Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot readers hyperclocker and Hallux-F-Sinister have shared news about Walmart's new strategy to take on Amazon. In a nutshell, Walmart will use more of Microsoft's cloud services and work with the company on AI and machine learning projects. The goal is to reduce its energy consumption and improve its delivery systems. Hyperclocker shares an excerpt from a report: Today, Walmart announced that it has established a strategic partnership with Microsoft to, "further accelerate Walmart's digital transformation in retail, empower its associates worldwide and make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers around the world." What that means in reality is, Walmart is embracing Microsoft's cloud services and will run its digital operations by taking full advantage of Microsoft Azure and Office 365. The partnership agreement lasts for five years and starts with a team of Walmart and Microsoft engineers working together to transition the retailer to Microsoft's ecosystem. Hallux-F-Sinister provides some commentary: According to CNN Money, Walmart and Microsoft are ganging up on Amazon.com. I found myself wondering if this was more like Lex Luthor teaming up with the Joker to fight Sinestro, or Bruce Wayne letting Tony Stark use the Bat Computer to fight against the thing Richard Pryor's character designed in whichever godawful nineteen eighties-era Superman sequel he was in. The story itself would bore an accountant to tears, I am convinced, so I did not dare read it for fear of being rendered insensate; but here is the URL if you find you are in desperate need of sleep. Perhaps this other bit of news will wake you up: Walmart is also contemplating starting its own streaming service to compete with Amazon and Netflix. According to GeekWire, citing The Information, "Walmart is considering various ways to stand out, including undercutting Amazon and Netflix on price or offering an ad-supported free service."

The woman who entered the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, this morning and started shooting has been identified as Nasim Aghdam. According to ABC7 News, "the YouTube shooter was a user of the platform" and had "a website with an alleged manifesto that targeted YouTube for censorship and demonetization of her video content. According to her website, a possible motivation for the shooting could have been tied to her many YouTube accounts, which she says have seen a decline in viewership over the past few months."
Here is a timeline of events from our original post:

Police have responded to multiple 911 calls at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. From a report: Vadim Lavrusik, a product manager at the company, tweeted that there is an active shooter on campus. The San Bruno Police Department instructed people to stay away from 901 Cherry Avenue, where the company is located. Multiple 911 calls have been received from inside the building, according to a report from local news station KRON. In a Twitter thread, YouTube product manager Todd Sherman said that employees first thought there had been an earthquake. People began running out of their meetings, he said, but before reaching the exit, they got word that someone had a gun. Sherman said he saw blood on the floor and the stairs. He also said the shooter may have committed suicide. Vadim Lavrusik, who works at YouTube's products team, tweeted, "Active shooter at YouTube HQ. Heard shots and saw people running while at my desk. Now barricaded inside a room with coworkers."

Update 20:30GMT: Google has issued the following statement, "we are coordinating with authorities and will provide official information here from Google and YouTube as it becomes available." San Bruno Police said it was "responding to an active shooter. Please stay away from Cherry Ave & Bay Hill Drive."

Update 20:40 GMT: CBS San Francisco reports: KPIX 5 reporter Andria Borba said at least two Homeland Security units were responding. Police radio transmissions describe casualties being taken to local hospitals. San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the hospital received patients from the incident but could not confirm a number.

Update 21:20 GMT: ABC News is reporting that the suspected shooter is a white adult female, and that this is "leaning towards a workplace violence situation."

Update 21:30 GMT: Law enforcement has confirmed that the shooter was a white female dressed in a headscarf. The woman reportedly shot her boyfriend then herself. It's unclear exactly how many people have been injured, but early reports estimate at least 9-10 victims. There is no word on their conditions.

Update 03:10 GMT: ABC7 News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as Nasim Aghdam. She reportedly had a website with an alleged manifesto that targeted YouTube for censorship and demonetization of her video content. Contrary to previous reports, she is said to have no relationship with anyone in the YouTube facility.

UPDATE 03:40 GMT: Aghdam's website can be found here.

Update 04:15 GMT: The shooter is believed to have known at least one of the victims, two law enforcement officials told CNN. Other sources suggest the shooter drove up from San Diego. YouTube says her YouTube channel "has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations."

Police have responded to multiple 911 calls at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. From a report: Vadim Lavrusik, a product manager at the company, tweeted that there is an active shooter on campus. The San Bruno Police Department instructed people to stay away from 901 Cherry Avenue, where the company is located. Multiple 911 calls have been received from inside the building, according to a report from local news station KRON. In a Twitter thread, YouTube product manager Todd Sherman said that employees first thought there had been an earthquake. People began running out of their meetings, he said, but before reaching the exit, they got word that someone had a gun. Sherman said he saw blood on the floor and the stairs. He also said the shooter may have committed suicide. Vadim Lavrusik, who works at YouTube's products team, tweeted, "Active shooter at YouTube HQ. Heard shots and saw people running while at my desk. Now barricaded inside a room with coworkers."

Update 20:30 GMT: Google has issued the following statement, "we are coordinating with authorities and will provide official information here from Google and YouTube as it becomes available." San Bruno Police said it was "responding to an active shooter. Please stay away from Cherry Ave & Bay Hill Drive."

Update 20:40 GMT: CBS San Francisco reports: KPIX 5 reporter Andria Borba said at least two Homeland Security units were responding. Police radio transmissions describe casualties being taken to local hospitals. San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the hospital received patients from the incident but could not confirm a number. Update 21:20 GMT: ABC News is reporting that the suspected shooter is a white adult female, and that this is "leaning towards a workplace violence situation."

Update 21:30 GMT: Law enforcement has confirmed that the shooter was a white female dressed in a headscarf. The woman reportedly shot her boyfriend then herself. It's unclear exactly how many people have been injured, but early reports estimate at least 9-10 victims. There is no word on their conditions.

Update 03:10 GMT: ABC7 News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as Nasim Aghdam. She reportedly had a website with an alleged manifesto that targeted YouTube for censorship and demonetization of her video content. Contrary to previous reports, she is said to have no relationship with anyone in the YouTube facility.

UPDATE 03:40 GMT: Aghdam's website can be found here.

Update 04:15 GMT: The shooter is believed to have known at least one of the victims, two law enforcement officials told CNN. Other sources suggest the shooter drove up from San Diego. YouTube says her YouTube channel "has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations."

