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Submission + - County's Claims That Its Social Workers Didn't Know Lying In Court was Wrong (ocweekly.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Using taxpayer funds, government officials in Orange County have spent the last 16 years arguing the most absurd legal proposition in the entire nation: How could social workers have known it was wrong to lie, falsify records and hide exculpatory evidence in 2000 so that a judge would forcibly take two young daughters from their mother for six-and-a-half years?

From the you-can't-make-up-this-crap file, county officials are paying Lynberg & Watkins, a private Southern California law firm specializing in defending cops in excessive force lawsuits, untold sums to claim the social workers couldn't have "clearly" known that dishonesty wasn't acceptable in court and, as a back up, even if they did know, they should enjoy immunity for their misdeeds because they were government employees.

Submission + - "HP pre-programmed failure date of non-HP ink cartridges in its printers" (myce.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: HP has programmed a failure date for non-HP / private label ink cartridges in its printers. Users around the world started to complain on the 13th of September this year that their printer rejected their non-HP cartridges. HP claimed that a firmware update was the culprit, but also printers who never received an update since they were unpacked rejected the cartridges starting at that particular date.

Submission + - MySQL 0-Day Could Lead To Total System Compromise (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researcher Dawid Golunski has discovered multiple severe vulnerabilities affecting the popular open source database MySQL and its forks. One of these – CVE-2016-6662 – can be exploited by attackers to inject malicious settings into MySQL configuration files or create new ones, allowing them to execute arbitrary code with root privileges when the MySQL service is restarted. This could lead to total compromise of the server running the vulnerable MySQL version.

Submission + - Loud Noise Brings Down Banking Data Center, Destroys Hardware

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ING Bank saw its Romanian payment and ATM services grind to a halt after a routine fire extinguisher test forced its data center operations offline for 10 hours. A loud noise emitted from inert gas being released during the planned extinguisher system drill cut off the bank’s main facility in Bucharest, Romania, but also caused irrevocable damage to dozens of its hard drives. Head of ING Retail Banking, Daniel Llano, apologized for the inconvenience and informed customers that the ‘serious’ technical fault had been caused by Inergen flooding. Inergen gas was released, but the pressure was too high, causing a sound exceeding 130dB. The noise, similar to that of a ‘running jet engine’,created large vibrations which spread to the casing protecting the hard drives – and destroyed the internal hardware.

Submission + - ITT Educational Services to Cease Operations at all ITT Technical Institutes (cnn.com)

Submitted by bsharma
bsharma writes: ITT Educational Services announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down immediately, accusing the federal government of unfairly stripping it of eligibility for student aid.
The company, which was established nearly 50 years ago, operates ITT Technical Institutes. It has around 40,000 students taking classes on campuses and online throughout the United States.

Submission + - More than a million 'smart' devices part of a spreading botnet

Submitted by beda
beda writes: Based on traffic observed in a distributed network of honeypots, researchers from CZ.NIC discovered a large number of 'smart' devices, such as CCTV cameras or home gateways, attacking Telnet protocol throughout the Internet. It is very likely that these are part of a spreading botnet with more than 20,000 new devices appearing every day. The article contains a lot of details and also a dedicated website for testing if a specific IP address was captured in the honeypot.

Submission + - Hacker takes down CEO wire transfer scammers, sends their Win 10 creds to the co (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity
mask.of.sanity writes: A penetration tester is hacking business email scammers compromising their Microsoft accounts and sending the criminal's information to police. The scammers, or whalers, are responsible for causing billions of dollars of damage by tricking business into wiring funds to bank accounts.

Submission + - The court that rules the world (buzzfeed.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

Submission + - Nova Scotia wind turbine speeds out of control, collapses (theweathernetwork.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This large wind turbine failed on August 17. Before the 80-metre-tall wind turbine buckled and toppled over, Enercon officials confirm that workers were told to leave, the Toronto Star reports. In addition to their towering height, the turbines have a blade length of 40 metres, the CBC notes.

