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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

GE stock has worst day in 11 years after Madoff whistleblower calls it a bigger fraud than Enron

General Electric shares plunged more than 11% Thursday after Harry Markopolos, who is famous for blowing the whistle on Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in 2008, accused GE of orchestrating a massive fraud.

GE CEO Larry Culp on Thursday bought 252,200 shares at $7.93 per share, a purchase worth almost $2 million, according to an SEC filing. The buy helped bump GE's share price around 2% in after-hours trading. Culp's ownership of GE stock nearly doubled this week after an earlier purchase Tuesday. GE Board Director Leslie Seidman called the fraud allegations "baseless" and "inflammatory" in an interview on CNBC's "Closing Bell" Thursday evening. She said Markopolos' claims do not "reflect the GE I know." Seidman chairs of the board's audit committee.

Markopolos said in a report released Thursday that GE was hiding nearly $40 billion of losses in its insurance business. He said this is the largest case of accounting fraud he and his team have investigated. "In fact, GE's $38 billion in accounting fraud amounts to over 40% of GE's market capitalization, making it far more serious than either the Enron or WorldCom accounting frauds," Markopolos wrote in the report, referring to the scandals that eventually helped bankrupt energy giant Enron in 2001 and long-distance telco WorldCom in 2002. GE strongly denied Markopolos' allegations.

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DannyB writes:

Denmark Offers to Buy U.S.

COPENHAGEN (The Borowitz Report)—After rebuffing Donald J. Trump's hypothetical proposal to purchase Greenland, the government of Denmark has announced that it would be interested in buying the United States instead.

"As we have stated, Greenland is not for sale," a spokesperson for the Danish government said on Friday. "We have noted, however, that during the Trump regime, pretty much everything in the United States, including its government, has most definitely been for sale."

"Denmark would be interested in purchasing the United States in its entirety, with the exception of its government," the spokesperson added.

A key provision of the purchase offer, the spokesperson said, would be the relocation of Donald Trump to another country "to be determined," with Russia and North Korea cited as possible destinations.

If Denmark's bid for the United States is accepted, the Scandinavian nation has ambitious plans for its new acquisition. "We believe that by giving the U.S. an educational system and national health care, it could be transformed from a vast land mass into a great nation," the spokesperson said.

Attention Denmark: at least our politicians are for sale, regardless of party affiliation, to purchasers both foreign and domestic.

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takyon writes:

Marvell at FMS 2019: NVMe Over Fabrics Controllers, AI On SSD

Taking things to the logical next step, Marvell also announced a native Ethernet/NVMeoF SSD controller. The 88SS5000 is effectively their 88SS1098 NVMe controller with the PCIe interface replaced by the dual 25GbE interface used by the NVMe to Ethernet converter. This new single-chip solution for Ethernet-attached SSDs helps cut costs and power consumption, making the whole idea more palatable to datacenter customers. Marvell showed samples of this controller paired with 8TB of Toshiba 96L 3D TLC NAND and 12GB of DDR4 DRAM.

Looking further into the future, Marvell shared their take on the idea of Computational Storage—SSDs that do more than just store data. Marvell is working to integrate a Machine Learning engine into future SSD controllers, allowing inferencing tasks to be offloaded from CPUs or GPUs onto the SSDs that already store the data being processed. The hardware setup is basically the same mess of cables connecting FPGAs to Flash that Marvell has shown in previous years, but on the software side their demo has matured greatly.

In addition to demonstrating realtime object recognition using a pre-trained model, Marvell now has a system to perform offline recognition on videos stored on the SSD. Their demo presented the results of this recognition as a graph showing which objects were recognized over the duration of a video. There was also a content-aware search engine that would return the segments of stored videos that depict the requested objects. For the demo, this functionality was exposed through a simple web interface. In production, the envisioned use case is to have an application server aggregating results from an array of content-aware SSDs that each perform some kind of analytics on their share of the overall dataset.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Crystals, amber, amethyst, phallic amulets, glass beads, figurines, and a miniature human skull were among the many artifacts archaeologists uncovered from an excavation site at Pompeii recently. The objects were probably left behind by someone fleeing the famous volcanic eruption in 79 AD—possibly even a sorceress. The various objects will be displayed at the Palastra Grande in Pompeii later this year.

