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Emails Cast Unflattering Light On Internal Politics of Obamacare Website Rollo

An anonymous reader writes with this report from The Verge linking to and excerpting from a newly released report created for a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, including portions of eight “damning emails” that offer an unflattering look at the rollout of the Obamacare website. The Government Office of Accountability released a report earlier this week detailing the security flaws in the site, but a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released yesterday is even more damning. Titled, “Behind the Curtain of the HealthCare.gov Rollout, ” the report fingers the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the development of the site, and its parent Department of Health and Human Services. “Officials at CMS and HHS refused to admit to the public that the website was not on track to launch without significant functionality problems and substantial security risks, ” the report says. “There is also evidence that the Administration, to this day, is continuing its efforts to shield ongoing problems with the website from public view.” Writes the submitter: “The evidence includes emails that show Obamacare officials more interested in keeping their problems from leaking to the press than working to fix them. This is both both a coverup and incompetence.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Emails Cast Unflattering Light On Internal Politics of Obamacare Website Rollo

I Tried The New Oculus Rift, And It Blew Me Away All Over Again

I’ve tried practically every version of the Oculus Rift VR headset, from some of the original duct-taped prototypes through to the latest DK2 developer kit and the Samsung Gear VR. Nothing I’ve seen prepared me for the new Crescent Bay demo. I just tried one of the best games I’ve never played . I want more. Read more…

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I Tried The New Oculus Rift, And It Blew Me Away All Over Again

The Reality of the iPhone Line Is a Black Market Nightmare

This week, people camped outside Apple stores for days anticipating the iPhone 6. But those line-waiters weren’t all frenzied Apple fans high on the joy of a new smartphone: As filmmaker Casey Neistat portrays it , many of the line-sitters were buying the new iPhone to immediately resell it on the black market. Read more…

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The Reality of the iPhone Line Is a Black Market Nightmare

So This Is How You Move a Neighborhood of Houses Across San Francisco

San Francisco’s current tech-led boom has seen slick new housing high-rises pop up all across the grid, but Bay Area urban renewal in the 1970s had a very different look. Photographer Dave Glass is a native of the city’s Western Addition, and snapped these images of Victorians being driven around town like massive domestic trailers almost 30 years ago. Read more…

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So This Is How You Move a Neighborhood of Houses Across San Francisco

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right. The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder . In a statement at the time, the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700,000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” Judge Amos Mazzant wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

Google’s Doubleclick Ad Servers Exposed Millions of Computers To Malware

wabrandsma (2551008) writes with this excerpt from The Verge: Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google’s DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying “our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Doubleclick Ad Servers Exposed Millions of Computers To Malware

UK Engineers 3D Print Their Own Raspberry Pi Laptop

Is there anything a robotic system for the extrusion of plastic in to solid forms over time can’t do? We present to you today the Pi-Top, a Raspberry Pi-based laptop that is completely 3D printed and lasts for hours on a single charge. The kit, which will launch as a Kickstarter soon, offers a 13.3-inch screen and a little keyboard and trackpad combo for data entry. Viola! A little… Read More

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UK Engineers 3D Print Their Own Raspberry Pi Laptop

Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

The official Android Twitter app running on Mac OS. Ron Amadeo If you remember, about a week ago, Google gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps through the ” App Runtime for Chrome .” The release came with a lot of limitations—it only worked with certain apps and only worked on Chrome OS. But a developer by the name of ” Vladikoff ” has slowly been stripping away these limits. First he figured out how to load any app on Chrome OS, instead of just the four that are officially supported. Now he’s made an even bigger breakthrough and gotten Android apps to work on any desktop OS that Chrome runs on. You can now run Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The hack depends on App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), which is built using Native Client , a Google project that allows Chrome to run native code safely within a web browser. While ARC was only officially released as an extension on Chrome OS, Native Client extensions are meant to be cross-platform. The main barrier to entry is obtaining ARC Chrome Web Store, which flags desktop versions of Chrome as “incompatible.” Vladikoff made a custom version of ARC, called ARChon , that can be sideloaded simply by dragging the file onto Chrome. It should get Android apps up and running on any platform running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up. The hard part is getting Android apps that are compatible with it. ARC doesn’t run raw Android app packages (APKs)—they need to be converted into a Chrome extension—but Vladikoff has a tool called ” chromeos-apk ” that will take care of that, too. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hack runs Android apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers

TrueCrypt Gets a New Life, New Name

storagedude writes: Amid ongoing security concerns, the popular open source encryption program TrueCrypt may have found new life under a new name. Under the terms of the TrueCrypt license — which was a homemade open source license written by the authors themselves rather than a standard one — a forking of the code is allowed if references to TrueCrypt are removed from the code and the resulting application is not called TrueCrypt. Thus, CipherShed will be released under a standard open source license, with long-term ambitions to become a completely new product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

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