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Comment A better solution (Score -1) 88

by johnck (#63933009) Attached to: IRS Will Pilot Free, Direct Tax Filing In 2024

A better solution would be for all tax agents to be publicly executed along with their friends, families, neighbors and pets. To leave a testament in history that tax collectors will never be tolerated again and need to be culled from the DNA pool, along with pro-tax sympathizers.

Submission + - GoFundMe allows fundraiser for suspect in parade massacre (lawenforcementtoday.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime. In light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, we want to clarify when and why we removed certain fundraisers in the past.”

So why is it that as of Tuesday night, a fundraiser is being allowed for the suspect in the Christmas parade massacre?

Comment Math (Score -1) 171

by johnck (#61986469) Attached to: How Should Facebook Be Fixed?

The math is clear: once every Facebook employee, shareholder, lobbyist and government employee/politician that aided Facebook is permanently imprisoned, then there won't be a Facebook Problem anymore.
Power

Reducing Poverty Can Actually Lower Energy Demand, Finds Research (arstechnica.com) 196

Posted by BeauHD from the counter-intuitive-findings dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation: As people around the world escape poverty, you might expect their energy use to increase. But my research in Nepal, Vietnam, and Zambia found the opposite: lower levels of deprivation were linked to lower levels of energy demand. What is behind this counterintuitive finding? [...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food -- that is, those not in extreme poverty -- can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country. This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.

In Zambia, Nepal, and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed -- more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking. But do households with higher incomes and more devices have a better chance of escaping poverty? Some do, but having higher incomes and mobile phones are not either prerequisites or guarantees of having basic needs satisfied. Richer households without access to electricity or sanitation are not spared from having malnourished children or health problems from using charcoal. Ironically, for most households, it is easier to obtain a mobile phone than a clean, nonpolluting fuel for cooking. Therefore, measuring progress via household income leads to an incomplete understanding of poverty and its deprivations.

So what? Are we arguing against the global south using more energy for development? No: instead of focusing on how much energy is used, we are pointing to the importance of collective services (like electricity, indoor sanitation and public transport) for alleviating the multiple deprivations of poverty. In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as structural adjustment, or high costs of servicing national debts. Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.

Submission + - SPAM: DOJ claws back more than half of $4.4M paid to Colonial Pipeline hacker group

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Justice Department announced Monday it has recovered 63.7 bitcoin ransom, which equals about $2.3million, after cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline
Russia-based hacker group called DarkSide broke into Colonial Pipeline's computer system in May and caused the company to shut down its operations
Hack was followed by widespread fuel shortages and panic buying in several states on the East Coast
Colonial Pipeline paid hackers 75 bitcoin, which equals about $4.4million
DOJ's ransomware task force tracked transfers of cryptocurrency and identified that 63.7 bitcoins had been transferred to a specific address
FBI has 'private key,' or password, needed to access assets accessible from the specific bitcoin address
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Twitter Restricts Accounts In India To Comply With Government Legal Request

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter disclosed on Monday that it blocked four accounts in India to comply with a new legal request from the Indian government. The American social network disclosed on Lumen Database, a Harvard University project, that it took action on four accounts — including those of hip-hop artist L-Fresh the Lion and singer and song-writer Jazzy B — to comply with a legal request from the Indian government it received over the weekend. The accounts are geo-restricted within India but accessible from outside of the South Asian nation. (As part of their transparency efforts, some companies including Twitter and Google make requests and orders they receive from governments and other entities public on Lumen Database.)

All four accounts, like several others that the Indian government ordered to be blocked in the country earlier this year, had protested New Delhi’s agriculture reforms and some had posted other tweets that criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s seven years of governance in India, an analysis by TechCrunch found. The new legal request, which hasn’t been previously reported, comes at a time when Twitter is making efforts to comply with the Indian government’s new IT rules, new guidelines that several of its peers including Facebook and Google have already complied with. On Saturday, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had given a “final notice” to Twitter to comply with its new rules, which it unveiled in February this year. The new rules require significant social media firms to appoint and share contact details of representatives tasked with compliance, nodal point of reference and grievance redressals to address on-ground concerns.
Link to Original Source
Movies