Wednesday police in Austin, Texas finally located the "serial bomber" believed to be responsible for six package bombs which killed two people over the last three weeks. "The operation was aided by different uses of technology, including surveillance cameras and cell phone triangulation." An anonymous reader shares this article: The suspect, who has been identified as 24-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, was killed near the motel he was traced to thanks to surveillance footage from a Federal Express drop-off store, The Austin American-Stateman reported. The authorities were able to gather information after police noticed the subject shipped an explosive device from a Sunset Valley FedEx store, a suburb approximately 25 minutes away from Austin. The evidence included the security footage from the store, as well as store receipts obtained showing suspicious transactions. The authorities were also able to look at the individual's Google search history, the Statesman noted, which gave them further insight into his dealings...

The authorities were also able to use cell phone triangulation technology, which provides a cell phone's location data via information collected from nearby cell towers... The phone's GPS capabilities can track the phone within 5 to 10 feet and can also provide "historical" or "prospective" location information. It can also "ping" the phone, forcing it to reveal its exact location... As cell phone companies store this type of data, law enforcement authorities must request it via the appropriate court processes.
"Authorities in Austin were able to use this technology to trace the suspect to a hotel in Williamson County."

In a bid to attract businesses involved in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Arizona lawmakers have proposed a bill that would allow the state's citizens to pay their taxes in bitcoin. "Arizona State Rep. Jeff Weninger, who introduced the bill, said it was a signal to everyone in the United States, and possibly throughout the world, that Arizona was going to be the place to be for blockchain and digital currency technology in the future," reports Investopedia. From the report: Weninger, a Republican, also cited the ease of making online payments through the cryptocurrency "while you're watching television," as another reason. But he did not divulge much detail about the implementation of such a system. That might be the reason why Weninger faces an uphill battle in getting the bill approved by the state legislature. Bitcoin's price volatility is already being cited as a possible roadblock to implementing such a measure by state legislators. Arizona state senator Steve Farley, a Democrat who's running for governor, said the bill puts the "volatility burden" of bitcoin's price on taxpayers who make payments in U.S. dollars. "It would mean that the money goes to the state and then the state has to take responsibility of how to exchange it," Farley said.

A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. "These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia," the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement.

Despite the fact that 60% of its pizza orders arrive digitally, "A growing number of Domino's delivery customers are casting a critical eye at the company's online pizza-tracking app," reports the lifestyle editor at Fox News. "More specifically, they think it's a bunch of crap." Fault-finding app users -- or "app truthers," as The Wall Street Journal calls them -- are subscribing to the notion that the Domino's pizza tracker is nothing but a bunch of smoke and mirrors. One user who spoke with the Journal claims his app told him that "Melinda" would be arriving shortly with his order, but when he opened the door, a delivery man he already knew handed him the pizza. "Ever since then, I knew everything they said, I felt, was made up," he said.

Another man claims the tracker told him his pizza was en route, even though he could see the Domino's restaurant from his house, and there was no sign of the pizza being out for delivery. Others claim the pizza app told them their food had been delivered when it hadn't, or that there were huge discrepancies between when their pies were supposed to be delivered and when they actually arrived. A whole thread on Reddit suggests that the app is just an automated timer disguised to look like a real-time tracker.
In a statement Domino's blamed the problem on employees not entering correct data, while also insisting that "the vast majority of the time Pizza Tracker works as designed."

According to the article, "A person who claimed to be a Domino's employee also said nearly as much in a 2015 Reddit thread. He/she added that the name of the person preparing the pizza -- as far as the app is concerned -- is usually the manager.

An anonymous reader shares a WSJ article: The internet's global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers -- "the next billion," the tech industry calls them -- is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy. Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out. "We are seeing a new kind of internet user," said Ceasar Sengupta, who heads a group at Alphabet's Google trying to adapt to the new wave. "The new users are very different from the first billion." A look at Megh Singh's smartphone suggests how the next billion might determine a new set of winners and losers in tech. Mr. Singh, 36, balances suitcases on his head in New Delhi, earning less than $8 a day as a porter in one of India's biggest railway stations. He isn't comfortable reading or using a keyboard. That doesn't stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies. "We don't know anything about emails or even how to send one," said Mr. Singh, who went online only in the past year. "But we are enjoying the internet to the fullest." Mr. Singh squatted under the station stairwell, whispering into his phone using speech recognition on the station's free Wi-Fi. It is a simple affair, a Sony Corp. model with 4GB of storage, versus the 32GB that is typically considered minimal in the developed world. On his screen are some of the world's most popular apps -- Google's search, Facebook's WhatsApp -- but also many that are unfamiliar in the developed world, including UC Browser, MX Player and SHAREit, that have been tailored for slow connections and skimpy data storage.

New submitter Zorro shares a report from Fox News: The premiere of "Star Trek: Discovery" on CBS' subscription streaming service, CBS All Access, was postponed nine months to maintain the quality of the brand. Executive producer Alex Kurtzman told the Television Critics Association Tuesday that they "spent a lot of time" discussing how to create this new world for TV that felt authentic to the "Star Trek" universe. Also during that time, executive producer Bryan Fuller decided to exit the series as showrunner to focus on other projects. Kurtzman said "it became clearer and clearer" that the targeted January debut would "compromise the quality of the show," so it was pushed with the blessing of CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves.

Mr.Intel quotes a report from Fox News: "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," Kurzweil said in an interview at the SXSW Conference with Shira Lazar and Amy Kurzweil Comix. Known as the Singularity, the event is oft discussed by scientists, futurists, technology stalwarts and others as a time when artificial intelligence will cause machines to become smarter than human beings. The time frame is much sooner than what other stalwarts have said, including British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, as well as previous predictions from Kurzweil, who said it may occur as soon as 2045. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, who recently acquired ARM Holdings with the intent on being one of the driving forces in the Singularity, has previously said it could happen in the next 30 years. Kurzweil apparently ins't worried about the rise in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In regard to AI potentially enslaving humanity, Kurzweil said, "That's not realistic. We don't have one or two AIs in the world. Today we have billions." He shares a similar view with Elon Musk by saying that humans need to converge with machines, pointing out the work already being done in Parkinson's patients. "They're making us smarter," Kurzeil said during the SXSW interview. "They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud... We're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier. We're really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree." You can watch the full interview on Facebook.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A huge outage hit Microsoft services Tuesday morning, with users across the globe experiencing problems accessing Outlook, Xbox and Skype. Users were unable to log onto the Outlook email client via mobile devices and received an error message when trying to access the desktop version of the service. Users also reportedly experienced problems with Microsoft's Xbox and Skype services. Microsoft acknowledged the Xbox issues in a statement posted to its Xbox Live status page. "Another issue has been identified that is causing problems for some members signing in to Xbox Live. The team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience," it said.

