"American luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group has just disclosed a major data breach impacting approximately 4.6 million customers," reports Ars Technica. "The breach occurred sometime in May 2020 after 'an unauthorized party' obtained the personal information of some Neiman Marcus customers from their online accounts." Neiman Marcus is working with law enforcement agencies and has selected cybersecurity company Mandiant to assist with the investigation. Thursday, Neiman Marcus disclosed that its 2020 data breach impacted about 4.6 million customers with Neiman Marcus online accounts. The personal information of these customers was potentially compromised during the incident. The bits of information include: - Names, addresses, contact information - Usernames and passwords of Neiman Marcus online accounts - Payment card numbers and expiration dates (although no CVV numbers) - Neiman Marcus virtual gift card numbers (without PINs) - Security questions of Neiman Marcus online accounts "Although the data breach occurred over a year ago, Neiman Marcus states it became aware of the incident this September."

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"Like a half-filled bag of salty snacks, there simply aren't enough semiconductor chips to go around these days," writes CNET. "At General Motors, the crisis struck one of its biggest cash cows as Cadillac confirmed too few chips led it to scrap the Super Cruise [hands-free highway driving] feature from its flagship Escalade SUV." Slashdot reader McGruber writes: A Cadillac spokesperson said "Super Cruise is an important feature for the Cadillac Escalade program. Although it's temporarily unavailable at the start of regular production due to the industry-wide shortage of semiconductors, we're confident in our team's ability to find creative solutions to mitigate the supply chain situation and resume offering the feature for our customers as soon as possible." CNET adds that in addition, "Essentially, Super Cruise is unavailable across GM's entire lineup of cars."

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An anonymous reader writes: This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually). Torvalds took the stage for the event's traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.... And the theme of community seemed to keep coming up — notably about what that community has ultimately taught Linus Torvalds. (For example, while Torvalds said he'd originally planned on naming the operating system Freax, "I am eternally grateful for two other people for having more taste than I did.") But even then Linux was a project that "I probably would've left behind," Torvalds remembered, "if it was only up to me." Torvalds credits the larger community for its interest (and patches) "that just kept the motivation going. And here we are 30 years later, and it's still what keeps the motivation going. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's been done for 29 of those 30 years, and every single feature ever since has been about things that other people needed or wanted or were interested in." Torvalds also says "I'm very proud of the fact that there's actually a fair number of people still involved with the kernel that came in in 1991 — I mean, literally 30 years ago.... I think that's a testament to how good the community, on the whole, has been, and how much fun it's been." And Torvalds says you can see that sense of fun in discussions about writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. "From a technical angle, does that make sense?" Torvalds asked. "Who knows. That's not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it.... "Probably next year, we'll start seeing some first intrepid modules being written in Rust, and maybe being integrated in the mainline kernel." "I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..." Yet Torvalds also saw Hohndel's analogy that it can be like juggling chainsaws. As a long-time watcher of C, Torvalds knows that C's subtle type interactions "are not always logical" and "are pitfalls for pretty much anybody. And they're easy to overlook, and in the kernel that's not always a good thing." Torvalds called Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution"

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Last month U.S. President Biden issued "a mandate that all companies with more than 100 workers require vaccination or weekly testing," remembers the New York Times, and "also moved to mandate shots for health care workers, federal contractors and a vast majority of federal workers, who could face disciplinary measures if they refuse." So what happened next? Until now, the biggest unknown about mandating COVID-19 vaccines in workplaces has been whether such requirements would lead to compliance or to significant departures by workers unwilling to get shots — at a time when many places were already facing staffing shortages. So far, a number of early mandates show few indications of large-scale resistance. "Mandates are working," said John Swartzberg, a physician and professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you define 'working' by the percentage of people getting vaccinated and not leaving their jobs in droves." Unlike other incentives — "prizes, perks, doughnuts, beer, we've seen just about everything offered to get people vaccinated" — mandates are among the few levers that historically have been effective in increasing compliance, said Swartzberg, who has tracked national efforts to increase rates of inoculation... [T]he pushback has been less dramatic than initially feared. At Houston Methodist Hospital, which mandated vaccines this summer for 25,000 employees, for example, only about 0.6% of employees quit or were fired. Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is tracking employer mandates, said that, despite their propensity for backlash and litigation, mandates generally increase vaccine compliance because the knowledge that an order is coming has often been enough to prompt workers to seek inoculation before courts even can weigh in. Mandates are becoming more commonplace as several other states have imposed requirements for workers. In New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon and the District of Columbia, health care workers must get vaccinated to remain employed. The Times's article (original URL here) provides statistics from specific examples: "When Tyson Foods announced Aug. 3 that it would require coronavirus vaccines for all 120,000 of its U.S. employees, less than half of its workforce was inoculated. Nearly two months later, 91% of the company's U.S. workforce is fully vaccinated, said Dr. Claudia Coplein, Tyson's chief medical officer." "In New York, where some 650,000 employees at hospitals and nursing homes were to have received at least one vaccine dose by the start of this week, 92% were in compliance, state officials said. That was up significantly from a week ago, when 82% of the state's nursing home workers and at least 84% of its hospital workers had received at least one dose." "As California's requirement that all health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus took effect Thursday, major health systems reported that the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90% or higher."

