An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets -- and more specifically what we deposit into them. "We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool," says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. "We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool." As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyze waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. "The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced," she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. "All other aspects of your life -- your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell -- have enhanced capabilities."

Smart toilet innovators believe the loo could become the ultimate health monitoring tool. Grego believes her product -- which analyses and tracks stool samples and sends the data to an app -- will provide "information related to cancer and many chronic diseases." For general consumers, it will provide peace of mind, she says, by establishing "a healthy baseline": "Having technology that tracks what is normal for an individual could provide an early warning that a checkup is needed." For people with specific conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, the device could provide helpful monitoring for doctors. "It's very difficult to know when to escalate or de-escalate treatment," she says. "Stool-based biomarkers can provide that information." At some point, she thinks, a smart toilet could make lifestyle suggestions -- it could tell you to eat more fibre or certain nutrients, for instance, or work out what kind of food triggered an uncomfortable gastric episode. "The science of nutrition is really moving in the direction of personalized nutrition," says Grego. "Our technology will be an enabler of this, because you have information of what you eat, but we can make seamless the obtaining of information of what comes out." Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine have been working on technology that can analyze feces (including "stool dropping time") and track the velocity and color of urine, as well as test it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the researchers have partnered with Izen, a Korean toilet manufacturer that's developed a scanner that can recognize the physical characteristics of whoever is sitting on the toilet -- or, in the words of the researchers, "the distinctive features of their anoderm" (the skin of the anal canal). While many people are ready for the smart toilet era, Stanford's study of user acceptance found that the "least favored module is analprint."

The Guardian article continues: Is all this -- your analprint out in the world, the makeup of your bowel movements analyzed -- a privacy breach too far? "Can it be kept secure?" asks Eerke Boiten, a professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University in Leicester. [...] Many people "wouldn't, for very good reasons, like cameras pointing up their bottoms," says Phil Booth, the coordinator of MedConfidential, which campaigns for the confidentiality of medical records. That said, under the guidance of a medical professional, "there are not necessarily inherent privacy risks" in using a smart toilet as a medical device, he says. However, it might get interesting if the data created by general consumer use was owned by a company: "You may trust that particular company, but every company is pretty much buyable by Google or Facebook or Amazon. Then, what I thought was something for my own health monitoring has become fodder to business models I really know nothing about."

Where does it end? Could the police or others involved in surveillance track you by analprint, via the public and home smart lavatories you visit? Might you be asked to provide a print at a police station? [...] "Once you start to measure something that is of the body, the privacy line is stepped over," says Booth. "If you don't measure what's going on with someone's bowel movements, the bowel movement is private." This is an alarming thought -- but, says Booth with a laugh, it is not as though governments will mandate smart toilets. He says there will always be people -- those into the "quantified self" movement -- who are happy to measure and track themselves. If smart loos are considered clinical devices collecting medical data, "then it's a straight medical breach risk -- not special to toilets, but because you've turned the toilet into a medical data-generating experience. Are they managing those risks correctly?"

The chief financial officer of Chinese tech firm Huawei will be released and allowed to return to China after reaching an agreement with the U.S. government on fraud charges, prosecutors said Friday in a Brooklyn federal court. CNBC reports: A U.S. district judge accepted the deferred prosecution agreement, which will last until Dec. 1, 2022. Under the deal, the executive, Meng Wanzhou, affirmed the accuracy of a statement of facts and agreed not to commit other crimes, or risk prosecution. Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, was arrested in Canada in December 2018. The U.S. sought to extradite her on bank and wire fraud charges, claiming she was misled a financial institution to violate American sanctions on Iran. The U.S. said Friday it plans to withdraw its extradition request.

Meng pleaded not guilty to the charges on Friday. As part of the agreement, however, she took "responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution," acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Nicole Boeckmann said in a statement. According to Boeckmann, Meng admitted to making "multiple material misrepresentations" while CFO of Huawei about the company's business in Iran, in conversations with the senior executive of a financial institution. The government claimed she did this to continue Huawei's business relationship with the firm. Boeckmann said the admission confirms the core allegations against Meng.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the past 18 months, as the judicial system has increasingly used electronic monitoring instead of prisons to monitor inmates through the coronavirus pandemic, newly released data confirm what activists and advocates have long argued: Ankle monitors are onerous, and they often subject wearers to vague rules, like avoiding people of "disreputable character." The ankle monitoring business, the research found, is also dominated by four profit-seeking companies, and it ultimately could drive more people back to prison.

