Facebook has open-sourced its Prophet forecasting tool, designed “to make it easier for experts and non-experts to make high-quality forecasts,” according to a blog post by Sean J. Taylor and Ben Letham in the company’s research team. “Forecasts are customizable in ways that are intuitive to non-experts,” they wrote. The code is available on GitHub…
Sixty-three-year-old Bob Zhang is worried about the future of tech jobs in the U.S. Will the high-paying positions be a thing of the past? Zhang thinks it’s already starting to happen. He’s one of 79 IT workers from the University of California, San Francisco, who’ve been laid off. Tuesday was their last day on…
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, passed two years, ago were a “mistake” that caused uncertainty for the broadband industry, the agency’s new chairman said. The net neutrality rules, along with the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated common carrier, “deviated” from the U.S. government’s longstanding light-touch regulatory approach toward the…
The group that sets standards for 4K on high-definition TVs has established specifications for 4K and HDR (high-dynamic range) video on mobile devices including smartphones, tablets and laptops. The devices will be eligible for a “Mobile HDR Premium” certification if they meet minimum specifications tied to screen resolution, bit depth and a handful of other…
Amazon Web Services, a major cloud hosting service, is having a system failure that has been affecting web sites and apps. AWS reported on its Service Health Dashboard at 2:35 p.m. ET that its engineers were working on the problem that has affected websites including Netflix, Reddit and Adobe. Those sites seem to be up…
Robotics company Boston Dynamics has built a two-legged, wheeled robot that can roll down a flight of stairs and jump on and off a table, all while maintaining its balance and speed. Handle, a 6-foot, 5-inch tall robot, can travel at 9 mph and jump four feet, according to Boston Dynamics, a Alphabet-owned company, which…
Microsoft has added a setting to Windows 10 that will let users restrict new software installation to only those apps hosted in the Windows Store. The option debuted in the latest version of Windows 10 Insider, the preview program which gives participants an early peek at the next feature upgrade as Microsoft builds it. That…
Intel is changing its view on how it upgrades chips. Rather than tying chip upgrades directly to the manufacturing process involved, Intel will look at delivering a sustained set of performance upgrades with each new chip architecture. “We’re going to be focused more on the generation by the amount of performance increment it will give…
BARCELONA — Moscow has rolled out new technologies to make the city safer, including 160,000 outdoor cameras focused on traffic and areas of possible crime. The effort is one of the largest municipal camera installations in Europe. Moscow, with 12 million residents, has installed enough cameras in the last 18 months to rival the number…
The profitability of ransomware made it the top cyber threat last year in two categories: the number of attacks and the amount of money generated for crooks, according to a Trend Micro lookback on data collected from customers. Not only is the ransomware business booming, it’s innovating, with Trend Micro researchers identifying 752 new families…