An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Two new articles take a look at "social media's dial-up ancestor" from back in the 20th century. First a new article in IEEE Spectrum remembers a time when tens of thousands of dial-up bulletin board systems kept modems busy all around the world playing chintzy "door" games, downloading textfiles and ANSI art, and reading messages left on FidoNet's "echo" forums. "To understand how the Internet became a medium for social life, you have to widen your view beyond networking technology and peer into the makeshift laboratories of microcomputer hobbyists of the 1970s and 1980s...amateurs tinkering in their free time to build systems for computer-mediated collaboration and communication." And the former sysop at "The Cave" has also written a new article about visiting the few surviving BBSes, some still in operation since 1983, many now accessible via telnet, and some still even delivering messages over FidoNet's phone-to-phone network.
Anyone else have fond memories of visiting (or running) a BBS?

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook's Connectivity Lab has announced that it has achieved data transmission rates of 20Gbps over the millimetre-wave (MMW) section of the radio spectrum; however, the transceiving stations need to be incredibly tightly calibrated to each other, with the team describing the margin for error as equivalent to 'a baseball pitcher aiming for a strike zone the size of a quarter'.

An anonymous reader writes:Concerned over the spread of fake news on the social networking giant, US President Barack Obama has criticized Facebook, saying fake stories on social networks are spreading lies this election. Speaking at a rally for Hillary Clinton at University of Michigan, Obama said: "The way campaigns have unfolded, we just start accepting crazy stuff as normal and people if they just repeat attacks enough and outright lies over and over again. As long as it's on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it, and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense," he told the gathering. A recent BuzzFeed investigation found that 38 percent of posts shared from three large right-wing politics pages on Facebook included "false or misleading information."

In response to a report from ProPublica alleging that Facebook gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls "Ethnic Affinities," three Facebook users have filed a lawsuit against the company. They are accusing the social networking giant of violating the Federal Housing Act of 1964 over its alleged discriminatory policies. Ars Technica reports: ProPublica managed to post an ad placed in Facebook's housing categories that excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. When the ProPublica reporters showed the ad to prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he described it as "horrifying" and "as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find." According to the proposed class-action lawsuit, by allowing such ads on its site, Facebook is in violation of the landmark civil rights legislation, which specifically prohibits housing advertisements to discriminate based on race, gender, color, religion, and other factors. "This lawsuit does not seek to end Facebook's Ad Platform, nor even to get rid of the "Exclude People" mechanism. There are legal, desirable uses for such functionalities. Plaintiffs seek to end only the illegal proscribed uses of these functions," the lawyers wrote in the civil complaint, which was filed last Friday. The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because the ad's buyer used the Ad Platform's 'Exclude People' functionality to exclude the class member based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin."

Tesla has updated its Supercharging Network of free fast-charging stations. Customers who purchase Teslas after January 1st, 2017, will be required to pay "a small fee to Supercharge." The fee itself "will be charged incrementally and cost less than the price of filling up a comparable gas car." The Verge reports: Current Tesla owners with Supercharger-equipped cars will be able to use the stations for free for the life of those vehicles, and a Tesla spokesperson tells The Verge that the free charging will transfer to successive owners. Customers who buy Teslas after that January 1st cutoff will be afforded 400 kWh of free Supercharging credits each year, good for about 1,000 miles, according to Tesla. The company says it will release more details about the change later this year, but added that "prices may fluctuate over time and vary regionally based on the cost of electricity." "Our Supercharger Network will never be a profit center," the company wrote in a blog post about the change. Tesla says that, by losing less money on providing free electricity at these stations, that the fees will subsidize the continued expansion of the Supercharger network. The Superchargers allow for a full charge in about 75 minutes or a half charge in about -- much faster than the standard Level 1 or Level 2 chargers found around the U.S. -- and Tesla has built 734 Supercharger stations (with nearly 5,000 chargers) since the network was started in 2012.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Chipmaker Broadcom Ltd said it would buy Brocade Communications Systems Inc for $5.5 billion, pushing deeper into the fast-growing market for network equipment used in data centers. The deal, the latest in a consolidating chip sector, will allow Broadcom to corner a larger share of the data center products market by using Brocade's fiber channel switches that speed up data transfer between servers and storage devices. Singapore-based Broadcom, formerly Avago Technologies, is known for its connectivity chips used in products ranging from mobiles to servers, while California-based Brocade makes networking switches, software and storage products. Broadcom said it planned to sell Brocade's networking business, which makes controllers and access points that help businesses offer high-speed internet to their customers, to avoid competing with its top customers such as Cisco Systems Inc.

