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Submission + - Taliban captures Biometric Database

Submitted by ghoul
ghoul writes: According to this Yahoo story US had been creating a Biometric database of Iris ,fingerprint and face data for 80% of Afghans. This was done using idiot proof handheld biometric scanners linked to a central Database both of which are now in taliban hands. With ISI help they should be able to break any data security which means they can use the scanners to scan and find whoever worked for the previous govt. Many other countries including India too has a national ID card with biometrics (which ISI regularly hacks to create fake cards to insert agents). US has been thinking of using Biometrics for Voter ID cards and is already using it for unemployment benefits. What do you think about such initiatives. the Indian and US govts are probably not going to fall anytime soon but hackers can still get in. At least with current identity theft you can change your passwords but you cant change your biometrics. Once its hacked its hacked.

Submission + - Data security law: China orders state firms to migrate to government cloud (scmp.com) 3

Submitted by Proudrooster
Proudrooster writes: Private cloud computing in China is dead. Tech giants Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Didi ,and China Telecom will loose 100% of their business when current contracts expire. FTA: Data stored in these platforms must be moved to digital infrastructure controlled by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (Sasac) within two months of the expiration of existing leases, with the final deadline at the end of September next year. The new law prohibits, 'Illegally Collecting, Using, Processing, Transmitting, Disclosing and Trading People's Personal Information.' according to the state-run Xinhua News agency, the full text of the law is not yet public but the CCP (government) will be granted full access to the data.

China has demonstrated with the recent tech stock crackdown on IPOs, crackdown on high income earners, and now this data security law that anyone and anything is expendable for the sake of total control by the CCP.

Submission + - Apple's New Child Safety Technology Might Harm More Kids Than It Helps (scientificamerican.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "It is not clear how well this algorithm will work nor what precisely it will detect. Some sexually-explicit-content detection algorithms flag content based on the percentage of skin showing. For example, the algorithm may flag a photo of a mother and daughter at the beach in bathing suits. If two young people send a picture of a scantily clad celebrity to each other, their parents might be notified.

Computer vision is a notoriously difficult problem, and existing algorithms—for example, those used for face detection—have known biases ...The risk of inaccuracies in Apple’s system is especially high because most academically-published nudity-detection algorithms are trained on images of adults. Apple has provided no transparency about the algorithm they’re using, so we have no idea how well it will work, especially for detecting images young people take of themselves—presumably the most concerning."

Submission + - Layoffs are just the beginning of bad news for Vice and Buzzfeed (aim.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The future is bleak for digital companies like Buzzfeed and Vice as they continue to lay off workers and struggle for organic growth

The youth-oriented, progressive publication Vice, laid off 17 staffers today, including Meredith Balkus, Vice’s managing editor of digital. Variety obtained a copy of the internal memo, “cutbacks coming in North America from the Vice Digital and women-focused Refinery29 groups”.

The news comes a year after the company chopped 155 from its staff over a revenue slowdown because of the pandemic.

Will they learn to code or build solar panels?

Submission + - CSP 2.0 Patent Troll Datawing Backs Off (theregister.com) 1

Submitted by LeeLynx
LeeLynx writes: From The Register:

The director of a tiny UK company has apologised after sending letters to businesses suggesting they had infringed his patents that he claimed covered an age-old web standard.
...
Datawing Ltd sent a number of letters to small businesses this month claiming to own one UK and one US patent on CSP and its use of a nonce. After an initial wave of alarm and outrage on Twitter when the letters surfaced, The Register tracked down their author: a penitent William Coppock.
...
The letter claimed "our patent has been widely overlooked by companies since the inception of CSP 2.0 in 2014," advertised Datawing's Scriptlock product which "augments CSP 2.0 with new features which greatly reduce the cost of adding CSP support to existing websites," and suggested that if companies weren't interested in Scriptlock, they should "obtain a licence to work the patent."

"Technical information is enclosed with instructions for how to register with us and license fees," it concluded.

Submission + - Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech SE. The largest real-world analysis (PDF) comparing natural immunity — gained from an earlier infection — to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant.

The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered. The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. Giving a single shot of the vaccine to those who had been previously infected also appeared to boost their protection. The long-term benefit of a booster dose of the inoculation, which has just recently begun in Israel, is unknown.

