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Why do you post less frequently on internet forums than you used to?

 * I work longer hours.
 * My kids take up my time.
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 * Due to my physical or mental health.
 * I'm less interested in communicating with others.
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24/05/21/0148235 story


CONNECTED CARS’ ILLEGAL DATA COLLECTION AND USE NOW ON FTC'S “RADAR”

posted by hubie on Tuesday May 21, @06:27AM   


upstart writes:

The regulator is warning OEMs to respect data privacy or it will get mad:

> The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Technology has issued a warning to
> automakers that sell connected cars. Companies that offer such products "do
> not have the free license to monetize people's information beyond purposes
> needed to provide their requested product or service," it wrote in a blog post
> on Tuesday. Just because executives and investors want recurring revenue
> streams, that does not "outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards,"
> the FTC wrote.
> 
> Based on your feedback, connected cars might be one of the least-popular
> modern inventions among the Ars readership. And who can blame them? Last
> January, a security researcher revealed that a vehicle identification number
> was sufficient to access remote services for multiple different makes, and yet
> more had APIs that were easily hackable.
> 
> Later, in 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published an extensive report examining
> the various automakers' policies regarding the use of data from connected
> cars; the report concluded that "cars are the worst product category we have
> ever reviewed for privacy."
> 
> Those were rather abstract cases, but earlier this year, we saw a very
> concrete misuse of connected car data. Writing for The New York Times, Kash
> Hill learned that owners of connected vehicles made by General Motors had been
> unwittingly enrolled in OnStar's Smart Driver program and that their driving
> data had been shared with their insurance company, resulting in soaring
> insurance premiums.
> 
> [...] The FTC says that automakers and other businesses must protect users'
> data against illegal collection, use, and disclosure. It points to recent
> enforcement actions against companies in other sectors that have illegally
> collected or used geolocation data, surreptitiously disclosed sensitive user
> data, and illegally used sensitive data for automated decisions.
> 
> The FTC says the easiest way to comply is to not collect the data in the first
> place.

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24/05/21/0143212 story


EUROPE IS UNCERTAIN WHETHER ITS AMBITIOUS MERCURY PROBE CAN REACH THE PLANET

posted by hubie on Tuesday May 21, @01:45AM   
from the Scotty-we-need-more-power dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

> This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding
> its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.
> 
> The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing
> its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when
> the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an
> orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the
> solar-electric propulsion system at the time.
> 
> According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of
> its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made
> some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its
> original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem
> is still poorly understood.
> 
> [...] The spacecraft consists of three components. The "transfer module" is
> where the current problems are occurring. It was built by the European Space
> Agency and is intended to power the other two components of the spacecraft
> until October 2025. It is essential for positioning the spacecraft for entry
> into orbit around Mercury. The other two elements of the mission are a
> European orbiter, MPO, and a Japanese orbiter, Mio. After their planned
> arrival in orbit around Mercury in December 2025, the two orbiters will
> separate and make at least one year's worth of observations, including the
> characterization of the small planet's magnetic field.
> 
> The news release is ambiguous about the fate of BepiColombo if full power
> cannot be restored to its propulsion system.
> 
> [...] What is clear, she said, is that the current thrust level can support
> the next critical milestone, BepiColombo's fourth Mercury swing-by, which is
> due to occur on September 5 of this year. This is the first of three swing-bys
> scheduled to happen in rapid succession from September to January that will
> slow the spacecraft down relative to Mercury.
> 
> "This swing-by sequence provides a braking delta-V of 2.4 km/s and provides a
> change of velocity vector direction with respect to the Sun as required for
> the trajectory end game in 2025," Montagnon said.

