Computers & Linux News

Finding the best internet provider starts with narrowing down what's available near you. Here's a look at the top ISPs and where the offer service.

Designed for business, it delivers sharp images and easy interactions to let designers and engineers create in virtual reality.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday said it had opened an investigation into whether Boeing failed to ensure that its 737 Max 9 plane was safe and manufactured to match the design approved by the agency. The New York Times (non-paywalled source): The F.A.A. said the investigation stemmed from the loss of a fuselage panel of a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines shortly after it took off on Friday from Portland, Ore., leaving a hole in the side of the passenger cabin. The plane returned to Portland for an emergency landing. "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again," the agency said. In a letter to Boeing dated Jan. 10, the F.A.A. said that after the Portland incident, it was notified of additional issues with other Boeing 737 Max 9 planes. The letter does not detail what other issues were reported to the agency. Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in use in the United States, said on Monday that they discovered loose hardware on the panel when conducting preliminary inspections on their planes. The new investigation is the latest setback for Boeing, which is one of just two suppliers of large planes for most airlines. The company has struggled to regain the public's trust after two crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, involving the 737 Max 8 killed a total of 346 people.

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Bundling home internet and TV service together can save you time and money. Here are the best internet and TV bundles for streaming, cable, fiber and more.

Jackery's Explorer 100 Plus is either a really little power station or a really big power bank that can recharge from solar panels. I took a closer look at CES 2024.

From the Sony Afeela concept car that's controlled by a PlayStation controller, to the first ChatGPT-enabled production vehicle, Antuan Goodwin shows us the biggest advances in car technology we saw at CES 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek.com: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country's intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines. De Volkskrant's investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 -- a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered -- after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country's government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman. It's believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It's unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant's investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper's sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.

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quonset writes: Hertz rental has announced it's selling off one third of its 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their depreciation is hurting the bottom line. "[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle," Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call. And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz's used EV rental cars.

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Spread love to the kiddos in your life this Valentine's Day.

The refreshed Model 3, with a new look and longer range, debuted in Europe last fall. It's now arrived in the United States.

Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to "sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization." From a report: The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo The Verge has obtained. They'll impact 170 people across various departments. Based on Citron's message to employees and my understanding of the business, Discord isn't in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic. In his memo to employees, which you can read in full below, Citron said Discord grew its headcount too fast over the last few years -- an admission that has become quite common among tech CEOs as of late. "We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020," Citron wrote. "As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated."

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Sony said the covers will go on sale early this year.

PlantPetz is a robotic pot that turns an ordinary house plant into an interactive companion. Gently touch a leaf, or talk to it, and the plant reacts with wiggles, shifts and critter sounds. There's also a vase for flowers to play a message with your touch.

A toaster for steak that cost three times as much as my first car, a first-of-its-kind grill and robots making ice creams were among the coolest pieces of kitchen technology we found at CES 2024.

Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement. 404 Media: "Google believes that users should have more control over repair -- including access to the same documentation, parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer (OEM) repair channels have -- which is often referred to as 'Right to Repair,'" Google's Steven Nickel wrote in a white paper published Thursday. Crucially, Google specifically says that regulators should ban "parts pairing," which is a tactic used by Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers to artificially restrict which repair parts can be used with a given device: "Policies should constrain OEMs from imposing unfair anti-repair practices. For example, parts-pairing, the practice of using software barriers to obstruct consumers and independent repair shops from replacing components, or other restrictive impediments to repair should be discouraged," the white paper says.

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At CES 2024, we saw John Deere's plans for making farming the nation's foods and crops more efficient -- and likely more sustainably.

Zack Whittaker, reporting for TechCrunch: Civil liberties advocates have long argued that "geofence" search warrants are unconstitutional for their ability to ensnare entirely innocent people who were nearby at the time a crime was committed. But errors in the geofence warrant applications that go before a judge can violate the privacy of vastly more people -- in one case almost two miles away. Attorneys at the ACLU of Northern California found what they called an "alarming error" in a geofence warrant application that "resulted in a warrant stretching nearly two miles across San Francisco." The error, likely caused by a typo, allowed the requesting law enforcement agency to capture information on anyone who entered the stretch of San Francisco erroneously marked on the search warrant. "Many private homes were also captured in the massive sweep," wrote Jake Snow, ACLU staff attorney, in a blog post about the findings. It's not known which law enforcement agency requested the nearly two-mile-long geofence warrant, or for how long the warrant was in effect. The attorneys questioned how many other geofence warrant application mistakes had slipped through and resulted in the return of vastly more data in error.

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You don't need to pay for a credit repair service to improve your credit score.

If you’re thinking about borrowing against your home for any of these reasons, think again.

U.S. software giant Ivanti has confirmed that hackers are exploiting two critical-rated vulnerabilities affecting its widely-used corporate VPN appliance, but said that patches won't be available until the end of the month. From a report: Ivanti said the two vulnerabilities -- tracked as CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 -- were found in its Ivanti Connect Secure software. Formerly known as Pulse Connect Secure, this is a remote access VPN solution that enables remote and mobile users to access corporate resources over the internet. Ivanti said it is aware of "less than 10 customers" impacted so far by the "zero day" vulnerabilities, described as such given Ivanti had zero time to fix the flaws before they were maliciously exploited.

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