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Comment Re:Argh. It’s ONE GUY (Score 2) 495

In this day of political correct verbiage, one is not allowed to use gender specific terms such as he, him, her and she. The English language currently has no other alternatives for singular references other than "it", so they and their has come in to use. I myself cringe when I see it used and hate that I am forced to employ that usage, but there are no real alternatives unless one was to get overly wordy in describing an individual.

Submission + - Lightsail 2 Solar Sail Cubesat Has Launched (planetary.org)

werepants writes: LightSail 2 is officially in space! The Planetary Society's solar sail CubeSat lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on 25 June at 02:30 EDT (06:30 UTC). The late-night launch came courtesy of SpaceX's triple-booster Falcon Heavy rocket, which was carrying 24 spacecraft for the U.S. Air Force's STP-2 mission.

Submission + - Humboldt County threatened cannabis fines. They were growing peaches and tomatoe (mercurynews.com)

schwit1 writes: County’s cannabis abatement program looks for greenhouses, asks questions later. Guilty until proven innocent.

O’Gorman’s greenhouse is large enough to have been flagged on Humboldt County’s satellite mapping system, the same one that helped the county increase its cannabis code enforcement by 700% in 2018.

He wasn’t the only Willow Creek resident who received unexpected — and unverified — accusations of growing illegal cannabis. Across the Trinity River, another county messenger posted a notice on the gate at the front of Jacques and Amy Neukom’s property.

Abatement notices give non-compliant cannabis growers just 10 days to clear up shop or get in contact with county officials.

Past that point, suspected growers are fined $10,000 for each day they don’t respond to the notice. From the moment a notice was posted on the Neukoms’ gate, they were on the clock.

It’s a system that, as of last November, had netted the county $1.2 million in abatement revenue of a total $2.2 million required by late responses.

Submission + - Microsoft releases optimized malloc() as open source

AmiMoJo writes: Microsoft has published "mimalloc", a replacement for malloc, on GitHub. mimalloc claims to be a drop-in replacement, in fact it can be used without even recompiling applications on Unix systems. Allocations are grouped by 64kB pages rather than by size class, which Microsoft claims improves performance significantly. The code is covered by an MIT licence.

Submission + - Still No Hard Evidence Russia Hacked The DNC (battleswarmblog.com)

Nova Express writes: A central part of the Trump collusion narrative was that embarrassing DNC documents published by Wikileaks during the 2016 election were originally hacked by Russia. Unfortunately, evidence for this claim has been scanty, and the section providing evidence for Russian hacking allegations was among the most heavily redacted sections of the Mueller report. Now, in response to a query from lawyers representing Roger Stone, the DOJ has admitted that not only did FBI agents not examine the DNC server, they never even read a non-redacted report from the CrowdStrike contractor who allegedly did so. "The FBI and DOJ were only allowed to see a 'draft' report prepared by Crowdstrike, and that report was redacted and that redacted draft is the 'last version of the report produced'; meaning, there are no unredacted & final versions...This means the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party.. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor."

Submission + - Lawsuits Claim Amazon's Alexa Voice Assistant Illegally Records Children (seattletimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A lawsuit filed in Seattle alleges Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices without their consent, in violation of laws governing recordings in at least eight states, including Washington. “Alexa routinely records and voiceprints millions of children without their consent or the consent of their parents,” according to a complaint filed on behalf of a 10-year-old Massachusetts girl on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle. Another nearly identical suit was filed the same day in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, on behalf of an 8-year-old boy. The federal complaint, which seeks class-action status, describes Amazon’s practice of saving “a permanent recording of the user’s voice” and contrasts that with other makers of voice-controlled computing devices that delete recordings after storing them for a short time or not at all.

The complaint notes that Alexa devices record and transmit any speech captured after a “wake word” activates the device, regardless of the speaker and whether that person purchased the device or installed the associated app. It says the Alexa system is capable of identifying individual speakers based on their voices and Amazon could choose to inform users who had not previously consented that they were being recorded and ask for consent. It could also deactivate permanent recording for users who had not consented. “But Alexa does not do this,” the lawsuit claims. “At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users that it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so.”

