After an iPhone was stolen, $10,000 vanished from the owner's bank account — and they were locked out of their Apple account's photos, contacts and notes. The thieves "stole thousands of dollars through Apple Pay" and "opened an Apple Card to make fraudulent charges," writes 9 to 5 Mac, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal. These thieves often work in groups with one distracting a victim while another records over a shoulder as they enter their passcode. Others have been known to even befriend victims, asking them to open social media or other apps on their iPhones so they can watch and memorize the passcode before stealing it. A 12-person crime ring in Minnesota was recently taken down after targeting iPhones like this in bars. Almost $300,000 was stolen from 40 victims by this group before they were caught.
The Journal adds that "similar stories are piling up in police stations around the country," while one of their article's authors has tweeted Apple's official response. "We sympathize with users who have had this experience and we take all attacks on our users very seriously, no matter how rare.... We will continue to advance the protections to help keep user accounts secure."

The reporter suggests alphanumeric passwords are harder to steal, while MacRumors offers some other simple fixes. "Use Face ID or Touch ID as much as possible when in public to prevent thieves from spying... In situations where entering the passcode is necessary, users can hold their hands over their screen to hide passcode entry."

Colorado farmer Danny Wood had a problem with his Steiger 370 tractor, reports the Associated Press: The tractor's manufacturer doesn't allow Wood to make certain fixes himself, and last spring his fertilizing operations were stalled for three days before the servicer arrived to add a few lines of missing computer code for $950. "That's where they have us over the barrel, it's more like we are renting it than buying it," said Wood, who spent $300,000 on the used tractor.

Wood's plight, echoed by farmers across the country, has pushed lawmakers in Colorado and 10 other states to introduce bills that would force manufacturers to provide the tools, software, parts and manuals needed for farmers to do their own repairs — thereby avoiding steep labor costs and delays that imperil profits....

The manufacturers argue that changing the current practice with this type of legislation would force companies to expose trade secrets. They also say it would make it easier for farmers to tinker with the software and illegally crank up the horsepower and bypass the emissions controller — risking operators' safety and the environment.... "I know growers, if they can change horsepower and they can change emissions they are going to do it," said Russ Ball, sales manager at 21st Century Equipment, a John Deere dealership in Western states.

The bill's proponents acknowledged that the legislation could make it easier for operators to modify horsepower and emissions controls, but argued that farmers are already able to tinker with their machines and doing so would remain illegal.
The article quotes Wood's representative in Congress, who also argues that local dealerships in rural areas would be impacted by the legislation. "I do sympathize with my farmers," he's quoted as saying, but added "I don't think it's the role of government to be forcing the sale of their intellectual property."

Domain and web hosting provider Namecheap is terminating all service with the company's Russian-based users over the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine. From a report: "Unfortunately, due to the Russian regime's war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, we will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia," US-based Namecheap told Russian users in an email on Monday. The company is asking Russian users to transfer their domains to another provider by March 6. Otherwise their sites will resolve to a 403 Forbidden page. In addition, Namecheap has begun blocking Russian clients from using the company's web hosting and private email services over Russian internet domains, including .ru and .su. "While we sympathize that this war may not affect your own views or opinion on the matter, the fact is, your authoritarian government is committing human rights abuses and engaging in war crimes so this is a policy decision we have made and will stand by," the company added. The decision has caused some Russian users to complain they've been unfairly targeted. "Whoever came up with this idea is an idiot and should be fired," wrote one user on Twitter, who claims Namecheap is "blanket targeting" civilians, instead of going after Russia's government.

"Both sides made closing arguments this week in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' fraud trial," reports Business Insider: Prosecutors said Holmes "chose to be dishonest" and that her allegations of abuse, which were a key part of her defense, were irrelevant. The defense said "rats flee a sinking ship" but Holmes stayed, noting "that's who that woman is...."

Prosecutors kicked off their arguments by recapping testimony from each of their 29 witnesses. They argued that Holmes saw money dry up at Theranos while its progress languished and had to decide whether to "watch Theranos slowly fail" or defraud investors and patients. "She chose fraud over business failure. She chose to be dishonest," said Assistant US attorney Jeffrey Schenk, according to NBC News. "That choice was not only callous, it was criminal."

