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Submission + - Why You Shouldn't Trust Geek Squad (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Orange County Weekly reports that Best Buy's "Geek Squad" repair technicians routinely search devices brought in for repair for files that could earn them $500 reward as FBI informants. This revelation came out in a court case, United States of America v. Mark A. Rettenmaier. Rettenmaier is a prominent Orange County physician and surgeon who took his laptop to the Mission Viejo Best Buy in November 2011 after he was unable to start it. According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal found an image of "a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck." Westphal notified his boss, who was also an FBI informant, who alerted another FBI informant — as well as the FBI itself. The FBI has pretty much guaranteed the case will be thrown out by its behavior, this illegal search aside. According to Rettenmaier's defense attorney, agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant for his home, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records. Plus, the file was found in the unallocated "trash" space, meaning it could only be retrieved by "carving" with sophisticated forensics tools. Carving (or file carving) is defined as searching for files or other kinds of objects based on content, rather than on metadata. It's used to recover old files that have been deleted or damaged. To prove child pornography, you have to prove the possessor knew what he had was indeed child porn. There has been a court case where files found on unallocated space did not constitute knowing possession because it's impossible to determine who put the file there and how, since it's not accessible to the user under normal circumstances.

Submission + - Sears Agrees to Sell Craftsman Brand to Stanley Black & Decker for $900 Mill (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by artmancc
artmancc writes: You've probably got a couple of Craftsman tools in your kit. Maybe you got one for Christmas. The brand—famous for hand tools with a lifetime guarantee—is being sold as battered retailer Sears announced plans to shutter 150 stores. Sears may be in pretty rough shape, but Craftsman has been a good deal for the company. According to Bloomberg, Sears acquired Craftsman in 1927, paying just $500 for it.Meanwhile, at CES, Sears unveiled a Bluetooth-enabled riding mower and tool chest.

Submission + - IBM: Next 5 years AI, IoT and nanotech will literally change the way we see (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Perhaps the coolest thing about IBM’s 9th “Five Innovations that will Help Change our Lives within Five Years” predictions is that none of them sound like science fiction. “With advances in artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, we aim to invent a new generation of scientific instruments that will make the complex invisible systems in our world today visible over the next five years,” said Dario Gil, vice president of science & solutions at IBM Research in a statement.

Submission + - Chernobyl's new sarcophagus now in place

Submitted by MrKaos
MrKaos writes: 30 years and seven months since the explosion that set all of this in motion the project known as the 'Shelter Implementation Plan' has been rolled into place sealing the crippled Chernobyl reactor. More than 10,000 people were involved in the project, which includes an advanced ventilation systems and remote controlled robotic cranes to dismantle the existing Soviet-built structure and reactor.

This sarcophagus – or New Safe Confinement (NSC) – is taller than the Statue of Liberty and larger than Wembley stadium.

Submission + - What Hack? Burlington Electric Speaks Out (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Burlington Electric Department general manager Neale Lunderville explains how his Vermont electric distribution utility was dragged into the center of a potential geopolitical nightmare shortly before the start of the New Year weekend.

Lunderville recaps the three days that thrust Burlington Electric into the national spotlight after the Washington Post wrongly reported that the utility was penetrated by Russian hackers.

Those reports came on the heels of a DHS alert on Grizzly Steppe, activities by two Russian APT groups alleged to have hacked the DNC. Lunderville also covers how benign indicators of compromise shared by DHS played a role in a long, disruptive weekend for his organization.

Comment Title and subject don't seem related (Score 1) 303

Furnishing a work from home office, and securing a remote office seem very different to me.

Or is your a house a target for thieves and meth heads already? Is your house a barn that it needs carpet and double strength walls?

Working from home implies the comforts of home. The OP wants to build an office in an industrial building...

  so this post really is "how do i build and secure a remote office"

Comment I bet Zuck doesn't read what people repost (Score 1) 232

If Zuck thinks it has no effect, then he is not reading posts. I have idiot friends repost these fake stories as fact. Then other idiot friends say "Wow! I didn't know that" - no one checks any fact check site. They usually don't even read the fake article, just the headline. And if you point out it is fake, they are convinced that all the fact check sites are run by the liberal media.

Is Zuck naive, or just protecting his baby from being called ugly?

People are sheep. Feed them enough BS often enough, and believe it regardless of facts. Global warming is myth. Freeing all the carbon sequestered for millions of years, can't be bad.

Comment Not just fake news, but fake news posts by users (Score 1) 284

by alphad0g (#53259967) Attached to: Facebook on its Fake News Problem: 'There's So Much More We Need To Do'

The larger problem is fake news by users. "Friends" of mine repost stories from sites that are pure fabrication. The headlines are salacious and always have the affect of painting someone in a negative light. For example, search on "Fake snopes" and you will find a facebook page with a long diatribe on why snopes.com is fake. Many people agree, but it isn't until much further down in the comments where people post counter posts (with many links) that debunk the story about "Snopes being fake"

I am sorry, but most people consume their facts in 2 sentence sound bites. If it comes from a friend it must be true. That is how Trump won the election - not news posts that Facebook itself posted, but the posts from everyone's friends that have them convinced that "Chelsea Clinton's wedding was paid for by the Clinton Foundation". Since the conservative hatred of liberals is much stronger then the opposite, everyone forgot about The Trump Foundation contribution to Florida AG who was investigating Trump University.

