This week the New York Times published their online investigation into the seamy world of the professional slander industry. (Alternate URL.) At first glance, the websites appear amateurish. They have names like BadGirlReports.date, BustedCheaters.com and WorstHomeWrecker.com. Photos are badly cropped. Grammar and spelling are afterthoughts. They are clunky and text-heavy, as if they’re intended to…

An anonymous reader quotes Inside.com’s developer newsletter: GitHub is blocking Google’s new third-party cookie tracking alternative, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), across all of GitHub Pages. Those GitHub Pages served from the github.io domain will now come with a Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() header set, although Pages sites with custom domains will not. Several big names have…

The plethora of wireless communications technologies have cut the comms wire for many applications, but these devices still require power. For home automation, this might mean a battery or mains power, but there is also an alternative that we don’t see often: Kinetic power. [Bigclivecom] bought some kinetic switches from eBay and gave it his…

Analyst firm SlashData surveyed over 19,000 respondents from 155 countries for its “State of the Developer Nation” survey — and now estimates that there’s 24.3 million active developers worldwide. TechRadar reports: The report pegs JavaScript as the most popular language that, together with variants including TypeScript and CoffeeScript, is used by almost 14 million developers…

Four astronauts, three from NASA and one from JAXA, return after six-month stay on ISS. …read more Source:: CNet

Four astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico this morning at 2:57 a.m. ET — returning from the International Space Station in the first U.S. crew splashdown in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot in 1968. Phys.org reports: It was an express trip home, lasting just 6 1/2…

Four astronauts return after six-month stay on ISS. …read more Source:: CNet

Friday the Free Software Foundation awarded their coveted “Respects Your Freedom” (RYF) certification to another new product: the Free Software Wireless-N Mini Router v3 (TPE-R1300) from ThinkPenguin, Inc. Just 45 products currently hold the FSF’s certification “that these products meet the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.” (That…

Back in the late 1980s, Commodore pulled the masterstroke of selling several models and generations of Amiga that were all powered by essentially the same speed 68000 and associated chipset. Sure, there were differences in the RAM and other options you could fit and later models had a few extra graphics modes. Still, the entry-level…

Save credits like a Hutt on games and collectibles during the weeklong celebration. …read more Source:: CNet