An anonymous reader writes “People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. ‘Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality, ‘ spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps
theodp writes “CNN reports that the U.S. government shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT Tuesday after lawmakers in the House and the Senate could not agree on a spending bill to fund the government. Federal employees who are considered essential will continue working. But employees deemed non-essential — close to 800, 000 — will be furloughed, and most of those are supposed to be out of their offices within four hours of the start of business Tuesday.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Facebook updated its Graph Search feature today to include posts and status updates. Now, you can find posts your friends have made about certain topics, from specific locations, or that you’ve commented on. Check out Facebook’s full blog post for more info, as well as our favorite clever uses for Graph Search . Read more… 
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Los Angeles Unified School District started issuing iPads to its students this school year, as part of a $30 million deal with Apple. Now Sam Sanders reports at NPR that less than a week after getting their iPads, high school students have found a way to bypass software blocks on the devices that limit what websites the students can use. The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, what the students are doing with them at all times and lets the district block certain sites, such as social media favorites like Facebook. ‘They were bound to fail, ‘ says Renee Hobbs, who’s been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. ‘There is a huge history in American education of being attracted to the new, shiny, hugely promising bauble and then watching the idea fizzle because teachers weren’t properly trained to use it and it just ended up in the closet.’ The rollout of the iPads might have to be delayed as officials reassess access policies. Right now, the program is still in Phase 1, with fewer than 15, 000 iPads distributed. ‘I’m guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices, ‘ says Steven Zipperman. ‘I want to prevent a “runaway train” scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.’ The incident has prompted questions about overall preparations for the $1-billion tablet initiative.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Apple has released iOS 7.0.2, a small update addressing the security flaw that enabled users to bypass the lockscreen. Read more here . Read more…