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Submission + - Computer experts: Ditch Georgia's voting machines (hotair.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.

The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.

The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Submission + - Ethanol plants are allowed to pollute a lot (reuters.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'Today, the nation’s ethanol plants produce more than double the climate-damaging pollution, per gallon of fuel production capacity, than the nation’s oil refineries, according to a Reuters analysis of federal data.'

Bio-ethanol has always been a pork barrel project which potential presidential candidates have had to pay obeisance to because it's so important to Iowa, which is the first real test of their popularity.

Submission + - A Quarter of Healthcare Orgs Say Ransomware Attacks Result in Patient Deaths (esecurityplanet.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Nearly a quarter of healthcare organizations hit by ransomware attacks experienced an increase in patient mortality, according to a new study from Ponemon Institute and Proofpoint.

The report, “Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare: The Cost and Impact on Patient Safety and Care,” surveyed 641 healthcare IT and security practitioners and found that the most common consequences of cyberattacks are delayed procedures and tests, resulting in poor patient outcomes for 57% of the healthcare providers, followed by increased complications from medical procedures. The type of attack most likely to have a negative impact on patient care is ransomware, leading to procedure or test delays in 64% of the organizations and longer patient stays for 59% of them.

The Ponemon report depends on the accuracy of self-reporting and thus doesn't have the weight of, say, an epidemiological study that looks at hospital mortality baseline data before and after an attack, but the data is similar to what Ponemon has found in the past and there have been a number of reports of patient deaths and other complications from ransomware attacks.

The new report found that 89% of the surveyed organizations have experienced an average of 43 attacks in the past year. The most common types of attacks were cloud compromise, ransomware, supply chain, and business email compromise (BEC)/spoofing/phishing.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a top concern for survey participants. Healthcare organizations have an average of more than 26,000 network-connected devices, yet only 51% of the surveyed organizations include them in their cybersecurity strategy.

Healthcare organizations are better at cloud security, with 63% taking steps to prepare for and respond to cloud compromise attacks, and 62% have taken steps to prevent and respond to ransomware — but that still leaves nearly 40% of healthcare organizations more vulnerable than they should be.

Preparedness is even worse for supply chain attacks and BEC, with only 44% and 48% having a documented response to those attacks, respectively.

The high costs of healthcare cyberattacks — an average of $4.4 million — mean that healthcare cybersecurity tools likely have a high ROI, even though roughly half of the survey respondents say they lack sufficient staffing and in-house expertise.

Submission + - IRS Moves Toward Free E-Filing (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Internal Revenue Service will spend $15 million studying a free, government-backed tax filing system under a provision in the sweeping climate and health-care law Congress passed this summer. It’s a landmark step toward overhauling the way most Americans file their taxes and ending years of domination of tax prep by private corporations. Democrats have long lamented that millions of American pay for the privilege of filing taxes, and that corporate tax services take money from the neediest households. Hardly anyone uses the free e-filing options that industry supports because of restrictions on which returns qualify.

But the IRS has lacked the funding — or the clout to outmaneuver private lobbyists — to seriously consider its own e-filing platform, current and former officials say, forcing taxpayers instead to deal with a consortium of private providers and setting the agency back decades in technology and customer service. “The IRS is completely beholden to the software companies at this point because it just doesn’t have anything to replace them,” said Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate, the IRS’s internal consumer rights watchdog, from 2001 to 2019.

The commercial tax prep industry is gargantuan, worth $11.9 billion in 2022, according to market research firm IBIS World; 9 in 10 individual tax returns were filed digitally in 2021, the IRS reported. The largest players, Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block, offer narrowly tailored free e-filing options, and charge $59 and $55, respectively, for their lowest-paid tiers, plus variable filing fees and costs for state tax returns. Tax experts say a government-backed system could give more Americans access to free and trustworthy services, while increasing IRS efficiency by encouraging more taxpayers to file easy-to-process digital returns rather than cumbersome paper ones. But that would upset an ecosystem that by many accounts has served taxpayers and the government well for decades. The U.S.'s voluntary tax compliance rate — the proportion of filers who pay federal taxes accurately each year — is 83.6 percent by the most recent measurements, among the highest of developed economies.

