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“Even as the White House began cracking down on U.S. work visas, major Silicon Valley technology firms last year dramatically ramped up hiring of workers under the controversial H-1B visa program,” reports the Mercury News.

Menlo Park-based Facebook in 2017 received 720 H-1B approvals, a 53 percent increase over 2016, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, which obtained federal government data. Mountain View’s Google received 1,213 H-1B approvals, a 31 percent increase. The number of H-1B approvals at Intel in Santa Clara rose 19 percent and Cupertino-based Apple received 673, a 7 percent increase…. [E]xperts say the data doesn’t show how many additional H-1B contractors tech companies may get from staffing agencies or outsourcing companies. In response to this news organization’s inquiries, Facebook said it does not publicly discuss its use of H-1B workers or contractors. Google, Apple and Intel did not respond to requests for information about their use of H-1B workers or contractors….
Amazon chalked up the largest increase in H-1B approvals, with 2,515 in 2017, a 78 percent leap. Microsoft received 1,479 approvals, an increase of 29 percent. Neither company responded to a request for comment.
A distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Engineering at Silicon Valley believes that the threat of a U.S. crackdown on H-1B visas may simply have prompted companies to secure as many visas as possible while they could.

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Source:: Slashdot

The flagship Sennheiser HD 800S isn’t going away, but now with the HD 820 there’s a closed-back version. I gave it a listen. …read more

Source:: CNet

The systems and database administrator for a Fortune 500 company notes that while NFS is “decades old and predating Linux…the most obvious feature missing from NFSv4 is native, standalone encryption.” emil (Slashdot reader #695) summarizes this article from Linux Journal:
NFS is the most popular remote file system in the Linux, UNIX, and greater POSIX community. The NFS protocol pushes file traffic over cleartext connections in the default configuration, which is poison to sensitive information.
TLS can wrap this traffic, finally bringing wire security to files vulnerable to compromise in transit. Before using a cloud provider’s toolset, review NFS usage and encrypt where necessary.
The article’s author complains that Google Cloud “makes no mention of data security in its documented procedures,” though “the performance penalty for tunneling NFS over stunnel is surprisingly small….”
“While the crusade against telnet may have been largely won, Linux and the greater UNIX community still have areas of willful blindness. NFS should have been secured long ago, and it is objectionable that a workaround with stunnel is even necessary.”

of this story at Slashdot.

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Source:: Slashdot

Certification, endpoint security, 2FA, phishing, and PII were among the themes and puns offered by readers in our latest cartoon caption competition. And the winners are … …read more

Source:: DarkReading

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: The European Parliament accepted a resolution to lengthen consumer goods and software’s longevity, a counter to the alleged planned obsolescence process built into a lot of products. The European Parliament now wants the European Commission to create a clear definition of the term “planned obsolescence” and to develop a system to track that aging process. It also wants longer warranty periods and criteria to measure a product’s strength. Each and every device should also have a mention of its minimal life expectancy.

Devices should also be easier to repair: batteries and other components should be freely accessible for replacement, unless safety dictates otherwise. Manufacturers will also need to give other companies access to their components so that consumers can visit those companies for repairs.

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Source:: Slashdot

We’re not sure why we’ve got a thing for DIN-rail mounted projects, but we do. Perhaps it’s because we’ve seen so many cool industrial control cabinets, or maybe the forced neatness of DIN-mounted components resonates on some deep level. Whatever it is, if it’s DIN-rail mounted, chances are good that we’ll like it.

Take this DIN-mounted bench power supply, for instance. On the face of it, [TD-er]’s project is yet another bench supply built around those ubiquitous DPS switching power supply modules, the ones with the colorful displays. Simply throwing one of those in a DIN-mount enclosure isn’t much to write home about, but there’s more to this project than that. [TD-er] needed some fixed voltages in addition to the adjustable output, so a multi-voltage DC-DC converter board was included inside the case as well. The supply has 3.3, 5, and 12 volt fixed outputs along with the adjustable supply, and thanks to an enclosed Bluetooth module, the whole thing can be controlled from his phone. Plus it fits nicely in a compact work area, which is a nice feature.

We haven’t seen a lot of DIN-rail love around these pages — just this recent rotary phase converter with very tidy DIN-mounted controls. That’s a shame, we’d love to see more.

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Source:: Hackaday

Fall TV is finally back! …read more

Source:: CNet

Viewers of HBO’s Southern gothic mystery who haven’t read the book have some weird, dark ideas about who the killer might be. Spoiler-free up to Episode 6. …read more

Source:: CNet

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Reports from earlier this month claimed Google was working on products for the Chinese market, detailing plans for a search engine and news app that complied with the Chinese government’s censorship and surveillance demands. The news was a surprise to many Googlers, and yesterday an article from The New York Times detailed a Maven-style internal revolt at the company. Fourteen hundred employees signed a letter demanding more transparency from Google’s leadership on ethical issues, saying, “Google employees need to know what we’re building.” The letter says many employees only learned about the project through news reports and that “currently we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.”

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google addressed the issue of China at this week’s all-hands meeting. The report says CEO Sundar Pichai told employees the company was “not close to launching a search product” in China but that Pichai thinks Google can do good by engaging with China. “I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world,” The Journal quotes Pichai as say, “and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China.” The report says Brin “sounded optimistic about doing more business in China” but that Brin called progress in the country “slow-going and complicated.”

of this story at Slashdot.

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Source:: Slashdot

95 percent of the 2.46 million affected vehicles had been fixed by June, so it’s not a widespread issue. …read more

Source:: CNet