Long, long virtual coaster, bad names for computers, AT&T wants CA $$, AI get’s racist, and more geek news of the week.
But at least one user is focusing on building coasters so slow, that take so long to complete, passengers would starve to death well before they reached the finish. One unnamed user recently posted his latest creation to 8chan. Named
Jennifer Null
AT&T is asking California taxpayers to give them $100 million so that AT&T can provide several parts of the state with unreliable, slow and expensive DSL service. As Steve Blum
Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users.
The US government isn’t saying whether it will divulge to Apple the method it used to access the locked iPhone seized by one of the San Bernardino shooters. The iPhone has been at the center of a bitter dispute between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But that legal battle
“So the question arises
USB Thief gets its name because it spreads on USB thumb and hard drives and steals huge volumes of data once it has taken hold. Unlike previously discovered USB-born malware, it uses a series of novel techniques to bind itself to its host drive to ensure it can’t easily be copied and analyzed. It uses a multi-staged encryption scheme that derives its key from the device ID of the USB drive. A chain of loader files also contains a list of file names that are unique to every instance of the malware. Some of the file names are based on the precise file content and the time the file was created. As a result, the malware won’t execute if the files are moved to a drive other than the one chosen by the original developers.
For the past few years, the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award has technically been open to non-human applicants (specifically,