An anonymous reader shares an AP report: New York state will soon launch a rebate intended to make electric vehicles more price competitive with traditional cars. Officials said they'll launch the initiative by April 1. The rebate of up to $2,000 will be available for zero-emission and plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. It's part of an effort to reduce automotive carbon emissions, the state's largest climate change contributor. "We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option," said state Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Westchester County Democrat who leads the Assembly energy committee. "They are becoming more affordable and we need to encourage them." Environmentalists supported the rebate when it was approved by lawmakers in 2016 and have been eagerly awaiting the launch.

schwit1 quotes a report from New York Post: An international team of astronomers has found 60 new planets orbiting stars close to Earth's solar system, including a rocky "super Earth." The experts also found evidence of an additional 54 planets, bringing the potential discovery of new worlds to 114. One planet in particular, Gliese 411b, has been generating plenty of attention. Described as a "hot super Earth with a rocky surface," Gliese 411b is located in the fourth-nearest star system to the Sun, making it the third-nearest planetary system to the Sun, according to the U.K.'s University of Hertfordshire, which participated in the research. Gliese 411b (also known as GJ 411b or Lalande 21185) orbits the star Gliese 411 (or GJ 411). Despite the "super Earth" label, Dr. Mikko Tuomi from University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Astrophysics told Fox News that Gliese 411b is too hot for life to exist on its surface. The 60 new planets are found orbiting stars that are mostly some 20 to 300 light years away, according to Tuomi. The discoveries are based on observations taken over 20 years by U.S. astronomers using the Keck-I telescope in Hawaii as part of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey. During the course of the research, scientists obtained almost 61,000 observations of 1,600 stars, which are now available to the public.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes the Wall Street Journal: Federal agents have persuaded police officers to scan license plates to gather information about gun-show customers, government emails show, raising questions about how officials monitor constitutionally protected activity. Emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency crafted a plan in 2010 to use license-plate readers -- devices that record the plate numbers of all passing cars -- at gun shows in Southern California, including one in Del Mar, not far from the Mexican border. Agents then compared that information to cars that crossed the border, hoping to find gun smugglers, according to the documents and interviews with law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the operation...

[T]he officials didn't rule out that such surveillance may have happened elsewhere. The agency has no written policy on its use of license-plate readers and could engage in similar surveillance in the future, they said. Jay Stanley, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the gun-show surveillance "highlights the problem with mass collection of data." He said law enforcement can take two entirely legal activities, like buying guns and crossing the border, "and because those two activities in concert fit somebody's idea of a crime, a person becomes inherently suspicious."

The FCC has unveiled a new privacy proposal Thursday that is sure to appeal to millions of internet users. Internet service providers? Not so much. The proposal would require ISPs like Verizon and Comcast to get your permission before sharing your precious info with advertisers. Fox News reports: The Federal Communication Commission has changed its broadband-privacy plan since it was initially proposed in March. The wireless and cable industries had complained that under the initial plan, they would be more heavily regulated than digital-ad behemoths like Google and Facebook, who are monitored by a different agency, the Federal Trade Commission. The FCC explained its new approach Thursday and plans to vote on it Oct. 27. The revised proposal says broadband providers don't have to get permission from customers ahead of time to use some information deemed "non-sensitive," like names and addresses. The previous plan called for customers to expressly approve the use of more of their information. This time around, customers still need to OK broadband providers' using and sharing a slew of their data, like a phone's physical location, websites browses and apps used, and what's in emails. And customers must be told what types of information is kept and how it will be used, and agency officials said they can still say no to internet service providers using other data, like names and addresses.

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from Fox News: Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources told Fox News on Monday. Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015. This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public -- in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said. The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee fired off a letter Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking why the DOJ and FBI agreed to the restrictive terms, including that the FBI would destroy the laptops after finishing the search. The immunity deals for Mills and Samuelson, made as part of the FBI's probe into Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state, apparently included a series of "side agreements" that were negotiated by Samuelson and Mills' attorney Beth Wilkinson. The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aids told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from Fox News: Immunity deals for two top Hillary Clinton aides included a side arrangement obliging the FBI to destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices, House Judiciary Committee sources told Fox News on Monday. Sources said the arrangement with former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson also limited the search to no later than Jan. 31, 2015. This meant investigators could not review documents for the period after the email server became public -- in turn preventing the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice, sources said. The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee fired off a letter Monday to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking why the DOJ and FBI agreed to the restrictive terms, including that the FBI would destroy the laptops after finishing the search. The immunity deals for Mills and Samuelson, made as part of the FBI's probe into Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state, apparently included a series of "side agreements" that were negotiated by Samuelson and Mills' attorney Beth Wilkinson. The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aids told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike writes that media outlets including Fox News were reporting WikiLeaks cancelled a big announcement scheduled for Tuesday and expected to reveal damaging information about Hillary Clinton. But they were all citing a tweet from NBC as their source. "Due to security concerns at the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange's balcony announcement on Tues has been cancelled," tweeted NBC producer Jesse Rodriguez -- which was apparently taken to mean the announcement had been cancelled altogether.

But six hours ago, citing WikiLeaks, that same producer reported that Assange "will appear via video link" at a Tuesday press conference in Berlin marking the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks. While it's possible this "appearance" will be different than the originally scheduled "announcement," it also seems very possible that the NBC producer's tweets were just misunderstood.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: The open-source disk cleaning application, BleachBit, got quite a decent ad pitch from the world of politics after it was revealed lawyers of the presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, used the software to wipe her email servers. Clinton is currently in hot water, being accused of using private servers for storing sensitive emails. "[South Carolina Representative, Trey Gowdy, spoke to Fox News about Hillary Clinton's lawyers using BleachBit to wipe the private servers. He said:] 'She and her lawyers had those emails deleted. And they didn't just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can't read them. They were using something called BleachBit. You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridesmaids emails. When you're using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.'" Two of the main features that are listed on the BleachBit website include "Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery," and "Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files." These two features would make it pretty difficult for anyone trying to recover the deleted emails. Slashdot reader ahziem adds: The IT team for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe systems "so even God couldn't read them," according to South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy on Fox News. His comments on the "drastic cyber-measure" were in response to the question of whether emails on her private Microsoft Exchange Server were simply about "yoga and wedding plans." Perhaps Clinton's team used an open-source application because, unlike proprietary applications, it can be audited, like for backdoors. In response to the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, privacy expert Bruce Schneier advised in an article in which he stated he also uses BleachBit, "Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software." Ironically, Schneier was writing to a non-governmental audience. Have any Slashdotters had any experience with BleachBit? Specifically, have you used it for erasing "yoga emails" or "bridesmaids emails?"