Submission + - Obama Admins Deleted 190 Speeches on Immigration Hours Before Trump Took Office 1

RoccamOccam writes: As reported by The Sunlight Foundation, in the dying minutes of the Obama administration’s final term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed from its website a collection of almost 200 speeches and testimonies delivered by agency leadership dating back to 2004. Access to a federal government web resource containing 12 years of primary source materials on ICE’s history has been lost.

The transcripts were of speeches and testimony delivered between 2004 and 2017 by high-ranking ICE officials, including the director of the agency and directors of ICE sub-units. Most contained prepared remarks submitted to congressional committees, often on controversial topics like the standard of medical treatment for detainees, treatment of unaccompanied children, sanctuary cities, drug trafficking, and E-Verify.

In one removed transcript — a February 2016 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the “Unaccompanied Children Crisis” — then-Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Homan detailed how ICE contracted out to “effectuate” the transportation of “UC” and enumerated the “important steps” that the administration had taken to “deter illegal immigration.”

The collection is difficult to recreate. The URL for each of the 190 removed transcripts either returns a “file not found” notice or redirects to a search page with no results. The collection has not been moved to the archive section of ICE’s website and not all of the transcripts were captured by the Wayback Machine, the independent nonprofit web archiving service run by Internet Archive.

Submission + - IT pro screwed out of unused vacation pay, bonus by HPE (theregister.co.uk)

Meg Whitman writes: From The Register today:

A "highly skilled IT professional" has lost his fight to be paid his unused vacation days as well as a non-trivial bonus, after a judge stuck to a law he admitted was outdated. Matthew White joined Hewlett-Packard in 2013 and left in July 2015, just months before the company split into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). After quitting, he was stunned when the US mega-corp, citing HPE's new policies, refused to hand over extra pay he felt was contractually due. Hewlett-Packard had enticed White with a sweet contract that offered a signing bonus, base salary, regular bonuses, and a benefits program. But after he quit, he was left without his unused vacation pay and a $10,000 bonus he felt he was entitled to...HPE decided that, under the law, White could only get hold of the relevant policies if he turned up, in person, to the company's official human resources headquarters – which is on the other side of America in California, roughly 2,500 miles away. White felt this was ridiculous given that HP, sorry, HPE is not only a massive organization with HR people all over the United States, but that it was a technology company with countless employees working across the world, often at home, and that the policies are likely readily available in an internal cloud. The judge had some sympathy for that view. "This part of the statute may indeed need reworking for today’s world where cloud-based digital records are replacing physical file folders located in a physical location, where employees work at home – sometimes remotely from any head office or regional office – and where worldwide companies like HP assign HP personnel for an entire country or region, or even outsource various HP responsibilities."


Submission + - A bug in Apple's software leaks colour information into black and white pages.

Wayne and Jill CONNO writes: I've tried to make this more interesting!

Apple users could be paying 10 times their usual printing costs due to a bug in OSX printing software. Most users will be aware of the need to make sure that pure ‘greyscale’ documents only contain Black and no CMY colour information.
This article describes a bug in OS X that causes trace amounts of colour information to be leaked into pure greyscale documents. This tiny change causes the pages to be treated as colour pages when they are printed, increasing the printing cost 10 fold. Businesses on a printing contract are usually billed 'per copy' with colour pages costing significantly more than B&W. The bug appears to be limited to Apple's software, affecting Apple Pages but not Microsoft Word, and Apple Preview but not Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Submission + - Former Mozilla Exec: Google Has Sabotaged Firefox for Years (zdnet.com) 2

An anonymous reader writes: A former high-ranking Mozilla executive has accused Google of intentionally and systematically sabotaging Firefox over the past decade in order to boost Chrome's adoption. He is not the first Firefox team member to come forward and make such accusations in the past eight months; however, his allegations span far beyond current events and accuse Google of carrying out a coordinated plan that involved introducing small bugs on its sites that would only manifest for Firefox users.

"When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut ties, break our search deal — nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things'," Johnathan Nightingale, a former General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla said. "I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly, and we learned from watching each other.

"But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers," Nightingale said. "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as 'incompatible'," he said.

"All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks. Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?"

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