October 7, 2016 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Fake Call Centers in India Scam Americans Of Millions

An anonymous reader writes:Indian police have arrested 70 people and are questioning hundreds more after uncovering a massive scam to cheat thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars by posing as U.S. tax authorities and demanding unpaid taxes, a police officer said Thursday. According to police in Mumbai, the yearlong scam involved running fake call centers which sent voice mail messages telling U.S. nationals to call back because they owed back taxes. Those who called back and believed the threats would fork out thousands of dollars to “settle” their case, Mumbai police officer Parag Marere said Thursday. The scam brought in more than $150, 000 a day, Marere said without giving a total sum. If the scam netted that amount daily, it would have made almost $55 million in one year. Some victims were also told to buy gift vouchers from various companies, and hand over the voucher ID numbers which the impostors then used to make purchases, Marere said. Police said they are likely to file charges against many of the 600 or more people still being questioned on suspicion of running the fake call centers, housed on several stories of a Mumbai office building. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continued here:
Fake Call Centers in India Scam Americans Of Millions

Amazon makes food delivery cheaper for Prime members

Amazon has cut the price of an AmazonFresh membership down to just $14.99 a month as long as you also subscribe to Prime. For that, you’ll be entitled to unlimited grocery deliveries in the locations where the service operates, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco. It makes the business effectively a bolt-on for Amazon’s paid tier which has developed substantially in the last few years. Users will be able to save almost $120 with the new charges compared to its predecessor, which was a $299 flat rate for a whole year. That should help beat back competition from traditional retailers like Walmart and Target , who are trying to catch up on this whole tech-based delivery lark from a standing start. Unlimited grocery delivery just got even easier! #AmazonFresh is now $14.99/month, exclusively for Prime members: https://t.co/D00Pf3qaxy pic.twitter.com/BygThOn2IG — Amazon (@amazon) October 5, 2016 Via: TechCrunch Source: Amazon

See original article:
Amazon makes food delivery cheaper for Prime members

AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions

AT&T is bringing its gigabit Internet service to 11 new metro areas. Currently available in parts of 29 cities around the country, the ultra-fast network — which the company is now calling AT&T Fiber — is expected to reach another 45 locations by the end of this year, reads a PCMag article. From the report: That includes 11 new markets: Florida: Gainesville and Panama City, Georgia: Columbus, Kentucky: Central Kentucky, Louisiana: Lafayette, Mississippi: Biloxi-Gulfport and Northeast Mississippi, Tennessee: Southeastern Tennessee and Knoxville, and Texas: Corpus Christi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions

BitTorrent reportedly fires its CEOs, gets out of the media game

BitTorrent has had a big interest in making it easy for creators to distribute and sell music and films, but it looks like that initiative might have just ground to a screeching halt. Variety is reporting that the company has fired its two CEOs, laid off an unknown number of staffers and is shutting down BitTorrent Now , its recently-launched ad-supported video and music streaming platform. If this is all true, it would mark a pretty dramatic change of pace for the company, which has sought to build an identify as a champion for an open internet. Not through piracy, for which the company is still closely linked thanks to the peer-to-peer sharing technology the company developed, but through more legit means. In addition to shuttering BitTorrent Now, the company has also reportedly closed a Los Angeles studio that served as the headquarters for the initiative. While BitTorrent Now was a bit of an update and rebrand, the company had been offering “bundles” of content from indie artists for years now. According to Variety , the company was bleeding money on the venture; one source said that spending was “out of control.” BitTorrent had also recently launched a live streaming platform, hired a news director and started its own news network. While today’s report didn’t have any details on what will happen with those initiatives, it’s not unreasonable to imagine they’re also in jeopardy. With both CEOs Robert Delamar and Jeremy Johnson out, CFO Dipak Joshi has apparently stepped in as interim CEO. All the turmoil reportedly started a few weeks ago, with layoffs kicking off in the second half of September. We’re reaching out to BitTorrent and will update this story with more details as we learn them. Source: Variety

Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

A Prisma for videos doesn’t sound so enticing now that Prisma itself has begun supporting the format. The popular app can now apply filters to videos and spit out 15-second snippets that look much more artistic than their source. Even better, it can process files even if you’re offline , which the team made possible by optimizing the algorithm. The bad news? Only the iOS version of the app supports videos for now, but the team is working on bringing the feature (along with offline processing) to Android. If you’ve ever used the app, you know that it can take some time to pass images through its filters, so you may be wondering how much longer videos take. It all depends on your device: it will take iPhone 7 up to 30 seconds, iPhone 6s a full minute and iPhone 6 two minutes to reveal your 15-second masterpiece. At the moment, videos only work with nine filters, but the developers plan to add more until all their filters can be applied to both photos and videos. While the app sounds more useful now, this still isn’t Prisma’s final form: the company promises to add support for GIFs “very soon, ” so you can give those reaction GIFs the artistic touch they deserve. Source: iTunes

Originally posted here:
Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

Terrific history of Benguiat, the ‘Stranger Things’ font

Typeroom looks back at ITC Benguiat , the font that so embodied its time that it’s now canonical for late 1970s to early 1980s. Turns out its designer and namesake Ed Benguiat was motivated by a potential big payoff: Inspired by Times New Roman and Bodoni, “he wanted to create a design that was pretty and readable in order to garner as much commission and licensing fees as possible. Back then, it was much harder to access different fonts so there was a larger incentive to have a typeface take off”. • How Ed Benguiat’s vintage font became the most hyped of the year (h/t Calpernia Addams )

More here:
Terrific history of Benguiat, the ‘Stranger Things’ font

‘Rogue’ Algorithm Blamed for Historic Crash of the British Pound

The British pound suffered a “flash crash” earlier this morning in which it plummeted six percent against the US dollar within a matter of minutes. All signs point to high frequency stock trading as the culprit—and possibly a single algorithm. Read more…

Continue reading here:
‘Rogue’ Algorithm Blamed for Historic Crash of the British Pound

Welcome to the machine—Yahoo mail scanning exposes another US spy tool

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock) Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody’s house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week’s Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps prove this intrusive robot scenario has already arrived in the digital world. Days ago, Reuters cited anonymous sources and reported that Yahoo covertly built a secret “custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming e-mails for specific information.” Yahoo, the report noted, “complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI.” Reuters then followed up, saying Yahoo acted at the behest of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Not to be outdone, The New York Times reported Yahoo used its system designed to scan for child pornography and spam to search for messages containing an undisclosed “signature.” The Times said a FISA judge found probable cause to believe that this digital signature “was uniquely used by a foreign power.” The scanning has ceased, the report noted, but neither of the news agencies said how long the search lasted and when it began. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Follow this link:
Welcome to the machine—Yahoo mail scanning exposes another US spy tool

Cops arrest hundreds of people allegedly involved in IRS phone scam

Enlarge (credit: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images News) Hundreds of people in Mumbai, India have been detained in relation to a massive telephone scam where fake callers “from the IRS” targeted Americans. In said calls, scammers tried to convince recipients that they were from the IRS in order to con victims into forking over thousands of dollars payable via prepaid credit cards. According to The Guardian , 200 Indian police officers raided nine locations across one of India’s largest cities. “Seventy workers have been formally arrested and around 630 others are being investigated,” Paramvir Singh, the police commissioner of Thane, told the British newspaper. “We expect that many more people will be arrested.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Cops arrest hundreds of people allegedly involved in IRS phone scam