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24/05/17/139259 story


EXXON MOBIL IS SUING ITS SHAREHOLDERS TO SILENCE THEM ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 19, @10:36PM   


upstart writes:

Column: Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global
warming:

> You wouldn't think that Exxon Mobil has to worry much about being harried by a
> couple of shareholder groups owning a few thousand dollars worth of shares
> between them — not with its $529-billion market value and its stature as the
> world's biggest oil company.
> 
> But then you might not have factored in the company's stature as the world's
> biggest corporate bully.
> 
> In February, Exxon Mobil sued the U.S. investment firm Arjuna Capital and
> Netherlands-based green shareholder firm Follow This to keep a shareholder
> resolution they sponsored from appearing on the agenda of its May 29 annual
> meeting. The resolution urged Exxon Mobil to work harder to reduce the
> greenhouse gas emissions of its products.
> 
> The company's legal threat worked: Days after the lawsuit was filed, the
> shareholder groups, weighing their relative strength against an oil behemoth,
> withdrew the proposal and pledged not to refile it in the future.
> 
> Yet even though the proposal no longer exists, the company is still pursuing
> the lawsuit, running up its own and its adversaries' legal bills. Its goal
> isn't hard to fathom.
> 
> "What purpose does this have other than sending a chill down the spines of
> other investors to keep them from speaking up and filing resolutions?" asks
> Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, who oversees public investment
> portfolios, including the state's retirement and college savings funds, worth
> more than $35 billion.
> 
> In response to the lawsuit, Frerichs has urged Exxon Mobil shareholders to
> vote against the reelection to the board of Chairman and Chief Executive
> Darren W. Woods and lead independent director Joseph L. Hooley at the annual
> meeting.
> 
> He's not alone. The $496-billion California Public Employees' Retirement
> System, or CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, is considering a
> vote against Woods, according to the fund's chief operating investment
> officer, Michael Cohen.
> 
> "Exxon has gone well beyond any other company that we're aware of in terms of
> suing shareholders for trying to bring forward a proposal," Cohen told the
> Financial Times. "There doesn't seem to be anything other than an agenda of
> sending a message of shutting down shareholders' ability to speak their mind."
> 
> California Treasurer Fiona Ma, a CalPERS board member, backs a vote against
> Woods. "As the largest public pension fund in the country, we have a
> responsibility to lead on issues that threaten to undermine shareowners," she
> says.
> 
> The proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co., which helps institutional investors
> decide how to vote on shareholder proposals and board elections, has counseled
> a vote against Hooley, citing Exxon Mobil's "unusual and aggressive tactics"
> in fighting activist investors.
> 
> Exxon Mobil's action against Arjuna and Follow This opens a new chapter in the
> long battle between corporate managements and shareholder gadflies.

[Continues...]

> Fossil fuel companies have been especially touchy about shareholder
> resolutions calling on them to take firmer action on global warming and to be
> more transparent about the effects their products have on climate.
> 
> In part that may be the result of some significant victories by activist
> shareholders. In 2021, nearly 61% of Chevron shareholders voted for the
> company to "substantially" reduce its greenhouse gas emissions — a shockingly
> large majority for a shareholder vote on any issue. That same year, the
> activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 led a campaign that unseated three Exxon
> Mobil board members and replaced them with directors more sensitive to climate
> risk.
> 
> Exxon Mobil also subjected the San Diego County community of Imperial Beach to
> a campaign of legal harassment over the city's participation in a lawsuit
> aimed at forcing the company and others in the oil industry to pay
> compensation for the cost of global warming, which stems from the burning of
> the companies' products.
> 
> Even in that context, Exxon Mobil's campaign against Arjuna and Follow This
> represents a high-water mark in corporate cynicism.
> 
> The lawsuit asserts that the investment funds' proposed resolution violated
> standards set forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission governing the
> propriety of such resolutions — it was related to "the company's ordinary
> business operations" and closely resembled resolutions on similar topics that
> had failed to exceed threshold votes at the company's 2022 and 2023 annual
> meetings. Both standards allow a company to block a resolution from the
> meeting agenda, or proxy.
> 
> [...] The company maintained that the shareholder groups aimed to "force
> ExxonMobil to change the nature of its ordinary business or to go out of
> business entirely."
> 
> That's flatly untrue. The resolution observed that the company's "cost of
> capital may substantially increase if it fails to control transition risks by
> significantly reducing absolute emissions."
> 
> That judgment is shared by many institutional investors and government
> regulators, and points to a path for preserving Exxon Mobil's business
> prospects, not destroying them.
> 
> In any case, what Exxon Mobil failed to note is that shareholder resolutions
> are always advisory — they can't require management to do anything.
> 
> In its lawsuit, the company whined about the sheer burden of handling an
> increase in shareholder resolutions, especially those on fraught topics such
> as the environment and social issues. Using what it described as an SEC
> estimate that it costs corporations $150,000 to deal with every submitted
> resolution, its annual meeting statement calculated that it has spent $21
> million to manage 140 submitted resolutions.
> 
> A couple of points about that. First, the SEC didn't estimate that every
> resolution costs $150,000 to manage. The SEC actually cites a range of $20,000
> to $150,000 each.
> 
> Second, a quick look at the company's financial statements gives the lie to
> its claim that shareholder resolutions are some sort of cataclysmic burden.
> Its statistics applied to the entire 10-year period from 2014 through 2023,
> not just a single year.
> 
> Over that decade, Exxon Mobil reported total profits of $204.3 billion. In
> other words, processing those 140 proposals — using the SEC's highest estimate
> to arrive at $21 million — cost Exxon Mobil one one-hundredth of a percent of
> its profits, at most, to deal with shareholder proposals.

