Dumpster divers say it's easy to list discarded toys, electronics and books on Amazon. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that's an accurate assertion. From a report: Just about anyone can open a store on Amazon.com and sell just about anything. Just ask the dumpster divers. These are among the dedicated cadre of sellers on Amazon who say they sort through other people's rejects, including directly from the trash, clean them up and list them on Amazon.com's platform. Many post their hunting accounts on YouTube. They are an elusive lot. Many The Wall Street Journal contacted wouldn't give details about their listings, said they stopped selling dumpster finds or no longer listed them as new, didn't respond to inquiries or stopped communicating. Some said they feared Amazon would close their stores.

So the Journal set out to test whether these claims were true. Reporters went dumpster diving in several New Jersey towns and retrieved dozens of discards from the trash including a stencil set, scrapbook paper and a sealed jar of Trader Joe's lemon curd. The Journal set up a store on Amazon to see if it could list some of its salvaged goods for sale as new. It turned out to be easy. Amazon's stated rules didn't explicitly prohibit items salvaged from the trash when the Journal disclosed the existence of its store to the company last month. The rules required that most goods be new and noted that sellers could offer used books and electronics, among other things, if they identified them as such.

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them. From the report: Activation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it's ever lost or stolen, and it's built into the "Find My" service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When you're getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple's Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. In other words, they won't be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts.

That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can't reuse. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive -- oh, and it's an environmental nightmare. [...] The T2 security chip, however, erases any hope and makes it impossible to do anything on a Mac without the proper Apple ID credentials. Attempting any kind of hardware tinkering on a T2-enabled Mac activates a hardware lock, which can only be undone by connecting the device to Apple-authorized repair software. It's great for device security, but terrible for repair and refurbishment. While recyclers may not be dealing with as many locked Macs as locked iPhones (especially since Activation Lock on Macs is still very new, and there are specific software criteria that need to be met), it's only a matter of time before thousands upon thousands of perfectly working Macs are scrapped or shredded, for lack of an unknown password.

Google executives misled their own employees last week when they said a former top Department of Homeland Security official who had recently joined the company was "not involved in the family separation policy," government emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal. From a report: In fact, Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff to former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, was involved in high-level discussions about immigration enforcement, helping to shape the department's narratives and talking points as one of Nielsen's trusted lieutenants. As Nielsen's deputy chief of staff, Taylor was included on some of the DHS secretary's emails and privy to her events schedule, often prepping his boss with reports and talking points ahead of public appearances between April and June 2018, when the family separation policy was in effect.

In one email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Taylor assisted Nielsen in preparing what he described as the "Protecting Children Narrative" -- the department's spin on a policy that horrified Americans when images of abandoned, caged migrant children in squalid camps emerged. Other emails from Nielsen's events planner show that he had been scheduled to participate in at least two weekly calls to "discuss Border Security and Immigration Enforcement" in June 2018. Two former DHS officials dismissed Google's claim that Taylor -- who last month joined the company as a government affairs and public policy manager advising on national security issues -- could have kept his hands clean from the policy.

New submitter symgym writes: Recently out of stealth mode is a new battery technology that's printed on silicon wafers (36 million "micro-batteries" machined into 12-inch silicon wafers). It can scale from small devices to large-scale grid storage and promises four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries for half the price. There should also be no issues with fires caused by dendrite formation. "When you use porous silicon, you get about 70 times the surface area compared to a traditional lithium battery... [and] there's millions of cells in a wafer," says Christine Hallquist of Cross Border Power, the startup that plans to commercialize the battery design developed by Washington-based company XNRGI. "It completely eliminates the problem of dendrite formation." If all of this is true, it's a massive disruptive invention. Hallquist also notes that the new batteries are 100% recyclable. "At the end of the life of this product, you bring the wafers back in, you clean the wafer off, you reclaim the lithium and other materials. And it's essentially brand new. So we're 100 percent recyclable."

