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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Meant to Combat ID Theft, Unemployment Benefits Letter Prompts ID Theft Worries:

My first thought when a reader shared a copy of the letter was that he recently had been the victim of identity theft. It took a fair amount of digging online to discover that the nebulously named "Cardholder Services" address in Florida referenced at the top of the letter is an address exclusively used by U.S. Bank.

That digging indicated U.S. Bank currently manages the disbursement of funds for unemployment programs in at least 17 states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The funds are distributed through a prepaid debit card called ReliaCard.

To make matters more confusing, the flood of new unemployment applications from people out of work thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic reportedly has overwhelmed U.S. Bank's system, meaning that many people receiving these letters haven't yet gotten their ReliaCard and thus lack any frame of reference for having applied for a new payment card.

[20200508_220152 UTC: Update 2: "Monitoring - We've corrected the issues affecting connectivity to our Dallas data center, and we'll continue to monitor this issue to ensure that connectivity remains stable. If you are still experiencing connectivity issues, please reach out to our Support team by opening a ticket through the Linode Manager or by emailing support@linode.com.

May 8, 21:57 UTC"]

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[20200508_170527 UTC: Update 1: "Investigating - Our Dallas data center is experiencing additional connectivity issues, which we're investigating. We'll post additional updates as we learn more.
May 8, 20:49 UTC

https://linode.statuspage.io/]

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martyb writes:

We are aware of connectivity issues with Linode, out hosting provider:

Linode Status Page:

Investigating - We are aware of connectivity issues affecting Linodes in our Dallas data center and are currently investigating. We will continue to provide additional updates as this incident develops.
May 8, 20:07 UTC

From what I could see, IRC dropped for a while as did access to our main page. There are reports on IRC that mail was down, too.

We are monitoring the situation and will update when we know more.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Clearview AI to stop selling controversial facial recognition app to private companies:

Controversial facial recognition provider Clearview AI says it will no longer sell its app to private companies and non-law enforcement entities, according to a legal filing first reported on Thursday by BuzzFeed News. It will also be terminating all contracts, regardless of whether the contracts are for law enforcement purposes or not, in the state of Illinois.

The document, filed in Illinois court as part of lawsuit over the company's potential violations of a state privacy law, lays out Clearview's decision as a voluntary action, and the company will now "avoid transacting with non-governmental customers anywhere." Earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported on a leaked client list that indicates Clearview's technology has been used by thousands of organizations, including companies like Bank of America, Macy's, and Walmart.

"Clearview is cancelling the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal, state, or local government department, office, or agency," Clearview's filing reads. "Clearview is also cancelling all accounts belonging to any entity based in Illinois." Clearview argues that it should not face an injunction, which would prohibit it from using current or past Illinois residents' biometric data, because it's taking these steps to comply with the state's privacy law.

Previously:
(2020-04-20) Security Lapse Exposed Clearview AI Source Code
(2020-04-18) Some Shirts Hide You from Cameras
(2020-03-13) Vermont Sues Clearview, Alleging "Oppressive, Unscrupulous" Practices
(2020-02-28) Clearview AI's Facial Recognition Tech is Being Used by US Justice Department, ICE, and the FBI
(2020-02-26) Clearview AI Reports Entire Client List Was Stolen
(2020-02-24) Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate "Creepy" Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI
(2020-02-06) Clearview AI Hit with Cease-And-Desist from Google, Facebook Over Facial Recognition Collection
(2020-01-22) Clearview App Lets Strangers Find Your Name, Info with Snap of a Photo, Report Says

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork on dead mainframe exhumed onto GitHub:

Source code for seminal adventure game has been Zork[sic] recovered and published on GitHub.

While classic adventure games (aka interactive fiction) are well represented in the Internet Archive - there's plenty of playable Zork versions here - this new trove is source code that's been retrieved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapes of Tech Square (ToTS) collection at the MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC).

If you access the repo and its README you're told the source was written "in the MDL programming language written on a PDP-10 timeshare computer running the ITS operating system".

[...] The code in the repo comes from 1977, before the game was commercialised but at a time it was informally distributed.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I've ever had, working with awfully good people. So I'm pretty blue.

What happened · Last year, Amazonians on the tech side banded together as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), first coming to the world's notice with an open letter promoting a shareholders' resolution calling for dramatic action and leadership from Amazon on the global climate emergency. I was one of its 8,702 signatories.

While the resolution got a lot of votes, it didn't pass. Four months later, 3,000 Amazon tech workers from around the world joined in the Global Climate Strike walkout. The day before the walkout, Amazon announced a large-scale plan aimed at making the company part of the climate-crisis solution. It's not as though the activists were acknowledged by their employer for being forward-thinking; in fact, leaders were threatened with dismissal.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

New Banksy artwork appears in English hospital's emergency department:

A new Banksy artwork has appeared at Southampton General Hospital.

The largely monochrome painting, which is one square metre, was hung in collaboration with the hospital's managers in a foyer near the emergency department.

It shows a young boy kneeling by a wastepaper basket dressed in dungarees and a T-shirt.