Prosecutors revisited Holmes' bombshell admissions during her seven days of testimony, including that she added pharmaceutical companies' logos to validation reports without authorization and kept Theranos' use of modified third-party devices a secret. Holmes has said she wanted to convey that the reports were the result of work done with those pharmaceutical companies and that she withheld information about the use of commercial devices because it was a trade secret.
The New York Times argues historians will see the trial as "a case study in the use of clothing to affect opinion (public and judicial) and, if not to make friends, at least to influence people. Or try to." When the verdict comes down, the transformation of the wunderkind founder of Theranos from black-clad genius to besuited milquetoast will be an integral part of the story. Did it work, or was it a seemingly transparent effort to play the relatable card? Rarely has there been as stark an example of Before and After.... Gone were her signature black turtlenecks and black slacks; gone the bright red lipstick and blond hair ironed straight as a board or pulled into a chignon.... Instead there was ... sartorial neutrality, in the form of a light gray pantsuit and light blue button-down shirt, worn untucked, with baby pink lipstick. She looked more like the college student trying on a grown-up interview look than the mastermind of a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme.... There was not a power heel or a power shoulder in sight. The only part of her outfit that was branded in any way was her diaper bag backpack (her son was born in July), which was from Freshly Picked and costs around $175...

The net effect of Ms. Holmes's makeover was middle manager or backup secretarial character in a streaming series about masters of the universe (but not her! uh-uh), with the diaper bag functioning as an implicit reminder of her maternal status and family values. In case that accessory wasn't enough, she often entered the courthouse with an actual family member — her mother, her partner — in tow, and a hand to cling to. It was code-switching of the most skillful kind. It was relatable. One of the stereotypes of Silicon Valley's superstars, after all, is that they are other: speaking in bits, relating to machines more than people; living, literally, in a different reality. When you want a jury to sympathize with your plight, you have to make them imagine themselves in your shoes. Which means, you need to look, if not like them, at least like someone they might know.

ICANN has responded to a request for it to reduce the $25,000 annual fee it charges gTLD registries. The answer is no. From a report: That wholly unsurprising reply came in a letter from registry services director Russ Weinstein to John McCabe, CEO of failing new gTLD operator Who's Who Registry. McCabe, in November, had asked ICANN to reduce its fees for TLDs, such as its own .whoswho, that have zero levels of abuse. ICANN fees are the "single biggest item" in the company's budget, he said. His request coincided with ICANN commencing compliance proceedings against the company for failure to pay these fees.

Weinstein wrote, in a letter [PDF] published today: "We sympathize with the financial challenges that some new gTLD registry operators may be facing in the early periods of these new businesses. New gTLD operators face a challenging task of building consumer awareness and this can and may take significant time and effort." But he goes on to point out that the $25,000-a-year fee was known to all applicants before they applied, and had been subject to numerous rounds of public comment before the Applicant Guidebook was finalized.

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a Guardian article which argues that Apple Store employees "are underpaid, overhyped and characters in a well-managed fiction story" who "use emotional guile to sell products": When customers run into trouble with their products, geniuses are encouraged to sympathize, but only by apologizing that customers feel bad, lest they implicate Apple's products as the source of the trouble. In this gas-lit performance of a "problem free" brand philosophy, many words are actually verboten for staff. Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with. Staff have reported the absurdist dialogues that can result, like when they are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so....

[I]n a move so ridiculous it's almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the "Genius Grove". Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. "We actually don't call them stores any more," the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), recently told the press. "We call them town squares."
The article argues that since there launch in 2001, Apple Stores "have raked in more money -- in total and per square foot -- than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process."

But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."

Leon Lederman, whose ingenious experiments with particle accelerators deepened science's understanding of the subatomic world, died early Wednesday in Rexburg, Idaho. He was 96. From a report: His wife, Ellen Carr Lederman, confirmed the death, at a care facility. She and Dr. Lederman, who had long directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, had retired to eastern Idaho. Early in his career Dr. Lederman and two colleagues demonstrated that there are at least two kinds of particles called neutrinos (there are now known to be three), a discovery that was honored in 1988 with a Nobel Prize in Physics. He went on to lead a team at the Fermi laboratory, in Batavia, Ill., that found the bottom quark, another fundamental constituent of matter.

For those baffled by such esoterica, Dr. Lederman was quick to sympathize. "'The Two Neutrinos' sounds like an Italian dance team," he remarked in his Nobel banquet speech. But he was determined to spread the word about the importance of the science he loved: "How can we have our colleagues in chemistry, medicine, and especially in literature share with us, not the cleverness of our research, but the beauty of the intellectual edifice, of which our experiment is but one brick?"

