Comment Re:Irony (Score 1) 104
Just came through the comments to make sure someone posted this joke as otherwise I would have.
Uber Paid 20-year-old Florida Man To Keep Data Breach Secret (reuters.com) 27
A 20-year-old Florida man was responsible for the large data breach at Uber last year and he was paid by the company to destroy the data through a so-called "bug bounty" program, three people familiar with the events have told Reuters. From the report: Uber announced on Nov. 21 that the personal data of 57 million users, including 600,000 drivers in the United States, were stolen in a breach that occurred in October 2016, and that it paid the hacker $100,000 to destroy the information. But the company did not reveal any information about the hacker or how it paid him the money. Uber made the payment last year through a program designed to reward security researchers who report flaws in a company's software, these people said. Uber's bug bounty service -- as such a program is known in the industry -- is hosted by a company called HackerOne, which offers its platform to a number of tech companies.
Comment Re:Don't allow blocking or spoofing of CallerID (Score 1) 116
You need to be able to spoof caller ID for things like an asymmertrical phone system, like an inbound that gets routed to 1000 internal callers that don't get an outside line. Or for VOIP. Or you end up with how my middle school was, where if they called your house it showed up as like "251" on Caller ID.
Comment Some of my group chats... (Score 2) 70
Oh man. If that thing starts reading the group chats I'm a part of, I can't wait to see what the recommendations will be.
"You should attend some sensitivity training."
"You should grow up a little and move out of your mom's basement and stop posting memes."
"Having friends like that may land you in jail."
Comment Re:I wish it was obvious (Score 1) 143
I used to drink 4x 44oz regular sodas per day back in high school and college. I worked so many hours on my feet that I burned it off so i never saw the consequences. I then started noticing that all the people joining me at the gas station soda machine were morbidly obese individuals that looked like Mammy Tornado and had huge FUPAs. It started to come together for me that this would be me in a few years.
Completely cut out soda after that. Now, as this comment said, I only drink it when mixed with whiskey. That's literally it. I can't even drink regular soda anymore, had to switch to diet. I should rightfully have died or gotten the Beetis from how much sugar I drank back then. Water tastes so much better.
Drinking a Can of Sugary Soda Every Day Can Boost a Person's Risk For Prediabetes, Study Finds (upi.com) 143
An anonymous reader quotes a report from UPI: Drinking a can of sugary soda every day can dramatically heighten a person's risk of developing prediabetes, a "warning sign" condition that precedes full-blown type 2 diabetes, a new study reports. A person who drinks a daily can of sugar-sweetened beverage has a 46 percent increased risk of developing prediabetes, said senior researcher Nicola McKeown, a scientist with the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. For this study, McKeown and her colleagues analyzed 14 years of data on nearly 1,700 middle-aged adults. The information was obtained from the Framingham Heart Study, a federally funded program that has monitored multiple generations for lifestyle and clinical characteristics that contribute to heart disease. Participants did not have diabetes or prediabetes when they entered the study. They self-reported their consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and diet sodas. The research team found those who drank the highest amounts of sugar-sweetened beverages -- six 12-ounce servings a week, on average -- had a 46 percent higher risk of prediabetes, if researchers didn't weigh other factors. Authors of the new study noted that prediabetes risk did decline when they included factors such as other dietary sources of sugar and how much body fat a person had. But it didn't fall much. The increased risk associated with sugary drinks still amounted to about 27 percent, McKeown said. Because the study was observational, it does not establish a direct cause-and-effect link between sugary drinks and prediabetes, McKeown said.
Buffer Sees Clear Benefits To Transparent Employee Salary Policy 137
An anonymous reader writes: At social media startup Buffer, a single leadership decision eliminated salary negotiation for new employees, preempted gender-based salary discrimination, and prompted a flood of job applications. The decision? Make all employee salaries transparent. "We set down transparency as a core value for the company," CEO Joel Gascoigne said in 2014. "And then, once we'd done that, we went through everything. And salaries was one of those key things that we found that [made us] question ourselves: 'Why are we not transparent about this?'" Years later, the policy is still in place (go ahead and calculate your salary as a would-be Buffer employee) — and it presents a fascinating case study for anyone interested in the ways open organizations approach a rather prickly subject: transparency.