He has discarded his Spiderman and Batman model figures in favour of a new favourite action hero - an NHS nurse.

The nurse's arm is outstretched and pointing forward in the fashion of Superman on a mission.

She is wearing a facemask, a nurse's cape, and an apron with the Red Cross emblem (the only element of colour in the picture).

The artist left a note for hospital workers, which read: "Thanks for all you're doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if its only black and white."

The painting will remain at Southampton General Hospital until the autumn when it will be auctioned to raise money for the NHS.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Public health experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have leaked their recommendations on how to safely reopen businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic—after officials in the Trump administration rejected the guidance and allegedly told CDC officials their plan would "never see the light of day."

The 17-page document (PDF found here) was initially set to be published last Friday but was nixed. Instead, it was released to the Associated Press by a CDC official who was not authorized to release it.

The guidance lays out detailed, phased recommendations for how to safely reopen child care programs, schools, day camps, faith communities, businesses with vulnerable workers, restaurants, bars, and mass transit. Though some of the general points laid out already appear on federal websites—such as an emphasis on hand hygiene—the document uniquely offers tailored recommendations for each type of business.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

How well can algorithms recognize your masked face?:

Facial-recognition experts say that algorithms are generally less accurate when a face is obscured, whether by an obstacle, a camera angle, or a mask, because there's less information available to make comparisons. "When you have fewer than 100,000 people in the database, you will not feel the difference," says Alexander Khanin, CEO and cofounder of VisionLabs, a startup based in Amsterdam. With 1 million people, he says, accuracy will be noticeably reduced and the system may need adjustment, depending on how it's being used.

[...] "We can identify a person wearing a balaclava, or a medical mask and a hat covering the forehead," says Artem Kuharenko, founder of NtechLab, a Russian company whose technology is deployed on 150,000 cameras in Moscow. He says that the company has experience with face masks through contracts in southeast Asia, where masks are worn to curb colds and flu. US Customs and Border Protection, which uses facial recognition on travelers boarding international flights at US airports, says its technology can identify masked faces.

But Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State University who works on facial recognition and biometrics, says such claims can't be easily verified. "Companies can quote internal numbers, but we don't have a trusted database or evaluation to check that yet," says. "There's no third-party validation."

A US government lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that functions as the world's arbiter on the accuracy of facial-recognition algorithms hopes to provide that external validation—but is being held up by the same pandemic that prompted the project.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TurkeyWaddle:

FDA: Makers of coronavirus antibody tests must now show tests actually work:

After a gush of bogus coronavirus blood tests, the US Food and Drug Administration announced Monday that test makers must submit data within 10 days showing that their tests actually work—or risk getting purged from the market.

[...] "In mid-March, it was critical for the FDA to provide regulatory flexibility for serology test developers, given the nature of this public health emergency... However, flexibility never meant we would allow fraud," the FDA wrote in a policy update Monday. "We unfortunately see unscrupulous actors marketing fraudulent test kits and using the pandemic as an opportunity to take advantage of Americans' anxiety."

[...] Thus, the presence of antibodies in a person's blood only tells if the immune system has encountered the germ in the past—it's not used to diagnose new cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are separate diagnostic tests for that, which generally work by detecting genetic material from the virus itself.

[...] the market has been flooded with shoddy tests and bogus claims. "Some test developers have falsely claimed their serological tests are FDA approved or authorized. Others have falsely claimed that their tests can diagnose COVID-19 or that they are for at-home testing," the FDA said. The agency also noted that "a concerning number of commercial serology tests are being promoted inappropriately, including for diagnostic use, or are performing poorly based on an independent evaluation by the [National Institutes of Health]."

looorg writes:

Sid Meier is apparently summing up his video games career with his memoir to be released in September 2020. Memoir might be a bit of an overstatement though, as it is also supposed to contain his design philosophy and thoughts on Gamers and the gaming industry at large.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular videogames, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry. Writing with warmth and ironic humor, Meier describes the genesis of his influential studio, MicroProse, founded in 1982 after a trip to a Las Vegas arcade, and recounts the development of landmark games, from vintage classics like Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon, to Civilization and beyond.

I laughed a bit seeing the book cover as it looks remarkably similar to something out of his first civilization game. Looking forward to see if he finally shares credit with Avalon Hill but I somehow doubt that.

https://sidmeiersmemoir.com/

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Following the denial last December in the EU, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has rejected the notion that non-humans can apply for patents. The patent office noted that the language in US patent laws and federal regulations assumes an inventor is a person.

App'n No. 16/524,350 was filed listing DABUS as inventor and identifying DABUS as an "artificial intelligence" that "autonomously generated" the invention. Stephen Thaler created DABUS, then DABUS created the invention. Thaler then filed as the applicant.

In briefing to the PTO, the patent applicant explained that DABUS conceived of the idea of the invention and recognized its "novelty and salience." In short, DABUS did everything necessary to be listed as an inventor with one exception — DABUS is not a human person.

The Patent Act does not expressly limit inventorship rights to humans, but does suggest that each inventor must have a name, and be an "individual."

