New submitter Heritype writes: Bank of Montreal, Canada's fourth biggest lender, said on Monday it was contacted by fraudsters on Sunday who claimed they were in possession of the personal and financial information of a limited number of the bank's customers. The bank said it believed the attack originated from outside the country and was confident the exposures that led to the theft of customer data had been closed off.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Canada's fifth biggest lender, said fraudsters contacted the lender on Sunday claiming they had electronically stolen personal and account information of 40,000 customers of its Simplii direct banking brand.
Other Canadian banks said they had not been affected. Further reading: BMO and CIBC-owned Simplii Financial reveal hacks of customer data.

Billly Gates writes: Windows 10 build 1803 has come out this month, but with some problems. AnandTech has a deep-dive with the review examing many new features including the much better support for Linux. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) now has native Curt and Tar from the command prompt as well as a utility to convert Unix to Windows pathnames called WSLpath.exe which is documented here. In addition it was mentioned on Slashdot in the past about OpenSSH being ported natively to Win32 in certain early builds. It now seems the reason was for Linux interoperability with this Spring Update 2. Unix sockets mean you can run Kali Linux on Windows 10 for penetration testing or run an Apache server in the background with full Linux networking support. Deemons now run in the background even with the command prompt closed. [...]

An anonymous reader shares a report: Here's a casualty of the cashless society you might not have previously thought of: the humble street performer. After all, if more of us are paying our way with smartphones and contactless cards, how can we give spare change to musicians on the subway? London has one solution: a new scheme that outfits performers with contactless payment terminals. The project was launched this weekend by the city's mayor, Sadiq Khan, and is a collaboration with Busk In London (a professional body for buskers) and the Swedish payments firm iZettle (which was bought this month by PayPal for $2.2 billion). A select few performers have been testing iZettle's contactless readers on the streets for the past few weeks, and Khan now says the scheme will be rolled out across London's 32 boroughs.

An anonymous reader writes: A new feature proposal for the Python programming language wants to add "transparency" to the runtime and let security and auditing tools view when Python may be running potentially dangerous operations. In its current form, Python does not allow security tools to see what operations the runtime is performing. Unless one of those operations generates particular errors that may raise a sign of alarm, security and auditing tools are blind that an attacker may be using Python to carry out malicious operations on a system.

But in Python Enhancement Proposal 551 (PEP-551), Steve Dower, a core Python developer, has proposed the addition of two new APIs that will let security tools detect when Python is executing potentially dangerous operations. The first, the Audit Hook API, will raise warning messages about certain type of Python operations; while the second, the Verified Open Hook API, is a mechanism to let the Python runtime know what files it is permitted to execute or tamper with.

Initial plans were to have PEP-551 ship with Python 3.7, scheduled for release in mid-June 2018, but the proposal did not make the final cut, according to a list of new features added for next month's release. This doesn't mean PEP-551 won't ship with a future version of Python. This is the second major scripting engine to open its runtime to security tools, after PowerShell.

Unknown third parties appear to be exploiting the Chrome Store's 'theme' section to offer visitors access to a wide range of pirate movies including "Black Panther", "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Rampage." From a report: When clicking through to the page offering Ready Player One, for example, users are presented with a theme that apparently allows them to watch the movie online in "Full HD Online 4k." Of course, the whole scheme is a dubious scam which eventually leads users to Vioos dot co, a platform that tries very hard to give the impression of being a pirate streaming portal but actually provides nothing of use. In fact, as soon as one clicks the play button on movies appearing on Vioos dot co, visitors are re-directed to another site called Zumastar which asks people to "create a free account" to "access unlimited downloads and streaming." Google services have a history of being exploited.

Europe is proposing a ban on single-use plastic items such as cutlery, straws and cotton buds in a bid to clean up the oceans. From a report: The European Commission wants to ban 10 items that make up 70% of all litter in EU waters and on beaches. The list also includes plastic plates and drink stirrers. The draft rules were unveiled Monday but need the approval of all EU member states and the European Parliament. It could take three or four years for the rules to come into force. The legislation is not just about banning plastic products. It also wants to make plastic producers bear the cost of waste management and cleanup efforts, and it proposes that EU states must collect 90% of single-use plastic bottles by 2025 through new recycling programs.

An invisible layer of scum on the sea surface can reduce carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere and the oceans by up to 50%, scientists have discovered. From a report: Researchers from Heriot-Watt, Newcastle and Exeter universities say the findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, have major implications for predicting our future climate. The world's oceans absorb around a quarter of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions, making them the largest long-term sink of carbon on Earth. Greater sea turbulence increases gas exchange between the atmosphere and oceans and until now it was difficult to calculate the effect of "biological surfactants." Teams from the Natural Environment Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the European Space Agency developed a system that compares "the surfactant effect" between different seawaters in real time. They found surfactants can reduce carbon dioxide exchange by up to 50%.

