Tag: california

Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Noah Coffey Federal authorities have arrested five more men accused of taking part in a 21st-century bank heist that siphoned a whopping $45 million out of ATMs around the world in a matter of hours. Prosecutors said the men charged on Monday were members of the New York-based cell of a global operation and contributed to the $45 million theft by illegally withdrawing $2.8 million from 140 different ATMs in that city. The arrests came after the defendants sent $800,000 in cash proceeds in a suitcase transported by bus to a syndicate kingpin located in Florida, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta E. Lynch said . Photos seized from one defendant’s iPhone showed huge amounts of cash piled on a hotel bed and being stuffed into luggage, she said. The heists took place during two dates in December 2012 and targeted payment cards issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman respectively. Prosecutors dubbed the heists “unlimited” operations because they systematically removed the withdrawal limits normally placed on debit card accounts. These restrictions work as a safety mechanism that caps the amount of loss that banks normally face when something goes wrong. The operation removed the limits by hacking into two companies that processed online payments for the two targeted banks, prosecutors alleged in earlier indictments. Prosecutors didn’t identify the payment processors except to say that one was in India and the other was in the United States. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Feds arrest ATM thieves after discovering $800,000 stuffed in a suitcase

Folding Wings Will Let Boeing’s New 777x Squeeze Into Small Airports

Commercial planes have gotten bigger and bigger over the past few decades, but the size of the gate at most airports have stayed the same. To circumvent this little infrastructural disconnect, Boeing’s future 777x jet will have a massive wingspan that folds up upon landing. Read more…        

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Folding Wings Will Let Boeing’s New 777x Squeeze Into Small Airports

Qualcomm’s Toq wants to be your platform-agnostic color smartwatch

Qualcomm Qualcomm became a surprise entrant in the wearable computing race when it announced its Toq smartwatch. Designed as a showcase for some of Qualcomm’s latest technology, the $349.99 Toq will go on sale on December 2nd through its own portal. From a function perspective, Toq follows somewhat worn paths with notifications sent from your phone, music playback controls, and additional data pushed from an on-phone app. Where Toq differs is less in interactions than hardware features. The display Qualcomm chose is its own Mirasol MEMS-based display. In effect, Mirasol is like a mash-up of E Ink and LCD displays, providing a low-power, static color image where appropriate, with video and animation capabilities that exceed those of traditional E Ink displays. Charging your Toq occurs through Qualcomm’s own WiPower LE wireless charging protocol, and the included charger serves as a case as well. Most smartwatches connect primarily through Bluetooth LE; Qualcomm’s Toq also includes access to its open source AllJoyn protocol, which offers a platform-agnostic approach to device-to-device communications. AllJoyn-enabled devices and software can interact with your Toq over WiFi-Direct or Bluetooth. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Qualcomm’s Toq wants to be your platform-agnostic color smartwatch

Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B

Lucas123 writes “Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17, 000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google’s renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500, 000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B

California shuts down 10 “fraudulent” health care websites

This is the real McCoy. Covered California In a move rarely seen by state authorities, California has shut down 10 domain names that the Golden State claims were fraudulent imitations of Covered California, the state’s own version of the Affordable Care Act. On Thursday, the state’s attorney general announced that it had forced 10 domain names to either redirect to the bona fide Covered California website, or to remove their sites entirely. California also sent cease and desist letters to the operators of those sites. As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, wrote in a statement : Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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California shuts down 10 “fraudulent” health care websites

Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use

Moyan Brenn A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning was “fair use.” In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don’t break copyright, and it doesn’t need the authors’ permission to engage in the scanning and display of short bits of books. On the fair use factor that’s often the most important—whether or not the fair use of a work hurts the market for the original work—US District Judge Denny Chin seemed to find the plaintiffs’ ideas both nonsensical and ignorant of the limits on the Google Books software: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use

Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

After three Jelly Bean releases in a row, Google has unleashed a major revision to the world’s most widely used operating system. With the  Nexus 5  comes Android 4.4 “KitKat.” KitKat brings a ton of enhancements: support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and a whole pile of UI refinements. The lower memory usage is particularly important because Google hopes this is the feature that will finally kill Gingerbread and other older versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich raised the system requirements for Android quite a bit, and to this day you still see lower-end phones shipping with Gingerbread because of the lower barrier to entry. Unfortunately, the only device that currently runs KitKat is the Nexus 5, which has a whopping 2GB of RAM, so there isn’t much memory testing that we can do right now. We’ll have to wait for actual low-memory hardware running KitKat to evaluate any of the low-memory requirement claims. We  can   take a look at just about everything else, though. We believe KitKat is the biggest Android release since Ice Cream Sandwich. Google has touched nearly every part of the OS in some way, so there’s a lot to cover. Read 47 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed

Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

MacRumors MacRumors user forums have been breached by hackers who may have acquired cryptographically protected passwords belonging to all 860,000 users, one of the top editors of the news website said Tuesday evening. “In situations like this, it’s best to assume that your MacRumors Forum username, e-mail address and (hashed) password is now known,” Editorial Director Arnold Kim wrote in a short advisory . He went on to advise users to change their passwords for their MacRumors accounts and any other website accounts that were protected by the same passcode. The MacRumors intrusion involved “a moderator account being logged into by the hacker who then was able to escalate their privileges with the goals of stealing user login credentials,” Kim said. The company is still investigating how the attacker managed to compromise the privileged account. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hack of MacRumors forums exposes password data for 860,000 users

How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Aryan Blaauw One Sunday late last month, administrators at Orlando, Florida-based TorGuard were in high spirits. They had just successfully rebuffed the latest in a series of increasingly powerful denial-of-service attacks designed to cripple their virtual private networking service. Despite torrents of junk traffic that reached peaks as high as 15Gbps, the admins had neutralized the offensive by locking down the TorGuard servers and then moving them behind the protective services of anti-DoS service CloudFlare. “This seemed to anger the attackers, however, because on Monday things got a bit more personal,” TorGuard administrator Ben Van Pelt told Ars. “Unable to spam, DDoS, hack, or social engineer us, they employed the tactics of the ‘4chan party van.’ Throughout the day our office received multiple unrequested deliveries from local pizza chains, Chinese food, and one large order of sushi. A handful of local electricians and plumbing services were also disappointed to be turned away. To my knowledge no fake calls have been placed to law enforcement yet, however nothing would surprise me at this point.” The two-month-long campaign of harassment and attacks, which Van Pelt suspects was carried out by a competing virtual private networking service, illustrates the lengths some people will go to goad their online adversaries. His experience provides a vivid account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a relentless stream of distributed denial-of-service attacks and ultimately what can be done to mitigate them. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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How one site beat back botnets, spammers and the “4chan party van”

Sweden Is Closing Many Prisons Due to Lack of Prisoners

rtoz writes “Sweden is taking steps to close many prisons due to lack of prisoners. This year alone, four prisons and a detention center got closed in Sweden. The percentage of the population in Sweden prison is significantly lower than in most other countries. … Though the Swedish Government is taking steps to close the prisons, the crime rate in Sweden has increased slightly. It seems they are planning to take steps for preventing crime rather than focusing on jailing people involved in criminal activities.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sweden Is Closing Many Prisons Due to Lack of Prisoners