Slashdot reader Nicola Hahn writes: While reporters clamor about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, NSA whistleblower James Bamford offers an important reminder: American intelligence has been actively breaching email servers in foreign countries like Mexico and Germany for years. According to Bamford documents leaked by former NSA specialist Ed Snowden show that the agency is intent on "tracking virtually everyone connected to the Internet." This includes American citizens. So it might not be surprising that another NSA whistleblower, William Binney, has suggested that certain elements within the American intelligence community may actually be responsible for the DNC hack.

This raises an interesting question: facing down an intelligence service that is in a class by itself, what can the average person do? One researcher responds to this question using an approach that borrows a [strategy] from the movie THX 1138: "The T-H-X account is six percent over budget. The case is to be terminated."
To avoid surveillance, the article suggests "get off the grid entirely... Find alternate channels of communication, places where the coveted home-field advantage doesn't exist... this is about making surveillance expensive." The article also suggests "old school" technologies, for example a quick wireless ad-hoc network in a crowded food court. Any thoughts?

Okian Warrior quotes a report from Fox News: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange implied in an interview that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer was the source of a trove of damaging emails the rogue website posted just days before the party's convention. Speaking to Dutch television program Nieuswsuur Tuesday after earlier announcing a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Seth Rich's killer, Assange said the July 10 murder of Rich in Northwest Washington was an example of the risk leakers undertake. The Washington Post provides some details of the murder in its report: "Rich was shot twice in the back as he walked to his townhouse about 4:20 a.m. Nothing was taken, but police have said attempted robbery is their leading theory for a motive, noting a spike in robberies in the neighborhood in the preceding weeks. WikiLeaks released the trove of emails later that month, on July 22. Rich, 27, had worked for the DNC for two years and helped develop a computer program to make it easier for people to find polling places on Election Day. After his death, the DNC's then-chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), attended a vigil for Rich in front of his home, and Hillary Clinton, before she was nominated in her run for president, evoked his name during a speech in which she advocated for limiting the availability of guns."

An anonymous reader writes from an Associated Press report: The UN weather agency said it suspects that the 54C temperature recorded in Kuwait has set a record for the eastern hemisphere. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said Tuesday it is setting up a committee to look into whether the temperature recorded last Thursday in Mitrabah, Kuwait, was a new high for the eastern hemisphere and in Asia. WMO's Omar Baddour said it is "likely" to be an eastern hemisphere record. Last week, swathes of the Middle East and North Africa and were hit by heatwaves that have become more frequent over the last half-century, and Earth is fresh off the hottest six months on record. WMO says the world record high of 56.7C was recorded at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, in 1913. In the UAE, highs of 49C are expected inland on Wednesday. Last year, the mercury rose above 50C in Sweiham, near Al Ain.An article on Citylab, citing NOAA's latest analysis notes that it was the warmest June in the modern history and also the 14th consecutive month of unprecedented hotness.

An anonymous reader writes: At this point 47 years ago we had begun our orbit around the Moon," writes Buzz Aldrin in a tweet. Today, Wednesday, July 20th, 2016, marks the 47th anniversary of when NASA astronauts landed on the moon for the very first time. Fox News reports: "Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins blasted off from Earth on a massive Saturn V rocket on July 16, 1969. Four days later, the Eagle module landed on the surface with Aldrin and Armstrong inside; Collins stayed behind in the orbiting Columbia craft. Millions of people back on Earth watched, captivated, as Armstrong was the first down the ladder, then uttered his now-famous line: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' The astronauts eventually returned to Earth, splashing down four days later in the Pacific. On the moon, an American flag and a plaque that read, in part, 'We came in peace for all mankind,' remained." To this day, only 12 people have ever walked on the moon. Hopefully, that number will increase within the next decade. NASA is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1 lander's arrival on Mars. Viking 1 was the first American craft to land on the red planet on July 20, 1976.

blottsie writes from a report via The Daily Dot: The Romanian hacker known as Guccifer (real name Marcel Lehel Lazar) admitted to the FBI that he lied to the public when he said he repeatedly hacked into Hillary Clinton's email server in 2013. FBI Director James Comey testified before members on Congress on Thursday that Guccifer never hacked into Clinton's servers and in fact admitted that he lied. Lazar told Fox News and NBC News in May 2016 about his alleged hacking. Despite offering no proof, the claim caused a huge stir, including making headline news on some of America's biggest publications, which offered little skepticism of his claims. "Can you confirm that Guccifer never gained access to her server?" asked Texas Republican Rep. Blake Farenthold. "He did not. He admitted that was a lie," Comey replied. Lazar is currently imprisoned in Alexandria, Virginia, following his extradition from Romania.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, the FDA announced it would regulate electronic cigarettes and other new tobacco products. Now, the U.S. Transportation Department announced it is permanently banning passengers and crew members from carrying electronic cigarettes in checked baggage or charging the devices onboard aircraft. They have cited a number of recent incidents that show the devices can catch fire during flight. Passengers can still carry e-cigarettes in their carry-on baggage or on their person, they just can't use the devices on flights. "Fire hazards in flight are particularly dangerous," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. "Banning e-cigarettes from checked bags is a prudent and important safety measure." The new rule covers e-cigarettes, e-cigars, e-pipes, and battery-powered portable electronic smoking devices in general. It does not prohibit passengers from transporting other battery-powered devices for personal use like laptop computers or cellphones.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, the FDA announced it would regulate electronic cigarettes and other new tobacco products. Now, the U.S. Transportation Department announced it is permanently banning passengers and crew members from carrying electronic cigarettes in checked baggage or charging the devices onboard aircraft. They have cited a number of recent incidents that show the devices can catch fire during flight. Passengers can still carry e-cigarettes in their carry-on baggage or on their person, they just can't use the devices on flights. "Fire hazards in flight are particularly dangerous," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. "Banning e-cigarettes from checked bags is a prudent and important safety measure." The new rule covers e-cigarettes, e-cigars, e-pipes, and battery-powered portable electronic smoking devices in general. It does not prohibit passengers from transporting other battery-powered devices for personal use like laptop computers or cellphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fox News: The infamous Romanian hacker known as "Guccifer," speaking exclusively with Fox News, claimed he easily -- and repeatedly -- breached former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal email server in early 2013. In the process of mining data from the Blumenthal account, Lazar said he came across evidence that others were on the Clinton server. "As far as I remember, yes, there were up to 10, like, IPs from other parts of the world," he said. From the report: "'For me, it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody,' Marcel Lehel Lazar, who goes by the moniker 'Guccifer,' told Fox News from a Virginia jail where he is being held. Fox News could not independently confirm Lazar's claims. The 44-year-old Lazar said he first compromised Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal's AOL account, in March 2013, and used that as a stepping stone to the Clinton server. He said he accessed Clintonâ(TM)s server 'like twice,' though he described the contents as 'not interest[ing]' to him at the time." Guccifer was sent to prison last month, which is when his potential role in the Clinton email investigation became apparent.

