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Submission + - Car thieves use laptop and malware to steal more than 30 Jeeps (abc13.com)

Submitted by altnuc
altnuc writes: Two thieves in Houston steal more than 30 Jeeps by using a laptop and a stolen database. The thieves simply look up the vehicles VIN number in a stolen database, reprogram a generic key fob, start the car, and drive away.

Chrysler has confirmed that more than 100 of their vehicles have been stolen in the Houston area since November.

Chrysler/Jeep owners should always make sure their vehicles are locked!

Submission + - How the Internet Helps Sex Workers Keep Customers Honest

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Mid-range prostitution is a relatively new market, enabled by technology. Before the internet, it was hard for escorts to find customers: They had to either walk the streets searching for customers, rely on word-of-mouth, or work with agencies. The internet changed all that as Allison Schrager writes at Quartz that if you work at Goldman Sachs in NYC and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her, you'll first have to talk to Rita. Rita will "insist on calling your office, speaking to the switchboard operator, and being patched through to your desk. Then she will want to check out your profile on the company website and LinkedIn. She’ll demand you send her message from your work email, and require a scan of either your passport or driver’s license."

Though some escorts rely on sex work-specific sites that maintain “bad date” lists of potentially dangerous clients, others make use of more mainstream sources to gather information about and verify the identities of potential johns. Rita is addressing a problem that every business, both legal and illegal, has. Before the internet, more commerce occurred locally—customers knew their merchants or service providers and went back to them repeatedly. As technology has expanded our transactional networks, it must also offer new ways of building trust and reputation. "The lesson here is that, while you’d think all the technological options for finding customers would make Rita’s job as a madam obsolete, it has actually made her services more critical," says Schrager. "One step ahead of the mainstream economy, Rita’s thriving business shows that some jobs won’t disappear. They just need to be recast in a way that capitalizes on what made them valuable in the first place."

Submission + - Google Accused Of Stealing Balloon Network Tech Behind Project Loon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google’s parent company Alphabet has found itself faced with a lawsuit, which claims that the tech giant stole the idea behind its Wi-Fi-emitting balloon network, Project Loon. Space Data of Chandler, Arizona, is arguing that it currently holds patents for a balloon-based system which carries broadband antennae to create a wireless network to deliver data services to U.S. armed forces and across remote areas of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

The organisation is seeking damages for two counts of patent infringement, as well as two counts of misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of written contract.

Submission + - FBI Says Utility Pole Surveillance Cam Locations Must Be Kept Secret (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A federal judge has been convinced by the FBI to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. Ars Technica writes about how such a privacy dispute is highlighting a powerful tool the authorities are employing across the country to spy on the public with or without warrants. Ars Technica reports: "The deployment of such video cameras appears to be widespread. What's more, the Seattle authorities aren't saying whether they have obtained court warrants to install the surveillance cams. And the law on the matter is murky at best. In an e-mail to Ars, Seattle city attorney spokeswoman Kimberly Mills declined to say whether the FBI obtained warrants to install surveillance cams on Seattle City Light utility poles. 'The City is in litigation and will have no further comment,' she said. Mills suggested we speak with the FBI office in Seattle, and we did. Peter Winn, [assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle], wrote to Judge Jones that the location information about the disguised surveillance cams should be withheld because the public might think they are an 'invasion of privacy.' Winn also said that revealing the cameras' locations could threaten the safety of FBI agents. And if the cameras become 'publicly identifiable,' Winn said, 'subjects of the criminal investigation and national security adversaries of the United States will know what to look for to discern whether the FBI is conducting surveillance in a particular location.'"

Submission + - Weary Homeowners Wage War on Waze

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: For many drivers, the app Waze is a godsend, providing real-time, crowdsourced traffic tips to motorists desperate for alternatives to congested thoroughfares but to some residents of the formerly quiet neighborhoods through which Waze has rerouted countless commuters, the app has destroyed their quality of life. Steve Hendrix writes at the Washington Post that when traffic on Timothy Connor’s quiet Maryland street in Tamoka Park, MD suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew that Waze was to blame for routing cars around a around a months-long road repair through his neighborhood. “I could see them looking down at their phones,” says Connor. “We had traffic jams, people were honking. It was pretty harrowing.” So Connor became a Waze Warrior. Every rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to deflect some of the flow. Neighbors filed false reports of blockages, sometimes with multiple users reporting the same issue to boost their credibility. “It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know,” says Bates Mattison. “In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood.”

But Waze was way ahead of them. It’s not possible to fool the system for long, according to Waze officials. For one thing, the system knows if you’re not actually in motion. More important, it constantly self-corrects, based on data from other drivers. “The nature of crowdsourcing is that if you put in a fake accident, the next 10 people are going to report that it’s not there,” says Julie Mossler, Waze’s head of communications. The company will suspend users they suspect of “tampering with the map."

