California governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law on Sunday preventing schools in the state from starting classes before 8am. Quartz reports: The law bars middle schools from starting before 8am, while high schools must wait till 8:30am to begin classes. This means that about half of California schools will need to delay their opening bell by 30 minutes or less, according to a legislative analysis (pdf), while one-quarter will need to wait an additional 31 to 60 minutes to get going. Schools have until July 1, 2022 to comply with the rule, or whenever their three-year collective bargaining agr[...]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Boosting testosterone levels significantly improves female athletic performance, according to one of the first randomized controlled trials. The findings come as the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) announced on Monday it would impose an upper limit for testosterone levels on trans female athletes competing in middle-distance events. The latest research confirmed that testosterone significantly increases endurance and lean muscle mass among young women, even when given for a relatively short period.
In the stud[...]
A family who spent nine years in a basement "waiting for the end of time" have been discovered by police in the Netherlands after one of them turned up at a local pub, reports say. The BBC reports: A man of 58 and a family with young adults aged 18 to 25 were living at a farm in the province of Drenthe. They were found after the eldest of the children ordered beer at a bar in the nearby village of Ruinerwold. He then told staff he needed help, broadcaster RTV Drenthe reported. The older man, who has been arrested, was initially assumed to be the father, but local mayor Roger de Groot later tol[...]
Roomba robotic vacuum maker IRobot Corp. is suing rival SharkNinja for copying a device of theirs and selling it at "half the price." "Shark is not even shy about being a copycat," iRobot said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Boston, "claiming that the Shark IQ Robot offers the same iRobot technology at 'half the price of iRobot i7+'."Bloomberg reports: The company that unveiled the Roomba robotic vacuum in the early 2000s launched a product last year that takes house cleaning to a new level: It maps your home, schedules sweeps through each room, empties the dust bin itself and e[...]
Alleged copyright troll Christopher Brady will no longer be able to issue false DMCA takedowns to other YouTubers, according to a lawsuit settlement filed today. The Verge reports: Under the new agreement, Brady is banned from "submitting any notices of alleged copyright infringement to YouTube that misrepresent that material hosted on the YouTube service is infringing copyrights held or claimed to be held by Brady or anyone Brady claims to represent." Brady agreed to pay $25,000 in damages as part of the settlement. He is also prohibited from "misrepresenting or masking their identities" when[...]
Earlier today, San Francisco-based research institute OpenAI announced that it had taught a robotic hand to solve Rubik's cube one-handed. "Lost in the shuffle is just what is new here, if anything, and what of it may or may not be machine learning and artificial intelligence -- the science in other words," writes Tiernan Ray via ZDNet. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from his report: The real innovation in Tuesday's announcement, from a science standpoint, is the way many versions of possible worlds were created inside the computer simulation, in an automated fashion, using an [...]
New submitter aaronb1138 writes: So my apartment (UDR) pulled a bit of a blitz last Friday (10/11) to install new "Smart" IoT stuff in my home today (10/15) under the umbrella of SmartRent management. According to a CNET article from earlier this year, this seems to be SmartRent's usual method of attack. UDR is usually pretty miserly, so I suspect the monetization of my apartment usage is being sold at a nice price to advertisers. SmartRent FAQ claims no data sales, but their privacy policy is wide open and gives no such assurances. Further, they won't acknowledge if they also operate in Calif[...]
The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet tweets from world leaders who break its rules. Instead, it will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinions. The company said the move will help its users stay informed about global affairs, but while balancing the need to keep the site's rules in check. TechCrunch reports: Twitter has been in a bind, amid allegations that the company has not taken action against world leaders who break its rules. "When it comes to the actions of world leaders on Twitter, we recognize that this is l[...]
At Google's hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. From a report: The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone's voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there's no internet connectivity. This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, li[...]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A thriving online bazaar selling stolen payment card data has been hacked in a heist that leaked the records for more than 26 million cards, KrebsOnSecurity reported on Tuesday. The 26 million figure isn't significant only to the legitimate consumers and businesses who own the stolen cards or the financial institutions that issued them. Fortunately for the card owners, the database is now in the hands of affected financial institutions, who can invalidate and replace the cards.
The hacked market is called BriansClub, a site available a[...]