alphadogg writes: Reflecting on the popular musician's uneasy relationship with the Internet and social media upon the 57-year-old surprising death. In 2010, Prince "famously shuttered his LotusFlow3r.com website," proclaiming that "The Internet is completely over... All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." In 2014, The Guardian ran a story titled "Prince quits the Internet," after the singer deleted his social media accounts. He filed a lawsuit against his fans, which was later dropped, for sharing bootlegged copies of his music online. He even banned fans from taking smartphone photos at his concerts in 2013. Prince did seem to open up to the Internet to some degree in the past couple years. Prince's HTNRUN album was posted on Jay Z's Tidal music site last year. In Silicon Valley, Prince is being remembered as a social innovator and a passionate advocate for Black youth," inspiring YesWeCode, Van Jones' initiative to teach 100,000 low-income kids to write code, and hackathons across the country to expose kids in underserved communities to computer science. Bob Brown from Networkworld writes, "News of Prince's death Thursday briefly crashed the TMZ news site. From there, fans flocked to the Internet and social media to mourn this music star who did his darnedest to stay off the grid." RIP Prince.

An anonymous reader writes: During an interview with Fox News, President Obama said "There's classified, and then there's classified" when trying to answer questions about an ongoing investigation about Hillary Clinton and her emails. Techdirt writes, "Clinton sent, received and stored classified info on a private email server. But some classified info is more equal than others. It all depends on who has it and how the current administration feels about that person. Clinton playing fast and loose with classified info is subject to an entirely different standard than the large number of whistleblowers the Obama administration has prosecuted over the years." President Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that while Hillary Clinton had been careless in managing her emails as secretary of state, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the country. Obama says, "There's stuff that is really top-secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source." Basically, classification means all things to all people, as long as it allows officials and agencies to control narratives and disrupt public accountability.

Mr.Intel writes: The IRS stopped accepting electronically filed tax returns Wednesday because of problems with some of its computer systems. The outage could affect refunds, but the agency said it doesn't anticipate "major disruptions." A "hardware failure" forced the shutdown of several tax processing systems, including the e-file system, the IRS said in a statement. The IRS.gov website remains available, but "where's my refund" and other services are not working. Some systems will be out of service at least until Thursday, the agency said. "The IRS is currently in the process of making repairs and working to restore normal operations as soon as possible," the IRS said.

PolygamousRanchKid writes: The ballot to fill a legislative seat in Canada next month includes none of the above—and it's a real person. Sheldon Bergson, 46, had his name legally changed to Above Znoneofthe and is now a candidate for the Ontario legislature, the CBC reports. The election is Feb. 11. The ballot lists candidates in alphabetical order by surname so his name will be the 10th of the 10 candidates as Znoneofthe Above, according to CBC. One of his opponents is running on the line of the None of The Above Party. Maybe the American folks can learn from their cousins up north? Shouldn't every election have a line for "None of the above"? I can't wait until Little Bobby Tables hits 35.

frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong, Musk said he was 'hoping to describe the architecture' of the spacecraft at the International Astronautical Conference in Mexico in late September. "That will be quite exciting," Musk said. 'In terms of the first flight to Mars, we are hoping to do that around 2025.' As for his plans to go into space, Musk said he was hoping to reach the International Space Station 'four or five years from now.'

An anonymous reader writes: The Georgia Aquarium has argued in court that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's denial of its permit to import beluga whales from Russia was arbitrary and capricious. The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service says the aquarium failed to meet the requirements of a law meant to protect marine mammals. Both sides accuse the other of twisting the facts, a NOAA lawyer accuses the aquarium trying "to confuse the court," and a lawyer for the aquarium says the government had "cooked the books" on whale population numbers.

SonicSpike sends a report on a proposed update to the International Traffic in Arms (ITAR) regulations which could shut down the sharing of files for 3D printed gun parts over the internet. "Hidden within the proposal, which restricts what gear, technology, and info can and cannot be exported out of the U.S., is a ban on posting schematics for 3D printed gun parts online." This follows a lawsuit from Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed back in May fighting the federal government's command to remove blueprints for the "Liberator" 3D-printed gun from their website. A senior official at the U.S. State Department said, "By putting up a digital file, that constitutes an export of the data. If it's an executable digital file, any foreign interests can get a hold of it."

Kexel writes: Nope, not an April Fools joke. A forty-year-old man in Massachusetts bought a Stormtrooper outfit, and then walked through a neighborhood near a school to show his friends. The principal saw his fake blaster and called 911. The man was then arrested and charged with disturbing a school and loitering. A police spokesman said the man "used bad judgment." I guess this shows you what not to do when geeking out on Star Wars.

An anonymous reader writes: Richard Wallace used to be an investigator for Tiversa, a cybersecurity company that sells services like "breach protection" and "incident response." These days, Wallace is testifying in federal court that Tiversa faked breaches to encourage sales, and extorted clients that weren't interested. For example, Wallace said Tiversa targeted a cancer testing center called LabMD in 2010, tapping into their computers and downloading medical records. Tiversa then used those records as evidence to convince LabMD they had been hacked, offering its "incident response" service at the same time. LabMD didn't fall for it, so Tiversa told the FTC about the "hack." The FTC, none-the-wiser, went after LabMD in court, eventually destroying the business. Wallace has also cast suspicion on reports Tiversa has issued, including one saying President Obama's helicopter blueprints were found on Iranian computers.

HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "David Knowles reports at Bloomberg that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina called out Apple CEO Tim Cook as a hypocrite for criticizing Indiana and Arkansas over their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts while at the same time doing business in countries where gay rights are non-existent. "When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he's in, including China and Saudi Arabia," Fiorina said. "But I don't hear him being upset about that."

In similar criticism of Hillary Clinton on the Fox News program Hannity, Fiorina argued that Clinton's advocacy on behalf of women was tarnished by donations made to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments where women's rights are not on par with those in America. ""I must say as a woman, I find it offensive that Hillary Clinton travels the Silicon Valley, a place where I worked for a long time, and lectures Silicon Valley companies on women's rights in technology, and yet sees nothing wrong with taking money from the Algerian government, which really denies women the most basic human rights. This is called, Sean, hypocrisy." While Hillary Clinton hasn't directly addressed Fiorina's criticisms, her husband has. "You've got to decide, when you do this work, whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country," former president Bill Clinton said in March. "And I believe we have done a lot more good than harm. And I believe this is a good thing.""