The new, comprehensive collection of hundreds of electronic monitoring-related rules, policies and contracts, obtained through public records requests across 44 states, demonstrates that four companies that make millions of dollars a year account for 64 percent of the contracts examined in the study. The companies -- Attenti, BI Inc., Satellite Tracking of People and Sentinel Offender Services LLC, according to the report -- also keep location data indefinitely, even after monitoring is completed, which is within the law. Governments also often require family members or employers to act as agents of the government and report potential violations, putting them in an awkward position in which they must be both supportive and supervisory.

Crucially, wearers must pay both one-time and ongoing fees for the monitors, which can be $25 to over $8,000 a year. The report argues that such costs "undermine financial security when it is needed most." By comparison, the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons said in 2018 that it costs just under $100 per day to incarcerate a federal inmate, or over $36,000 a year. Put another way, wearers in Los Angeles and Sacramento counties in California, which impose the highest annual costs, according to the new findings, pay $22 a day -- still considerably less than what taxpayers would otherwise pay.

The United Kingdom is the latest country to rule that an artificial intelligence can't be legally credited as an inventor. Engadget reports: Per the BBC, the UK Court of Appeal recently ruled against Dr. Stephen Thaler in a case involving the country's Intellectual Property Office. In 2018, Thaler filed two patent applications in which he didn't list himself as the creator of the inventions mentioned in the documents. Instead, he put down his AI DABUS and said the patent should go to him "by ownership of the creativity machine."

The Intellectual Property Office told Thaler he had to list a real person on the application. When he didn't do that, the agency decided he had withdrawn from the process. Thaler took the case to the UK's High Court. The body ruled against him, leading to the eventual appeal. "Only a person can have rights. A machine cannot," Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing of the Appeal Court wrote in her judgment. "A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person." In August, an Australian Court ruled that an AI can be recognized as an inventor in a patent submission. However, a U.S. District Judge ruled earlier this month that a computer using AI can't be listed as an inventor on patents because only a human can be an inventor under U.S. law.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill Wednesday that would block Amazon and other companies from punishing warehouse workers who fail to meet certain performance metrics for taking rest or meal breaks. The California Senate approved the measure earlier this month. The law allows warehouse workers to challenge performance goals that many say discourage them from taking bathroom breaks or other rest breaks throughout the work day. The bill was written in response to high rates of reported injuries at Amazon warehouses where performance quotas are algorithmically enforced.

The law does not explicitly name Amazon in its text, but both Republican and Democratic lawmakers recognize that the e-commerce giant would be greatly affected by the enactment of the legislation. Over the last few years, Amazon has come under intense criticism for its performance quotas with several outlets reporting that workers have peed in bottles as a means of meeting their warehouse fulfillment goals and maintaining their jobs. The law will also force companies like Amazon to make these performance algorithms more transparent, disclosing quotas to both workers and regulators.

A collection containing data about more than 700 million users, believed to have been scraped from LinkedIn, was leaked online this week after hackers previously tried to sell it earlier this year in June. From a report: The collection, obtained by The Record from a source, is currently being shared in private Telegram channels in the form of a torrent file containing approximately 187 GB of archived data. The Record analyzed files from this collection and found the data to be authentic, with data points such as: LinkedIn profile names, LinkedIn ID, LinkedIn profile URL, location information (town, city, country), and email addresses. While the vast majority of the data points contained in the leak are already public information and pose no threat to LinkedIn users, the leak also contains email addresses that are not normally viewable to the public on the official LinkedIn site.

A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group unanimously voted Thursday to recommend distributing Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 booster shots to older Americans and nursing home residents, clearing the way for the agency to give the final OK as early as this evening. CNBC reports: The agency's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices specifically endorsed giving third Pfizer shots to people 65 and older in the first of four votes. The panel will also vote on whether to recommend the shots for adults with medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease and those who are more frequently exposed to the virus -- possibly including people in nursing homes and prisons, teachers, front-line health employees and other essential workers. The elderly were among the first groups to get the initial shots in December and January.

