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Hundreds of individuals were arrested over a four-month period around the world on as part of an operation to crack down on scams meant to hijack wire transfers from both businesses and individuals, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. In total, 281 individuals were arrested worldwide, with 74 of these arrests taking place in the United States, as part of Operation reWired. The operation also involved the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Homeland Security, State and Treasury departments. It was meant to disrupt business email compromise (BEC) schemes. This type of scheme typically targets employees of an...

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is demanding answers from major tech platforms following an unsubstantiated claim online that the gunman involved in last weekend's mass shooting in Odessa, Texas, was driving a vehicle with an O'Rourke campaign sticker. Jen O’Malley Dillon, campaign manager for the former House lawmaker from Texas, sent letters to Facebook, Google and Twitter on Friday asking for greater transparency about how the companies respond to disinformation on their platforms and calling on them to take action against any fraudulent accounts involved in amplifying the claim. “As a campaign, we’re almost entirely powerless to stop misinformation,” O’Malley...

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor ($98.90 @ OutletPC) [with built-in Radeon Vega 8 graphics, pre-thermal-pasted, and includes heatsink & fan] Motherboard : MSI B450-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard ($84.89 @ OutletPC) [ATXform Factor] Memory : Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($59.99 @ Amazon) Storage : Team GX2 256 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($29.99 @ Newegg) Power Supply EVGA 400 W ATX Power Supply ($32.89 @ OutletPC) Case Thermaltake Versa H21 ATX Mid Tower Case $44.99 Walmart Wireless Network Adapter : TP-Link TL-WN881ND PCIe x1 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi Adapter...

California, the birthplace of the American tech industry, is emerging as a great foe. On Monday, the state legislature resumes and will consider a bill that, if passed, could classify drivers for ride-hailing companies like Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. as employees, entitled to better wages and benefits. The bill, along with state laws pending or passed on issues ranging from privacy to net neutrality, could substantially reshape companies across the technology sector, many of which are based in the Silicon Valley area where local ordinances targeting tech are also taking hold. The push by policy makers against local...

Looking to upgrade from a XYZ Pro Printer to one that can reach a nozzle temp of 300 C. I've kind of settled on the QIDI Tech X-Max. Anyone have experience with them or other recommendations?

The recent movement to investigate, and even break up, the current tech oligarchy has gained support on both sides of the Atlantic, and even leapt across the gaping divide in American politics. The immediate concerns relate to such things as the control of key markets by one or two firms, the huge concentration of wealth accruing to the tech elite and, increasingly, the oligarchy’s control over and manipulation of information pipelines. What has not been discussed nearly as much is the end game of the oligarchs. What kind of world do they have in mind for us? (snip) For an...

Using a clip from a recent appearance on Conan, a YouTuber “deepfaked” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head onto comedian Bill Hader’s body. Photo: YouTube ============================================================ A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic among pundits and politicians. During an appearance on CBS This Morning this week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri summed up the general attitude toward deepfakes, which his platform currently doesn’t have a policy against: “I don’t feel good about it.” Earlier this month, deepfaked and manipulated videos...

Apple CEO Tim Cook said Sunday in a commencement address at Stanford University that technology companies need to take responsibility for the "chaos" they create. He did not name specific companies in his speech, but referenced several reasons that tech firms, particularly social media platforms, have come under scrutiny in recent months. He also made an apparent reference to embattled health startup Theranos. “Lately it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation – the belief you can claim credit without accepting responsibility,” Cook said, according to videos posted online of his speech. “We see it...

Some of the world’s biggest tech companies have told their employees to stop talking about technology and technical standards with counterparts at Huawei Technologies Co Ltd in response to the recent U.S. blacklisting of the Chinese tech firm, according to people familiar with the matter. Chipmakers Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc, mobile research firm InterDigital Wireless Inc and South Korean carrier LG Uplus have restricted employees from informal conversations with Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker, the sources said. The U.S. Department of Commerce has not banned contact between companies and Huawei. On May 16, the agency put Huawei...