HughPickens.com writes The Washington Post reports that the $7.4 million verdict that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke copied Marvin Gaye's music to create their hit song "Blurred Lines" could ripple across the music industry, potentially changing how artists work and opening the door to new copyright claims. Howard King, lead attorney for Thicke and Williams, said in closing arguments that a verdict for the Gaye family would have a chilling effect on musicians trying to evoke an era or create an homage to the sound of earlier artists. Williams contended during the trial that he was only trying to mimic the "feel" of Gaye's late 1970s music but insisted he did not use elements of his idol's work. "Today's successful verdict, with the odds more than stacked against the Marvin Gaye estate, could redefine what copyright infringement means for recording artists," says Glen Rothstein, an intellectual property attorney. King says record labels are going to become more reluctant to release music that's similar to other works — an assertion disputed by Richard Busch, the lead attorney for the Gaye family. "While Mr. Williams' lawyer suggested in his closing argument that the world would come to an end, and music would cease to exist if they were found liable, I still see the sun shining," says Busch. "The music industry will go on."

Music copyright trials are rare, but allegations that a song copies another artist's work are common. Singers Sam Smith and Tom Petty recently reached an agreement that conferred songwriting credit to Petty on Smith's song, "Stay With Me," which resembled Petty's hit "I Won't Back Down." Other music copyright cases include Former Beatle George Harrison's 1970 solo song "My Sweet Lord" which had a melody heavy with echoes of "He's So Fine," the 1962 hit from The Chiffons. The copyright owner sued Harrison. A judge said that while the tunes were nearly identical, Harrison was guilty only of "subconscious plagiarism." Harrison would eventually pay out $587,000. Probably the most bizarre case of musical infringement was when John Fogerty was accused of stealing from John Fogerty. The Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman was sued for his 1985 solo song "The Old Man Down the Road" because his former label thought it sounded too much like the 1970 Fogerty-penned "Run Through the Jungle," a song it owned the rights to.

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."

ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas's writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren't interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, "The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]." After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7's plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams.

Bennett Haselton writes: They would never admit it, but your high school admins would probably breathe a sigh of relief if all of their sexting-mad students would go ahead and install Snapchat so that evidence of (sometimes) illegal sexting would disappear into the ether. They can't recommend that you do this, because it would sound like an implicit endorsement, just like they can't recommend designated drivers for teen drinking parties -- but it's a good bet they would be grateful. Read on for the rest.

Five teenagers at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Illinois were arrested in November in conjunction with a girl's topless photo being distributed throughout the school. Last Thursday, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, a prosecutor announced that contemplating filing child pornography charges against "dozens" of students for distributing explicit pictures to other students at Rochester Adams High School. In Portland, Oregon, police are investigating a group of Grant High School students for making videos of each other having sex at the school and off campus. (And, of course, these are just the incidents that police found out about.) Naturally, schools everywhere have been falling over themselves to institute strict anti-cyber-bullying and anti-sexting policies (not to mention that sending and forwarding sexually explicit pictures of children under 18 is a federal crime as well).

Schools have rules for reasons that are a mixture of cynical protection against lawsuits and sincere concern for the students. When education system teach students not to smoke cigarettes, they're presumably doing that out of genuine concern for students' welfare, since it would be hard to sue the school for not teaching about the dangers of smoking. When a school installs a railing by the side of a walkway to keep students safe from passing cars, they're probably motivated by a mixture of concern over being sued, and legitimate concern for students' safety. When the school installs software on their computers to block Facebook and Reddit (even outside of class time, when computers are sitting idle and students have nothing else to do), they're probably motivated entirely by liability concerns - because they know virtually all of those students can get on those websites at home, so they're not affecting the students' long-term welfare by keeping them off of those websites, but they just don't want to be liable for anything if the students access those sites at school.

In the case of anti-sexting policies, I'm not cynical enough to think that schools are motivated entirely by liability concerns. There are actual risks to sexting pictures of yourself, even if you're never charged with violating child pornography laws: the embarrassment of your picture being forwarded around the school, or ending up in the archive of a porn site. On the other hand, worse things happen to dozens of high school students every month, but only a handful of schools get dragged into the national spotlight as a result of a child porn investigation. So let's call it about 25% due to legitimate concern for students and 75% due to liability reasons and concern for adverse publicity.

But sexting students could vastly reduce schools' concerns about both issues, by sending pictures using an app like Snapchat, which automatically deletes photos after the recipient has viewed them -- in order to greatly reduce the chance of a picture being saved or forwarded after it's sent. Please note, I'm not saying the photos can't be saved anyway, or recovered by computer forensics. And take heed: I'm not saying you should do it either way! But if you greatly reduce the chances of an image being saved, you greatly reduce the chances of it leading to a scandal that engulfs the school, or leads to a federal child pornography charge.

Of course there are cases where teens were arrested for sending child pornography through Snapchat as well. But these high-profile stories don't address the relevant question, which is: Are you less likely to get arrested (or expelled, or humiliated) for sending these pictures if you do it through Snapchat, even if the likelihood doesn't drop to zero? Obviously, yes.

Now even someone with no phone-hacking knowledge can figure out that if they receive an image over Snapchat, they can "save" it by taking a photo of their screen with another phone or camera, and the sender won't know. (You can also take a normal screen shot with the phone, but that will notify the sender that you took a screen shot, unless you download a third-party app or try some other hack which may or may not even work by the time you read this.) However, this assumes that the trust relationship between the sender and the recipient is already broken at the time the message is being sent, if the recipient is saving the message without the knowledge or consent of the sender. Some of these sexts are presumably being sent in the context of a relationship in which some (sweet, naive, misguided) trust still exists, so that if the sender sends the message and the recipient doesn't use some sneaky workaround, the picture will get deleted on schedule. If trust only falls apart later, then the recipient won't have a copy of the image any more if it was sent by Snapchat, but they will if it was sent via text.

Actually, it may be possible for the recipient to recover a snapchat image after their smartphone Snapchat app has supposedly "deleted" it -- a company called Digital Forensics offers Snapchat image recovery as a service, but they charge $300-$500 per incident, and even they haven't figured out how to do it on an iPhone yet.

So, in terms of boolean logic, if you send an explicit photo via Snapchat, it might end up being saved permanently and forwarded if:
(
the recipient is already being dishonest with you (saving pics without your permission) at the time that you send the picture
AND
the recipient is smart enough to figure out how to save Snapchat pictures without notifying you -- not that hard, but eliminates some people
)
OR
(
you later go through a nasty breakup with the recipient and they're determined to humiliate you or get you in trouble with the law
AND
they don't mind the fact that they could also get in trouble with the law, for saving or forwarding the picture
AND
they're willing to spend $300 to recover the image
AND
they don't have an iPhone
)

Whereas if you send a photo via regular text, all it takes to get in trouble is either (a) the recipient going through a nasty breakup with you, that puts them in a vindictive frame of mind, while they still have a copy on their phone, or (b) the recipient's family member snooping through their messages.