"In a brutal reminder of the secrecy tech companies enforce on employees, Apple recently fired an employee after his daughter posted a video of the iPhone X," writes long-time Slashdot reader HockeyPuck. Engadget reports: His daughter took down the video as soon as Apple requested it, but the takedown came too late to prevent the clip from going viral, leading to seemingly endless reposts and commentary... [I]t's important to stress that this wasn't a garden variety iPhone X. As an employee device, it had sensitive information like codenames for unreleased products and staff-specific QR codes. Combine that with Apple's general prohibition of recording video on campus (even at relatively open spaces like Caffe Macs) and this wasn't so much about maintaining the surprise as making sure that corporate secrets didn't get out. Apple certainly didn't want to send the message that recording pre-release devices was acceptable. All the same, it's hard not to sympathize -- the [radiofrequecy] engineer had poured his heart into the iPhone X, only to be let go the week before the handset reaches customers.
In a new follow-up video, the former Apple engineer's daughter says "I had no idea this was a violation," adding that her father "takes full reponsibility for letting me film his iPhone X." Here's some more quotes from her video.

BUL2294 writes Consumerist has an article about a homeowner in Kitsap County, Washington who is unable to get broadband service. Due to inaccurate broadband availability websites, Comcast's corporate incompetence, CenturyLink's refusal to add new customers in his area, and Washington state's restrictions on municipal broadband, the owner may be left with no option but to sell his house 2 months after he bought it, since he works from home as a software developer. To add insult to injury, BroadbandMaps.gov says he has 10 broadband options in his zip code, some of which are not applicable to his address, have exorbitant costs (e.g. wireless), or are for municipal providers that are prevented from doing business with him by state law. Yet, Comcast insists in filings that "the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever." As someone who had Comcast call to cancel on the day of my closing (two days before my scheduled install) because they didn't offer service to my house after all, I can sympathize.

An anonymous reader writes: The final chapter to Peter Jackson's series of films based on The Hobbit debuted last week, and the reviews haven't been kind. Ars Technica just posted theirs, and it highlights all the problems with Battle of the Five Armies, a two-hour and twenty-four minute film based on only 72 pages of the book. Quoting: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. ... There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. ... There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset — the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films." Other review titles: "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped," "The Phantom Menace of Middle Earth," and "Lots of Fighting, Not Much Hobbit."

Hugh Pickens writes "Rebecca Rosen writes that if you've recently opened up — or, more specifically, tried to open up — a CFL light bulb, you can sympathize with the question posted on Quora last year, 'What is the worst piece of design ever done?' The site's users have given resounding support to one answer: plastic clamshell packaging. 'Design should help solve problems' — clamshells are supposed to make it harder to steal small products and easier for employees to arrange on display — but this packaging, says Anita Schillhorn, makes new ones, such as time wasted, frustration, and the little nicks and scrapes people incur as they just try to get their damn lightbulb out. The problem is so pervasive there is even a Wikipedia page devoted to 'wrap rage,' 'the common name for heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-remove packaging.' Amazon and Wal-Mart are prodding more manufacturers to change their packaging to cut waste. 'We've gotten e-mails from customers who've purchased scissors in a clamshell, which would require another pair of scissors to open the package,' says Nadia Shouraboura, Amazon's vice president of global fulfillment. Other worthy answers to the Quora question include the interfaces on most microwaves, TV remotes, New York City's parking signs, and pull-handles on push-only doors, but none gained even close to the level of popular repudiation that clamshells received."

eldavojohn writes "The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution is a comprehensive snapshot of the latest research of biological evolution. The text is written by Eugene V. Koonin, an editor for a journal and researcher at NCBI. The book, although lacking in foundational knowledge and often foregoing explanation of research, presents a comprehensive and well-referenced view of modern evolutionary research. It is heavily laden with acronyms and jargon specific to biology and evolution. As a result, reading it requires either prior knowledge or a high tolerance for looking up these advanced topics with the reward of it being an extremely eye opening and enjoyable read worthy of your time." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Last week we discussed news that Diablo 3 will include a real-money auction house for items and require a permanent connection to the internet even for single-player games. Fan reaction has been loud and varied, with many decrying the restrictive DRM. Blizzard exec Robert Bridenbecker said he was surprised by the outrage at the online requirement, saying, "it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that." Some other developers came out in support of the scheme; id Software's Tim Willits said always-on would be "better for everybody" in the end. Max Schaefer, one of the makers of Diablo 3 competitor Torchlight 2, said he understands why they did it, even though Torchlight 2 is not doing the same: "... it seems that most of what they are doing is related to trying to keep a truly secure, cheat-free economy in Diablo III. Whatever you do, you have to make sacrifices. We sacrifice a cheat-free environment to give players the most options, they are sacrificing options and flexibility for security of the economy like you would in an MMO. I understand their approach and sympathize with the technical difficulties of what they are trying to do."