Submission + - SPAM: Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they’re buying garbage. I do not use the term “garbage” lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There’s nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there’s nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I’ve actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it’s always had a massive performance problem — as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I’d charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It’s not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it’s nowhere near acceptable performance.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - NIF Laser Approaches Fusion Milestone (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab make a major advance on the path to fusion ignition and energy breakeven.

Comment facts don't matter, apparently (Score 1, Interesting) 423

by davek (#60722178) Attached to: Election Was Most Secure In American History, US Officials Say

"On Monday, I asked Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria about this scenario. If ballots signed by someone else “came through, we would still have the signature match to rely on for identity,” he said. Asked if he was confident the safeguard would identify those ballots, he said, “I’m confident that the process has been working throughout this process.”

"He was wrong. Eight of the nine ballots went through. In other words, signature verification had an 89 percent failure rate in catching mismatched signatures.

source: https://www.zerohedge.com/poli...

Comment Re:can we stop editorilaizing the headline, please (Score 1) 71

by davek (#57420694) Attached to: Cities Will Sue FCC To Stop $2 Billion Giveaway To Wireless Carriers

Yes. Misrepresenting someone's argument in order to attack it is called the "Straw-man" fallacy.

I also know that the /. headline is simply parroting the ars one. However, just because ars is a hopelessly biased opinion source, doesn't mean that slashdot needs to be also.

Submission + - Linux kernel developers contemplating revolt against SJW Code of Conduct (lulz.com) 11

Submitted by IHTFISP
IHTFISP writes: Apparently, the Linux kernel developer community may be preparing to stage a revolt against the SJW Code of Conduct disruptors who are threatening the core meritocracy of Linux code development. From LULZ:

Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project to join the Contributor Covenant [...] an agreement to implement a special Code of Conduct (frequently CoC from now on) aimed at changing the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming. CC’s Code of Conduct is controversial particularly because it allows anyone to be banned from contributing code for any reason, usually with no mechanism for oversight or accountability.

On September 16 the pro-CoC side got their wish—Linux had officially committed to implementing and obeying the CC Code of Conduct—and they immediately set about using it to remove top Linux coders. Sage Sharp, who describes theyself as a “diversity & inclusion consultant, hufflepuff, non-binary agender trans masculine” and has 7k followers, cites GeekFeminismWiki and targets Google’s Theo Ts’o with accusations of being a rape apologist.

Opposition to CC’s Code of Conduct has generated thousands of posts on 4chan’s technology board alone.

This has prompted a growing discussion of rescinding GPL license grants from code contributions, in protest.

Specifically, in apparent retaliation, members of the Linux kernel developer community (by way of the Linux Kernel Mailing List) are now considering en masse rescinding of their grants of GPL licenses for their code contributions, in protest. Developers who have been banned as a result of the CoC are being encouraged to do the same.

This recent development may have been stimulated in part by founder Linus Torvalds' recent announcement that he will be stepping away from Linux kernel development, at least for the near term. Apparently, Linus was under increasing pressure from the CoC activists for his infamous impatience with—and boorish verbal abuse towards—submitters of code that does not meet his exacting standards for inclusion in the kernel.

In response, perennial Linux critic and agitator Richard Stallman (RMS) has stated he intends to decline comment on this internal Linux community controversy.

Submission + - Wendy's Faces Lawsuit For Unlawfully Collecting Employee Fingerprints (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A class-action lawsuit has been filed in Illinois against fast food restaurant chain Wendy's accusing the company of breaking state laws in regards to the way it stores and handles employee fingerprints. The complaint is centered around Wendy's practice of using biometric clocks that scan employees' fingerprints when they arrive at work, when they leave, and when they use the Point-Of-Sale and cash register systems.

Plaintiffs, represented by former Wendy's employees Martinique Owens and Amelia Garcia, claim that Wendy's breaks state law --the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)-- because the company does not make employees aware of how it handles their data. More specifically, the lawsuit claims that Wendy's does not inform employees in writing of the specific purpose and length of time for which their fingerprints were being collected, stored, and used, as required by the BIPA, and nor does it obtain a written release from employees with explicit consent to obtain and handle the fingerprints in the first place. Wendy's also doesn't provide a publicly available retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying employees' fingerprints after they leave the company, plaintiffs said. The plaintiffs also claim that Wendy's also sends this data to a third-party without their consent.

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