Your high school would never tell you so out loud, but between Snapchat and texting, you can guess which they would prefer you to use.

Of course, this advice wouldn't have done much good for the Portland students who made and distributed their own sex videos, since creating the illegal permanent recording was their entire goal. Snapchat can help protect people from mild levels of stupid, but it's a barrier you can overcome if you aim high and truly believe in yourself.

Got something to say about privacy, technology, or other topics of interest? Long-form submissions are welcome.

Bennett Haselton writes: They would never admit it, but your high school admins would probably breathe a sigh of relief if all of their sexting-mad students would go ahead and install Snapchat so that evidence of (sometimes) illegal sexting would disappear into the ether. They can't recommend that you do this, because it would sound like an implicit endorsement, just like they can't recommend designated drivers for teen drinking parties -- but it's a good bet they would be grateful. Read on for the rest.

Five teenagers at Warren Township High School in Gurnee, Illinois were arrested in November in conjunction with a girl's topless photo being distributed throughout the school. Last Thursday, in Rochester Hills, Michigan, a prosecutor announced that contemplating filing child pornography charges against "dozens" of students for distributing explicit pictures to other students at Rochester Adams High School. In Portland, Oregon, police are investigating a group of Grant High School students for making videos of each other having sex at the school and off campus. (And, of course, these are just the incidents that police found out about.) Naturally, schools everywhere have been falling over themselves to institute strict anti-cyber-bullying and anti-sexting policies (not to mention that sending and forwarding sexually explicit pictures of children under 18 is a federal crime as well).

Schools have rules for reasons that are a mixture of cynical protection against lawsuits and sincere concern for the students. When education system teach students not to smoke cigarettes, they're presumably doing that out of genuine concern for students' welfare, since it would be hard to sue the school for not teaching about the dangers of smoking. When a school installs a railing by the side of a walkway to keep students safe from passing cars, they're probably motivated by a mixture of concern over being sued, and legitimate concern for students' safety. When the school installs software on their computers to block Facebook and Reddit (even outside of class time, when computers are sitting idle and students have nothing else to do), they're probably motivated entirely by liability concerns - because they know virtually all of those students can get on those websites at home, so they're not affecting the students' long-term welfare by keeping them off of those websites, but they just don't want to be liable for anything if the students access those sites at school.

In the case of anti-sexting policies, I'm not cynical enough to think that schools are motivated entirely by liability concerns. There are actual risks to sexting pictures of yourself, even if you're never charged with violating child pornography laws: the embarrassment of your picture being forwarded around the school, or ending up in the archive of a porn site. On the other hand, worse things happen to dozens of high school students every month, but only a handful of schools get dragged into the national spotlight as a result of a child porn investigation. So let's call it about 25% due to legitimate concern for students and 75% due to liability reasons and concern for adverse publicity.

But sexting students could vastly reduce schools' concerns about both issues, by sending pictures using an app like Snapchat, which automatically deletes photos after the recipient has viewed them -- in order to greatly reduce the chance of a picture being saved or forwarded after it's sent. Please note, I'm not saying the photos can't be saved anyway, or recovered by computer forensics. And take heed: I'm not saying you should do it either way! But if you greatly reduce the chances of an image being saved, you greatly reduce the chances of it leading to a scandal that engulfs the school, or leads to a federal child pornography charge.

Of course there are cases where teens were arrested for sending child pornography through Snapchat as well. But these high-profile stories don't address the relevant question, which is: Are you less likely to get arrested (or expelled, or humiliated) for sending these pictures if you do it through Snapchat, even if the likelihood doesn't drop to zero? Obviously, yes.

Now even someone with no phone-hacking knowledge can figure out that if they receive an image over Snapchat, they can "save" it by taking a photo of their screen with another phone or camera, and the sender won't know. (You can also take a normal screen shot with the phone, but that will notify the sender that you took a screen shot, unless you download a third-party app or try some other hack which may or may not even work by the time you read this.) However, this assumes that the trust relationship between the sender and the recipient is already broken at the time the message is being sent, if the recipient is saving the message without the knowledge or consent of the sender. Some of these sexts are presumably being sent in the context of a relationship in which some (sweet, naive, misguided) trust still exists, so that if the sender sends the message and the recipient doesn't use some sneaky workaround, the picture will get deleted on schedule. If trust only falls apart later, then the recipient won't have a copy of the image any more if it was sent by Snapchat, but they will if it was sent via text.

Actually, it may be possible for the recipient to recover a snapchat image after their smartphone Snapchat app has supposedly "deleted" it -- a company called Digital Forensics offers Snapchat image recovery as a service, but they charge $300-$500 per incident, and even they haven't figured out how to do it on an iPhone yet.

So, in terms of boolean logic, if you send an explicit photo via Snapchat, it might end up being saved permanently and forwarded if:
(
the recipient is already being dishonest with you (saving pics without your permission) at the time that you send the picture
AND
the recipient is smart enough to figure out how to save Snapchat pictures without notifying you -- not that hard, but eliminates some people
)
OR
(
you later go through a nasty breakup with the recipient and they're determined to humiliate you or get you in trouble with the law
AND
they don't mind the fact that they could also get in trouble with the law, for saving or forwarding the picture
AND
they're willing to spend $300 to recover the image
AND
they don't have an iPhone
)

Whereas if you send a photo via regular text, all it takes to get in trouble is either (a) the recipient going through a nasty breakup with you, that puts them in a vindictive frame of mind, while they still have a copy on their phone, or (b) the recipient's family member snooping through their messages.

Your high school would never tell you so out loud, but between Snapchat and texting, you can guess which they would prefer you to use.

Of course, this advice wouldn't have done much good for the Portland students who made and distributed their own sex videos, since creating the illegal permanent recording was their entire goal. Snapchat can help protect people from mild levels of stupid, but it's a barrier you can overcome if you aim high and truly believe in yourself.

Got something to say about privacy, technology, or other topics of interest? Long-form submissions are welcome.

HughPickens.com writes Kitsap Sun reports at Military.com that the USS Ranger, a 1,050-foot-long, 56,000-ton Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, is being towed from the inactive ship maintenance facility at Puget Sound for a 3,400-mile, around-Cape Horn voyage to a Texas dismantler who acquired the Vietnam-era warship for a penny for scrap metal. "Under the contract, the company will be paid $0.01. The price reflects the net price proposed by International Shipbreaking, which considered the estimated proceeds from the sale of the scrap metal to be generated from dismantling," said officials for NAVSEA. "[One cent] is the lowest price the Navy could possibly have paid the contractor for towing and dismantling the ship."