Fortunately the turbines operate in a wooded area away from residents, so no one was injured. An evacuation protocol was also put in place.

Enercon and Nova Scotia's provincial government are conducting investigations to determine if there were any safety violations at the time of the incident.

Another 10 turbines in the area remain in operation, unaffected by the collapse. The cause of the collapse remains unknown.

Submission + - Something "Unexpected" Happened When Seattle Raised The Minimum Wage

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The latest research comes from the University of Washington which researched the impact of Seattle's recent minimum wage hike on employment in that city (as background, Seattle recently passed legislation that increased it's minimum wage to $11 per hour on April 1, 2015, $13 on January 1, 2016 and $15 on January 1, 2017). "Shockingly", the University of Washington found that Seattle's higher minimum wages "lowered employment rates of low-wage workers" (the report is attached in its entirety at the end of this post).

Yet, our best estimates find that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance appears to have lowered employment rates of low-wage workers. This negative unintended consequence (which are predicted by some of the existing economic literature) is concerning and needs to be followed closely in future years, because the long-run effects are likely to be greater as businesses and workers have more time to adapt to the ordinance. Finally, we find only modest impacts on earnings. The effects of disemployment appear to be roughly offsetting the gain in hourly wage rates, leaving the earnings for the average low-wage worker unchanged. Of course, we are talking about the average result.



More specifically, we find that median wages for low-wage workers (those earning less than $11 per hour during the 2nd quarter of 2014) rose by $1.18 per hour, and we estimate that the impact of the Ordinance was to increase these workers’ median wage by $0.73 per hour. Further, while these low-wage workers increased their likelihood of being employed relative to prior years, this increase was less than in comparison regions. We estimate that the impact of the Ordinance was a 1.1 percentage point decrease in likelihood of low-wage Seattle workers remaining employed. While these low-wage workers increased their quarterly earnings relative to prior years, the estimated impact of the Ordinance on earnings is small and sensitive to the choice of comparison region. Finally, for those who kept their job, the Ordinance appears to have improved wages and earnings, but decreased their likelihood of being employed in Seattle relative other parts of the state of Washington.

Still not convinced? How about a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco that finds that "higher minimum wage results in some job loss for the least-skilled workers—with possibly larger adverse effects than earlier research suggested."

Comment Re:Would they believe (Score 1) 348

by HexaByte (#52755989) Attached to: US Customs and Border Protection Wants To Know Who You Are On Twitter

Seems sad the govt assumes everyone has one or more of these accounts.

Just 8 short years ago, I was doing computer security inspections/reviews for US govt. agencies. We were told NOT to have such accounts as they are possible security holes. After all, if the bad guys know everything about you, you're easier to hack and or manipulate.

Submission + - New Li-Ion battery with twice the capacity planned for release next year

Submitted by lars_stefan_axelsson
lars_stefan_axelsson writes: MIT News reports that SolidEnergy, an MIT spinoff is preparing to release a new Li-Ion battery that provides double the energy density per weight and volume, compared to current batteries.

The battery uses a thin layer of lithium metal as the anode compared to the graphite which is used today. There is also a change to the electrolyte. The new battery can be manufactured using current process lines, and commercial release of batteries for smart phones is planned for early next year, with electric cars following in 2018.

So if this holds true, it's a pretty big step forward, in an industry that otherwise usually sees a couple of percent improvement per step otherwise.

Submission + - 18-Year-Old Random Number Generator Flaw Fixed In Libgcrypt, GnuPG (helpnetsecurity.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a “critical security problem” that affects all versions of the Libgcrypt cryptographic library and, therefore, all versions of the GnuPG (a.k.a. GPG) hybrid-encryption software. The bug has now been fixed, and he advises users of GnuPG-2 to update Libgcrypt to version 1.7.3, 1.6.6, or 1.5.6, and users of GnuPG-1 to upgrade to version 1.4.21.

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