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Netflix's co-CEO revealed a list Monday showing its top shows and movies of all-time, reports NBC News. The list revealed that the 19th-century drama Bridgerton "was its most watched TV series ever, with 82 million subscribers tuning in for at least two minutes in its first 28 days on the service..." French series "Lupin: Part 1" and season one of "The Witcher," a fantasy series starring Henry Cavill, tied for second on the list, with 76 million accounts. Among movies, the action film Extraction earned the No. 1 spot. The film about a captured CIA agent was watched by 99 million accounts in the first 28 days, Netflix said. Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic horror film, and the action-comedy Spenser Confidential were the second- and third-most popular films, according to the company. All the films and series on the list were Netflix originals. Using a different metric — which shows attracted the most hours of actual viewing time — Bridgerton still came in #1 for TV shows, followed by "Money Heist: Part 4" and "Stranger Things Season 3." And the top three movies (based on hours of viewing) were Bird Box, Extraction, and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

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ZDNet reports: Some of the world's largest tech giants — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce/Slack, Atlassian, SAP, and Cisco — have joined forces to establish the Trusted Cloud Principles in what they are claiming is their commitment to protecting the rights of their customers... Some of the specific principles that have been founded by the signatories include governments should seek data directly from enterprise customers first, rather than cloud providers, other than in "exceptional circumstances"; customers should have a right to notice when governments seek to access customer data directly from cloud service providers; and there should be a clear process for cloud providers to challenge government access requests for customers' data, including notifying relevant data protection authorities, to protect customers' interests. Also outlined in the principles is the point that governments should create mechanisms to raise and resolve conflicts with each other such that cloud service providers' legal compliance in one country does not amount to a violation of law in another; and governments should support cross-border data flows. At the same time, the cloud service providers acknowledge that under the principles they recognise international human rights law enshrines a right to privacy, and the importance of customer trust and customers' control and security of their data. The signatories also said they commit to supporting laws that allow governments to request data through a transparent process that abides by human right standards; international legal frameworks to resolve conflicting laws related to data access, privacy, and sovereignty; and improved rules and regulations at the national and international levels that protect the safety, privacy, and security of cloud customers and their ownership of data... The Trusted Cloud Principles come days after a separate data cloud framework was stood up between Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and other major tech giants, plus the EDM Council, a cross-industry trade association for data management and analytics. Under the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework there are six components, 14 capabilities, and 37 sub-capabilities that sets out cloud data management capabilities, standards, and best practices for cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid-cloud implementations while also incorporating automated key controls for protecting sensitive data.

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What it feels like when you're sure you've found the bug that's been kicking your ass, and it turns out you actually did.

Ministers meeting in Milan hear calls for sweeping carbon cuts ahead of the COP26 climate summit.

The American media company Ozy "boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos," remembers the New York Times, calling it "a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif." Ozy was founded in 2013 with seed funding from Laurene Powell Jobs, followed by further investments that by 2020 were over $83 million (according to the data service PitchBook). But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said. After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy. Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July. Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts. The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website. Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman.... The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.

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"Days before Germany's federal elections, Facebook took what it called an unprecedented step: the removal of a series of accounts that worked together to spread COVID-19 misinformation and encourage violent responses to COVID restrictions," reports the Associated Press. The crackdown, announced Sept. 16, was the first use of Facebook's new "coordinated social harm" policy aimed at stopping not state-sponsored disinformation campaigns but otherwise typical users who have mounted an increasingly sophisticated effort to sidestep rules on hate speech or misinformation. In the case of the German network, the nearly 150 accounts, pages and groups were linked to the so-called Querdenken movement, a loose coalition that has protested lockdown measures in Germany and includes vaccine and mask opponents, conspiracy theorists and some far-right extremists. Facebook touted the move as an innovative response to potentially harmful content; far-right commenters condemned it as censorship. But a review of the content that was removed — as well as the many more Querdenken posts that are still available — reveals Facebook's action to be modest at best. At worst, critics say, it could have been a ploy to counter complaints that it doesn't do enough to stop harmful content. "This action appears rather to be motivated by Facebook's desire to demonstrate action to policymakers in the days before an election, not a comprehensive effort to serve the public," concluded researchers at Reset, a U.K.-based nonprofit that has criticized social media's role in democratic discourse.... Even with the new rule, a problem remains with the takedowns: they don't make it clear what harmful material remains up on Facebook, making it difficult to determine just what the social network is accomplishing. Case in point: the Querdenken network. Reset had already been monitoring the accounts removed by Facebook and issued a report that concluded only a small portion of content relating to Querdenken was taken down while many similar posts were allowed to stay up... Facebook initially declined to provide examples of the Querdenken content it removed, but ultimately released four posts to the Associated Press that weren't dissimilar to content still available on Facebook... Reset's analysis of comments removed by Facebook found that many were actually written by people trying to rebut Querdenken arguments, and did not include misinformation.