“They are objects of everyday life in the female world and are extraordinary because they tell micro-stories and biographies of the inhabitants of the city who tried to escape the eruption,” Massimo Osanna, general director of the Archaaological Park of Pompeii, said in a statement.

The catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD wiped out several nearby towns and killed thousands of people. The eruption released 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, ejecting many tons of molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the course of two days. In the first phase, immediately after the eruption, a long column of ash and pumice blanketed the surrounding towns, most notably Pompeii and Herculaneum. By late night or early morning, pyroclastic flows (fast-moving hot ash, lava fragments, and gases) swept through and obliterated what remained, leaving the bodies of the victims frozen in seeming suspended action.

[...] The archaeologists were diligently excavating Casa del Giardino in the park when they found a decaying wooden box with brass hinges. Many of the artifacts are adorned with iconography associated with fertility, fortune, and protection against bad luck, according to Osanna, such as Egyptian scarab beetles (used to protect pregnant women and babies), phallus-shaped pendants, and bird bones used to ward off the "evil eye."

They also found ten victims in a separate room of Casa del Giardino—most likely the servants' quarters—all victims of the eruption. The wooden box may have belonged to one of them. Since none of the recovered items were made of gold (an indication of wealth and elite status), it's more likely the owner was a servant or slave.

"There are dozens of good luck charms next to other objects that were attributed with the power of crushing bad luck," said Osanna. "They could have been necklaces that were worn during rituals rather being used to look elegant."

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MostCynical writes:

Forbes reports that a security researcher in California registered the vanity plate "NULL," partly for fun and partly in the hope that this spoofed the system into returning errors whenever his plate was seen.

Instead he received more than $12,000 in fines, as his plate became a dumping ground for erroneous data records.

Every single speeding ticket for which no valid license plate could be found was assigned to his car. The Los Angeles police department eventually scrapped the tickets but advised the man to change his plates, or the same problem would continue to occur. In response, the man has apparently said: "No, I didn't do anything wrong," insisting to his Def Con audience that, whatever happens, "I won't pay those tickets."

Also covered in the Guardian.
 

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Zachary Weagly, a 2018 graduate of Penn State Berks and an avid fisherman, noticed that the quality of the water where he fished changed with the local environment. He asked Tami Mysilwiec, associate professor of biology and one of his teachers, if he could use some of her laboratory's Biolog Ecoplates to test the water and a three-site, multiyear project to test freshwater in the Blue Marsh watershed in Pennsylvania began.

"Zach came to me because he is an avid fisherman and our campus abuts a tributary of the Schuylkill River, Tulpehocken Creek," said Mysilwiec. "When he went fishing he noticed changes in the water and the fish at various times.

Biolog Ecoplates are commercially available and contain three sets of identical wells that test for 31 different forms of carbon-containing chemicals. Bacterial communities have identifiable reaction patterns on these plates and researchers can characterize the communities and track changes in them through time and environmental change.

The first site tested is on a creek that receives runoff from agricultural land. The second site is a lake with an artificial dam that is unusual because water empties from the lake from below rather than falling over a spillway. The third site is downstream in an area with industrial complexes, a hospital and an airport.

"The three sites are in three different environmental areas," said Mysilwiec. "The water quality changes on a seasonal basis, which leads to the question of what happens to potential pathogens."

The testing plates can provide an idea of what the microbes in the water like to eat, and from that, a profile of the bacteria is possible. Some of the chemicals tested are antibiotics, nutrients, growth factors and other metabolites.

The researchers, including Jill M. Felker, research technologist at Penn State Berks and graduate student at Antioch New England, and Katherine H. Baker, associate professor emerita in the School of Science, Engineering and Technology at Penn State Harrisburg, looked at E. coli and Enterococci bacterial counts, because those are the two bacteria the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency uses to decide if recreational waterways are safe.