The Ranger was commissioned Aug. 10, 1957, at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and decommissioned July 10, 1993, after more than 35 years of service. It was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on March 8, 2004, and redesignated for donation. After eight years on donation hold, the USS Ranger Foundation was unable to raise the funds to convert the ship into a museum or to overcome the physical obstacles of transporting the ship up the Columbia River to Fairview, Oregon. As a result, the Ranger was removed from the list of ships available for donation and designated for dismantling. The Navy, which can't retain inactive ships indefinitely, can't donate a vessel unless the application fully meets the Navy's minimum requirements. The Ranger had been in pristine condition, but for a week in August volunteers from other naval museums were allowed to remove items to improve their ships. The Ranger was in a slew of movies and television shows, including "The Six Million Dollar Man," "Flight of the Intruder" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" where it stood in for the USS Enterprise carrier. But the Ranger's most famous role was in the 1980's Tom Cruise hit, "Top Gun." "We would have liked to have seen it become a museum, but it just wasn't in the cards," Navy spokesman Chris Johnson told Fox. "But unfortunately, it is a difficult proposition to raise funds. The group that was going to collect donations had a $35 million budget plan but was only able to raise $100,000."

HughPickens.com writes Donald McNeil writes in the NYT that this year's flu season may be deadlier than usual because this year's flu vaccine is a relatively poor match to a new virus that is now circulating. "Flu is unpredictable, but what we've seen thus far is concerning," says Dr. Thomas R. Frieden. According to the CDC, five U.S. children have died from flu-related complications so far this season. Four of them were infected with influenza A viruses, including three cases of H3N2 infections. The new H3 subtype first appeared overseas in March but because it was not found in many samples in the United States until September, it is now too late to change the vaccine. Because of the increased danger from the H3 strain — and because B influenza strains can also cause serious illness — the CDC recommends that patients with asthma, diabetes or lung or heart problems see a doctor at the first sign of a possible flu, and that doctors quickly prescribe antivirals like Tamiflu or Relenza. "H3N2 viruses tend to be associated with more severe seasons," says Frieden. "The rate of hospitalization and death can be twice as high or more in flu seasons when H3 doesn't predominate."

schwit1 writes Federal employees and contractors are unwittingly undermining a $10 billion-per-year effort to protect sensitive government data from cyberattacks, according to a published report. The AP says that workers in more than a dozen agencies, from the Defense and Education departments to the National Weather Service, are responsible for at least half of the federal cyberincidents reported each year since 2010, according to an analysis of records.

HughPickens.com writes John R. Gillis writes in the NYT that to those of us who visit beaches only in summer, beaches seem as permanent a part of our natural heritage as the Rocky Mountains but shore dwellers know that beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all. Today, 75 to 90 percent of the world's natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores. The extent of this global crisis is obscured because so-called beach nourishment projects attempt to hold sand in place (PDF) and repair the damage by the time summer people return, creating the illusion of an eternal shore. But the market for mined sand in the U.S. has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. Interior mining operations use huge machines working in open pits to dig down under the earth's surface to get sand left behind by ancient glaciers.

One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don't adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Dubai brings sand for its beaches all the way from Australia. Huge sand mining operations are emerging worldwide, many of them illegal, happening out of sight and out of mind, as far as the developed world is concerned. "We need to stop taking sand for granted and think of it as an endangered natural resource," concludes Gillis. "Beach replenishment — the mining and trucking and dredging of sand to meet tourist expectations — must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with environmental considerations taking top priority. Only this will ensure that the story of the earth will still have subsequent chapters told in grains of sand."

theodp writes: Microsoft is aiming to offer free programming courses to over a million young Latin Americans through its Yo Puedo Programar and Eu Posso Programar initiatives ("I Can Program"). People between the ages of 12 and 25 will be able to sign up for the free online courses "One Hour Coding" and "Learning to Program," which will be offered in conjunction with Colombia's Coding Week (Oct. 6-10). The online courses will also be available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Puerto Rico. "One Hour Coding" (aka Hour of Code in the U.S.) is a short introductory course in which participants will learn how the technology works and how to create applications, and it offers "a playful immersion in the computer sciences," Microsoft said in a statement. In the virtual, 12-session "Learning to Program" course, students will discover that "technical complexity in application development tools is a myth and that everyone can do it," the statement added. Taking a page from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge its execs embraced, Microsoft is encouraging students to complete the Hour of Code and challenge four other friends to do the same (Google Translate).

New submitter BobandMax writes ExamSoft, the management platform software that handles digital bar exam submissions for multiple states, experienced a severe technical meltdown on Tuesday, leaving many graduates temporarily unable to complete the exams needed to practice law. The snafu also left bar associations from nearly 20 states with no choice but to extend their submission deadlines. It's not the first time, either: a classmate of mine had to re-do a state bar exam after an ExamSoft glitch on the first go-'round. Besides handling the uploading of completed exam questions, ExamSoft locks down the computer on which it runs, so Wikipedia is not an option.

mpicpp (3454017) writes with this update about a long-awaited project, the European Extremely Large Telescope: The partial demolition of Cerro Armazones, a mountain in northern Chile's Antofagasta region, marked the start of constructing the world's largest and most powerful telescope, an instrument capable of capturing 14 times more light than existing telescopes. At 2:00 p.m. Thursday, the blasting of Cerro Armazones, 3,060 meters (11,800 feet) high, removed from the peak between 25 and 30 meters (80 and 100 feet) of its height in order to create a plain some 200 meters (655 feet) long, on which to mount the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, a project of the European Southern Observatory. On this site will be built a structure 60 meters (200 feet) high and 80 meters (260 feet) in diameter, with mirrors of 39.3 meters (129 feet) which in 10 years will begin to explore the origins of the universe. The telescope will shed light on the 'dark ages' of the universe, when the Milky Way was only 500,000 years old, and thanks to its enormous size it could also contribute to finding extraterrestrial life by detecting whether exoplanets have oxygen in their atmospheres.

OakDragon (885217) writes A Toronto woman had the presence of mind to record herself, using her smartphone, as she suffered from a bout of semi-paralysis. She had suffered the same symptoms two days earlier, and had gone to the hospital; but by that time the condition had passed, and doctors sent her home. However, using the smartphone video, doctors later diagnosed her with a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke. The diagnosis was confirmed with an MRI.