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24/05/17/1243226 story


POSSIBLE EVIDENCE OF "GLUEBALLS" FOUND DURING BEIJING SPECTROMETER III
EXPERIMENTS

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 19, @05:51PM   


upstart writes:

Possible evidence of glueballs found during Beijing Spectrometer III
experiments:

> A large international team of physicists working on the BES III collaboration
> has announced possible physical evidence of glueballs. In their study,
> published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group analyzed decaying
> particles in a particle collider and uncovered what they believe to be
> evidence of glueballs.
> 
> Glueballs are theoretical interactions that can occur between gluons, which
> are carriers of the strong nuclear force. Up until this latest research, it
> was not known if such theories were correct.
> 
> Gluons are subatomic particles that are believed to hold quarks together.
> Quarks are also subatomic particles; they form the nuclei of protons. Mesons
> are also made from quarks, or more specifically, one quark and one antiquark.
> Because gluons carry the strong nuclear force, they are able to interact with
> quarks and other gluons. Due to this latter characteristic, researchers have
> suggested that gluons could form a kind of particle without involving quarks.
> The result would be a glueball.
> 
> For this new study, the research team was looking for evidence of glueballs.
> To do so, they forced mesons to collide at high speeds at the Beijing
> Electron-Positron Collider, located at the Institute of High Energy Physics in
> Beijing, China. They then studied the resulting debris field.
> 
> More specifically, they looked for and measured rare combinations of
> proton/antiprotons in the debris field—prior work using the same collider had
> found evidence of these.
> 
> The researchers were able to analyze 10 billion samples generated over the
> past decade, and they found evidence of particles with an average mass of
> 2,395 MeV/c2, which matches what theory has suggested for glueballs.
> 
> For now, they have named the particle X(2370) based on the mass of the
> original particles observed.
> 
> The research team acknowledges that their findings are not absolute proof of
> the existence of glueballs—other interactions, they note, could have led to
> similar findings. Thus, more work is required before a consensus can be
> reached.

More information: M. Ablikim et al, Determination of Spin-Parity Quantum Numbers
of X(2370) as 0−+ from J/ψ→γKS0KS0η′, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.181901

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24/05/17/1247248 story


'CALIFORNIA STOP' IS COSTING CALIFORNIANS MILLIONS IN TICKETS

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 19, @12:36PM   


upstart writes:

'California Stop' Is Costing Californians Millions In Tickets:

> The "California Stop," also known as the "California Roll," is the act of not
> coming to a full and complete stop at a stop sign. Whatever it's called where
> you live, it's illegal and can get you a $200+ ticket and can land you in hot
> water with your driving record when it's issued by an agency with authority.
> One California agency however, with no type of traffic authority has been
> issuing thousands of rolling stop tickets by secretly recording drivers.
> 
> KTLA reports that California's Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority
> issues around 17,000 rolling stop tickets each year, bringing in over $1.1
> million in revenue annually. What exactly is the Mountains Recreation and
> Conservation Authority? According to the agencies site, it's described as "a
> local public agency dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and protection
> of open space, wildlife habitat, and urban, mountain and river parkland that
> is easily accessible to the public."
> 
> [...] The problem with these tickets — aside from being issued by a state park
> agency with no real authority to issue them — is that they're technically not
> citations. It seems their sole purpose is to bring in revenue for the MRCA as
> one Prius driver who was ticketed discovered. "They're engaged in a deceptive
> practice of pretending to enforce the motor vehicle code when they don't have
> the authority to do that, and they're tricking people into paying these
> tickets," they told KTLA.