"We found that the lake near the survey was over the acceptable amounts 93% of the time," said Felker. "We also found that depending on the season, E. coli could be 36 percent higher than previously measured and Enterococci could be 86 percent higher than previously measured.

The researchers noted that "common human practices can potentially change a waterway's chemistry, leading to the preferential selection of pathogenic microbial communities."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Ohio state's top legal eagle just made it harder for the FBI, ICE, cops to snoop around its DMV DB for people's faces

The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training.

"I share the privacy and civil-liberty concerns of those who fear misuse of this powerful identification technology," said the Buckeye State's AG Dave Yost this week.

"Ohio's database is protected by limited access, regular auditing and strict rules about the kind of searches that can be conducted. That applies to state and local law enforcement as well as federal law enforcement."

Yost conducted a 30-day probe after internal documents and emails from federal and local agencies, obtained by eggheads at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and shared with the Washington Post last month, revealed that the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), among other agencies, have freely searched Ohio's DMV database for license plates to retrieve drivers' faces.

The crime-fighters were searching not just for suspects but also witnesses, victims, and other folks. All of this was conducted without the explicit consent from millions of Americans, and at least some without any warrants: the Feds and plod just had to ask DMV officials nicely in many cases. Yost's investigation found that a total of 11,070 searches by law enforcement had been made since 2017. Out of these searches, 418 were conducted by federal agencies. The vast majority – 10,652 – were made by state police.

Any requests to access to Ohio's DMV databases, which currently contains 24 million images, will now have to go through its Bureau of Criminal Identification (BCI). Staff members will directly handle the searches.

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martyb writes:

People are Still Drinking Bleach-and Vomiting and Pooping their Guts Out:

The "Church of Bleach" is still strong, despite years of warnings.

The US Food and Drug Administration this week released an important health warning that everyone should heed: drinking bleach is dangerous—potentially life-threatening—and you should not do it.

The warning may seem unnecessary, but guzzling bleach is an unfortunately persistent problem. Unscrupulous sellers have sold "miracle" bleach elixirs for decades, claiming that they can cure everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, flu, hair loss, and more. Some have promoted it to parents as a way to cure autism in children—prompting many allegations of child abuse.

Of course, the health claims are false, not to mention abhorrent. When users prepare the solution as instructed, it turns into the potent bleaching agent chlorine dioxide, which is an industrial cleaner. It's toxic to drink and can cause severe diarrhea, vomiting, life-threatening low blood pressure, acute liver failure, and damage to the digestive tract and kidneys.

In this week's warning, the FDA noted that some sellers will warn consumers that vomiting and diarrhea are common but say that those unpleasant effects indicate the solution is "working."

"That claim is false," the FDA wrote succinctly.

The agency released a nearly identical warning back in 2010. But in this week's consumer alert, the agency said that it has continued to receive "many reports" of consumers sickened by these bleach-based potions.

takyon writes:

TSMC Shows Colossal Interposer, Says Moore's Law Still Alive

In the company's first blog post, TSMC has stated that Moore's Law is still alive and well, despite the zeitgeist of recent times being the reverse. The company also showed a colossal 2500mm² interposer that includes eight HBM memory chips and two big processors.

Godfrey Cheng, TSMC's new head of global marketing, wrote the blog post. He notes that Moore's Law is not about performance, but about transistor density. While performance traditionally improved by increasing the clock speed and architecture, today it is more often improved by increasing parallelization, and hence requires increases in chip size. This enhances the importance of transistor density because chip cost is directly proportional to its area.

[...] "one possible future of great density improvements is to allow the stacking of multiple layers of transistors in something we call Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits. You could add a CPU on top of a GPU on top of an AI Edge engine with layers of memory in between. Moore's Law is not dead, there are many different paths to continue to increase density."

