Xpertfeed

  A demo in the upcoming elections will inform the potential future adoption of the remote model The Brazilian government is considering the adoption of online voting, in a move that aims to phase out the current electronic voting machine set-up and generate savings. The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) has released a request for proposals from technology companies and the firms will be able to demonstrate potential solutions in the upcoming municipal elections in November. The demonstration will be carried out with a sample of voters from the cities of São Paulo, Valparaiso de Goiás and Curitiba, who will choose fictitious candidates online. The demo results should inform the discussions over a potential change in the electoral process. According to the TSE, the investigations over a potential adoption of online voting aim to find a more modern approach for the electronic voting system to make the process of choosing elected representatives "even more democratic and accessible elec...

  All new Git repositories on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" starting October 1, 2020. Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms. GitHub repositories are where users and companies store and synchronize their source code projects. By default, GitHub uses the term " master " for the primary version of a source code repository. Developers make copies of the " master " on their computers into which they add their own code, and then merge the changes back into the " master " repo. "On  October 1, 2020 , any new repositories you create will use  main  as the default branch, instead of  master ," the company said. Existing repositories that have " master " set as the default branch will be left as...

  This prosthetic iris demonstrates the power and promise of nanotechnology. Smart contact lenses are a sci-fi trope, but they may also offer hope for sufferers of certain kinds of debilitating eye ailments. That's the goal of new research into a a tunable, low-powered iris embedded in a smart contact lens. It's a good example of the growing role of nanotechnology in human augmentation and therapeutics. The human iris controls pupil size in response to light, a critical function that allows the retina to take in appropriate sensory information. Too much light and the world is washed out, too little and it's veiled in darkness. A host of eye diseases and deficiencies inhibit the iris from responding appropriately, including aniridia and keratoconus. Light sensitivity, similarly, is a painful debilitation and is often associated with chronic migraine. Researchers at Imec, an innovation hub based in Belgium, along with partners like CMST, a Ghent University-affiliated research...

  Firefox will block automatic downloads initiated from sandboxed iframes -- the technology usually used for web embeds. Mozilla will add a new security feature to Firefox in October that will make it harder for malicious web pages to initiate automatic downloads and plant malware-laced files on a user's computer. Called a  drive-by download , this type of attack has been around for two decades and usually takes place when users visit a website that contains malicious code placed there by an attacker. The role of the malicious code is to abuse legitimate features in browsers and web standards to initiate an automatic file download or download prompt, in the hopes of tricking the user into running a malicious file. There are multiple forms of drive-by downloads, depending on the browser feature attackers decide to use. Browsers like  Chrome ,  Firefox , and Internet Explorer have, across the years, gradually deployed various forms of protections against automatic driv...