MoviePass Settles With FTC Over Fraud and Data Security Failures (theverge.com) 30

Posted by BeauHD from the spectacular-rise-and-fall dept.
On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission charged the executives of the long-defunct MoviePass app over allegations that they fraudulently blocked customers from using the service as advertised while failing to protect their data privacy. The FTC also announced that it had reached a settlement with MoviePass and its executives as a result of the investigation. The Verge reports: Under the proposed settlement, MoviePass, its parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics, its CEO Mitch Lowe, and chairman Ted Farnsworth are forbidden from falsely representing their business and data security practices to customers. Any businesses controlled by these entities are also required to roll out comprehensive information security programs to protect consumers. "MoviePass and its executives went to great lengths to deny consumers access to the service they paid for while also failing to secure their personal information," Daniel Kaufman, FTC acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a statement Monday. "The FTC will continue working to protect consumers from deception and to ensure that businesses deliver on their promises."

The FTC's complaint accuses the company of deceptively marketing its "one movie per day" service to subscribers and barring customers from using the service as advertised. It also alleges that the company falsely invalidated customer passwords over "suspicious activity or potential fraud" in order to ban frequent moviegoers from the service. The FTC also says that MoviePass initiated a ticket verification program as a means of discouraging people from using the service. As part of the settlement, MoviePass' operators must put comprehensive data security programs into place in any future ventures after saving MoviePass customer data in plain text, the FTC said.
Programming

Swift Playgrounds For iPadOS 15 Lets You Build Apps On the iPad, Submit Them To the App Store (9to5mac.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the one-stop-shop dept.
For the first time, you can code, iterate and build apps on the iPad itself. 9to5Mac reports: Using Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS 15, customers will be able to create iPhone and iPad apps from scratch and then deploy them to the App Store. It remains to be seen how limited or not the development experience will be. It is probably notable that Apple chose not to rebrand this as "Xcode," signifying that you aren't going to be able to do everything you can do with Xcode on the Mac. TechCrunch highlights some of the other new features available in iPadOS 15: iPadOS 15 retains the overall look and feel of the current iPad operating system. The updates in the new OS are mostly centered around multitasking. The iPad's widget support gets a big update with iPadOS 15. The widgets are larger, more immersive and dynamic. And, iOS's App Library is finally available on the iPad, where it tweaks the overall user experience. The feature, added to the iPhone in 2020, presents the user with an organized view of the apps on the iPad.

Also added to iPadOS 15 is a new multitasking system. Called Split View, a drop-down menu at the top of the screen unlocks several multitasking, multiwindow options. The system seems much smoother than the current multiscreen option on iPad OS, which is clunky and hidden. With Split View a feature called Shelf makes it easy to switch between different screens and screen grouping.

Comment union (Score -1) 116

by johnck (#61461636) Attached to: Walmart Will Give 740,000 Employees a Free Smartphone

I wonder if these phones will be selectively given out to employees who have been determined to be at high risk for aiding or leading a charge of unionization. Walmart has always been incredibly hostile to both unions and spending money on employees, so I highly doubt there's a genuine positive motive behind such a gesture.

I'm sure after Amazon's scare in Alabama, many companies have perked up in their unionbusting activities.

Comment yawn (Score -1) 148

by johnck (#61461632) Attached to: A New Type Of COVID-19 Vaccine Could Debut Soon

It's utterly exhausting keeping up with covid propaganda theatre. Large portions of the US are over covid, have stopped all precautions for months (or over a year if you live outside the wastelands of liberal prison cities), and there's zero uptick in deaths or infections. If anything, we're at a better point now than where we were under the boot of the human magical 8 ball, Herr Fauci, and his team of highly specialized grifters.

I wouldn't trust their snake oil for anything. History will not be kind to these humans, that is if they can still be referred to as such what with their very obvious and awkward sexual fetish for genetic tampering.

Submission + - Former CDC Director Received Death Threats from Some in the Scientific Community 1

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: In an interview in Vanity Fair, former CDC Director Robert Redfield revealed that he had received death threats from people he knew in the scientific community after he expressed his belief that the COVID-19 virus did, in fact, leak from a lab in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a source, and it hadn’t been.

After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”

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