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Submission + - Oregon Signs Nation's First Right-To-Repair Bill That Bans Parts Pairing (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oregon Governor Tina Kotek today signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far. The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams. But Oregon's bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function. Known as parts pairing or serialization, Oregon's bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to target that practice. Oregon State Senator Janeen Sollman (D) and Representative Courtney Neron (D) sponsored and pushed the bill in the state senate and legislature.

Oregon's bill isn't stronger in every regard. For one, there is no set number of years for a manufacturer to support a device with repair support. Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—"electric toothbrushes."

Submission + - Ransomware victim makes large profit recovering ransom (dw.com)

Submitted by thegarbz
thegarbz writes: In 2019 Maastricht University in the Netherlands was hit with a ransomware attack which locked 25,000 staff and students out of their research data. The university agreed to pay a ransom of €200,000 to unlock the encrypted data. It seems that a small part of the ransom has been recovered, but with a twist.

As part of an investigation into the cyberattack, Dutch police tracked down a bank account belonging to a money launderer in Ukraine, into which a relatively small amount of the ransom money — around €40,000 worth of Bitcoin — had been paid. Prosecutors were able to seize the account in 2020 and found a number of different cryptocurrencies. The authorities were then able to return the ransom back to the university after more than two years. But the value of the Bitcoin held in the Ukrainian account has increased from its then-value of €40,000 to €500,000.

Submission + - Code bloat has become astronomical (positech.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: An indie game programmer Cliff Harris shares his concerns about the current state of compute: Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware to achieve it.

Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.

Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.

Submission + - GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor (cloudsek.com)

Submitted by Grokew
Grokew writes: Goodwill ransomware group propagates very unusual demands in exchange for the decryption key. The Robin Hood-like group is forcing its Victims to donate to the poor and provides financial assistance to the patients in need.

In order for the victims to obtain the decryption keys, they must provide proof of Donating to the homeless, sharing a meal with the less fortunate, and pay a debt of someone who can't afford it.

Submission + - Writing Google Reviews About Patients is Actually A HIPAA Violation (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by August Oleman
August Oleman writes: According to The Verge, health providers writing Google reviews about patients with identifiable information is a HIPAA violation:

In the past few years, the phrase 'HIPAA violation' has been thrown around a lot, often incorrectly. People have cited the law, which protects patient health information, as a reason they can’t be asked if they’re vaccinated or get a doctor’s note for an employer.

But asking someone if they’re vaccinated isn’t actually a HIPAA violation. That’s a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. [...]

In the post, he used the patient’s full name and described, in detail, the specific dental problem he was in for: “excruciating pain” from the lower left quadrant, which resulted in a referral for a root canal.

That’s what a HIPAA violation actually looks like.

Submission + - 40,000 Chromebooks and 9,600 iPads Go Missing at Chicago Public Schools

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "When the school system [Chicago Public Schools] shifted to having students learn remotely in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, it lent students iPads, MacBooks and Windows computer devices so they could do school work and attend virtual classes from home," reports Frank Main in the Chicago Sun-Times. "CPS then spent about $165 million to buy Chromebook desktop computers so that every student from kindergarten through senior year in high school who needed a computer could have one. Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out. Of them, nearly 40,000 Chromebooks have been reported lost — nearly a fifth of those that were lent. 'Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success,' according to a written statement from CPS officials in response to questions about the missing school property. Also missing are more than 9,600 iPads, 114 televisions, 1,680 printers and 1,127 audiovisual projectors, among many other items. Officials say CPS has bought new computer devices to replace the missing ones."

There were 340,658 students enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at the start of the 2020-2021 school year.

Comment So... (Score 1) 1163

by ski9826 (#41961675) Attached to: Secession Petitions Flood White House Website
Why does opposing Obama so much that you don't want to be a part of the US anymore have to have something to do with race? I'm sure this is the case for some (maybe more than some), but I would disagree with almost everything that man does and stands for, whether he was white, black, or purple polka dot.

Comment Re:Tweedledee won ! (Score 1) 1576

by ski9826 (#41910591) Attached to: Barack Obama Retains US Presidency
Oh, really? How about when Clinton relaxed the lending restrictions on banks allowing them to make questionable and fiscally irresponsible loans? That was the beginning of the end. They all played a part in this, but don't blow hot air up my ass.

Comment Re:So fucking what? (Score 1) 349

by ski9826 (#41730965) Attached to: Black Sheep Blackberry Blackballed By Business

Sounds like you need to update your OS. I have both Android and iOS mobile devices and they are able to automatically configure themselves with the exchange server. It even tries to find the exchange server based on your email address. Besides this is a one-time configuration issue and not enough to complain about.

Unless your organization uses a cloud exchange service such as Office 365 - it does not discover this automatically, and you have to change your user name and mail server address. This is NOT a 1-time deal usually. Users sometimes have to delete/re-add their email account from the phone. Or do a hard reset to fix other issues on the phone. And if they are not techy, they will need to be walked through this every time. Can be frustrating

Blackberry has its share of exploits. One was demonstrated at Pwn2Own which exploited the browser of a BB Torch 9800. This exploit could be used to install Flexispy. There was also a talk at DefCon 2006 where the BB could be exploited to get access to the internal LAN of the corporation.

My point being that don't be so smug about the security of your device. There are exploits out there.

Agree with you there, there are exploits for just about everything. But the organization will usually be best-served by making their devices as secure as possible, and the per-device AES encryption is pretty good

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