Longtime reader theodp writes: Nonprofit Code.org, which is bankrolled by the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Infosys, has teamed up with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and is "calling on all educators and parents" to "help us build a database of all schools that teach (or don't teach) computer science" (via direct responses and email advocacy tools). Called the K-12 Computer Science Access Report, Code.org says "the database will be a resource that everyone in the CS community can use." For what purposes, however, is not entirely clear, although the Code.org Medium post indicates the database will be used by the nonprofit and the CS community to "make our shared vision [for every school to teach computer science] a reality." The post cites a 2016 study conducted by Google and Gallup -- which took principals to task for being clueless about what constituted "computer science" and misgauging parental and student demand for CS -- and goes on to add that the new database will allow the organization to "be able to report more precisely which schools do or don't offer this opportunity to their students." As far as a timeframe for the naughty-or-nice K-12 CS school database goes, Code.org reports, "our goal is to gather data for 100% of US schools by the end of 2018." In earlier posts, Code.org has thanked its partners for their help in "changing [K-12 CS] education policies in forty states" (make that 43 states!) and claimed credit for "pressing lawmakers" into unlocking Federal funding for K-12 CS with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has long made it easier for users to unlock the bootloader on its phones. But that is changing now. Android Authority: Earlier this month a support page, which detailed ways to unlock a bootloader, disappeared without any explanation from the company's websites. In a statement, the company said, "In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and risk of data being compromised, Huawei will cease providing bootloader unlock codes for devices launched after May 25, 2018." It added, "For devices launched prior to the aforementioned date, the termination of the bootloader code application service will come into effect 60 days after today's announcement. Moving forward, Huawei remains committed to providing quality services and experiences to its customers. Thank you for your continued support."

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian on-demand streaming service, with fewer than 400 employees, has pulled off a milestone that Silicon Valley companies Facebook, Amazon and Google-owned YouTube can only dream about at the moment. On several occasions Sunday evening, more than 10 million viewers simultaneously tuned in to Hotstar, the largest on-demand streaming service in India, to watch the deciding match of the 11th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tournament. The real-time concurrent views, displayed publicly on Hotstar's website, peaked at 10.7 million, the highest any online streaming service has reported to date. It's a big milestone for Star India-owned Hotstar, which first broke the previous top record -- about 8 million concurrent views -- in the first qualifier match in the same cricket tournament last week. In 2012, YouTube reported that its platform saw about 8 million concurrent views on the live-stream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from near-space to the Earth's surface.

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Looking to better compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, Pandora has launched a new Premium Family package. The new package offers unlimited access to all of Pandora's premium features for up to six people. The price is just $15 per month, but there's a 60-day free trial available so you can try it out for size first. Pandora explains that the new package offers "all of the features of Pandora Premium to up to six unique Pandora accounts simultaneously" and costs $14.99 USD monthly or $164.89 annually. As noted by Phone Arena, there are no limits on the number of tracks that can be streamed, there are no ads, and subscribers are free to download music for offline listening.

It's not just you, others have also noticed that popular songs on the Billboard charts sound similar. But what you may not realize is that in the recent days, they're sounding even more similar. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels for The Pudding make the case: From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%. In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.

The Pakistani megacity of Karachi, home to more than 20 million people, is among the most water-stressed cities in the world, only able to meet half of its daily water demand. From a report: Karachi requires 1,100 million of gallons per day (mgd), but only receives 550 mgd, according to the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB). Karachi's water is sourced from the Indus River via Keenjhar Lake, which sits more than 90 miles away from the city. The water shortage in Karachi is linked to myriad factors including climate change, mismanagement of water resources, and corruption. Most of all, however, a rising population increasing at a rate of 4.5 percent a year creates a strain on the finite water supply. Pakistan ranks in the top ten of countries worst affected by climate change, and water shortages are likely to deepen in both intensity and frequency in the coming decade.

A high school in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province located on the eastern coast of China, has employed facial recognition technology to monitor students' attentiveness in class, local media reports. From the report: At Hangzhou Number 11 High School, three cameras at the front of the classroom scan students' faces every 30 seconds, analyzing their facial expressions to detect their mood, according to a May 16 report in the state-run newspaper The Paper. The different moods -- surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral -- are recorded and averaged during each class. A display screen, only visible to the teacher, shows the data in real-time. A certain value is determined as a student not paying enough attention. A video shot by Zhejiang Daily Press revealed that the system -- coined the "smart classroom behavior management system" by the school -- also analyzes students' actions, categorized into: reading, listening, writing, standing up, raising hands, and leaning on the desk.

Microsoft is developing a tool that can detect bias in artificial intelligence algorithms with the goal of helping businesses use AI without running the risk of discriminating against certain people. From a report: Rich Caruana, a senior researcher on the bias-detection tool at Microsoft, described it as a "dashboard" that engineers can apply to trained AI models. "Things like transparency, intelligibility, and explanation are new enough to the field that few of us have sufficient experience to know everything we should look for and all the ways that bias might lurk in our models," he told MIT Technology Review. Bias in algorithms is an issue increasingly coming to the fore. At the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit in Boston this week, Gabriele Fariello, a Harvard instructor in machine learning and chief information officer at the University of Rhode Island, said that there are "significant ... problems" in the AI field's treatment of ethics and bias today. "There are real decisions being made in health care, in the judicial system, and elsewhere that affect your life directly," he said.