(f) The term "inventor" means the individual or, if a joint invention, the individuals collectively who invented or discovered the subject matter of the invention.

35 U.S.C. 100(f). In denying the DABUS petition, PTO Commissioner's Office suggests that the word "Whoever" in Section 101 indicates a human "natural person." (citing Webster's 2011). Of course, Section 271 also uses "whoever" to define infringement — and human "natural persons" are almost never the ones charged with infringement.

Here's the official USPTO decision (pdf).

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

IRS Orders The Dead To Return Stimulus Money:

One week after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that dead people aren't eligible for stimulus check after it emerged that an unknown number of recently deceased Americans had received a $1200 tax credit as part of the coronavirus helicopter money package, the Internal Revenue Service [...] announced that individuals who got a $1,200 stimulus payment intended for someone who's deceased or incarcerated should return the money. It wasn't clear how the IRS will "enforce" collecting from the dead or their relatives.

[...] Instructions posted to the IRS's website Wednesday said recipients of what the Treasury Department calls "inadvertent" payments should write void on paper checks and mail them back[...]. Even more amusing were instructions to those who received direct-deposit payments or have already cashed the payments: they should send a personal check or money order to the IRS for the amount of the payment.

Deceased and incarcerated individuals do not qualify to receive Economic Impact Payments. See FAQ #41 to learn how to return an inadvertent payment: https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/economic-impact-payment-information-center

— Treasury Department (@USTreasury) May 6, 2020

[...] The IRS excessive generosity was noticed last month, when it[sic] people in prison and family members of individuals who had died in the past several months were receiving payments. The reason is that while the federal government regularly updates taxpayer rolls with death certificate information, the IRS was relying on data that in some cases was from as long ago as 2018 for processing the payments.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Zoom Acquires Keybase to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Video Platform:

Popular communications platform provider Zoom Video announced on Thursday that it has acquired secure messaging and file-sharing service Keybase for an undisclosed sum. The move is the latest by the company as it attempts to bolster the security of its offerings and build in end-to-end encryption that can scale to the company's massive user base.

"There are en-to-end encrypted communications platforms. There are communications platforms with easily deployable security. There are enterprise-scale communications platforms. We believe that no current platform offers all of these. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use, and scale, all at once," Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said in a statement.

Zoom said it would offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts.

[...] "This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom's wide variety of uses," Yuan wrote in a blog post. "Our goal is to provide the most privacy possible for every use case, while also balancing the needs of our users and our commitment to preventing harmful behavior on our platform. Keybase's experienced team will be a critical part of this mission."

Details on Zoom's encryption roadmap are available on the Zoom blog.

Previously:
(2020-04-21) This Open-Source Program Deepfakes You During Zoom Meetings, in Real Time
(2020-04-20) Every Security Issue Uncovered so far in the Zoom Video Chat App
(2020-04-17) Looking for Alternative, Self-Hosted Audio (or Video) Chat Services
(2020-04-15) Over 500,000 Zoom Accounts Sold on Hacker Forums, the Dark Web
(2020-04-13) Zoom Admits Data Got Routed Through China

Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

These last few weeks we've all been reminded about the importance of washing our hands. It's not complicated: you just need soap, water, and about 30 seconds worth of effort. In a pinch you can even use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. But what if there was an even better way of killing bacteria and germs on our hands? One that's easy, fast, and doesn't even require you to touch anything. There might be, if you've got a high voltage generator laying around.

In his latest video, [Jay Bowles] proposes a novel concept: using the ozone generated by high-voltage corona discharge for rapid and complete hand sterilization. He explains that there's plenty of research demonstrating the effectiveness of ozone gas [as] a decontamination agent, and since it's produced in abundance by coronal discharge, the high-voltage generators of the sort he experiments with could double as visually striking hand sanitizers.

[...] Despite what appears to be the nearly complete eradication of bacteria on his hands after exposing them to the ozone generator, [Jay] is quick to point out that he's not trying to give out any medical advice with this video. This simple experiment doesn't cover all forms of bacteria, and he doesn't have the facilities to test the method against viruses. The safest thing you can do right now is follow the guidelines from agencies like the CDC and just wash your hands the old fashioned way; but the concept outlined here certainly looks worthy of further discussion and experimentation.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/04/28/washing-your-hands-with-20000-volts/

[Ed Note - A lot of the comments in the hackaday article express concern about exposure to ozone at the levels that are generated here. Don't try this at home kids!]

Original Submission

Uber will lay off 3,700 people from its customer support and recruiting teams, the company announced in a Wednesday regulatory filing. That figure represents 14 percent of Uber's 26,900 employees, CNBC reports.

Uber has already frozen hiring, and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will forego his salary for the remainder of the year, the company says.

The Information reported last week that Uber's ride bookings have fallen 80 percent from the same period a year earlier. Uber has tried to compensate by expanding its delivery business, launching two new services called Uber Connect and Uber Direct. But rides have historically been the largest part of Uber's business, making an 80 percent drop difficult to stomach.

Last week, Uber's main US rival, Lyft, announced 1,000 layoffs—a 17-percent reduction of the company's workforce.

Original Submission