I don't know how to fix it, but the future of politics is fake mud slinging on Facebook.

Submission + - Accused British "Flash Crash" trader to be extradited to the US. (zerohedge.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: Navinder Sarao has lost his appeal and is set to be extradited to the USA, where he faces charges with a possible maximum sentence of 380 years. He is accused of causing the "flash crash" in 2010, when the Dow Jones index dropped by 1000 points. He ran his trading from his bedroom in his parents' house and it is claimed that he made more than £30M (approximately $40M) in 5 years. His parents had no idea what he was doing, nor the scale of his income. He is accused of placing trades that he never intended to fill, so, to this naive person, it's hard to distinguish what he did from that of the large high-speed trading firms.

Submission + - Non-cable Internet providers offer faster speeds to the wealthy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When non-cable Internet providers—outlets like AT&T or Verizon—choose which communities to offer the fastest connections, they don’t juice up their networks so everyone in their service area has the option of buying quicker speeds. Instead, they tend to favor the wealthy over the poor, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

The Center’s data analysis found that the largest non-cable Internet providers collectively offer faster speeds to about 40 percent of the population they serve nationwide in wealthy areas compared with just 22 percent of the population in poor areas. That leaves tens of millions of Americans with the choice of either purchasing an expensive connection from the only provider in their area—typically a cable company—or just doing the best they can with slower speeds. Middle-income areas don’t fare much better, with a bit more than 27 percent of the population having access to a DSL provider’s fastest speeds. The Center reached its conclusions by merging the latest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data with income information from the US Census Bureau.

Submission + - FTC Shuts Down $9 Million Phone Fraud Ring

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The FTC has shut down a phone fraud scam that involved scammers calling consumers–mostly elderly and on fixed incomes–and pressuring them to invest in web sites that supposedly had ties to large companies, promising quick returns. The scheme allegedly netted the scammers more than $9 million.

The scheme involved six companies that the FTC alleges were owned and operated by three defendants, Susan Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez and William Whitley. The commission alleges that the defendants would call consumers unsolicited and try to convince them to hand over money for an investment in e-commerce sites that supposedly had links to large, legitimate sites such as Amazon.

“The details of the offer differ, but Defendants routinely describe it as an offer to purchase or invest in e-commerce websites, or websites that direct traffic to e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com. Defendants’ telemarketers typically promise consumers that they will earn money based on sales at the e-commerce websites and/or traffic through their websites to the e-commerce websites. Defendants promise consumers substantial returns or income, such as hundreds or thousands of dollars every quarter,” the FTC complaint says.

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 + - Oldest-ever proteins extracted from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich shells (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700,000-year-old horse in Canada’s Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia. The teeth, buried at the fossil site that houses the earliest hominin remains outside Africa, came from extinct horses, rhinos, and deer. One team has also extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich eggshells from the site of some of the world’s earliest human footprints.

Submission + - Vanity Fair Publishes Expose Article on Theranos

Submitted by PvtVoid
PvtVoid writes: In a new article, Vanity Fair examines the Theranos disaster, from origins to aftermath. It's a compelling story of hubris, glamour and secrecy about the unicorn Silicon Valley company that turned out to be founded on bullshit. While not the only unicorn company founded on bullshit, Theranos had the distinction of actually putting its customers' lives in danger: "[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] soon discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots. The agency found that Theranos appeared to ignore erratic results from its own quality-control checks during a six-month period last year and supplied 81 patients with questionable test results." At least Elizabeth Holmes is going to be played by Jennifer Lawrence in an upcoming movie.

Submission + - Working Round The 'Big Data Bottleneck' In Modern CPUs (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Modern CPU architecture is built to retrieve large chunks of data, to limit the number of time-consuming journeys between the central controller and the location of the data in memory banks. When you're fetching the first data block of a picture for Photoshop, bringing along the adjacent block makes sense, because you're probably going to need it. But when you're making ten calls to a 'sparse' dataset, where each of the items you want is resident in different memory allocation, and none of them have any relevant adjacent data, the architecture is fighting the intention.

Researchers from MIT have addressed the problem by creating a C++ extension that gathers these requests into one queue for each core, and then forces the cores to swap and negotiate which requests they can most efficiently handle for the minimum number of journeys to memory. In earluy tests, access to sparse datasets has been increased by up to four times using this method, and promises even greater increases with a dedicated architecture. Contributing researcher Vladimir Kiriansky explains why the teams called the extension 'Milk', and why the name also explains the challenge: "It’s as if, every time you want a spoonful of cereal, you open the fridge, open the milk carton, pour a spoonful of milk, close the carton, and put it back in the fridge."

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