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Full Title: Former Operator of Illegal Booter Services Sentenced for Conspiracy to Commit Computer Damage and Abuse Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, November 15, 2019 An Orland Park, Illinois, resident was sentenced yesterday to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release on one count of conspiracy to cause damage to internet-connected computers for his role in owning, administering and supporting illegal booter services that launched millions of illegal denial of service, or DDoS, attacks against victim computer systems in the United States and elsewhere. Chief U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle...

Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee is expected to try again on Thursday to pass his S.386 bill, which helps India’s graduates grab hundreds of thousands of college level jobs from American graduates. All GOP Senators are expected to stay silent while Lee pushes his bill that rewards roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers in the United States with a fast track to citizenship. Silicon Valley investors back his bill, which also allows companies to annually pay 60,000 of India’s contract workers — plus 60,000 family members — with government-provided green cards after they take jobs from American graduates. Existing “country...

Automatic emergency braking will be standard in most cars in 2022. The technology is expected to cut the number of rear-end crashes in half, but hundreds of drivers say sometimes the system slams on the brakes – apparently for no reason. CBS News found reports of several accidents and injuries that drivers blamed on false activations of emergency automatic braking systems. Safety advocates and carmakers say in the vast majority of cases it works, but it is not perfect. For Cindy Walsh, getting behind the wheel of her 2018 Nissan Rogue raises her anxiety level. Since she bought the SUV...

Yahoo has announced it will be removing all content from its free long-running online discussion boards, Yahoo Groups. While Yahoo said in a statement that the Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist, users will no longer be able to upload any new content to the site as of October 21, and from December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The content that will be affected include files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digest, and message history. "You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded," the...

Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would. Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was.“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers … derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”That the “tech...

About 40 state attorneys general will participate in an antitrust investigation of Facebook led by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing three people familiar with the matter. In September, James had announced an investigation with seven other states and the District of Columbia into whether the social media giant has “endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.” The three people who spoke to the Post said the larger inquiry is still confidential, and that New York could enlist further states before the probe is...

Tech IPOs have long been viewed as a boon for Silicon Valley workers, ushering in a new era of corporate stability and stock-driven wealth. That’s not been the case at Uber, where the stock price has fallen roughly 30 percent since going public in May and employees say they’ve noticed cuts to amenities as basic as the brands of coffee available for brewing. Uber is changing as it shifts from a closely held unicorn start-up to a publicly traded company that appears to be losing investors’ confidence, according to interviews with current and former workers. Those changes include laying off...

Contract employees at Google's Pittsburgh campus are voting on whether to unionize Tuesday. If successful, this will be the first union with the Pittsburgh Association of Tech Professionals, a new arm of the United Steelworkers. Renata Nelson, a Google contractor in Pittsburgh, said the main priorities are to improve wages and benefit, and to cement job security. "Our salaries are fairly low compared to industry average," Nelson said. "We've seen people being hired at lower and lower rates recently." Google contractors in Pittsburgh are employed through international consulting company HCL Technologies. According to United Steelworkers, HCL employees work at Google's...

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...