WASHINGTON — World View announced June 5 it performed the longest flight to date of its stratospheric balloon, demonstrating its ability to carry out missions traditionally reserved for satellites. The company said its Stratollite balloon system recently completed a 16-day test flight, taking off May 18 from the company’s headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, and landing June 3 in Nevada. Prior to this flight, the longest flight by a Stratollite was five days. In addition to proving its ability for extended flights, the Stratollite also demonstrated its ability to maintain position. That included “multiple” tests where the balloon stayed within an...

Red pill or blue pill? You decide.Twenty years after the Wachowskis’ iconic 1999 film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a red pill or a blue pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by...

IT'S simply not enough for billionaires to have everything they've ever wanted – they need eternity to enjoy it, too. At least a dozen of the world's richest men have ploughed millions into bizarre ways to live forever. Here are five of the weirdest. 1) Cure for ageing A number of billionaires are putting their cash to good use by trying to find a "cure" for ageing. They include Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, who has pumped money into Unity, a California company that hopes to stop the ageing process. It's already raised over $116 million in funding and...

This video shows the Top 10 companies by market capitalization worldwide from 1998 to 2018. It includes American companies such as, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Walmart, General Electric, Amazon, as well as companies from other countries, such as Tencent, BP, Alibaba, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.

On April 10, 2018, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz grilled Facebook Chairman and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the social media platform’s content moderation policies. Citing examples of Facebook censoring pro-conservative accounts and articles, Sen. Cruz explained to Zuckerberg, “to a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias.” Sen. Ted Cruz then pressed the Facebook chairman on whether his organization was a “neutral public forum,” arguing that neutrality is necessary to enjoy the protections guaranteed by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. A willingness to consider modifying Section 230 to weaken protections enjoyed by...

Pornography online attracts millions of erotica-hungry people ready to see sex on-demand. You can simply ask your phone to show you anything you desire and there it is: any time, any place. With the advent of deepfake porn, the possibilities have expanded even further, with people who have never starred in adult films looking as though they’re doing sexual acts on camera. Experts have warned that these videos enable all sorts of bad things to happen, from paedophilia to fabricated revenge porn. What are deepfakes? Deepfakes are videos and images that use deep learning AI to forge something not actually...

Interesting find - headline... "Japan just found a 'semi-infinite' deposit of rare-earth minerals — and it could be a 'game-changer' in competition with China Jeremy Berke Apr. 13, 2018, 12:26 PM" Story highlights... "Japan started seeking its own rare-earth mineral deposits after China withheld shipments of the substances amid a dispute over islands that both countries claim as their own, Reuters reported in 2014. ... A new finding that could change the global economy... The newly discovered deposit is enough to "supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world," the study's authors wrote in the study. ... The...

May 8 (UPI) -- The study of a unique crystalline material, composed of aluminum and platinum atoms, has revealed a pair of electronic properties that have never been seen before. The atoms in the new materials are crystallized in a special pattern, with each row offset from the other. The pattern creates a spiral staircase of aluminum and platinum atoms. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, the material's unique crystalline structure produces Rarita-Schwinger fermions in its interior and extremely long quadruple topological Fermi arcs on its surface. Rarita-Schwinger fermions are a type of...

Excerpt not allowed from Quartz, story here.

Parents have been using apps and GPS devices to keep track of their kids for years, but now a local school district wants to prohibit parents from using one feature while their students are in school. Lake Travis ISD's board will vote Wednesday on a policy change to prevent parents from using devices to listen in to their kids while they're at school. It's a legal issue, the district told KXAN. Parents who are discreetly listening in to their kids might also be listening in on other children, and in addition to raising privacy concerns, the practice could violate federal...

How deeply does Google penetrate both your internet life and your real life? Maybe you've been considering ditching Google search for Duck Duck Go, or trading in Google Chrome for a privacy-respecting browser like Brave? Perhaps you want to separate yourself from Gmail and Google Maps? Those are all worthwhile endeavors, but what happens when you actively block all of your devices from even pinging Google's servers? Apparently, nothing short of nightmare fuel. Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill recently accepted a monumental challenge: blocking tech giants from her everyday life due to privacy concerns and sheer curiosity. But she took the challenge...