"Hallquist says the battery banks that Cross Border Power plans to sell to utility companies as soon as next year will be installed in standard computer server racks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "One shipping container worth of those racks (totaling 40 racks in all) will offer 4 megawatts (MW) of battery storage capacity, she says. Contrast this, she adds, to a comparable set of rack-storage lithium ion batteries which would typically only yield 1 MW in a shipping container."

The Verge recently profiled "a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon.

"Some live out of RVs and vans, moving from town to town, only stopping long enough to pick the stores clean and ship their wares to Amazon's fulfillment centers." The majority of goods sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than 2 million merchants who use the company's platform as their storefront and infrastructure. Some of these sellers make their own products, while others practice arbitrage, buying and reselling wares from other retailers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows sellers to send their goods to company warehouses and have Amazon handle storage and delivery, and then with an app that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check whether they'd be profitable to sell on the site. A few sellers, like [Chris] Anderson, have figured out that the best way to find lucrative products is to be mobile, scouring remote stores and chasing hot-selling items from coast to coast.

"It's almost like I'm the front end of the business and Amazon is just an extension of my arm," says Sean-Patrick Iles, a nomad who spent weeks driving cross-country during Toys R Us' final days. It was a feeding frenzy Anderson and others also hit the road for...

For Anderson, the holy grail is the Bounce Dryer Bar, a $5 plastic oblong you affix to the dryer rather than adding a dryer sheet to each load. Now discontinued, a two-pack sells on Amazon for $300. Discontinued nail polish, Pop-Tarts, hair curling products: Anderson has chased them all when the scanner has shown them fetching multiples of their normal price. He once hunted a particular brand of discontinued dental floss across the Big Lots of America, buying six-packs for 99 cents and selling them on Amazon for over $100 apiece.
According to the article, Anderson "thinks the constant travel is part of why his marriage ended..."

Lab-grown meat, first introduced to the world six years ago in the form of a $280,000 hamburger, could hit supermarket shelves at $10 a patty within two years, European start-ups told Reuters. From a report: Consumers concerned about climate change, animal welfare and their own health are fueling interest in so-called clean meat, with the number of associated business start-ups climbing from four at the end of 2016 to more than two dozen two years later, according to the Good Food Institute market researcher. Plant-based meat alternatives are also booming. Shares in Beyond Meat have more than tripled in price since its initial public offering in May. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods each sell 100% plant-based meat alternatives to retailers and fast food chains across the United States.

And cultured meat grown from animal cells could be next on the mainstream menu, with producers eyeing regulatory approval as they improve the technology and reduce costs. It was Dutch start-up Mosa Meat's co-founder Mark Post who created the first "cultured" beef hamburger in 2013 at a cost of 250,000 euros ($280,400), funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, but Mosa Meat and Spain's Biotech Meats say that production costs have fallen dramatically since then. "The burger was this expensive in 2013 because back then it was novel science and we were producing at very small scale. Once production is scaled up, we project the cost of producing a hamburger will be around 9 euros," a Mosa Meat spokeswoman told Reuters, adding that it could ultimately become even cheaper than a conventional hamburger.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades. Since the 1980s, the Iroise coast in Brittany has received a supply of bright orange landline novelty phones shaped like the famous cartoon cat. Anti-litter campaigners have been collecting fragments of the feline for years as they clean the beaches.

But now, the source of the problem has been found -- a lost shipping container. Last year, campaigners from the Ar Vilantsou anti-litter group made the novelty phone a symbol of the plastic pollution on the beaches of the Finistere region -- part of which is a designated marine park. Once a common household item, its eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, and thousands were made and sold during the 1980s. Collectors still buy and sell the vintage Garfield phone online today. The beach-cleaning teams had long suspected that a lost shipping container -- perhaps blown overboard -- had regurgitated its precious orange cargo. But they had never been able to find it.