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in with a story about the DMCA. He starts "On January 16, a man named Guntram Graef who invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to ask YouTube to remove a video of giant penises attacking his wife's avatar/character in the virtual community "Second Life", retracted the claim and stated that he now believes the video was not a copyright violation. (He had sent similar notices to BoingBoing and the Sydney Morning Herald just for posting screen shots of the video.) His statements in a C-Net interview suggest that he didn't mean to alienate the anti-censorship community and was probably angry over what he saw as a sexually explicit attack on his wife. But the event sparked renewed debate over the DMCA and what constitutes abuse of it. I sympathize with Graef and I admire him for admitting an error, but I still think the incident shows why the DMCA is a bad law." Hit that link below to read the rest of his story.

timmit was one of many readers to point out the story of a stolen Sidekick, writing with this excerpt from the site: ""When my friend realized that she had left the Sidekick in the taxi she asked me to immediately send a message to the phone saying that we would give a reward for the phone. There was no response. After a day of waiting, she had to go to the store and spend over $300 on a new Sidekick. When she put her SIM card in, she saw that the person(s) that had taken the phone had not only signed on to AOL leaving their name and password in the phone, but they had taken pictures of themselves." I can sympathize, after someone with the address Rmluckyguy@aol.com tried to sell me back the Visor Deluxe stolen from my car last year in Philadelphia. I hope Evan has better luck.

Last week we mentioned a Guardian post about secondhand games, with some industry commentary that the secondhand market was lowering the innovation expectations of developers. Today, the Gamers With Jobs: Press Pass reacts to the whining of the poor underpaid developers: "The always candid David Jaffe wrote: 'You know what? Why the **** should we even try anymore?' while Epic's CliffyB noted: 'What other entertainment medium that's mass market is at $60 a pop?' Cliffy would seem to have the right of it. The used market for DVDs, or CDs is relatively small. Why? Presumably because getting a five dollar discount on a fifteen dollar DVD is not as enticing as thirty dollars off of a sixty dollar game; when it's only five bucks, the natural desire to buy something perfect and new will, in most cases, outweigh thriftiness. While I certainly sympathize with Mr. Jaffe's frustration on this matter, his concerns are a result of working for an industry which refuses to intelligently adapt to a changing marketplace."

Thanks to EvilAvatar for their story discussing UbiSoft's new patch for PC stealth action title Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, which "checks PCs for ANY clone or virtual drive programs and then fails to launch the game if such devices or programs are found." The article explains: "What this has, in turn, done is disabled thousands of consumers who use programs like Daemon Tools, CloneCD or Alcohol 120% from playing their UbiSoft games even if they have their own physical CDs in an actual drive." The writer is furious, pointing out: "Irregardless of what the virtual drives or virtual clone programs on your system are for, you will not be able to play Raven Shield with patch 1.5 unless you remove them completely off your system", and wondering whether this action is allowed under the EULA for the product. There are also similar discussions on the official UbiSoft forums for the game, though many sympathize with UbiSoft's anti-piracy efforts "telling you that in order to use the product you have to keep the CD in."

mikosullivan asks: "I'm a programmer for the Roanoke Rescue Mission in Roanoke, VA. The mission provides meals, shelter, and other help to the homeless. We're looking at upgrading the mission's information systems to a Linux-based network, from server to desktop. One of the major wrinkles in our plans is finding a good accounting system for Linux. My manager strongly feels (and I sympathize) that they should stick to accounting software that is already used by established accounting firms. There are certainly a plethora of Linux and open source accounting packages out there, but she wants to stay away from the bleeding edge, at least for accounting. She wants a tried-and-true, established, conservative choice for accounting software. What accounting software for Linux is most accepted and established in the marble and wood-paneled world of conservative bean counters? It doesn't have to be open source, but cost is a major issue, and open source is, of course, preferred."

Stella Daily writes: "The unlikely subject of Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind , based on the 1998 Sylvia Nasar book of the same name, is John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose doctoral thesis earned him a Nobel Prize -- and a schizophrenia patient whose illness kept him out of the academic community for decades. The John Nash of the film is a brilliant young man who doesn't quite fit in, ignores his classes, is gawky with women and, above all, is consumed with a desire for an original idea. It is easy to like this Nash, with his Southern drawl and his earnest demeanor, and to sympathize with him as he fights his way back from insanity." Stella explains below why things aren't quite that simple.

JavaDuke asks: "I live in Australia and recently purchased a product via the phone based on information that I read over the Internet. Part of that information was a guarantee, '...can be returned as part of our unconditional money back guarantee.' I tried to return the product but was told that I was (just) outside of their '90 day money back guarantee', which was never stated on their guarantee page (which I checked just prior to calling them). The page was changed within 2 hours of my conversation with them to read '...can be returned as part of our 90 day money back guarantee.' Luckily, Google still has the old version cached, but the real problem I'm having is how in the world do I get these pages verified in such a way that they will then stand up in court?"