Facebook needs to be more forthcoming about the kinds of content it takes down. That's according to 73 organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Lives Matter, SumOfUs and more, who signed a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From a report on CNET: The group asks for more clarity on the social networking giant's position on removing video and other content that highlight civil rights issues at the behest of authorities. The growing importance of Facebook in your life means it plays a central role in the news, video and content you see. That was made horrifyingly clear over the summer when its Facebook Live streaming video tool was used to broadcast the shooting of a black man by a police officer in Minnesota. The next day, the medium was used to broadcast a sniper firing shots at police officer at another civil rights demonstration. "With the onset of Facebook Live, your company is taking on an increasingly central role in controlling media that circulates through the public sphere," the letter said. "News is not just getting shared on Facebook: it's getting broken there."

Opera has long advertised its free VPN service Opera Max to customers. But it looks like, the company isn't pleased with users keeping its servers at work at all times. Over the last few days, according to a report on AndroidPolice, Opera Max has introduced ads on its apps, as well as links to sponsored apps. But the company is not done yet. It now requires a user to go back to the app and "add time" to the free VPN service every 12 hours if they wish to continue the service. Adding time doesn't cost anything, but it will subject users to an ad on each occasion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Study after study has demonstrated a link between strong social connections and reduced mortality risk. But does that hold true as our social interactions increasingly take place in online spheres? A new study out of Yale and the University of California suggests that it does. The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people who use Facebook live longer than those who do not, and that certain types of Facebook activities -- like posting pictures and accepting friend requests -- are associated with a lower risk of mortality. "There's a big debate about online social media. There are people that worry that worry it substitutes for healthy social interaction," co-author James Fowler, a social scientist from University of California, San Diego, told CBC News. The researchers started with 12 million Facebook profiles, then narrowed it down to four million people whose identities could be verified through California's voter registration list. Then they used data from the California Department of Public Health to compare those people to voters who don't use the social networking platform. They found the risk of dying in a given year was 12 per cent lower for Facebook users than non-Facebook users. That doesn't mean Facebook is necessarily good for you, Fowler cautions. Correlation does not prove causation, so it's impossible to say whether being on Facebook makes you healthier, or whether healthy people are more likely to be on Facebook. Still, Fowler said the study does help debunk some of the negative associations people have with social media. "The fact that we found such a strong positive relationship between health and social networks speaks against the hypothesis that they're making us unhealthy in some way," he said.

Jon Russell, reporting for TechCrunch:Here's fuel to the fire for those who believe that Facebook will buy anything that looks, smells or moves like Snapchat. The U.S. social networking giant this summer made an unsuccessful bid to acquire Snow, a Snapchat-like service from Naver, the $25 billion-valued Korean firm behind chat app Line, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. Snow currently has around 80 million downloads, and it is adding around 10 million more each month, according to the source. That growth has also encouraged acquisition interest from Tencent -- the maker of blockbuster chat app WeChat -- Alibaba and others, TechCrunch understands. "It's true that Snow is receiving love calls from various companies," a representative from Naver told us in a statement. Despite acknowledging outside interest, Naver did not name Snow's would-be suitors.

Tuesday Microsoft updated their open source Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), adding support for both C++ and Python. "This announcement is more than a point release..." argues Network World. "It's the recognition of AI and machine learning as the next big platform after mobile." This announcement represents a shift in Microsoft's customer focus from research to implementation... The toolkit is a supervised machine learning system in the same category of other open-source projects such as Tensorflow, Caffe and Torch. Microsoft is one of the leading investors in and contributors to the open machine learning software and research community. A glance at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference reveals that there are just four major technology companies committed to moving the field of neural networks forward: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM.
A Microsoft engineer described CNTK as "democratizing AI," according to Microsoft's announcement, which also notes that their toolkit "has been optimized to best take advantage of the NVIDIA hardware and Azure networking capabilities that are part of the Azure offering."

An anonymous reader writes: The city legislature of Seoul, South Korea, is considering implementing a law that would ban after work messaging to employees, in an effort to reduce work-related stress among employees. Members of the Seoul Metropolitan Council proposed a revision to a public ordinance that would ban after-work messaging to employees of the city's government. The new rule is an attempt to guarantee employees the right to restand states that employee privacy must not be subject to employer contact outside of work hours. If passed, it would ban managers from contacting public sector employees after work hours through phone calls, text messaging, or social networking. Kim Kwang-soo, one of the councilors who submitted the ordinance revision, said that the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) must guarantee the rights of city workers by protecting them from undue stress. He said, "Of course SMG officials must always be prepared for the needs of citizens, but many of them are working under conditions that infringe on their right to rest."

