Computers & Linux News

Superprof, which claims to be "the world's largest tutoring network," has made its newest members' passwords utterly predictable... leaving them wide open to hackers. From a report: SuperProf is a website that helps you find a private tutor -- either online via webcam, or face-to-face. The site claims to have over three million tutors on its books, helping people learn languages, how to play musical instruments, or giving kids extra lessons in tricky subjects. It's not the only site which offers these kind of services. For instance, SuperProf has just taken over UK-based The Tutor Pages, and -- to the surprise of many Tutor Pages teachers -- migrated them to SuperProf. And, sadly, that account migration has been utterly incompetent from the security point of view. In an email that SuperProf sent Tutor Pages teachers last night, it shared details of how they can login to their new SuperProf account. If a tutor's name is Barbara, her new SuperProf-provided password is "superbarbara". Clarinetist Lisa's new SuperProf-supplied password is "superlisa."

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Last August, 50 employees at Three Square Market got RFID chips in their hands. Now 80 have them. From a report: The idea came about in early 2017, president of Three Square Market Patrick McMullan says, when he was on a business trip to Sweden -- a country where some people are getting subcutaneous microchips to do things like enter secure buildings or book train tickets. It's one of very few places where chip implants, which have been around for quite a while, have taken off in some fashion. The chips he and his employees got are about the size of a very large grain of rice. They're intended to make it a little easier to do things like get into the office, log on to computers, and buy food and drinks in the company cafeteria. Like many RFID chips, they are passive -- they don't have batteries, and instead get their power from an RFID reader when it requests data from the chip. A year into their experiment, McMullan and a few employees say they are still using the chips regularly at work for all the activities they started out with last summer. Since then, an additional 30 employees have gotten the chips, which means that roughly 80 of the company's now 250 employees, or nearly a third, are walking, talking cyborgs. "You get used to it; it's easy," McMullan says. As far as he knows, just two Three Square Market employees have had their chips removed -- and that was when they left the company.

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Two anonymous readers share a report: When the ground-services employee who stole a turboprop airliner last week declined air-traffic controllers' piloting advice, saying he had played videogames, it was no surprise to some devotees of intricate home flight-simulation programs [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available.]. Such software can mimic many phases of aircraft operations, including takeoffs, as well as how to respond to heavy weather and emergencies, pilots and software makers say. The simulators are also more affordable than pursuing a pilot's license and can help satisfy a lifelong obsession with flying. Last year, two million units of vehicle-simulation games for PCs and consoles were sold world-wide, the most common being flight simulators, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Home programs have evolved over more than three decades. They can represent all types of aircraft, from wartime bombers to modern-day passenger airliners. A setup can cost a few dozen dollars for a videogame to thousands for software with intricate renderings of cockpits and real-world environments. A new conference called FlightSimExpo held in Las Vegas in June drew around 1,100 people, its organizers said. FlightSimCon held its sixth annual gathering in Dallas in June, according to its website. Many hobbyists say they don't think of simulators in the same vein as traditional videogames, because they aren't trying to rack up points or compete. They simply focus on flying.

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The anime-style show premieres Oct. 7 on Disney Channel.

If you've been waiting for a brilliant reason to buy the phone, the new autumnal-hued model may qualify.

Porsche's first battery-electric vehicle promises to be quite the athlete.

Smartphone brand Motorola has been criticised for revealing a "shameless" copy of the iPhone X as its new model. BBC: Many phone-makers have copied the look of the iPhone X, which has a smaller bezel around the screen and a "notch" at the top that houses a camera. However, reviewers said the new Motorola P30 was a "brazen" and "egregious" rip-off of Apple's flagship device. Lenovo, which owns the Motorola brand, has not yet responded to the criticism. [...] Commenting on the similarity between the Motorola P30 and the iPhone X, technology blogger Marques Brownlee called it the "most shameless rip yet." News site Mashable said Motorola "even went so far as to adorn the screen with a wallpaper that's a dead ringer for Apple's default wallpaper." News and reviews site Technobuffalo said the design was an "egregious clone" that was "nearly impossible to distinguish" from the iPhone X. Tech news site The Verge pointed out that Google's image recognition algorithms described photos of the P30 as "iPhone."

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Facebook has already said it'll ban sites that share and host the designs. Will others follow suit?

One really big sign to points to Samsung unveiling a real 8K TV at IFA 2018.

That's the lowest price to date on DJI's amazingly capable quadcopter, which can be controlled using just your hands. Plus: Two bonus deals!

The scorching temperatures and forest fires of this summer's heatwave have finally stirred the world to face the onrushing threat of global warming, claims the climate scientist behind the recent "hothouse Earth" report. Following an unprecedented 270,000 downloads of his study, Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said he had not seen such a surge of interest since 2007, the year the Nobel prize was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Guardian: "I think that in future people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit," said the veteran scientist. "This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now." The heatwave has dominated headlines across the northern hemisphere this summer. New temperature records have been set in Africa and cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US. Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 29 in South Korea, 91 in Greece and nine in California. There have even been freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic circle, while holidaymakers and locals alike have sweltered in unusually hot weather in southern Europe. Coming amid this climate chaos, the "hothouse Earth" paper by Rockstrom and his co-authors struck a chord with the public by spelling out the huge and growing risk that emissions are pushing the planet's climate off the path it has been on for 2.5m years.

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We don't expect to see new hardware, but there should be some cool previews of upcoming games.

The midsize truck segment is heating up again after a long period of cooling off and we're curious how the newest kid on the block can compare to more established competitors.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has removed 23 Firefox add-ons from its add-on store that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer told Bleeping Computer Friday. The list of blocked add-ons includes "Web Security," a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, which was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users' browsing histories to a server located in Germany. "The mentioned add-on has been taken down, together with others after I conducted a thorough audit of [the] add-ons," Rob Wu, a Mozilla Browser Engineer and Add-on review, told Bleeping Computer via email. "These add-ons are no longer available at AMO and [have been] disabled in the browsers of users who installed them," Wu said.

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Trendy addresses are also being used to convince people to invest.

The lawsuit focuses on an exception made for traditional dealerships, which Tesla does not use.

Nuro's driverless pods won't show up until the fall, though -- it'll be a self-driving Prius before then.

With a bunch of styling tweaks and a little extra performance, it could be the answer to your dad's case of late-middle-age ennui.

The Shelby GT adds a little style and a dash of power for a bunch more money.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google announced today that it's working with Danish hearing aid manufacturer GN Hearing to create a new hearing aid spec for Android smartphones called ASHA, or Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids. It's designed to be battery-efficient, while providing high quality audio with low latency. Hearing aids utilizing this spec will be able to connect to and stream from Android devices without having to use another intermediate device. ASHA will enable Bluetooth hearing aids to be utilized the same way as headphones, used to call friends or listen to music. Google has published the new protocol specifications online for any hearing aid manufacturer to build native hearing aid support for Android. GN Hearing has announced that the ReSound LiNX Quattro and Beltone Amaze will be the first hearing aids to receive direct streaming support in a future update.

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