Motherboard's Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler report of the underground industry where thieves, coders, and hackers work to remove a user's iCloud account from a phone so that they can then be resold. They reportedly are able to do this by phishing the phone's original owners, or scam employees at Apple Stores, which have the ability to override iCloud locks. The other method (that is very labor intensive and rare) involves removing the iPhone's CPU from the Logic Board and reprogramming it to create what is essentially a "new" device. It is generally done in Chinese refurbishing labs and involves stealing a "clean" phone identification number called an IMEI. Here's an excerpt from their report: Making matters more complicated is the fact that not all iCloud-locked phones are stolen devices -- some of them are phones that are returned to telecom companies as part of phone upgrade and insurance programs. The large number of legitimately obtained, iCloud-locked iPhones helps supply the independent phone repair industry with replacement parts that cannot be obtained directly from Apple. But naturally, repair companies know that a phone is worth more unlocked than it is locked, and so some of them have waded into the hacking underground to become customers of illegal iCloud unlocking companies.

In practice, "iCloud unlock" as it's often called, is a scheme that involves a complex supply chain of different scams and cybercriminals. These include using fake receipts and invoices to trick Apple into believing they're the legitimate owner of the phone, using databases that look up information on iPhones, and social engineering at Apple Stores. There are even custom phishing kits for sale online designed to steal iCloud passwords from a phone's original owner. [...] There are many listings on eBay, Craigslist, and wholesale sites for phones billed as "iCloud-locked," or "for parts" or something similar. While some of these phones are almost certainly stolen, many of them are not. According to three professionals in the independent repair and iPhone refurbishing businesses, used iPhones -- including some iCloud-locked devices -- are sold in bulk at private "carrier auctions" where companies like T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and cell phone insurance providers sell their excess inventory (often through third-party processing companies.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like "SimCity." A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city's patterns of movement. Like "SimCity," Replica's "user-friendly" tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It's an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They're not completely sure where the data is coming from.

Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, "Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they're using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school)." To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations -- creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city's real-world patterns but that "obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people," as Bowden told The Intercept. The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data -- and raises new questions about Google's encroachment on the physical world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Republic of Ireland will become the world's first country to sell off its investments in fossil fuel companies, after a bill was passed with all-party support in the lower house of parliament. The state's 8 billion euro national investment fund will be required to sell all investments in coal, oil, gas and peat "as soon as is practicable", which is expected to mean within five years. The Irish fossil fuel divestment bill was passed in the lower house of parliament on Thursday and it is expected to pass rapidly through the upper house, meaning it could become law before the end of the year. The Irish state investment fund holds more than 300 million euro in fossil fuel investments in 150 companies. The bill defines a fossil fuel company as a company that derives 20% or more of its revenue from exploration, extraction or refinement of fossil fuels. The bill also allows investment in Irish fossil fuel companies if this funds their move away from fossil fuels. "The [divestment] movement is highlighting the need to stop investing in the expansion of a global industry which must be brought into managed decline if catastrophic climate change is to be averted," said Thomas Pringle, the independent member of parliament who introduced the bill. "Ireland by divesting is sending a clear message that the Irish public and the international community are ready to think and act beyond narrow short term vested interests."

An anonymous reader writes: The city of Richmond, California, is suing Chevron, its largest employer and its largest public-safety scourge. But while industrial accidents like refinery fires are commonplace in the low-lying industrial town, that's not what this lawsuit is about. Richmond and six other California cities are suing oil companies for contributing to the changing climate, which threatens to inundate their shorelines. "In an era of federal deregulation and rising seas, these lawsuits feel increasingly urgent," writes deputy editor Adam Rogers. "The question is whether the courts will even see them as plausible."

