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Submission + - U.S. Supreme Court EPA Ruling Cited in Challenge to DOJ's OPT Authority

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a June 30th filing in a case challenging the U.S. Department of Justice's authority over Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs (e.g, see Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command), attorneys for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers advised the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the EPA lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution from existing power plants.

It's the latest salvo fired in tiny WashTech's ongoing OPT legal battle that pits it against the U.S. DOJ, an alliance of 60 businesses, trade associations, and organizations (led by Mark Zuckerberg's billionaire-backed FWD.us PAC), and 150+ U.S. universities and colleges whose attorneys have filed Amicus Briefs with the Court in support of Optional Practical Training. Attorneys for some of the nation's largest tech, trade, and manufacturing lobbying groups have also been granted leave by the Court to intervene as defendants in the case to help the DOJ quash WashTech. "Members of ITI would incur significant direct and indirect costs if the OPT program were declared unlawful," argued lawyers in 2019 on behalf of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft. "Member companies would lose thousands of employees who depend on OPT for employment authorization. Those businesses would face significant costs in hiring new workers to fill these critical jobs."

The July 15th DOJ response to the WashTech filing appeared to suggest (IANAL) to the Court that any comparisons to the EPA ruling should be ignored, since that was an "extraordinary case" involving a potentially huge economic impact. While the DOJ filing did not attempt to estimate the economic impact of filling the "773,844 active online job postings" for open computing jobs that was cited as important in the 2021 Amicus Brief in support of OPT signed by tech companies and others, the CEO of tech giant-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org estimated the value of filling just 500K tech jobs at $1.7 trillion in a 2017 pitch ("A trillion-dollar opportunity for America") for Federal support of K-12 computer science education to the incoming Trump administration (in 2012, Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith unveiled the company's National Talent Strategy, "a two-pronged approach that will couple long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" to address tech workforce needs). The importance of OPT to the economy was also underscored in the Amicus Brief signed by the universities and colleges, which advised the Court that "the labor market would lose 443,000 jobs" even if OPT was not eliminated but just reduced to 40% of its current size.

Submission + - Scientists discover 200 pits on the moon that are always 63F/17C in the shade. (livescience.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Lunar scientists think they've found the hottest places on the Moon, as well as some 200 Goldilocks zones that are always near the average temperature in San Francisco.

The moon has wild temperature fluctuations, with parts of the moon heating up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and dropping to minus 280 F (minus 173 C) at night. But the newly analyzed 200 shaded lunar pits are always always 63 F (17 C), meaning they're perfect for humans to shelter from the extreme temperatures. They could also shield astronauts from the dangers of the solar wind, micrometeorites and cosmic rays. Some of those pits may lead to similarly warm caves.

These partially-shaded pits and dark caves could be ideal for a lunar base, scientists say.

"Surviving the lunar night is incredibly difficult because it requires a lot of energy, but being in these pits and caves almost entirely removes that requirement," Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author on the NASA-funded research published online July 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, told Live Science.

Submission + - Proxy Service 911[.]re Closes After Disclosing Breach (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: 911[.]re, a proxy service that since 2015 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, announced this week that it is shutting down in the wake of a data breach that destroyed key components of its business operations, KrebsOnSecurity reports.

"On July 28th, a large number of users reported that they could not log in the system," the statement continues. "We found that the data on the server was maliciously damaged by the hacker, resulting in the loss of data and backups. Its [sic] confirmed that the recharge system was also hacked the same way. We were forced to make this difficult decision due to the loss of important data that made the service unrecoverable."

Operated largely out of China, 911 was an enormously popular service across many cybercrime forums, and it became something akin to critical infrastructure for this community after two of 911's longtime competitors — malware-based proxy services VIP72 and LuxSock — closed their doors in the past year.

911 wasn't the only major proxy provider disclosing a breach this week tied to unauthenticated APIs: On July 28, KrebsOnSecurity reported that internal APIs exposed to the web had leaked the customer database for Microleaves, a proxy service that rotates its customers' IP addresses every five to ten minutes. That investigation showed Microleaves — like 911 — had a long history of using pay-per-install schemes to spread its proxy software.

Submission + - Musk-Twitter Trial to Start Oct. 17, Delaware Judge Rules (time.com)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk over a canceled $44 billion buyout of the social-media platform is set for a five-day trial starting Oct. 17 in Delaware, a judge ruled.

The decision late Thursday by Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick comes after Musk’s lawyers claimed Twitter wanted an Oct. 10 start date “without justification.” Twitter said it wasn’t opposed to Oct. 17 as long as it was assured of a full five-day trial.

McCormick agreed earlier this month to fast-track the trial over the Musk’s failed deal to acquire Twitter for $54.20 a share, which he nixed over claims that usage statistics for the social-media platform are inflated by spam and robot accounts.

Twitter claimed Musk, the world’s richest person, was dragging his feet on setting the schedule and lobbed a letter onto the court docket without sharing it with his opponents. McCormick, in her eight-page order, warned both sides that any pre-trial information exchanges “should not be requested or withheld in an effort to inflict unreasonable demands on or extract unreasonable benefits from the opposing party.”

Twitter’s lawyers say they’ll need only four days to prove Musk is misusing questions about spam and robot accounts as a pretext to walk away from the deal. The company said it had turned over all its information about those accounts and it is seeking to force the billionaire, who co-founded Tesla Inc., to consummate the acquisition.