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24/05/17/1254255 story


HR SAYS BUSINESS LEADERS SCARED RTO POLICY CAUSES STAFF ATTRITION

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 19, @07:50AM   


Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

> Evidence is mounting that tech companies' policies demanding staff return to
> the office are only serving to drive out the talent that became accustomed to
> remote work.
> 
> According to a Gartner-led survey of 3,500 employees in the tech industry
> undertaken in November 2023, 19 percent of non-executives said they'd quit
> over a return-to-office mandate, and an even larger proportion in management
> positions expressed similar sentiments.
> 
> "While 58 percent of executives with a mandate to return to the office said
> their organization provided a convincing reason for the decision, many senior
> leaders are unwilling to come back into the office," said Caroline Ogawa,
> director of Gartner's HR practice.
> 
> In another Gartner poll run in September of 170 HR heads, some 63 percent
> voiced higher expectations of staff coming back to the traditional workplace;
> 34 percent said a mandated return was already in place, and 13 percent warned
> that “consequences” of not complying had “intensified”.
> 
> Ogawa added: “An April 2024 Gartner survey of 64 HR leaders revealed 64
> percent say senior leaders are concerned onsite requirements will increase
> attrition,” she added.
> 
> Canalys predicted more than 18 months ago that tech businesses need to
> re-consider the metrics they use to evaluate how productive an employee is:
> because being tethered to a desk is not giving an accurate picture. Proximity
> bias, the analysis said, would have implications for staff retention.

[Continues...]

> Amazon said last year that engineers worked better when together in person and
> Meta’s policy concurred, adding that working side by side in the physical
> sense was essential to help new starters or graduate imbibe corporate culture.
> 
> Pandemic post child Zoom also ironically said it wanted the workforce to
> return to the office, and put in place a swanky new office in London where
> “remote work” meets “we need you back in the office”.
> 
> Just this week, research from the University of Michigan and the University of
> Chicago found a number of senior staffers exiting their employers including
> Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX due to RTO mandates. Microsoft contested the
> study.

How many of our community have kept 'working from home' and what pressures have
you been under to return to the office?

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24/05/17/1235248 story


HOW THE CHARTER-DISNEY DISPUTE CAUSED STREAMING SERVICES TO BE BUNDLED WITH
CABLE

posted by janrinok on Sunday May 19, @03:05AM   


"dalek" writes:

A recent article on SN discussed Comcast bundling streaming services with its
cable offering, and the reason for this is the precedent set during the dispute
between Charter and Disney last year.

Minutes before the Florida-Utah college football game on August 31, Disney
pulled their channels from Charter Spectrum's lineup over a carriage fee
dispute. Disney's timing was intentional in blacking out their channels right
before the start of football season, expecting fans would be angry that networks
like ESPN were unavailable, and would pressure Charter into agreeing to higher
fees. Although carriage fee disputes are quite common, this one seemed
different, especially when Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey promptly scheduled a
conference call with investors and permanently discontinue carrying Disney-owned
networks.

Winfrey said that the current business model of pay TV is "broken", insisting
that any resolution to the blackout address what Charter saw as more fundamental
issues. ESPN receives the highest subscriber fees of any channel by a wide
margin, and hoping to address the rising costs of cable, Charter indicated it
would begin offering a cheaper option for TV without sports channels. Charter
also objected that streaming platforms are not yet profitable, saying that
higher subscriber fees were subsidizing the cost of developing streaming
services, but those streaming services contained premium programming that wasn't
available with a cable subscription. In other words, Charter said it was unfair
for cable subscribers to pay the costs for Hulu and Disney+ without getting
access to the programming on those services.