An anonymous reader writes: Jason Koebler via Motherboard has interviewed James Busch -- a radiologist and owner of "the first 10 Gbps residential connection in the United States" -- at a coffee shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Motherboard reports: "For reference, the Federal Communications Commission officially classifies 'broadband' as 25 Mbps. His connection is 400 times faster than that. Busch found a way to make good use of his 1 Gbps connection, and now he's found a use for 10 Gbps, too. 'An X-ray averages around 200 megabytes, then you have PET scans and mammograms -- 3D mammograms are 10 gig files, so they're enormous,' Busch said. 'We go through terabytes a year in storage. We've calculated out that we save about 7 seconds an exam, which might seem like, 'Who cares,' but when you read 20,000 or 30,000 exams every year, it turns out to be something like 10 days of productivity you're saving just from a bandwidth upgrade.' While 10 gig connections sound excessive at the moment, Busch says his family quickly started using all of its 1 gig bandwidth. 'We ballooned into that gig within eight or nine months. With my kids watching Netflix instead of TV, with me working, we did utilize that bandwidth,' he said. 'There were situations where my daughter would be FaceTiming and the others would be streaming on the 4K TVs and they'd start screaming at each other about hogging the bandwidth. We don't see that at 10 gigs.' So why does Busch have a 10 Gbps and the rest of us don't? For one, 10 Gbps offerings are rare and scattered in mostly rural communities that have decided to build their own internet networks. Most companies that have the technology offer gigabit connections (a still cutting-edge technology only available in a handful of cities) at affordable prices and 10 Gbps connections at comparatively exorbitant ones. In Chattanooga, 1 gig connections are $69.99 per month; 10 gig connections are $299. Thus far, 10 Gbps connections are available in Chattanooga; parts of southern Vermont; Salisbury, North Carolina; and parts of Detroit and Minneapolis. But besides Busch, I couldn't find any other people in the United States who have signed up for one. EPB, the Chattanooga government-owned power utility that runs the network, confirmed that Busch is the city's only 10 Gbps residential customer. Rocket Fiber, which recently began offering 10 Gbps in Detroit, told me that it has 'no customers set in stone,' but that it's in talks with prospective ones. Representatives for U.S. Internet in Minneapolis and Fibrant in Salisbury did not respond to my requests for comment. Michel Guite, president of the Vermont Telephone Company, told me his network has no 10 Gbps customers, either."

Intel has announced the Atom E3900 series. Based upon the company's latest generation Goldmont Atom CPU core, the E3900 series will be Intel's most serious and dedicated project yet for the IoT market. AnandTech adds: So what does an IoT-centric Atom look like? By and large, it's Broxton and more. At its core we're looking at 2 or 4 Goldmont CPU cores, paired with 12 or 18 EU configurations of Intel's Gen9 iGPU. However this is where the similarities stop. Once we get past the CPU and GPU, Intel has added new features specifically for IoT in some areas, and in other areas they've gone and reworked the design entirely to meet specific physical and technical needs of the IoT market. The big changes here are focused on security, determinism, and networking. Security is self-evident: Intel's customers need to be able to build devices that will go out into the field and be hardened against attackers. Bits and pieces of this are inerieted from Intel's existing Trusted Execution Technology, while other pieces, such as boot time measuring, are new. The latter is particularly interesting, as Intel is measuring the boot time of a system as a canary for if it's been compromised. If the boot time suddenly and unexpectedly changes, then there's a good chance the firmware and/or OS has been replaced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Telling little fibs leads down a slippery slope to bigger lies -- and our brains adapt to escalating dishonesty, which makes deceit easier, a new study shows. Neuroscientists at the University College London's Affective Brain Lab put 80 people in scenarios where they could repeatedly lie and get paid more based on the magnitude of their lies. They said they were the first to demonstrate empirically that people's lies grow bolder the more they fib. The researchers then used brain scans to show that our mind's emotional hot spot -- the amygdala -- becomes desensitized or used to the growing dishonesty, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. And during this lying, brain scans that show blood supply and activity at the amygdala decrease with increasing lies, said study co-author and lab director Tali Sharot. "The more we lie, the less likely we are to have an emotional response" -- say, shame or guilt -- "that accompanies it," Sharot said. Garrett said he suspects similar escalation factors happen in the "real world," which would include politics, infidelity and cheating, but he cautioned that this study was done in a controlled lab setting so more research would be needed to apply it to other situations. The study found that there is a segment of people who don't lie and don't escalate lies, but Sharot and Garrett weren't able to determine how rare those honest people are. It also found that people lie more when it benefits both them and someone else than when they just profit alone.