Comment Do you still do Gumball 3000? (Score 1) 205
I went to the finish line party of Gumball 3000 this year and it reminded me of how many times you had been on the rally. When was the last time you went on the rally, and do you plan on going on another rally some day? Your enthusiasm for driving and the rally itself made many of the documentaries worth watching.
Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant 378
Beeftopia (1846720) writes In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."
Comment I am completely for this (Score 1) 246
I got kinda heated when I first saw this but now I am 100% in support of this as long as the fines stay that reasonable. In the United States the courts would usually levy life-ending or business-bankrupting fines for cyber infractions but if the max penalty for trolling was €320 then I really wouldn't care.
Comment Re:They did this because their IT is a joke (Score 1) 85
Not to mention that the director of IT at one particular building is such an idiot that he couldn't even keep kiosk computers in the lobby running for more than 2 weeks at a time before they got virus infestations and permanently bluescreened. Had he never heard of Deepfreeze? I was only 20 years old at the time but could have run circles around him with a little common sense.
Comment They did this because their IT is a joke (Score 1) 85
Back in 2007 my friend and I worked in a crap call center for them and we got bored and found out that all of the shares for all call centers CORPORATION WIDE had effective permissions set to "EVERYONE" meaning that any one person could modify everyone else's files. This included IE favorites and any files on the roaming profile, as well as drop zones for operating system ISOs and installer programs used by IT. Would have been extremely easy at that point to steal everyone's password in the entire building, or just destroy everything, and wreak havoc corporation wide. They also only had restrictions on executables locally but you could craft up batch files to circumvent that. We did the right thing and tried to tell them but he got suspended over it and they threatened to make us "disappear" if we told anyone so I just walked out that day. At any other company all operations would have stopped until this was fixed as it was a severe issue but apparently it was just business as usual for them.
A move like this doesn't surprise me. Their IT management is a complete joke. They can play games as much as they want but this is how IT debacles like AOL's internal problems get started.
Comment Funny until you get raided (Score 1) 203
It's all fun and games and a super awesome idea until you get your door kicked in because someone uses your net to download CP or fraud a bunch of credit cards. You think about these things way differently when it actually happens to you. This is a terrible idea.
MIT President Tells Grads To 'Hack the World' 86
theodp writes "On Friday, MIT President L. Rafael Reif exhorted grads to 'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'. A rather ironic choice of words, since 'hack the world' is precisely what others said Aaron Swartz was trying to do in his fateful run-in with MIT. President Reif presumably received an 'Incomplete' this semester for the promised time-is-of-the-essence review of MIT's involvement in the events that preceded Swartz's suicide last January. By the way, it wasn't so long ago that 2013 commencement speaker Drew Houston and Aaron Swartz were both welcome speakers at MIT."
House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers 750
Lucas123 writes "U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass) is pushing a bill that would require all U.S. handgun manufacturers to include 'personalization technology' in their weapons. Tierney said he got the idea for The Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 from the latest James Bond film, Skyfall. In it Bond escapes death when his handgun, which is equipped with technology that recognizes his fingerprints, becomes inoperable when a bad guy picks it up. 'This technology, however, isn't just for the movies — it's a reality,' Tierney said. Tierney pointed to a myriad of cases where the smart gun tech could prevent children from being harmed or killed in firearms accidents. Jim Wallace, executive director of the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, the official state association of the NRA, said he knows of no gun owners who would want smart gun technology on their weapons. Wallace said any technology that may impede the proper function of a weapon is a problem. He pointed to the fact that any integrated processor technology would also require a battery of some kind, which could pose a system failure if it lost power."