Subscriber fees for networks like ESPN are particularly high because of
multi-billion dollar contracts they've entered into with sports leagues with the
expectation that revenue from subscriber fees would continue to increase.
Although it doesn't directly involve Disney, the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports
Group and its impact on sports like baseball show the failures of this business
model. In 2015, the St. Louis Cardinals signed a 22-year contract worth over a
billion dollars for Fox Sports Midwest to broadcast most of their games. When
many Fox properties were purchased by Disney, their regional sports networks
were auctioned off to Sinclair to satisfy antitrust regulators. Contracts like
the $1 billion agreement with the Cardinals were negotiated on the basis that
these networks would bring in enough subscriber fee and advertising revenue to
remain profitable.

[Continues...]

As cord-cutting accelerated, revenue for regional sports networks rapidly dried
up, increasing costs for their remaining subscribers and driving the networks
into bankruptcy. Contracts like the $1 billion agreement with the Cardinals may
be terminated early, and Diamond Sports Group is in an even more precarious
situation in their efforts emerge from bankruptcy now that Comcast has dropped
their channels. The situation isn't as dire for networks like ESPN, but
declining revenue has already led to several rounds of major layoffs. Charter
was also concerned by Disney's plans to offer ESPN direct-to-consumers instead
of as part of a larger cable subscription, insisting that content providers and
distributors need to collaborate for the business model to be viable.

Charter and Disney ended their dispute on September 11, agreeing that streaming
services like Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ would be made available to some Spectrum
subscribers and that ESPN's direct-to-consumer channels could also be purchased
as an add-on. Disney couldn't afford to permanently lose the estimated $4
billion in revenue from Charter's TV subscribers, especially since they are
already on the hook for lengthy and very expensive contracts to carry live
sports. However, some Disney-owned channels like Freeform were permanently
removed from Charter's lineup, which was notable because content providers often
insist that distributors like Charter agree to carry all of their channels.
Although this didn't resolve many of the underlying issues like the lack of
profitability of streaming platforms, the decline of cable TV, or the massive
contracts for the rights to carry sports, it set a precedent of bundling
streaming services with cable TV packages.

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24/05/17/0335204 story


WHERE ARE FLOPPY DISKS TODAY? PLANES, TRAINS, AND ALL THESE OTHER PLACES

posted by hubie on Saturday May 18, @10:21PM   


Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

> I don't remember when I first started using a floppy disk in the mid-70s. It
> was either installing firmware on IBM S/370 mainframes or on a dedicated
> library workstation to create Library of Congress catalog records. Oh, the
> exciting life I've led! In either case, it would have been a single-sided,
> 8-inch floppy disk, which held an amazing 79.7 KiloBytes (KB) of data.
> 
> [...] As personal computers gained popularity in the 1970s, the floppy disk
> moved from my world of mainframes and workstations to PCs. There, it found its
> place as an affordable and accessible storage solution. 
> 
> Then, in 1976, a guy named Steve Wozniak wanted to add a floppy drive to his
> next computer. His buddy, Steve Jobs, got a 5.25-inch floppy disk from
> Shugart's new company, Shugart Associates, in 1976, and after a lot of
> hacking, Woz got the first floppy drive to run on what would become the Apple
> II. 
> 
> [...] It wasn't just major companies, either. Floppy disks enabled anyone to
> create and sell programs, which sparked the freeware and shareware movements.
> They also enabled people to share data easily for the first time. Long before
> we were using modems and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share programs,
> pictures, and data, we would share them by "sneakerware." That is, literally
> walking the information from one computer to another by hand carrying disks. 
> 
> [...] By the early 2000s, floppy disks had become increasingly rare, used
> primarily with legacy hardware and industrial equipment. Sony manufactured the
> last new floppy disk in 2011. 
> 
> Despite its obsolescence, the floppy disk's legacy endures. Its iconic design
> has become a symbol of data storage, and the floppy disk icon still appears on
> many computer desktops as the file-saving symbol.

[Continues...]

