Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that’s largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.
Source: Gartner: Global PC shipments grew 1.4% in Q2 2018, first increase in 6 years | VentureBeat
The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of producing plastic items like grocery bags, which we use for an average of 12 minutes but can persist in the environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place
Source: More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution – Scientific American Blog Network
Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.
Source: Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends – The New York Times
This statistic shows the operating system market share worldwide on Desktop PCs 2013-2018. In February 2018, the OS market share of the Windows operating system range was at 82.55 percent.
Court says an attacker was only required to send malformed UDP packets to a target’s Steam client, which would have triggered the bug and allowed him to run malicious code on the target’s PC.
Source: Valve Patches Security Bug That Existed in Steam Client for the Past Ten Years
This plan rests on Richard Jenkins, an engineer, sailor, and adventurer who invented the saildrone more or less by accident. Jenkins doesn’t act like one of Silicon Valley’s world-conquering capitalist nerds. For starters, he tends to skip the usual platitudes about disruption to focus on sailing, beer, and sailing with beer. “What’s the definition of a sailor?” he asks while launching one of the drones off the Alameda dock. “A primitive organism for turning beer into urine.”
Source: This Man Is Building an Armada of Saildrones to Conquer the Ocean – Bloomberg
“On default, Alexa ends the sessions after each duration… we were able to build in a feature that kept the session going [so Alexa would continue listening]. We also wanted to make sure that the user is not prompted and that Alexa is still listening without re-prompts,” Erez Yalon, manager of Application Security Research at Checkmarx, told Threatpost.
When a user grants a website access to their social media profile, they are not only trusting that website, but also third parties embedded on that site” writes Englehardt. This chart shows that what some trackers are pulling from users. Freedom To Tinker warned OnAudience about another security issue recently, leading it to stop collecting user info.
Source: Login With Facebook data hijacked by JavaScript trackers | TechCrunch
Don’t use Facebook.
With the removal of old architecture and other bits of tidying up, with v4.17 RC1 there were more lines of code removed than added: something described as “probably a first. Ever. In the history of the universe. Or at least kernel releases.”
Source: Linus Torvalds says Linux kernel v5.0 ‘should be meaningless’
Linus describes Secure Boot as being “pushed in your face by people with an agenda.” But his real problem is that Secure Boot would then imply Kernel Lockdown mode.
Source: Torvalds Expresses Concerns Over Current “Kernel Lockdown” Approach – Phoronix