“American Homes For Rent is a publicly traded company that owns more than 50,000 properties,” writes Slashdot reader McGruber — calling our attention to a glaring security error. “Its website has a tab on its listings that says ‘Let Yourself In.’ If you click it, you are taken to Rently.com, a website that sells the…

“Whether it is consumers’ data or competitors’ code, Google’s view seems to be the same: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine,” argues Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck. Google had urged America’s Supreme Court to rule in their ongoing legal case about access to Java’s APIs, a case which Google says hinges…

Amazon Ring is building “a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors,” reports the director Nieman Journalism Lab, in a post from The Atlantic: That’s right: A doorbell company wants to report crime news. It already is, actually. Several people on LinkedIn describe their jobs as “news editors” at…

Save big on Star Wars games, drones, clothes and more! …read more Source:: CNet

[Bithead] wanted to make a prop replica of an Electrostaff from Star Wars, but wasn’t sure how best to create the “crackling arcs of energy” effect at the business ends. After a few false starts, he decided to leverage the persistence of vision effect by spinning LEDs in more than one axis to create helical…

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Deputies in this corner of western Oregon outside ultraliberal Portland used to track down criminals the old-fashioned way, faxing caught-on-camera images of a suspect around the office in hope that someone might recognize the face. Then, in late 2017, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office became the first law…

An expired Mozilla security certificate started causing problems for many who’d customized the browser with add-ons. …read more Source:: CNet

Despite the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, “censorship cannot be the only answer,” argues the EFF, adding that “removing entire categories of speech from a platform does little to solve the underlying problems.” “Tech companies and online platforms have other ways to address the rapid spread of disinformation, including addressing the algorithmic ‘megaphone’ at the heart…

Though Slack’s web site promises that “Slack is where work happens,” Vox argues instead that “an increasing emphasis on new technology to moderate our workdays isn’t necessarily making our work better or making us more productive. If wielded poorly, it can even make it worse. Slack is one of numerous types of workplace software that…

Have you shopped for an appliance lately? They’re all LEDs, LEDs everywhere. You might say that manufacturers are out of touch with the utility of tactile controls. [Wingletang]’s fancy new washing machine is cut from this modern cloth. While it does have a nice big knob for selecting cycles, the only indication of your selection…