An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A South Carolina man was sentenced this week to two years in federal prison for taking government-owned networking equipment and selling it on eBay. The man, Terry Shawn Petrill, 48, of Myrtle Beach, worked as the IT Security Director for Horry County in South Carolina, the Department of Justice said in a press release on Tuesday. According to court documents, "beginning on June 11, 2015, through August 23, 2018, Petrill ordered forty-one Cisco 3850 switches that were to be installed on the Horry County network." US authorities said that through the years, when the switches would arrive, Petrill would take custody of the devices and tell fellow IT staffers that he would handle the installation alone. However, investigators said that "Petrill did not install the switches on the network and instead sold them to third parties and kept the proceeds for himself." FBI agents who investigated the case said they tracked nine of the 41 missing Cisco switches to ads on eBay, while the location of the rest remains unknown. Nonetheless, this was enough to file charges against Petrill, which authorities arrested and indicted in November 2019. Besides prison time, Petrill was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $345,265.57 to the Horry County Government.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will use its plant in Brandenburg, Germany to demonstrate a radical overhaul of how its cars are built, as well as making electric car battery cells and battery packs. Musk also said he has plans for a "ravecave" on the roof of the new factory, which would make it a "real fun place to work." "I think a ravecave is culturally necessary," he adds. Reuters reports: Tesla plans to manufacture a new version of its Model Y crossover vehicle, and possibly even battery cells at the site. "It will be the first time that there will be a transformation in the core structural design of the vehicle. It's quite a big thing. Both manufacturing, engineering and design as well," Musk said in the video. Tesla wanted to help accelerate a transition to sustainable energy, not just build cars, Musk said. "The three elements needed for a sustainable energy future are sustainable energy generation, energy storage, and sustainable transport, electric cars." Musk's comments come after Tesla acquired a license that will enable it to trade electricity across western Europe and started surveying customers in Germany about potentially using Tesla electricity in their cars. "I think we will be building some batteries and cells and other things here. That will be good for stationary storage of wind and solar," Musk stated. Musk, who said he was pleased with the progress being made on the plant, told the bystanders that "Deutschland Rocks" and praised the availability of local engineering talent, saying that Tesla would need to make lots of hires. "We will start off with the factory but we will also do some original engineering and design work. It is going to be, actually to be totally frank, better than the one in the U.S."

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The Justice Department plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, after Attorney General William P. Barr overruled career lawyers who said they needed more time to build a strong case against one of the world's wealthiest, most formidable technology companies, The New York Times just reported, citing five people briefed on internal department conversations. From the report: Justice Department officials told lawyers involved in the antitrust inquiry into Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, to wrap up their work by the end of September, according to three of the people. Most of the 40-odd lawyers who had been working on the investigation opposed the deadline. Some said they would not sign the complaint, and several of them left the case this summer. Some argued this summer in a memo that ran hundreds of pages that they could bring a strong case but needed more time, according to people who described the document. Disagreement persisted among the team over how broad the complaint should be and what Google could do to resolve the problems the government uncovered. The lawyers viewed the deadline as arbitrary. While there were disagreements about tactics, career lawyers also expressed concerns that Mr. Barr wanted to announce the case in September to take credit for action against a powerful tech company under the Trump administration. But Mr. Barr felt that the department had moved too slowly and that the deadline was not unreasonable, according to a senior Justice Department official. A former telecom industry executive who argued an antitrust matter before the Supreme Court, Mr. Barr has shown a deep interest in the Google investigation. He has requested regular briefings on the department's case, taking thick binders of information about it on trips and vacations and returning with ideas and notes.

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Apple said on Thursday that it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that could reduce ad sales by Facebook and other companies targeting users on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The delay could benefit Facebook, which last week said the changes to the iOS 14 operating system would render one of its mobile advertising tools "so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it." Apple announced new privacy rules in June that were slated to take effect with the launch of its iOS 14 operating system this fall. Among them is a new requirement that advertisers who employ an Apple-provided tracking identifier, or other tools that have a similar function, must now show a pop-up notification asking for tracking permission. Facebook said last week it would quit using the tool that requires a prompt in its own apps but did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Apple said Thursday that developers will still have the option to use the prompt when iOS 14 arrives.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The smell of summer in Los Angeles, or any major city, is often tinged with asphalt. A freshly paved road or a new tar roof doesn't just wrinkle your nose, however: A new study suggests fresh asphalt is a significant, yet overlooked, source of air pollution. In fact, the material's contribution to one kind of particulate air pollution could rival or even exceed that of cars and trucks. "It's a super cool paper," says Allen Robinson, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved with the research. "Asphalt could be a big, important contributor" to air pollution, he says. Air quality has improved over the past several decades in California and many other parts of the United States, largely because of cleaner exhaust from vehicles and power plants. Despite that, air pollution still contributes to many health problems -- ranging from asthma to heart attacks. And many sources of air pollution continue to be a problem, from livestock emissions to volatile organic compounds from paints, cleaning products, and personal care products (especially those that contain fragrances, such as shampoo). Yet, when scientists looked at all the known sources of air pollution in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, they didn't add up. Some sources had not yet been identified. "Asphalt was something that jumped out to us," says Drew Gentner, an environmental engineer at Yale University who led the new study. The material, made from crude oil or similar substances, contains the kinds of semivolatile organic compounds that lead to some types of air pollution. There's also a lot of it. Gentner and colleagues gathered two types of fresh road asphalt and heated them in a laboratory furnace. They also tested new asphalt shingles and liquid asphalts used for roofing. They reasoned that new material should release more chemicals than older material, and they wanted to see how the emission rate changes as the fresh asphalt ages.