"Wondering which IoT device types are part of the Mirai botnet causing trouble today? Brian Krebs has the list," tweeted Trend Micro's Eric Skinner Friday, sharing an early October link which identifies Panasonic, Samsung and Xerox printers, and lesser known makers of routers and cameras. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Part of the responsibility should also lie with lawmakers and regulators, who have failed to create a safety system to account for the Internet-of-Things era we are now living in. Finally, it's time for consumers to acknowledge they have a role in the attack too. By failing to secure the internet-connected devices, they are endangering not just themselves but the rest of the Internet as well.
If you're worried, Motherboard is pointing people to an online scanning tool from BullGuard (a U.K. anti-virus firm) which checks whether devices on your home network are listed in the Shodan search engine for unsecured IoT devices. But earlier this month, Brian Krebs pointed out the situation is exacerbated by the failure of many ISPs to implement the BCP38 security standard to filter spoofed traffic, "allowing systems on their networks to be leveraged in large-scale DDoS attacks..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Pirate services obtain content by capturing and restreaming feeds obtained from official sources, often from something as humble as a regular subscriber account. These streams can then be redistributed by thousands of other sites and services, many of which are easily found using a simple search. Dedicated anti-piracy companies track down these streams and send takedown notices to the hosts carrying them. Sometimes this means that streams go down quickly but in other cases hosts can take a while to respond or may not comply at all. Networking company Cisco thinks it has found a solution to these problems. The company's claims center around its Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP) platform, a system that aims to take down illicit streams in real-time. Perhaps most interestingly, Cisco says SPP functions without needing to send takedown notices to companies hosting illicit streams. "Traditional takedown mechanisms such as sending legal notices (commonly referred to as 'DMCA notices') are ineffective where pirate services have put in place infrastructure capable of delivering video at tens and even hundreds of gigabits per second, as in essence there is nobody to send a notice to," the company explains. "Escalation to infrastructure providers works to an extent, but the process is often slow as the pirate services will likely provide the largest revenue source for many of the platform providers in question." To overcome these problems Cisco says it has partnered with Friend MTS (FMTS), a UK-based company specializing in content-protection. Among its services, FMTS offers Distribution iD, which allows content providers to pinpoint which of their downstream distributors' platforms are a current source of content leaks. "Robust and unique watermarks are embedded into each distributor feed for identification. The code is invisible to the viewer but can be recovered by our specialist detector software," FMTS explains. "Once infringing content has been located, the service automatically extracts the watermark for accurate distributor identification." According to Cisco, FMTS feeds the SPP service with pirate video streams it finds online. These are tracked back to the source of the leak (such as a particular distributor or specific pay TV subscriber account) which can then be shut-down in real time.

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider's Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: "'OCP has a cultlike following,' one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. 'The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.' OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it 'open source' so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there's a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple's networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely -- never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple's exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple's secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said 'no.' 'The whole team quit the same week,' this person told us."

Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established, nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. From an ArsTechnica report: Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that's also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm's bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020 -- the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. "The Snapdragon X50 5G modem heralds the arrival of 5G as operators and OEMs reach the cellular network and device testing phase," said Qualcomm exec veep Cristiano Amon. "Utilising our long history of LTE and Wi-Fi leadership, we are thrilled to deliver a product that will help play a critical role in bringing 5G devices and networks to reality. This shows that we're not just talking about 5G, we're truly committed to it."

An anonymous reader writes: IBM is leading a prestigious consortium of tech players in the open development of a new framework that, the company says, can speed data centre performance by a factor of 10. Participants in the OpenCAPI group include IBM, Google, Nvidia, Mellanox, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Micron and Xilinx. Chris Johnson, a Principal Engineer at Google commented 'Google is committed to open standards and we are excited to contribute to the cross-industry use and development of OpenCAPI'. Google's collaboration with RackSpace on the Zaius server will include IBM's forthcoming POWER9 processor technology, which is built around OpenCAPI. Tom Eby, vice president of Micron's compute and networking business said:"While memory has always been an essential building block for computing, it is quickly becoming the critical technology to unlocking next-generation performance."