> But as obsolete as its technology may seem, the floppy disk is still used
> today. For example, industrial embroidery machines from the 1990s were built
> to read patterns and designs from floppy disks. Some older industrial machines
> and equipment, like computer numerical control (CNC) machines, still use
> floppy disks to load software updates and programs. 
> 
> Some older Boeing 747 models still use floppy disks to load critical
> navigation database updates and software into their avionics systems. Indeed,
> Tom Persky, the president of floppydisk.com, which sells and recycles floppy
> disks, said in 2022 that the airline industry remains one of his biggest
> customers.
> 
> Closer to the ground, in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which
> launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless its Automatic Train
> Control System staff is booted up with a floppy. Why? It has no hard drive and
> it's too unstable to be left on, so every morning, in goes the disk, and off
> goes the trains. It will be replaced, though… eventually. Currently, the
> updated replacement project is scheduled to be completed in 2033/4. 
> 
> Floppy drives also live on in medical devices such as CT scanners and
> ultrasound machines. Famously, or infamously, until 2019, the US nuclear
> missile sites force still used 8-inch floppy disks as part of the system for
> coordinating operational components. On a far more amusing note, those Chuck
> E. Cheese's animatronic figures you saw at your eighth birthday party? Yep,
> they're driven by floppy disks.
> 
> [...] Eventually, they'll all have to replace their old kit. But, it won't
> surprise me a bit when, by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil, someone,
> somewhere, will still be running a floppy drive in a production system. 

When was the last time you saw a floppy "in the wild"?

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24/05/17/034234 story


SILICON REVERSE ENGINEERING: THE 8085'S UNDOCUMENTED FLAGS

posted by hubie on Saturday May 18, @05:33PM   


owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2013/02/looking-at-silicon-to-understanding.html

> The 8085 microprocessor has two undocumented status flags: V and K. These
> flags can be reverse-engineered by looking at the silicon of the chip, and
> their function turns out to be different from previous explanations. In
> addition, the implementation of these flags shows that they were deliberately
> implemented, which raises the question of why there [sic] were not documented
> or supported by Intel. Finally, examining how these flag circuits were
> implemented in silicon provides an interesting look at how microprocessors are
> physically implemented.
> 
> Like most microprocessors, the 8085 has a flag register that holds status
> information on the results of an operation. The flag register is 8 bits: bit 0
> holds the carry flag, bit 2 holds the parity, bit 3 is always 0, bit 4 holds
> the half-carry, bit 6 holds the zero status, and bit 7 holds the sign. But
> what about the missing bits: 1 and 5?

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24/05/17/032257 story


AT&T PAID BRIBES TO GET TWO MAJOR PIECES OF LEGISLATION PASSED, US GOV'T SAYS

posted by hubie on Saturday May 18, @12:48PM   
from the I'm-shocked,-SHOCKED-to-find-that-gambling-is-going-on-in-here! dept.

upstart writes:

Payments helped AT&T obtain key legislative wins in Illinois, prosecutors say:

> The US government has provided more detail on how a former AT&T executive
> allegedly bribed a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain
> legislation favorable to AT&T's business.
> 
> Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza is set to go on trial in
> September 2024 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully
> influence then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. AT&T itself agreed to
> pay a $23 million fine in October 2022 in connection with the alleged illegal
> influence campaign and said it was "committed to ensuring that this never
> happens again."
> 
> US government prosecutors offered a preview of their case against La Schiazza
> in a filing on Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of
> Illinois. A contract lobbyist hired by AT&T "is expected to testify that AT&T
> successfully passed two major pieces of legislation after the company started
> making payments to Individual FR-1."
> 
> The Madigan ally referred to in the court document as "Individual FR-1" is
> former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a Chicago Tribune article notes. Acevedo,
> who was Madigan's assistant majority leader in the Illinois House before
> retiring in 2017, was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in
> 2022. Madigan left his House speaker post in 2021.
> 
> In one internal email sent to an AT&T employee, La Schiazza allegedly
> described the company's quid pro quo with Madigan as "the friends and family
> plan."
> 
> The government said the bribery scheme resulted in passage of legislation
> eliminating AT&T's Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation to provide
> landline phone service, and separate legislation related to small cell
> deployments. Madigan, a Democrat, was House speaker when both bills were
> passed. The lobbyist who is expected to testify allegedly acted as an
> intermediary by transmitting payments to Madigan's ally.