The lawsuits face two big legal hurdles: getting scientific proof that climate change (and specific companies causing climate change) are to blame for the cities' woes, along with overcoming oil companies' contention that cities can't sue them at all, since at the federal level, they're beholden to the Clean Air Act. But the urban plaintiffs have a plan for that. They are not asking for new regulations or bans; they're asking for reparations for a problem they say oil companies willfully hid from them. "Oil and gas, like cigarettes, are products. The companies that sell them are liable for the damages they cause," says Sharon Eubanks, an attorney at Bordas & Bordas who was lead counsel in the Justice Department's RICO case against the Philip Morris tobacco company. "They have misled the public about the product's dangers."

schwit1 shares a report from Los Angeles Times: Prosecutors said 33-year-old [Eric Lundgren, an electronic-waste recycling innovator] ripped off Microsoft by manufacturing 28,000 counterfeit discs with the company's Windows operating system on them. He was convicted of conspiracy and copyright infringement, which brought a 15-month prison sentence and a $50,000 fine. In a rare move though, a federal appeals court has granted an emergency stay of the sentence, giving Lundgren another chance to make his argument that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Lundgren does not deny that he made the discs or that he hoped to sell them. But he says this was no profit-making scheme. By his account, he just wanted to make it easier to extend the usefulness of secondhand computers -- keeping more of them out of the trash.

The case centers on "restore discs," which can be used only on computers that already have the licensed Windows software and can be downloaded free from the computer's manufacturer, in this case Dell. The discs are routinely provided to buyers of new computers to enable them to reinstall their operating systems if the computers' hardware fails or must be wiped clean. But they often are lost by the time used computers find their way to a refurbisher. Lundgren said he thought electronics companies wanted the reuse of computers to be difficult so that people would buy new ones. He thought that producing and selling restore discs to computer refurbishers -- saving them the hassle of downloading the software and burning new discs -- would encourage more secondhand sales. In his view, the new owners were entitled to the software, and this just made it easier. The government, and Microsoft, did not see it that way. Federal prosecutors in Florida obtained a 21-count indictment against Lundgren and his business partner, and Microsoft filed a letter seeking $420,000 in restitution for lost sales. Lundgren claims that the assistant U.S. attorney on the case told him, "Microsoft wants your head on a platter and I'm going to give it to them."

According to The Wall Street Journal, Uber is selling its Xchange Leasing unit to the car marketplace Fair.com. "It reportedly won't be a clean break," reports Engadget. "Uber will both take a stake in Fair and point would-be drivers to the site through its app. Fair, in return, will offer jobs to roughly 150 workers affected by the switch. Other companies in the running had included Avis Budget Group (yes, the car rental agency), activist investor Carl Icahn's self-titled Icahn Enterprises, Innovate Auto Finance and two capital investment firms."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal judge in Detroit sentenced former engineer James Liang to 40 months in prison on Friday for his role in Volkswagen AG's multiyear scheme to sell diesel cars that generated more pollution than U.S. clean air rules allowed. U.S. District Court Judge Sean Cox also ordered Liang to pay a $200,000 fine, 10 times the amount sought by federal prosecutors. Cox said he hoped the prison sentence and fine would deter other auto industry engineers and executives from similar schemes to deceive regulators and consumers. Prosecutors last week recommended that Liang, 63, receive a three-year prison sentence, reflecting credit for his months of cooperation with the U.S. investigation of Volkswagen's diesel emissions fraud. Liang could have received a five-year prison term under federal sentencing guidelines. Liang's lawyers had asked for a sentence of home detention and community service.

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: China's latest crackdown on those attempting to skirt state censorship controls has seen it warn e-commerce platforms over the sale of illegal virtual private networks (VPNs). Five websites, including shopping giant Alibaba, have been asked to remove vendors that sell VPNs. It is the latest in a series of measures from the Chinese government to maintain strict control over content. Apple has previously been asked to remove VPN apps. China's cyber-regulator the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has ordered the websites to carry out immediate "self-examination and correction." "The CAC has ordered these five sites to immediately carry out a comprehensive clean-up of harmful information, close corresponding illegal account.. and submit a rectification report by a deadline," the regulator said in a statement.

