A former Jet2 IT contractor with a grudge has been jailed for a cyber-attack on the company. From a report: Scott Burns, 27, of Queen Street in Morley, Leeds, was jailed for 10 months for his actions, which cost the company $214,000. The attack shut down Jet2's computer network for 12 hours in January 2018. Burns wanted revenge for the firm's treatment of him following an incident at a 2017 "Benidorm roadshow," Leeds Crown Court heard. Details about happened at the event in Benidorm were not outlined in court. The court heard only fast-thinking by one employee at the Leeds-based airline stopped Burns' actions being a "complete disaster" for Jet2. Burns pleaded guilty to eight counts under the Computer Misuse Act at a previous hearing. Judge Andrew Stubbs QC told Burns: "You intended to cause as much damage to Jet2's computer system as you could. "This went far beyond being mischievous. This was a revenge attack for a perceived slight you had suffered."

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As part of the XML-RPC site work, I want to statically rebuild the site from the Frontier object database containing all the content as a Manila site. I have copies of manila.root and xmlRpc.root. I have gotten it to build a static site that appears ready to be built by the Frontier website framework. Now if I can only remember how to build one of those.

I'm looking at the docs, and for the life of me I can't find a simple explanation of how to actually build a site, which is odd because that's what the docs purport to be about. Back then we didn't do a Hello World for this problem, that helps to put the stuff you need to know first up front.

Update: The Web menu is tantalizing but it doesn't appear to have a command that builds a whole site.

Armed with walkie talkies, wooden staves, the Indigenous Guard has stood up to violence in their territories for decades

FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades, huge budgets, and an eSports ecosystem. But what about its core, the shooting mechanics? How have we progressed on that front? Why do some guns feel like it's the real thing, while others feel like toys?

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Opposition groups vow not to take part in February's vote amid a dispute over the country's electoral roll.

Measures to de-escalate the war in the east of Ukraine could be seen before the end of the year.

Zack Whittaker, writing for TechCrunch: Last week, Spotify sent a number of USB drives to reporters with a note: "Play me." It's not uncommon for reporters to receive USB drives in the post. Companies distribute USB drives all the time, including at tech conferences, often containing promotional materials or large files, such as videos that would otherwise be difficult to get into as many hands as possible. But anyone with basic security training under their hat will know to never plug in a USB drive without taking some precautions first. Concerned but undeterred, we safely examined the contents of the drive using a disposable version of Ubuntu Linux (using a live CD) on a spare computer. We examined the drive and found it was benign. On the drive was a single audio file. "This is Alex Goldman, and you've just been hacked," the file played. The drive was just a promotion for a new Spotify podcast. Because of course it was. Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of Rendition Infosec, called the move "amazingly tone deaf" to encourage reporters into plugging in the drives to their computers.

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Pakistan celebrate their first Test victory on home soil, since the return of cricket's longest format to the country earlier this month.

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission intended to achieve all this will require three launches from Earth over the course of a decade, and five separate machines. From a report: The organisations involved -- America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, and the European Space Agency, ESA -- are each responsible for specific craft in the chain of what David Parker, ESA's head of human and robotic exploration, calls "the most ambitious robotic pass-the-parcel you can think of." On December 11th, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, space scientists and astrobiologists outlined the details of the MSR. The project will begin with the launch, next July, of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. This will carry to the planet a successor to Curiosity, a rover that has been crawling productively over the Martian surface since 2012. The Mars 2020 rover, yet to be named, will land in a 45km-wide crater called Jezero, in February 2021. Its main purpose is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. Around 3.5bn years ago, Jezero contained a lake. Mars 2020 will drill for samples from the clay and carbonate minerals now exposed on the surface of what used to be a river delta flowing into this lake. When the rover finds something that its masters want to bring back to Earth, it will hermetically seal a few tens of grams of the material in question into a 6cm-long titanium test tube, and then drop the tube on the ground. It can deal in this way with around 30 samples as it travels to different parts of the crater. Once it has dropped a tube it will broadcast that tube's location to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite already on station that is armed with a high-magnification camera. This camera will take photographs of the tube and its surroundings, so that the tube can be found at a later date. The tubes are intended to be able to survive for more than 50 years on the surface of Mars, at temperatures less than 20C. The next phase of the project will begin in 2028, when a "fetch rover" designed and built by ESA will be sent to Mars to find and collect the tubes.

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Tehran has been reactivating parts of its nuclear programme in protest at the US withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution. "I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."

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Amid social upheaval, the reformist movement has proven once again it cannot offer a genuine democratic alternative.

Saudi court verdict over 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is 'anything but justice', says UN rapporteur.

The US-made mess in Afghanistan has much to do with its failed policies and shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude.

Americans searching for last-minute Christmas gifts on Amazon.com will get lots of results that include "Amazon's Choice" products. Many shoppers will assume that is a dependable stamp of approval. It isn't. From a report: Amazon attaches the badge to countless legitimate listings, but also to products regulators have raised safety concerns about, that make false claims or whose listings appear to have been manipulated by sellers to get the endorsement. Amazon sometimes gives the badge to items that violate its own policies. One is the energy supplement Redline Microburst, which calls itself a "fat burner" and which last week carried an Amazon's Choice designation, even though Amazon rules explicitly prohibited sales of Redline-brand products. Amazon has awarded the badges in recent months to a sexual-enhancement drink the Food and Drug Administration said contained Viagra, which is a prescription-only medication, and to five cellphone chargers claiming Apple certification that weren't certified brands. Amazon discloses little about the mechanics behind its Choice badge. Algorithms make most of the decisions, some former Amazon executives said. An Amazon executive in a September letter to U.S. senators said it uses "tools, including algorithms."

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