President Donald Trump said this week that the federal budget is a “mess” and is promising to make it leaner. This means that federal IT spending — now at $81.6 billion — is likely to see cuts, analysts said. The Trump administration is still filling top technology policy positions, including replacing former federal CIO Tony…
Investigations into reported collisions by drones with civil aircraft found that they were caused instead by birds, wires and posts, or structural failures unrelated to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), a U.S. regulator said. There has been widespread concern about the risks that the flying of drones close to aircraft can pose, and the Federal Aviation…
The road to develop self-driving cars might be paved with lawsuits. Waymo, a spin-off from Google’s self-driving car initiative, is suing Uber for allegedly stealing its trade secrets. On Thursday, it filed a lawsuit against Uber and its startup Otto — a self-driving trucking company — claiming that the two companies were using stolen intellectual…
Security researchers have achieved the first real-world collision attack against the SHA-1 hash function, producing two different PDF files with the same SHA-1 signature. This shows that the algorithm’s use for security-sensitive functions should be discontinued as soon as possible. SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) dates back to 1995 and has been known to be…
Tesla is planning a total of five Gigafactories, where it will manufacture solar panels and battery systems for both its electric vehicles and for home and commercial energy storage. “Later this year, we expect to finalize locations for Gigafactories 3, 4 and possibly 5,” the company stated in a letter to shareholders. Tesla Tesla will…
Ransomware criminals chatting up victims, offering to delay deadlines, showing how to obtain Bitcoin, dispensing the kind of customer support that consumers lust for from their cable and mobile plan providers, PC and software makers? What’s not to love? Finnish security vendor F-Secure yesterday released 34 pages of transcripts from the group chat used by…
Retromobile 2017 Car Show Image by Reuters/Benoit Tessier One of the true stellar classic car events on the world happened recently in Paris. “Retromobile” features hundreds of amazingly cool, some one of a kind models. Here we’ll talk a look at 11 of the decidedly coolest – courtesy of Reuters. To read this article in…
The internet is a tough place to have a conversation. Abuse has driven celebrities and ordinary folks from social media platforms that are ill-equipped to deal with it, and some publishers have switched off comment sections. That’s why Google and Jigsaw (an early stage incubator at Google parent company Alphabet) are working on a project…
How would you feel about an artificial intelligence system handling your taxes this year? H&R Block, the tax services company, is betting that customers will be willing to have A.I. assist their human tax preparers in getting them the biggest refunds possible or at least reduce how much they owe. The company, which has about…
The Node.js Foundation this week has released Node.js 7.6.0, an experimental version of the server-side JavaScript platform that moves forward with async/await capabilities for handling asynchronous operations. But the Foundation advises enterprise users to skip using the new release in production and instead wait for Node.js 8 to arrive in April. With Node’s release strategy,…