Musk counters in court filings Twitter’s handover of the so-called bots material hasn’t been robust and that the company’s mishandling of that data provides a legitimate basis for his cancellation of the buyout.

The case is Twitter v. Musk, 22-0613, Delaware Chancery Court (Wilmington).

Submission + - Large Chunk of Space Debris Lands In Australia (newsweek.com)

Submitted by 192_kbps
192_kbps writes: A large piece of space debris, likely from a Space X Dragon, landed on a sheep farm in New South Wales, Australia. This is the largest piece of space junk to land in Australia since Skylab's 1979 re-entry.

Submission + - Australian teenager built spyware, netted over $300,000 (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'Jacob Wayne John Keen, now 24, was 15 years old and living in his mother’s rental when he allegedly created a sophisticated spyware tool known as a remote access trojan (RAT) that allowed users to remotely take control of their victims’ computers.

'Keen allegedly sold the tool for $35 on a hacking forum, making between $300,000 and $400,000 by selling it to more than 14,500 people in 128 countries.'

Perhaps sentencing him to work for the spy agencies — as in 'Catch me if you can' — would be the most appropriate sentence, though as with him, a period in prison does seem appropriate.

Submission + - SPAM: Brittney Griner: US could swap Russia arms dealer for two Americans

Submitted by Ryan Hillary
Ryan Hillary writes: The Biden administration has made a "substantial offer" to bring two American detainees home from Russia, the US secretary of state has said.

Reports suggest Moscow is interested in exchanging basketball star Brittney Griner for convicted Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout.

Secretary Antony Blinken said he would raise the matter in a call next week with Russia's foreign minister.

Mr Blinken and Sergei Lavrov have not spoken since the war in Ukraine began.

Both the White House and the Department of State declined on Wednesday to disclose details of the proposed deal.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Boeing takes added charge for Starliner, bringing cost overruns to near $700M

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Boeing disclosed a charge of $93 million in the second quarter from its Starliner astronaut capsule program.

The latest Starliner-related charge means the company has absorbed $688 million in costs from delays and additional work on the capsule to date.

Boeing was once seen as evenly matched with SpaceX in the race to launch NASA astronauts, but fell behind due to development setbacks.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Hyundai to pay $19.2 million for widespread credit-reporting failures (reuters.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: A U.S. regulator has ordered a Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS) affiliate to pay $19.2 million for repeatedly giving credit-reporting agencies inaccurate information about its customers, including that they were delinquent on loans and leases.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau called the case its largest against an auto servicer under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.

According to the regulator, Hyundai provided inaccurate information more than 8.7 million times across 2.2 million accounts from January 2016 to March 2020, tarnishing customers' credit reports and often resulting in lowered credit scores.

The CFPB said the errors resulted from "systemic" procedural shortfalls that the South Korean automaker knew about, sometimes through internal audits, but did not fix or took as long as eight years to fix sufficiently.

Submission + - Roboticists Discover Alternative Physics (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Energy, mass, velocity. These three variables make up Einstein's iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? A precursor step to understanding physics is identifying relevant variables. Without the concept of energy, mass, and velocity, not even Einstein could discover relativity. But can such variables be discovered automatically? Doing so could greatly accelerate scientific discovery. This is the question that researchers at Columbia Engineering posed to a new AI program. The program was designed to observe physical phenomena through a video camera, then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics. The study was published on July 25 in Nature Computational Science.

The researchers began by feeding the system raw video footage of phenomena for which they already knew the answer. For example, they fed a video of a swinging double pendulum known to have exactly four "state variables"—the angle and angular velocity of each of the two arms. After a few hours of analysis, the AI produced the answer: 4.7. The researchers then proceeded to visualize the actual variables that the program identified. Extracting the variables themselves was not easy, since the program cannot describe them in any intuitive way that would be understandable to humans. After some probing, it appeared that two of the variables the program chose loosely corresponded to the angles of the arms, but the other two remain a mystery. "We tried correlating the other variables with anything and everything we could think of: angular and linear velocities, kinetic and potential energy, and various combinations of known quantities," explained Boyuan Chen Ph.D., now an assistant professor at Duke University, who led the work. "But nothing seemed to match perfectly." The team was confident that the AI had found a valid set of four variables, since it was making good predictions, "but we don't yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking," he explained.

After validating a number of other physical systems with known solutions, the researchers fed videos of systems for which they did not know the explicit answer. The first videos featured an "air dancer" undulating in front of a local used car lot. After a few hours of analysis, the program returned eight variables. A video of a lava lamp also produced eight variables. They then fed a video clip of flames from a holiday fireplace loop, and the program returned 24 variables. A particularly interesting question was whether the set of variable was unique for every system, or whether a different set was produced each time the program was restarted.

Submission + - 'Orwellian' Facial Recognition Cameras In UK Stores Challenged By Rights Group (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group. Big Brother Watch said Southern Co-operative's use of biometric scans in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton, and London was “Orwellian in the extreme” and urged Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate whether it breaches data protection legislation.

The complaint claims the use of the biometric cameras “is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects." It outlines how the facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers. If a customer on the list enters the store, staff are alerted. [...] "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse," Southern Co-operative said. It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender.

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