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The Links page on Scripting News should be more reliable and faster after the change I made in Radio3 today.

Every time I read about how Biden's popularity is dropping, I wonder if there's any reality to this. If it were really a troubling sign that means in the next election, Americans will do what Germans did in 1932, we'll vote into power a fascist party, and open the US to concentration camps and mass exterminations of our own citizens. You may think this is wild, but before Covid the idea of 700K Americans dying of a disease that was largely preventable, because of disinformation from the government itself, that would have seemed like a paranoid delusion. I recorded a podcast in March 2020 to preserve that perspective. If the US actually does vote Repubs into power, we deserve what we get.

Here's the big problem with Ted Lasso season 2. You have to like at least one character in a sitcom like Ted Lasso. That was the charm of season one, the star, the person the show is named after, was very likeable, and so were almost all of the others. Nice people, you cheer for them. This season you have to brace yourself because at any moment the formerly likeable Ted Lasso is going to do something supremely assholelike. I'm not joking. Come on. Anyway it's just like Apple to switch the user interface radically without any warning, just ask Gruber about where they moved the freaking tabs in the new version of Safari. It's conceivable that a character could reveal a very well hidden dark side and pull it off, but it's not very common and they totally don't pull it off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A London secondary school is trying to stop its pupils from using "basically" at the beginning of sentences and deploying phrases such as "oh my days" in a crackdown on "fillers" and "slang" in the classroom. Ark All Saints academy has produced lists of "banned" language which includes "he cut his eyes at me", which the Collins dictionary says originates in the Caribbean and means to look rudely at a person and then turn away sharply while closing one's eyes dismissively. Neither should they use "that's long," which can mean something that is boring or tedious, or "that's a neck" which indicates a comment or action is stupid. "Bare," "wow," "cuss" and "oh my God" are also out. The list -- which is intended to steer the language used in formal learning situations and exams rather than in the playground -- has drawn criticism from linguists who described it as "crude and shortsighted ... a disservice and discredit to young people." Teachers say it guides pupils to use language that fits more formal situations and helps them succeed. The school said the specific words and phrases on the list were selected because they were "showing up a lot in pupils' work" and it stressed the importance of pupils expressing themselves "clearly and accurately." Expressions that must not be used at the beginning of sentences include: "ermmm," "because," "no," "like," "say," "you see," "you know," and "basically." "The development of reading and speaking skills is a central part of what drives our school to help our students learn effectively and fulfil their potential in academic and non-academic ways," said Lucy Frame, the principal at the school in Camberwell, south-east London. "None of the words or phrases listed are banned from general use in our school or when our students are interacting socially. But this list is used in some formal learning settings to help students understand the importance of expressing themselves clearly and accurately, not least through written language in examinations." The intervention may reflect a widening gap between language that is accepted by examiners and that used day-to-day by pupils in some areas of the UK. External examiners have noted pupils nationwide using "unnecessarily rude and strident vocabulary" in weaker answers. Bridging the gap between what is normal language for pupils and what is acceptable for exams is a challenge for teachers. A 2019 survey of 2,100 tutors found that "slanglish" was the most common reason for English GCSE failures. Yet, as a subject of study, "code-switching/style-shifting, youth slang ... and use of accent and dialect" is increasingly of interest to English language A-level students, according to the AQA exam board. [...] Some fear such moves could alienate some pupils. Dr Marcello Giovanelli, a senior lecturer in English language and literature at Aston University, said: "Slang has always been at the forefront of linguistic innovation." He described "he cut his eyes at me" as a "wonderfully creative example" and said "dismissing students' home or own use of language may have negative effects on identity and confidence." Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London and the director of the Slang and New Language Archive, said: "It shouldn't be about good or bad language, it should be about appropriate language for the context." "You don't want to make them feel they have to reject the cultural aspects of their own language," said Dr Natalie Sharpling, who teaches applied linguistics at Warwick University. "We should celebrate the different ways language is being used and concentrate on the content of what is being said." Sharpling said she had observed an increasing trend in schools to police language and said "it would be a shame if it becomes a case of if you want to be successful, this is the way you have to speak."

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I'm watching Ted Lasso just to see how bad a TV show can be. Best line so far: "A sad white person is still a white person." Try changing that to black and see if it gets through the censors. Also a reporter that gives up his sources shouldn't be a reporter.