Posts

You may not realize it, but the primary language for database programming SQL is almost 50 years old. And in an industry where tech and programming processes can be born, live and die a natural death in a matter of months, you could argue the power of knowing how to store and organize raw data is more relevant now than ever before. As one of the top tech skills of 2019, you can learn about the language as well as one of the most well-known database systems with the training in the MySQL and SQL for Beginners course available now ($12....

There are many surprising analogies between proteins, the basic building blocks of life, and musical notation. These analogies can be used not only to help advance research but also to make the complexity of proteins accessible to the public. We’re computational biologists who believe that hearing the sound of life at the molecular level could help inspire people to learn more about biology and the computational sciences. While creating music based on proteins isn’t new, different musical styles and composition algorithms had yet to be explored....

This update was delivered to the world on Blizzard’s forum. In it, the company stated that support will be arriving coming in this week’s patch, specifically 9.0.2. The post goes on to say that World of Warcraft will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than operating under emulation on Rosetta. What this means for you, the Mac-toting WoW lover, is that your MMORPG of choice should run slickly and smoothly on Apple’s new machines....

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has announced a Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Roadmap for the city as part of a long-term strategy to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and other zero-emission forms of transport. Under the plans, every Boston neighborhood will have EV charging stations by 2023; EVs will account for almost a quarter of every vehicle purchase in the city by 2025; and the majority of the municipal fleet will be decarbonized over the coming decades....

Journalists all over the world could soon be using a tool like this. In a few years, a tool like this could even be used by everyone to root out fake content in their social media feeds. As researchers who have been studying deepfake detection and developing a tool for journalists, we see a future for these tools. They won’t solve all our problems, though, and they will be just one part of the arsenal in the broader fight against disinformation....

If you think you’re a pro PlayStation gamer, you shouldn’t just sit at your home and brag to your friends. Go online and test your skills against the best of the world. But, to do that, you’ll need the Playstation Plus subscription. Luckily for you, the one-year subscription is available for just $39.99, down from $59.99. The PlayStation Plus subscription doesn’t only let you yell at teens in a battle royale game, but offers 100GB of cloud storage too....

Yeah, beating someone online is fun. It’s satisfying — especially if you can hear their anguish down the other end of the line — but there’s something even better about wiping the floor with someone you can see. Someone you’re in the room with. Maybe it’s the facial expressions, maybe it’s the body language, maybe it’s look of horror in their eyes; but it’s probably a mixture of all that....

“Are you sure you want to buy this,” I asked you incredulously. “Yes,” you insist. “I’ve got really good health insurance – and it includes dental.” “But wait,” I retort. “You’ll look really silly.” “I don’t mind,” you said. “I’m completely bereft of self-awareness. I could streak through the streets wearing nothing but a latex horse mask, and I wouldn’t even blush. And anyway — being a dickhead’s cool.” “You know you can rent these, right,” I said....

It has since emerged that the vulnerability in question was discovered at China’s principal hacking competition, the Tianfu Cup, where a professional hacker won a prize for his work in uncovering it. The normal protocol would be to inform Apple of the vulnerability. But it’s alleged that, instead, the breach was kept secret, with the Chinese government acquiring it to spy on the country’s Muslim minority. Hacking competitions are an established way for technology companies like Apple to locate and attend to weaknesses in their software’s cybersecurity....

Summer is fast approaching. And the same way we anticipate shorts weather, backyard cookouts, and other rites of the season, many are also bracing for another inevitability of the summer months — trying to adequately cool their home without the benefit of a central air conditioning system. With central AC, you can attach a smart thermostat, sync it to your phone, and have ultimate control over every aspect of AC use and cost, even when you aren’t home....

CNN backed its claim with numbers provided by Bank of America Securities, which showed a tiny $1 investment in Bitcoin at the start of 2010 would be worth more than $90,000 today (or, considering its latest price dives, until quite recently). Still, regardless of its recent performance, Bitcoin dominated more traditional investments. Even though the US stock market is the strongest in the world, $1 in American stocks at the start of the decade would now reportedly be valued at just $3....

If there was a single paralyzing fear in the first 20 years of computing, the one that filled both experts and occasional users alike with dread, it was probably the fear of forgetting to back up your work. If you didn’t stash critical in-progress work or your gotta-have-em documents to an external hard drive with regularity, there was always the fear that a crash could delete all that valuable data forever....

Cryptocurrency services known to have been affected include Bitfinex, Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, CoinMarketCap, and MyEtherWallet. — Bitfinex (@bitfinex) July 2, 2019 The full extent of interruptions to live cryptocurrency trade as a result of Cloudflare’s outage hasn’t yet been disclosed. Hard Fork has reached out to Coinbase and Bitfinex to learn more, and will update this piece should we receive a reply. At pixel time, Cloudflare seems to have returned to normal, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem is reminded once again of how damaging reliance on centralized services can be....

The report noted the app was used to communicate with voters and it was possible to view and download all data without any special technical requirement or hack. The link to the database was available in the source code of the home page of the Elector app’s website. The source code even included usernames and passwords of administrators of the database. [Read: Report: US Department of Justice holds China responsible for 2017 Equifax breach] According to the New York Times, the app maker has now fixed the bug and said it the mishap was a “one-off incident that was immediately dealt with....

I know what you might think: “Not me. I’m not the kind of person to burnout! I know how to manage my stress. I know how to manage challenges. I’m in the control of my life!” Burnout is only for the others… till it hit you. I experienced a severe form of burnout at the beginning of my career, as I was mentioning in this article about stress. I was exhausted, angry, and I had strong physical symptoms, like dizziness and headaches....

Out of the 20 million individuals affected by the breach, 6.7 million are children. Among other things, the data exposed sensitive details like names, addresses, national identifiation numbers, phone numbers, and martial status. The leaked cache contains about 18GB of data, according to security researchers from vpnMentor who discovered the breach. The data was hosted on an unsecured server located in Miami, Florida. The researchers say seems to belong to Ecuadorian IT consulting firm Novaestrat....

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) May 17, 2020 I call him a living shitpost because, like the anonymous cowards he’s paying homage to when he tweets about being “red-pilled,” he’s playing a game. “Red-pilling” or “taking a red pill” is a reference to the movie The Matrix. The film’s protagonist, Neo, is offered the choice between taking a wild adventure where the terrible truth about humanity will become clear to him or remaining in his boring, normal life....

It’s been almost an hour since I first heard the song, and I’m yet to recover from it. What the hell, Elon? I understand that you’re rich and you have lots of money lying around to do stupid stuff. But you could’ve created something like a flamethrower and spared our ears. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2020 [Read: Tesla becomes America’s first $100B publicly listed carmaker] I know, by now, Musk’s fan army is preparing their angry tweets at me, but sit down for a moment, grab a beer, and listen to this song....

According to figures shared by InsideEVs, there’s no sign of the trend slowing down either. In fact, plug-in electric vehicles had their best month of the year in September. The month saw a record 160,059 registrations of plug-in vehicles, that’s 166% more than September 2019. [Read: 4 ridiculously easy ways you can be more eco-friendly] Let’s drill down into that number further: battery electric vehicles (BEVs) outsold plug-in hybrid (PHEVs) cars by about 29%....

The survey was run by TeamBlind, the company behind the Blind anonymous social networking app. The app’s designed to allow professionals from major companies to connect with each other, and TeamBlind runs several surveys like this. It published the results for this one earlier in the week. The first question, which was put to 5,138 Blind users, found that most prefer traditional banks, with 62 percent trusting them more. Further, 57 percent of tech employees felt the same way....