[...] [System-technology co-optimization (STCO)] is done through advanced packaging, for which TSMC supports silicon-based interposers and fan-out-based chiplet integration. It also has techniques to stack chips on wafers, or stack wafers on top of other wafers. As one such example, TSMC showed a nearly-2500mm² silicon interposer – the world's largest – on top of which two 600mm² processors are placed and eight 75mm² HBM memory chips, which makes for 1800mm² of compute and memory silicon on top of the interposer-based package, well over two times the conventional reticle size limit.

Related: Dual-Wafer Packaging (Wafer-on-Wafer) Could Double CPU/GPU Performance
Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan

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pkrasimirov writes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49355236

A Russian passenger plane has made an emergency landing in a cornfield near Moscow after striking a flock of birds.

At least 74 people were injured in the incident, which saw the plane land with its engines off and landing gear retracted, emergency officials said.

[...] The Kremlin on Thursday hailed the pilots as heroes for "saving people's lives and landing the plane". A spokesman said they would receive state awards soon.

The airline said the plane was significantly damaged and would not fly again. An official investigation is under way.

[...] The plane had more than 230 passengers and crew on board when the birds were reportedly sucked into its engines and the crew immediately decided to land.

[...] Collisions between birds and planes are a common occurrence in aviation, with thousands reported every year in the US alone. However, they rarely result in accidents or cause damage to the aircraft.

Flight is U6178 Moscow-Simferopol, plane was VQ-BOZ.

Reports say one engine was out and the other was badly damaged so the crew shut it off. But on this video I can hear some engine noise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f893GhbiBA

Glide-landing 7 crew, 226 passengers, and ~6 tons of jet fuel safely in a corn field is undoubtedly an achievement.

Original Submission

Mykl writes:

Reports had been coming out over the past few days about the likely sale of microblogging site Tumblr by Verizon to Automattic, owner of Wordpress. Now, the Guardian reports that the sale price is said to be just under $3 million, well short of the $1.1 billion price that Yahoo (who was subsequently acquired by Verizon) paid for it in 2013.

Tumblr is the second major Yahoo property to be spun-off by Verizon. The photo-sharing site Flickr was unloaded in April 2018 to photo-sharing site SmugMug. Unlike Flickr, Tumblr managed to maintain the bulk of its userbase through most of the years of its Yahoo ownership, thanks to the strength of its home-grown community, which survived in the face of competition from Facebook and Twitter.

That community took a hit in December 2018, however, when Verizon announced a plan to clean up the site by banning all adult content. The immediate cause of the decision was a temporary ban from Apple's App Store for the Tumblr app, after child pornography was discovered on the social network. But Tumblr's chief executive, D'Onofrio, said that in the longer term, "it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves".

Tumblr users disagreed, arguing that the site's broadly permissive attitude was key to its unique community.

Rumors are that the sale was conditional upon the site remaining porn-free. On that basis, is $3m too much for it?

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow7671

Researchers: Cloud Services Compromise Mobile Apps

Cloud-based back-end services are letting mobile app developers down, according to research(pdf) announced this week. Even when app developers are careful about their own code, the online services that they use introduce vulnerabilities on a regular basis.

The research, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University, studied the top 5,000 apps on the Google Play Store. It found that between them, they were using 6,869 server networks across the world.

They scanned cloud-based back-ends and found 1,638 vulnerabilities, of which 655 were zero-days not listed in the National Vulnerability Database. These included SQL injection, cross-site scripting and external XML entity attacks. Some of the apps affected had over 50 million installations, according to their paper.

Mobile apps access back-end services using third-party software-development kits (SDKs) and APIs. Developers use some of them explicitly, but many others are hidden in imported third-party libraries. The apps that use these services communicate with them invisibly. Users don't know what the services are doing or exactly which servers their phones are talking with when their apps fetch content and advertisements.

[...]The researchers scanned the apps with a tool called SkyWalker, which they will soon make available for app developers to audit the cloud-based tools that they are building into their apps.

They will present their findings at the USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara, California, which runs August 14–16, 2019.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

California will outlaw the use of a pesticide linked to developmental problems in humans after President Donald Trump's administration scrapped plans for a nationwide ban, state health officials said Wednesday.

