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Submission + - Appin's global censorship campaign to stop you from reading these docs (muckrock.com) 1

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: Founded in 2003, Appin has been described as a cybersecurity company and an educational consulting firm. Appin was also, according to Reuters reporting and extensive marketing materials, a prolific “hacking for hire” service, stealing information from politicians and militaries as well as businesses and even unfaithful spouses.

Legal letters, being sent to newsrooms and organizations around the world, are trying to remove that story from the internet — and are often succeeding. Now, MuckRock, Techdirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing back, helping to ensure the materials stays available. As Masnick at Techdirt notes, "This kind of censorial bullying may work on other publications, but Techdirt believes that (1) important stories, especially around surveillance and hacking, deserve to be read and (2) it’s vitally important to call it out publicly when operations like Appin seek to silence reporting, especially when it’s done through abusing the legal process to silence and intimidate journalists and news organizations."

Submission + - ask slashdot: Roll you own home router 2

Submitted by eggegick
eggegick writes: I'm looking for a cheap mini PC I can turn into a headless Linux based
wireless and Ethernet router. The setup would be a cable modem on the
Comcast side, Ethernet out from the modem to the router and Ethernet
and WiFi out to the home network. My goal is to have a firewall that
I trust, not a firewall that comes from the manufacture that might
have back doors.

Submission + - Paper Trail: Firms churning out fake papers now bribing journal editors (science.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Rather than targeting potential authors and reviewers, someone who called himself Jack Ben, of a firm whose Chinese name translates to Olive Academic, was going for journal editors—offering large sums of cash to these gatekeepers in return for accepting papers for publication. . . . So cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, in partnership with Wise and other industry experts, identified several paper mills and more than 30 editors of reputable journals who appear to be involved in this type of activity. Many were guest editors of special issues, which have been flagged in the past as particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are edited separately from the regular journal. But several were regular editors or members of journal editorial boards. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.”

Submission + - FBI violated hundreds of Americans' constitutional rights in Beverly Hills raid (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Jan. 23 ruling reversed a 2022 lower court decision siding with the FBI and requires federal officials to destroy any inventory records of the hundreds of box holders not charged with a crime.

Agents took about $86 million in cash from the boxes in the March 2021 raid, as well as a trove of jewelry, gold bars and coins, silver and other valuables. In May of that year, the FBI "commenced administrative forfeiture proceedings" against an unspecified number of the boxes, according to court documents filed by the government.

Civil asset forfeiture is the process through which the government seizes money or other property believed to be linked to a crime, even if the owner isn't charged with a crime.

The FBI's raid on U.S. Private Vaults was part of its investigation on the company, which ultimately shut down and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money. The government argued before the 9th Circuit that its warrant authorized the FBI to seize the deposit boxes and inventory their contents in accordance with standardized policy.

Submission + - TV station blames Photoshop automation for bigger boobs on MP (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'The original image, of her wearing a sleeveless white dress, was altered so that she had bigger breasts and an exposed midriff.'

'“Our graphics department sourced an online image of Georgie to use in our story on duck hunting,” Hugh Nailon, the director of the network, said in a statement.

'“As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original....

'But Adobe, which owns Photoshop, said that the changes to the image would have required human intervention.'

Submission + - As solar capacity grows, duck curves are getting deeper in California (renewableenergyworld.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: As solar capacity in California continues to grow, the midday dip in net load (or duck curve) is getting lower, presenting both economic and grid stress challenges for grid operators, according to the California Independent System Operator (CAISO).

The duck curve presents two challenges related to increasing solar energy adoption. The first challenge is grid stress. The extreme swing in demand for electricity from conventional power plants from midday to late evenings, when energy demand is still high but solar generation has dropped off, means that conventional power must quickly ramp up electricity production to meet consumer demand.

That rapid ramp up makes it more difficult for grid operators to match grid supply with grid demand in real time. In addition, if more solar power is produced than the grid can use, operators might have to curtail solar power to prevent overgeneration.

The other challenge is economic. The dynamics of the duck curve can challenge the traditional economics of dispatchable power plants because the factors contributing to the curve reduce the amount of time a conventional power plant operates, which results in reduced energy revenues.

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