ask, you could get as many as four different answers for what the best phone is to buy. And depending on what kind of phone user you are, any one of them could be the ideal phone for you. The answer has been the iPhone for years, and as long as expensive Android flagships don't get updates and the Google Pixel is only available in three countries, that's not going to change any time soon - whether Android people like it or not.

Facebook's controversial Messenger Kids app is heading outside the U.S. to Canada and Peru. From a report: As part of the expansion, the social networking giant said Friday that it would also debut Spanish and French language versions of the children's messaging app that are now available in all three countries where the service is available. Facebook introduced Messenger Kids in December, pitching it as a safer way for children under 13 to chat with friends while sending them silly GIFs, emoji, and other goofy digital imagery. Unlike the core Facebook social networking service or other messaging apps, Facebook said that Messenger Kids does not display any online ads or allow kids to buy things within the app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: Linux Networking Efforts Advances with New DPDK and OpenSwitch Releases.

In an effort to promote tourism, the southern tropical Chinese island of Hainan will no longer censor its internet. "Visitors to select areas of Hainan will be able to access Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, according to a new plan authorities have put together to turn the province into a free trade port by 2020," reports The Verge. "It's not clear if other banned platforms will be uncensored." From the report: The three-year action plan was published on Thursday, but removed from the local government website by Friday, as spotted by the South China Morning Post. For Hainan, China will lift part of its censorship system, or what's known as the Great Firewall, that blocks access to most foreign social media and news sites. Tourists will be able to enter designated zones in Hainan's two major cities to access Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Other banned foreign social media platforms, like Google, Instagram, or WhatsApp, haven't been mentioned. Ironically, China appears to be censoring people's reactions to the news that some censorship is being lifted. One user on Weibo commented that people weren't allowed a chance to provide any feedback on the new tourism plan. "Thousands of comments have since been deleted. As if censoring people solved the problem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In data-hungry, tech-happy chain restaurants, customers are rating their servers using tabletop tablets, not realizing those ratings can put jobs at risk, an investigation by BuzzFeed News has found. From the report: When the Smokey Bones restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, where Nicole Bishop waits tables introduced Ziosk tabletop tablets, she wasn't too worried about them. Ziosks are designed to increase restaurant efficiency by allowing customers to order drinks, appetizers, and desserts, and pay their bill from the table without talking to a server. But, as Bishop soon discovered, they also prompt customers to take a satisfaction survey at the end of every meal, the results of which are turned into a score that's used to evaluate the server's performance. One day not long after the Ziosks appeared, Bishop found that her work schedules had been cut short in half, a change she estimated would cost her between $200 and $400 a week. The report documents stories of several other waiters, all of whom have been affected by the tablet. It adds: Ziosk tablets sit atop dining tables at more than 4,500 restaurants across the United States -- including most Chili's and Olive Gardens, and many TGI Friday's and Red Robins. Competitor E La Carte's PrestoPrime tablets are in more than 1,800 restaurants, including most Applebee's. Tens of thousands of servers are being evaluated based on a tech-driven, data-oriented customer feedback system many say is both inaccurate and unfair. And few of the customers holding the reins are even aware their responses have any impact on how much servers earn.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eWEEK: Red Hat adds dynamic case management features to its business process management suite.

In 2013, we began a News Fellows program, as an investment in the next generation of digital reporters. The fellowship is an important part of the Google News Initiative’s commitment to strengthen the quality of journalism and empower news organizations to make use of technology, through pairing students interested in journalism and technology with prestigious media organizations around the world.

Since its launch, the program has expanded into 12 regions with an alumni network of over 300 journalists and innovators across the world. This month, we welcomed the 2018 U.S. Google News Initiative Fellows to Mountain View ahead of their summer fellowships at journalism nonprofits across the country:

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  Yan Wu, Northeastern University, Center for Investigative Reporting. Yan Wu is a designer and coder turned interactive storyteller. As a graphic intern at The Boston Globe, she had not only worked on projects like 11 months, 1 president, 2471 tweets independently, but also collaborated with the Pulitzer prize winning Spotlight team and other developers on the race series.

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  Julie Christie, Temple University, Investigative Reporters & Editors. Julie Christie is almost a senior at Temple University in the Klein College of Media and Communication, where she's studying journalism. She's currently the Enterprise Editor at The Temple News, the university's independent student newspaper.

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  Marlee Baldridge, University of Missouri, Nieman Journalism Lab. Marlee is a senior studying entrepreneurial journalism at the University of Missouri. A native of Harrisburg, Missouri (population 289), she joined the inaugural Potter Digital Ambassador program and helped integrate sustainable video and social strategies into the reporting of a rural Missouri newspaper

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  Pankhuri Kumar, Columbia University, Pew. Pankhuri is currently completing a dual degree in Journalism and CS at Columbia University. With a math and CS background, she hopes to pursue a career in interactive and computational journalism.

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  Taylor Blatchford, University of Missouri, Poynter. Taylor Blatchford graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in investigative and international journalism. She leads a team focused on bringing community engagement into the reporting process at the Columbia Missourian, a daily city newspaper.

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  Riley Wong, University of Pennsylvania,ProPublica. Riley Wong conducts machine learning and data science research for healthcare. They graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 in computer science. Their passions include social impact, QTPOC community building, music, and art.

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  Corinne Osnos, Northwestern University, Matter. Corinne is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied media innovation and entrepreneurship.  As a research assistant for The Membership Puzzle Project, Corinne performed UX research on public radio sites and is now conducting qualitative research on Burning Man.

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  Erin McAweeney, University of Washington-Seattle,Witness. Erin is a researcher and technologist working in data journalism, information ethics, and algorithmic bias. In her undergrad she was an editor for a non-profit street paper that provided employment and an outlet for the marginalized homeless population in her community.

This month, we welcomed the 2018 U.S. Google News Initiative Fellows to Mountain View ahead of their summer fellowships at journalism nonprofits across the country.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tempe, Arizona, police have released a massive report on the fatal Uber vehicle crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March. The report provides more evidence that driver Rafaela Vasquez was distracted in the seconds before the crash. "This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted,'' the report concludes. Police obtained records from Hulu suggesting that Vasquez was watching "The Voice," a singing talent competition that airs on NBC, just before the crash. Hulu's records showed she began watching the program at 9:16pm. Streaming of the show ended at 9:59pm, which "coincides with the approximate time of the collision," according to the police report.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We are looking for a talented and skilled LINUX expert to set up two cron jobs on our Centos servers. The cron jobs should execute .sh srcipts daily and email us the results of the output. Job is available... (Budget: $10 - $30 USD, Jobs: Apache, Debian, Linux, System Admin, UNIX)

1- Magento 2 installation 2- Porto theme Instation (Budget: €18 - €36 EUR, Jobs: Apache, HTML, Linux, Magento, PHP)