The decision to ban chlorpyrifos in the agriculturally rich state follows "mounting evidence" of serious health effects for exposed children and other vulnerable people, two California health agencies said in a statement.

Toxic effects including "impaired brain and neurological development" occur at lower levels of the pesticide than previously thought, said the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR).

Farmers using the product will have 15 days to challenge the ban notice in court before it comes into effect, the DPR told AFP.

Virtually all residential uses of the pesticide has been banned since the end of 2001 throughout the United States.

[...] The European Commission announced this month it will recommend chlorpyrifos does not have its license renewed when it expires in January, following a negative assessment by the EU's food safety watchdog. Eight European countries have already individually banned products containing the pesticide.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Cisco warned of problems on the horizon as it wrapped up it fiscal 2019 financial results [PDF].

[...]"Our Q4 results marked a strong end to a great year," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said of the numbers. "We are executing well in a dynamic environment, delivering tremendous innovation across our portfolio and extending our market leadership."

Where Cisco took a hit, however, was in its outlook for the fiscal 2020 first quarter. Switchzilla told analysts it only expects to see growth of 0-2 per cent year over year, and EPS will sit between 80 and 82 cents. Both were well short of what analysts had expected from the networking giant.

Cisco also warned that it was taking a big hit in China, where the ongoing trade wars and state-backing for local companies has got so bad that Robbins said his company has been "uninvited" and frozen out of bidding for deals with telcos in the Middle Kingdom.

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[Ed note: This story had been posted earlier but was lost when we had the site crash Thursday morning. Prior comments have, unfortunately, been lost. --Fnord666]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On Tuesday, Netflix, working in conjunction with Google and CERT/CC, published a security advisory covering a series of vulnerabilities that enable denial of service attacks against servers running HTTP/2 services.

HTTP/2, like earlier versions, governs the application layer of the internet stack; it runs atop the transport layer (TCP), the network layer (IP), and data link layer of the internet. The eight CVEs disclosed do not allow information disclosure or modification, but they could be employed to overload servers.

"Today, a number of vendors have announced patches to correct this suboptimal behavior," the media streaming biz said in its post. "While we haven’t detected these vulnerabilities in our open source packages, we are issuing this security advisory to document our findings and to further assist the Internet security community in remediating these issues."

Seven of the flaws were identified by Jonathan Looney of Netflix, and the eighth (CVE-2019-9518) which was found by Piotr Sikora of Google.

Netflix, which characterized the severity of the flaws as "high," did not name the vendors affected by vulnerable HTTP/2 implementations but CERT/CC has.

Original Submission

[Ed note: This story was originally posted 2019-08-15 04:41 UTC but was lost when we had the site crash Thursday morning. Prior comments have, unfortunately, been lost. --martyb]

takyon writes:

'Google Blocked TorrentFreak From Appearing in Search Feature'

Documents released by whistleblower Zachary Vorhies suggests that Google actively blocked hundreds of sites, including TorrentFreak, from its Google Now service. The blocklist doesn't provide a specific reason for the blockade, but other sites are flagged for having a high user block rate or for peddling hoax stories. Vorhies has shared the documents with the US Department of Justice.

At TorrentFreak, we have written hundreds of articles about website blocking and censorship. Today, we're featured in one ourselves.

Leaked Google documents reveal that TorrentFreak.com shows up in one of Google's previously unknown blocklists, which actively hides our domain from the Google Now service.

Google Now was a Google search feature that presented users with informational cards, to provide users with more details on subjects of interest to them. While the brand no longer exists, the feature is still present in the Google Android app and its feed.

The controversial blocklist is part of a treasure trove of files that were leaked by whistleblower Zachary Vorhies, who shared them with Project Veritas. The entire collection of files uncovers many previously unknown policies and actions from Google.

The story that broke SoylentNews™.

See also (Zachary Vorhies in the news): YouTube Software Engineer Describes Seeing Altercation In Building Courtyard
America's Greatest Makers is like American Idol for geeks, so we talked to one

Previously: Veritas Claims Leaked Internal E-Mails from Google Showing Political Bias of Results

Original Submission