Chase Purdy reports via Quartz: The maker of vegan mayonnaise has been working on getting lab-made meat onto dinner tables everywhere. It's just that nobody knew about it. Hampton Creek -- a company that built its name on plant-based condiments and vegan-friendly cookie doughs -- today revealed that, for the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood, or as the industry likes to call it, "clean meat." Perhaps even more surprising is that Hampton Creek expects to beat its closest competitor to market by more than two years. Since it was founded in 2015, Memphis Meats has raised at least $3 million from five investors for the development of its meat products, according to Crunchbase. By contrast, Hampton Creek -- just a 20-mile drive from its Silicon Valley rival -- has raised more than $120 million since 2011. It's one of Silicon Valley's unicorns -- a company that has a valuation that exceeds $1 billion.

With Windows 8, Microsoft introduced Windows Store, which consisted of "Metro / Modern UI" apps which worked best on touch capable devices. Since the release of Windows 8, many users complained that they wanted traditional apps -- the applications they had grown accustomed to -- to be included in Windows Store. This would have come in handy to especially Windows RT users, who couldn't easily get traditional applications installed on their devices. Well, guess, what, that's changing now. Though only for Windows 10 users who have gotten the Anniversary Update -- and guess what, many haven't and might not for another month and a half. At any rate, ArsTechnica elaborates: Until now, applications built for and sold through the Windows Store in Windows 10 have been built for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), the common set of APIs that spans Windows 10 across all the many devices it supports. This has left one major category of application, the traditional desktop application built using the Win32 API, behind. Announced at Build 2015, codename Project Centennial -- now officially titled the Desktop App Converter -- is Microsoft's solution to this problem. It allows developers to repackage existing Win32 applications with few or no changes and sell them through the store. Applications packaged this way aren't subject to all the sandbox restrictions that UWP applications are, ensuring that most will work unmodified. But they are also given the same kind of clean installation, upgrading, and uninstallation that we've all come to expect from Store-delivered software. Centennial is designed to provide not just a way of bringing Win32 apps into the store; it also provides a transition path so that developers can add UWP-based functionality to their old applications on a piecemeal basis. Evernote, one of the launch applications, uses UWP APIs to include support for Live Tiles and Windows' notification system. In this way, developers can create applications that work better on Windows 10 but without having to rewrite them entirely for Windows 10.

With the holidays coming up, Bennett Haselton has updated his geek-oriented gift guide for 2014. He says: Some of my favorite gifts to give are still the ones that were listed in several different previously written posts, while a few new cool gift ideas emerged in 2014. Here are all my current best recommendations, listed in one place. Read on for the list, or to share any suggestions of your own.

TheRealHocusLocus writes: Disaster preppers have a saying, "two is one and one is none," which might also apply to 24x7 base load energy sources that could sustain us beyond the age of fossil fuel. I too was happy to see Skunkworks' Feb 2013 announcement and the recent "we're still making progress" reminder. I was moved by the reaction on Slashdot: a groundswell of "Finally!" and "We're saved!" However, fusion doesn't need to be the only solution, and it's not entirely without drawbacks.

All nuclear reactors will generate waste via activation as the materials of which they are constructed erode and become unstable under high neutron flux. I'm not pointing this out because I think it's a big deal — a few fusion advocates disingenuously tend to sell the process as if it were "100% clean." A low volume of non-recyclable waste from fusion reactors that is walk-away safe in ~100 years is doable. Let's do it. And likewise, the best comparable waste profile for fission is a two-fluid LFTR, a low volume of waste that is walk-away safe in ~300 years. Let's do it.

Why pursue both, with at least the same level of urgency? Because both could carry us indefinitely. LFTR is less complicated in theory and practice. It is closer to market. There is plenty of cross-over: LFTR's materials challenges and heat engine interface — and the necessity for waste management — are the same as they will be for commercial-scale fusion reactors. To get up to speed please see the 2006 fusion lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard on the Wiffle ball 6 plasma containment, likely the precursor to the Skunkworks approach. And see Thorium Remix 2011 which presents the case for LFTR.

Last week you had the chance to ask chef, travel writer, reality TV star, and all around food geek Ben Starr about sustainable farming, brewing, and building the perfect kitchen. Read below to see what he had to say.