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Apple, Google, Cisco and Intel this week sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, challenging the agency's recent rule that it can refuse to adjudicate patent claims while litigation about them is pending in court. From a report: The companies say the rule hurts innovation and their legal rights, letting invalid patents stay on the books while lawsuits slowly wend their way through court. The rule, which was introduced by the USPTO in March and became final in May, deals with the agency's obligations around inter partes review (IPR) -- a sort of expert-court process for assessing whether patent claims are valid. USPTO says deferring to an ongoing court case is more efficient than setting up a parallel review internally. District courts are costly and have less expertise in patent law, Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler told Axios. Cisco owns 16,000 U.S. patents, but the agency is undermining its ability to invalidate unworthy ones, he said.

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Oy the White House thinks they're running a campaign. They're supposed to be running a country.

Monica Chin, reporting for The Verge: On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test -- it was his real grade. "He was like, I'm gonna have to get a 100 on all the rest of this to make up for this," said Simmons in a phone interview with The Verge. "He was totally dejected." At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn't have read his response in that time, Simmons knew -- her son was being graded by an algorithm. Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity's AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students' answers. And she decided to game it. Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords -- anything that seems relevant to the question. "The questions are things like... 'What was the advantage of Constantinople's location for the power of the Byzantine empire,'" Simmons says. "So you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in." "I wanted to game it because I felt like it was an easy way to get a good grade," Lazare told The Verge. He usually digs the keywords out of the article or video the question is based on. Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test. Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

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Sixteenth thousand academics urge EU leaders to increase investment over the next seven years.

Mature male elephants play a crucial role in passing on their knowledge to younger males, a study suggests.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said Apple must pay over 12,000 retail workers in California for the time spent waiting for compulsory bag searches at the end of their shifts. From the report: A unanimous three-judge panel reversed a judge who had tossed the case and ordered him to enter summary judgment for the plaintiffs, after the California Supreme Court in response to certified questions in the case said in February that time spent undergoing security checks is compensable under state law.

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More than a dozen internet service providers (ISPs) across Europe have reported DDoS attacks that targeted their DNS infrastructure. From a report: The list of ISPs that suffered attacks over the past week includes Belgium's EDP, France's Bouygues Telecom, FDN, K-net, SFR, and the Netherlands' Caiway, Delta, FreedomNet, Online.nl, Signet, and Tweak.nl. Attacks lasted no longer than a day and were all eventually mitigated, but ISP services were down while the DDoS was active. NBIP, a non-profit founded by Dutch ISPs to collectively fight DDoS attacks and government wiretapping attempts, provided ZDNet with additional insights into the past week's incidents. "Multiple attacks were aimed towards routers and DNS infrastructure of Benelux based ISPs," a spokesperson said. "Most of [the attacks] were DNS amplification and LDAP-type of attacks." "Some of the attacks took longer than 4 hours and hit close to 300Gbit/s in volume," NBIB said. The DDoS attacks against European ISPs all took place starting with August 28, a day after ZDNet exposed a criminal gang engaging in DDoS extortion against financial institutions across the world, with victims like MoneyGram, YesBank India, Worldpay, PayPal, Braintree, and Venmo.

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On Thursday morning a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying SpaceX's 12th batch of Starlink Internet satellites. The mission went nominally, with the first stage making a safe landing several minutes after the launch, and the full stack of satellites deploying shortly thereafter. From a report: Prior to launch, webcast commentator Kate Tice, a senior program reliability engineer at SpaceX, offered several details about development of the space-based Starlink Internet service. "We are well into our first phase of testing of our private beta program, with plans to roll out a public beta later this year," Tice said. For several months, SpaceX has been collecting names and addresses for people interested in participating in the public beta here. Tice also revealed the first official public information about internal tests, saying that SpaceX employees have been using Starlink terminals, collecting latency statistics, and performing standard speed tests of the system. "Initial results have been good," she said. These tests reveal "super-low latency," and download speeds greater than 100 megabits per second. This, she noted, would provide enough bandwidth to play the fastest online games and stream multiple HD movies at once.

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Apple is investing in the construction of two of the world's largest onshore wind turbines, advancing its efforts to become entirely carbon neutral by 2030. From a report: The power produced by the turbines, located in Denmark, will support Apple's data center in Viborg, the company said in a blog post Thursday. the Viborg center backs Apple's key products, including the App Store, Apple Music, iMessage and Siri. Apple said in July that it extended its goal to become entirely carbon neutral by 2030 to its manufacturing and supply chain. Apple on Thursday said that Varta, a German-based supplier, committed to running its Apple production with 100% renewable power. So far, 72 manufacturing partners have committed to completely renewable energy for Apple production, it added.

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Stop and watch this CNN story about evictions in Houston. They call it the "downward spiral of the COVID economy." We are going to pay for this. The sooner we start the easier it's going to be on everyone, esp the poor families, but really everyone. We're on a downward spiral. The stories are going to get worse.