[Continues...]
On one occasion, AT&T employees allegedly discussed in emails whether they could
be certain of receiving "credit" from lawmakers for the payments to Individual
FR-1:

> Notably, Individual ATT-3 emphasized that even though Individual FR-1 would
> technically receive payment from Intermediary 4, "we would make sure that ATT
> gets credit for fulfilling this request," referring to credit from Madigan.
> Defendant responded that he had no objection to the plan "as long as you are
> sure we will get credit and the box checked."
> 
> On the same day, Individual ATT-3 subsequently emailed Individuals ATT-1 and
> ATT-2 and asked, "are we 100% certain that we will get credit for being
> responsive?" Individual ATT-3 further sought to confirm that AT&T "would get
> credit from the powers that be," another veiled reference to Madigan.
> Individual ATT-2 responded, "I would hope that as long as we explain the
> approach to McClain and [Individual FR-1] gets the money then the ultimate
> objective is reached." Individual ATT-3 wrote in response, "I don't think Paul
> [defendant] wants this based on 'hope.' We need to confirm prior to executing
> this strategy."

The emails tellingly contained "no discussion of whether this arrangement would
be acceptable" to the person receiving the payments, the government said. "These
emails demonstrate that it was McClain, acting as Madigan's agent, who dictated
the payment arrangement with Individual FR-1, that the payments had no
connection to any legitimate business need of AT&T, but were instead intended to
secure Madigan's legislative support," the filing said.

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24/05/17/0254202 story


PSA: DEBIAN MAINTAINERS FOR KEEPASSXC PASSWORD MANAGER CHANGE DEFAULTS TO
MINIMAL FUNCTIONALITY

posted by hubie on Saturday May 18, @08:04AM   


upstart writes:

Team KeePassXC (@keepassxc@fosstodon.org):

> Debian Users - Be aware the maintainer of the KeePassXC package for Debian has
> unilaterally decided to remove ALL features from it. You will need to switch
> to `keepassxc-full` to maintain capabilities once this lands outside of
> testing/sid.

The default install package is being changed to one where all extra
functionality has been removed by default, such as networking capability and
browser integration. There is a lot of arguing whether this was the proper way
to handle it, or whether the default compiler options should have remained the
same in the default package and a keepassxc-minimal optional package have been
offered instead.

For those who rely on package managers, which approach would you have preferred?

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24/05/17/1958253 story


"THE MORNING AFTER": GRAND THEFT AUTO 6 IS COMING FALL 2025

posted by janrinok on Saturday May 18, @05:18AM   


Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

> One of the biggest, most iconic gaming series is almost back. Grand Theft Auto
> 6 is apparently on track for a fall launch next year — a little more specific
> than the previous release window of “2025.”
> 
> There’s no new trailer, and GTA publisher, Take-Two, is not quite ready to
> offer a specific release date. CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety: “I think
> we’re going to leave it there for now.”
> 
> The sixth mainline installment will be set in Leonida (Rockstar’s Florida
> equivalent) and focused mostly on Vice City (Miami). Compared to GTA Vice
> City, however, it’ll be contemporary. So, I’m banking on OnlyFans pastiches,
> vapes, self-driving cars and everything else 2020s. Plus explosions and crime.

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24/05/17/0228217 story


FEDS PROBE WAYMO DRIVERLESS CARS HITTING PARKED CARS, DRIFTING INTO TRAFFIC

posted by hubie on Saturday May 18, @03:17AM   
from the crash-test-dummies dept.

upstart writes:

Auto-safety regulator is investigating 22 reports of Waymo cars malfunctioning:

> Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into
> construction zones—all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving
> vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety
> Administration (NHTSA) said Monday.
> 
> To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects
> Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars
> equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen
> incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.
> 
> Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified
> based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document
> single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as
> gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to
> disobey traffic safety control devices."
> 
> The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose
> a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already
> evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated
> driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or
> abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA
> said.
> 
> [...] Earlier this year, Waymo voluntarily recalled more than 400 self-driving
> cars after back-to-back collisions in Arizona. While Waymo relies on machine
> learning to "interpret complex object and scene semantics" that ensure
> self-driving cars safely navigate roads, Waymo has said it's mostly focused on
> responding to varied weather patterns or less predictable movements of
> emergency vehicles and is still learning how unpredictable navigating the road
> can be.

