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Submission + - IRS follows bitcoin transactions to take down child-porn site (forbes.com)

Submitted by pgmrdlm
pgmrdlm writes: The largest dark web child pornography site in the world has been taken down. That was the word today from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), together with the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom and Republic of Korea at a joint press conference announcing arrests and forfeitures.

According to the IRS-CI, agents became aware of Welcome to Video, the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content, because of their work on previous dark web marketplaces. The dark web, also referred to as “Darknet,” refers to content that you don’t typically access through regular internet browsing activities.

IRS-CI was able to trace bitcoin transactions on the site to people all over the world who were uploading and downloading this material, as well as find the location of the site administrator. By analyzing the blockchain and de-anonymizing bitcoin transactions, the agency was able to identify hundreds of predators around the world — even though those users thought that they could remain anonymous.

Submission + - Yahoo! Groups To Be Deleted on December 14th (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by AnalogDiehard
AnalogDiehard writes: From the article: 'Yahoo Groups is shutting down after more than 18 years, and the Verizon-owned company is deleting all content from the site in mid-December.

"Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site," the company said in a notice to users. "Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded."'

Yahoo! cites declining membership and revenue as well as competition from social media as the reason for the move. Former members also blame their laborious user-hostile interface and intrusive ads. Yahoo! Groups became more and more of a ghost town as members abandoned the service in groves, and a visit there today reveals that many groups have not been active for years.

Users have until December 14th to download any files, photos, links, data et al that have been uploaded (although true to Yahoo! convention you have to download them one at a time).

Submission + - Speaking of Google's moderation policy

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: For some reasons Slashdot didn't pay attention to quite an alarming story when a development version of the most popular ad-blocker add-on for Google Chrome, uBlock Origin, was removed from the Chrome Web Store. Google's automated systems gave this reason for the removal: "the bundling of unrelated functionality in extensions". The developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, was unfazed and said this, "I won't re-submit to try to have the dev build restored in the CWS, uBO does not "bundle unrelated functionality" as implied in the email, thus closing as wontfix". The issue immediately sparked a public outcry on Reddit and other social media, and only a Google engineer manually intervened the add-on was reinstated. It's understandable that Google automates a large number of its internal processes using, e.g. neural networks, but when a major add-on gets delisted in a perfect world it should raise alarms, so that the human beings could intervene and obviously nothing like that happened. The same Google engineer also added that if something like that happens again, the developer should write to him directly in Twitter which obviously means that a situation like this may and will happen again and Google doesn't want to immediately address the issue, "Public outcry isn't necessary, but communication is. Run-ins with review are, unfortunately, one of the side effects of centralized stores. Short term I'd strongly encourage u/gorhill4 to reach out to me (preferably via Twitter) when something like this happens so I can jump on it right away. Longer term I'm hopeful that we can improve our developer communications to make it a bit easier on devs and clearer as to what their options are in terms of requesting clarification or contesting review decisions."

As a continuation of the story, an open source app implementing the WireGuard protocol was rejected in Play Store because the app had a link which opened a page for donations. The existence of such a link ostensibly infringed on Google apps "Payments Policy". What's strange about this is that Play Store has literally hundreds of thousands of apps which open full screen ads, which add shortcuts with advertisements to your home screen and do other nasty things which apparently comply with Google's high standards.

What does Slashdot think about that?

Comment Re:Translation: He got #MeToo'ed (Score 1) 89

by KingRatMass (#59309912) Attached to: Red Hat CFO 'Dismissed' From Company, Forfeits $4M Retention Award
You are probably right on the money. This happened in the C-suites. If it was anything other than a hanging offense, he would have been asked to throw himself on his sword and resign. Either he was too fucking stupid to see the writing on the wall. Or the remainder of the C-Levels needed to nail him to the wall to virtue signal to the company as a whole that they still have shit under control.

Submission + - PHP.CE Conference Cancelled After Too Few Women Submit Session Proposals

Submitted by Roger Wilcox
Roger Wilcox writes: The organizers of the PHP.CE event have cancelled their conference indefinitely in the wake of online backlash over the fact that all scheduled speakers were white men. Here is a link to the announcement from PHP.CE : cancellation notice.

Conference organizers cite these posts to explain their decision:
https://twitter.com/KarlLHughe...
https://steemit.com/php/@crell...
https://markbakeruk.net/2019/0...

Submission + - Dr Tim Ball Defeats Michael Mann's Climate Lawsuit! (principia-scientific.org) 2

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Supreme Court of British Columbia dismisses Dr Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit versus Canadian skeptic climatologist, Dr Tim Ball. Full legal costs are awarded to Dr Ball, the defendant in the case.

The Canadian court issued it’s final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball’s libel lawyers.

Not only did the court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.

This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are “unprecedented.”

Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph (shown below).

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"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

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