"Earlier this year I gave a talk at FullStack conference in London about making iFrames cool again," writes a lead engineer at PayPal.
In a nutshell: iframes let you build user experiences into embeddable 'cross-domain components', which let users interact with other sites without being redirected. There are a metric ton of awesome uses for that other than tracking and advertizing. Nothing else comes close for this purpose; and as a result, I feel we're not using iframes to their full potential.
There are big problems, though... My talk went into how at PayPal, we built Zoid to solve so[...]
Long-time Slashdot reader StonyCreekBare shared this press release from the Texas Department of Information Resources (Dir) press release as of August 17, 2019, at approximately 5:00 p.m. central time:
On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments...
At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor. Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
It appears[...]
To address the affects of global warming, a team of designers "propose building ice-making submarines that would ply polar waters and pop out icebergs to replace melting floes," reports NBC News:
"Sea level rise due to melting ice should not only be responded [to] with defensive solutions," the designers of the submersible iceberg factory said in an animated video describing the vessel, which took second place in a recent design competition held by the Association of Siamese Architects. The video shows the proposed submarine dipping slowly beneath the ocean surface to allow seawater to fill[...]
Stack Overflow shares a new tool from a team of researchers that "takes the description of a programming task as a query and then provides relevant, comprehensive programming solutions containing both code snippets and their succinct explanations" -- the Crowd Knowledge Answer Generator (or CROKAGE):
In order to reduce the gap between the queries and solutions, the team trained a word-embedding model with FastText, using millions of Q&A threads from Stack Overflow as the training corpus. CROKAGE also expanded the natural language query (task description) to include unique open source softwa[...]
"As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare, I'm concerned that a cyberattack with widespread impact, an intrusion in one area that spreads to others or a combination of lots of smaller attacks, could cause significant damage, including mass injury and death rivaling the death toll of a nuclear weapon," warns an assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University:
Unlike a nuclear weapon, which would vaporize people within 100 feet and kill almost everyone within a half-mile, the death toll from most cyberattacks would be slower. People might die from [...]
In just 16 days XKCD author Randall Munroe releases a new book titled How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. He's just released an excerpt from the chapter "How to Catch a Drone," in which he actually enlisted the assistance of tennis star Serena Williams.
An anonymous reader writes:
Serena and her husband Alexis just happened to have a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera -- and Munroe asked her to try to smash it with tennis balls. "My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5-7 tries to hit a dro[...]
It's an unexpected surprise that's been popping up "all over the country," according to the Better Business Bureau. People are receiving boxes of unordered merchandise from Amazon.
The companies, usually foreign, third-party sellers that are sending the items are simply using your address and your Amazon information. Their intention is to make it appear as though you wrote a glowing online review of their merchandise, and that you are a verified buyer of that merchandise. They then post a fake, positive review to improve their products' ratings, which means more sales for them. The payoff i[...]
"Don't ask your smart device to look up a phone number, because it may accidentally point you to a scam," warn the consumer watchdogs at the Better Business Bureau:
You need the phone number for a company, so you ask your home's smart device -- such as Google Home, Siri, or Alexa -- to find and dial it for you. But when the company's "representative" answers, the conversation takes a strange turn. This representative has some odd advice! They may insist on your paying by wire transfer or prepaid debit card. In other cases, they may demand remote access to your computer or point you to an un[...]
Google has made a proposal to the unofficial cert industry group that "would cut lifespan of SSL certificates from 825 days to 397 days," reports ZDNet.
No vote was held on the proposal; however, most browser vendors expressed their support for the new SSL certificate lifespan. On the other side, certificate authorities were not too happy, to say the least. In the last decade and a half, browser makers have chipped away at the lifespan of SSL certificates, cutting it down from eight years to five, then to three, and then to two. The last change occured in March 2018, when browser makers tri[...]
The New York Times explains a new issue by describing what happened when Xavier Einaudi tried to close his Wells Fargo checking account.
For weeks after the date the bank said the accounts would be closed, it kept some of them active. Payments to his insurer, to Google for online advertising and to a provider of project management software were paid out of the empty accounts in July. Each time, the bank charged Einaudi a $35 overdraft fee... By the middle of July, he owed the bank nearly $1,500. "I don't even know what happened," he said.
Current and former bank employees said Einaudi w[...]