[Continues...]

> [...] While Waymo cars failing to recognize an unusual object on the road may
> be somewhat expected on what Waymo described as its "rapid learning curve,"
> keeping cars out of construction zones has seemingly consistently posed a
> challenge despite being a "key focus" for Alphabet's self-driving car company.
> 
> [...] While other self-driving car companies have made headlines for shocking
> accidents, including two nighttime fatal crashes involving Ford BlueCruise
> vehicles and a Cruise robotaxi dragging a pedestrian 20 feet, Waymo has
> boasted about its safety record.
> 
> [...] NHTSA appears to be closely monitoring all self-driving car companies,
> helping to trigger recalls of more than 900 Cruise vehicles and a whopping 2
> million Teslas—which covered every car with Autopilot—last year. More
> recently, the agency began probing Amazon's Zoox after its autonomous SUVs
> started unexpectedly braking, injuring two motorcyclists who couldn't react
> fast enough before rear-ending the vehicles, Bloomberg reported.

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24/05/16/1310212 story


WOMAN WAS LIVING INSIDE ROOFTOP GROCERY STORE SIGN WITH COMPUTER AND COFFEE
MAKER FOR A YEAR

posted by janrinok on Friday May 17, @10:32PM   
from the movin'-on-up dept.

hubie writes:

https://apnews.com/article/michigan-store-rooftop-sign-homeless-0185c0d7e4cd7a2f8581e8b8e0eb01b7

> Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery
> store made a startling discovery: A 34-year-old woman was living inside the
> business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker,
> police said.
> 
> "She was homeless," Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department
> said Thursday. "It's a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody
> living up in a sign."
> 
> The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere
> but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year, Warren
> said. She was found April 23.
> 
> Midland, best known as the global home of Dow Inc., is 130 miles (209
> kilometers) north of Detroit.
> 
> The Family Fare store is in a retail strip with a triangle-shaped sign at the
> top of the building. The sign structure, probably 5 feet (1.5 meter) wide and
> 8 feet (2.4 meters) high, has a door and is accessible from the roof, Warren
> said.
> 
> "There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk," he said. "Her
> clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you'd have
> in your home."
> 
> The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an
> outlet on the roof, Warren said.

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24/05/16/124226 story


HOMEOWNER'S INSURANCE MEETS CLIMATE CHANGE

posted by janrinok on Friday May 17, @05:52PM   
from the uninsurable dept.

An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following story:

The New York Times is running a story on the difficulties of obtaining
homeowner's insurance in areas of the USA affected by firestorms/storms/floods,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/13/climate/insurance-homes-climate-change-weather.html
or non-paywalled at https://archive.is/BB8wQ

> The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated
> in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading
> to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the
> Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last
> year, the trends are worsening.
> 
> In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a
> third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly
> available financial data. That's up from 12 states five years ago, and eight
> states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by
> as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire
> states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in
> claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody's,
> and those losses are increasing.
> 
> [...] The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American
> economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won't issue a
> mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can't buy a home. With fewer buyers,
> real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues,
> leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic
> services.

The link includes a number of plots to support the article.

Have you changed to higher deductible homeowner's insurance to effectively
"co-insure" your house, while saving on the premium? If you are unable to buy
insurance at all, are you prepared to self-insure, accepting all the financial
risk--or is this even possible if your bank still holds a significant mortgage?

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<  Yesterday's News  >
Immutability, Three Rules of: (1) If a tarpaulin can flap, it will. (2) If a
small boy can get dirty, he will. (3) If a teenager can go out, he will.


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