Submission + - Student photographer threatened with suspension for sports photos (petapixel.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Anthony Mazur is a senior at Flower Mound High School in Texas who photographed school sports games and other events. Naturally he posted them on line. A few days ago he was summoned to the principal's office and threatened with a suspension and 'reporting to the IRS' if he didn't take those 4000 photos down. Reportedly, the principle's rationale was that the school has copyright on the images and not him.

Submission + - The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers (dice.com) 9

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The latest biography of Elon Musk, by technology journalist Ashlee Vance, provides an in-depth look into how the entrepreneur and tech titan built Tesla Motors and SpaceX from the ground up. For developers and engineers, getting a job at SpaceX is difficult, with a long interviewing/testing process... and for some candidates, there's a rather unique final step: an interview with Musk himself. During that interview, Musk reportedly likes to ask candidates a particular brainteaser: 'You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?' If you can answer that riddle successfully, and pass all of SpaceX’s other stringent tests, you may have a shot at launching rockets into orbit.

Submission + - Patent Issued Covering Phone Notifications of Delivery Time and Invoice Quantity (eff.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The staggering ingenuity of the US Patent system has again been showcased by the EFF's analysis of recent patents. This week's patent and follow up patent cover the futuristic innovative idea that when you order something, you can update your order and add additional amounts to your order while it's being processed. But wait, it gets even more innovative! You may one day be able to even to notify when you would like it delivered — ON YOUR PHONE. I know, you're busy wiping all that brain matter off your screen as your head seems to have exploded. Well, it turns out that inventor and patent holder Scott Horstemeyer (aka Eclipse IP, LLC of Delray Beach, FL) found no shortage of targets to go after with his new patents. It appears Tiger Fitness (and every other online retailer) was sending notices to customers about shipments. Did I mention Professional waste-of-space Horstemeyer is a lawyer too? But not just a regular lawyer, a "SUPER lawyer" from the same firm that patented social networking in 2007, sued Uber for using location finding technologies in 2013 and sued Overstock.com as well as a small time shoe seller for using shipping notifications in 2014.

Submission + - How to break the Internet (in a bad way) (reason.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality."

Across the board, the authors write, letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in everything they say they're trying to avoid. For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.

Submission + - World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Airlander 10 is the world's biggest aircraft. It's an airship that incorporates elements of blimps, planes, and hovercraft. Buoyed by a vast volume of helium, it's capable of cruising at a speed of 80 knots. It was built as a military venture, intended to be used for surveillance tasks. But as the war in Afghanistan wound down, government officials found they had no use for the airship. They ended up selling it back to the company who made it for $300,000 — after paying them $90 million to build it. Now, a small group of investors are trying to get it operational, in part to show people how safe the technology can be, and to hopefully spur construction of more airships. They say the Airlander 10 is capable of surviving a missile strike, but visions of the Hindenberg still loom large in our cultural memory.

Submission + - France will block WWW sites that promote terrorism 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the first use of government powers enacted after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered five websites blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism. The action raises questions about how governments might counter groups such as the self-declared Islamic State on digital platforms.

captcha: skaters

Submission + - "Climate Change" discussion in Florida (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has an article in the Miami Herald about there being certain words state employees have been ordered to avoid.

"We were told not to use the terms 'climate change', 'global warming', or 'sustainability'," said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP's Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel."

Submission + - NASA's HI-SEAS Project Suggests a Women-only Mars Mission (slate.com) 1

Submitted by globaljustin
globaljustin writes: Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA concluded, “Small women haven’t been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there’s no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it’s brain power you want,” says Drysdale. “The logical thing to do is to fly small women.”

Submission + - Brits ignore government's parental-control broadband filters (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Broadband customers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems foisted on ISPs by the government — with takeup in the single-digits for three of the four major broadband providers. Last year, the government pushed ISPs to roll out network-level filters, forcing new customers to make an "active" decision about whether they want to use them or not. Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has a much better takeup, with 36% of customers signing up for it. The report, from regulator Ofcom, didn't bother to judge if the filters actually work, however.

Submission + - Egypt authorities detain French 'spy' bird found with tracker (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post reports, "In a case that ruffled feathers in Egypt, authorities have detained a migratory bird that a citizen suspected of being a spy. A man in Egypt’s Qena governorate, some 450 kilometers (280 miles) southeast of Cairo, found the suspicious bird among four others near his home and brought them to a police station Friday, said Mohammed Kamal, the head of the security in the region. With turmoil gripping Egypt following the July 3 popularly backed military coup that overthrew the country’s president, authorities and citizens remain highly suspicious of anything foreign. Conspiracy theories easily find their ways into cafe discussion — as well as some media in the country. Earlier this year, a security guard filed a police report after capturing a pigeon he said carried microfilm. A previous rumor in 2010 blamed a series of shark attacks along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast on an Israeli plot. It wasn’t. In the bird’s case, even military officials ultimately had to deny the bird carried any spying devices. They spoke Saturday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists."

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