Comment Our Software Dependency Problem (Score 2) 3

Just the other day I read a very interesting article (Our Software Dependency Problem) where the author writes about how we got where we are today with regards to code sharing and dependencies, and the main reason is automated dependency managers:

For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined.

...

A dependency manager (sometimes called a package manager) automates the downloading and installation of dependency packages. As dependency managers make individual packages easier to download and install, the lower fixed costs make smaller packages economical to publish and reuse.

...

Before dependency managers, publishing an eight-line code library would have been unthinkable: too much overhead for too little benefit. But NPM has driven the overhead approximately to zero, with the result that nearly-trivial functionality can be packaged and reused. In late January 2019, the escape-string-regexp package is explicitly depended upon by almost a thousand other NPM packages, not to mention all the packages developers write for their own use and donâ(TM)t share.

The whole article is interesting and I recommend reading it.

Comment Re:Canceling (Score 1) 441

Did you write the words "good people"/"bad people"? No, not directly however it is implied in what you wrote. The following two texts convey exactly the same meaning:

that people who have been taking care of their teeth now have to pay their own unsubsidized bills and subsidize the bills of people who have been abusing their teeth and not taking responsibility for it.

that the good people who have been taking care of their teeth now have to pay their own unsubsidized bills and subsidize the bills of the bad people who have been abusing their teeth and not taking responsibility for it.

Or am I wrong? Can you explain what significant difference the two texts convey?

Comment Re:Canceling (Score 1) 441

that people who have been taking care of their teeth now have to pay their own unsubsidized bills and subsidize the bills of people who have been abusing their teeth and not taking responsibility for it.

There we have it, the just world fallacy , e.g. people that does not have holes in their teeth are good people that take responsibility for their teeth while people that get holes are bad people that are reckless.

The world is not composed of purely good or bad people. You will be much better off having a more nuanced world view.

Comment Re: Wouldn't the water (Score 3, Informative) 166

WTF do tax rates have to do with this discussion?

Well since a moron brought up the connection between government management and moronness I think it is a relevant factor, especially since people that think taxes should be as low as possible or even not exist are extremely high on the moron scale.

Comment Re:Canceling (Score 1) 441

Ah, the classical "other people's money" attempt to trigger outrage.

As a tax payer you pay for funding public education regardless of whether you have children yourself or not. THIS IS A GOOD THING. Government is not a à la carte operation where you get to veto things you do not directly benefit from.

What's next? If the government decides to pay a percentage of dental expenses for the rest of the year, would that be "unfair" to those that have had holes in their teeth before?

Submission + - Twitter and Meta take down pro-US propaganda campaign (bbc.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Twitter and Meta have removed from their platforms an online propaganda campaign aimed at promoting US interests abroad, researchers say. This is the first major covert pro-US propaganda operation taken down by the tech giants, says a report by social media analytics firm Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). They removed dozens of accounts used in the campaign in July and August. It is not clear who is behind the propaganda operation. The researchers say Twitter has identified the US and the UK as the "presumptive countries of origin", while Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said the US was "the country of origin". However, the researchers were clear that even though the companies named these countries, it did not prove they were behind the campaign. "We do not have the necessary information to attribute this activity to a single country or organisation," the SIO told the BBC. "What is clear, is that the activity is meant to further Western interests, including those of the US and allies." The BBC has approached the US State Department, the UK government, Twitter and Meta for comment.

Comment Re:RAID for everyone, then? (Score 1) 66

So what's the backup strategy for everyone else, now? MIrror sets by default, with a 3rd backup drive sitting on the shelf? RAID-5?

ZFS. The awsome combined block level + file system originating from Sun Microsystems. The file system is copy on write which means that generating snapshots are superfast, and if you set up a task to generate snapshots regulary with some retention policy (e.g. zfs-auto-snapshot, znapzend or similar) from the client side you only need to to synchronize file content into a zfs destination folder (using rsync, synchthing or whatever), and the zfs will implicitly create and maintain all the "incremental" history (say hourly snapshots for 24h -> daily snapshots for 7days -> weekly snaphots for 1 month -> monthly snapshots for 1 year, or whatever policy you want).

ZFS is supported natively on several BSD distribuions. For linux due to licesing issued zfs is not directly included in the kernel, but ZFS on linux provides means to load it as a kernel module. For a nice ready to use package solution there is TrueNAS.

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