The vote is seen as mostly a win for President Joe Biden, whose administration has said it wants to give booster shots to all eligible Americans 16 and older as early as this week. While the CDC panel's recommendation doesn't give the Biden administration everything it wanted, boosters will still be on the way for millions of Americans. The endorsement comes a day after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to administer third Pfizer shots to many Americans six months after they complete their first two doses. While the CDC's panel's recommendation isn't binding, Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is expected to accept the panel's endorsement shortly.

A stalkerware company that's designed to let customers spy on their spouses's, children's, or employees' devices is exposing victims' data, allowing anyone on the internet to see screenshots of phones simply by visiting a specific URL. From a report: The news highlights the continuing lax security practices that many stalkerware companies use; not only do these companies sometimes market their tools specifically for illegal surveillance, but the targets are re-victimized by these breaches. In recent years the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has acted against stalkerware companies for exposing victim data. The stalkerware company, called pcTattleTale, offers the malware for Windows computers and Android phones. "Discover their secret online lives right from your phone or computer," a Facebook post from pcTattleTale reads. "pcTattletale is a popular keylogger and montoring [sic] app that you can use to see what you [sic] kids, spouse, or employees are doing online." Security researcher Jo Coscia showed Motherboard that pcTattleTale uploads victim data to an AWS server that requires no authentication to view specific images.

ytene writes: As reported by CNBC, the US Court of Federal Claims has released a redacted version of the lawsuit, filed by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, in a complaint against NASA. Earlier this year, the agency had awarded a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX for the design and development of a lunar lander.

Although NASA has a long history of awarding contracts to promote innovation and competition, the Blue Origin suit seemed a little unusual given the company's current lack of launch experience (they have completed numerous successful tests, including a high-altitude "edge of space" flight for Bezos, his brother and guests, but have yet to place any vehicle in orbit, let alone establish a credible, commercial space flight presence).

As was also reported by CNBC, the Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation in to the initial Blue Origin complaint, after NASA suspended the process, but found no evidence that NASA awarded the contract incorrectly and denied the initial Blue Origin complaint.

TikTok users are watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress to help them determine which stocks to invest in. NPR reports: Among a certain community of individual investors on TikTok, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's stock trading disclosures are a treasure trove. "Shouts out to Nancy Pelosi, the stock market's biggest whale," said user 'ceowatchlist.' Another said, "I've come to the conclusion that Nancy Pelosi is a psychic," while adding that she is the "queen of investing." "She knew," declared Chris Josephs, analyzing a particular trade in Pelosi's financial disclosures. "And you would have known if you had followed her portfolio." Last year, Josephs noticed that the trades, actually made by Pelosi's investor husband and merely disclosed by the speaker, were performing well.

Josephs is the co-founder of a company called Iris, which shows other people's stock trades. In the past year and a half, he has been taking advantage of a law called the Stock Act, which requires lawmakers to disclose stock trades and those of their spouses within 45 days. Now on Josephs' social investing platform, you can get a push notification every time Pelosi's stock trading disclosures are released. He is personally investing when he sees which stocks are picked: "I'm at the point where if you can't beat them, join them," Josephs told NPR, adding that if he sees trades on her disclosures, "I typically do buy... the next one she does, I'm going to buy." The report notes that Senate and House members have already filed more than 4,000 financial trading disclosures this year, with at least $315 million of stocks and bonds bought or sold. "That's according to Tim Carambat, who in 2020 created and now maintains two public databases of lawmaker financial transactions -- House Stock Watcher and Senate Stock Watcher," reports NPR. "He says there is a significant following for his work," reports NPR.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Federal Reserve is pushing ahead with its study into whether to implement its own digital currency and will be releasing a paper on the issue shortly, Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday. No decision has been made on the matter yet, he added, and said the Fed does not feel pressured to do something quickly as other nations move forward with their own projects. "I think it's important that we get to a place where we can make an informed decision about this and do so expeditiously," Powell said at his post-meeting news conference. "I don't think we're behind. I think it's more important to do this right than to do it fast." Powell added that the Fed is "working proactively to evaluate whether to issue a CBDC, and if so in what form."

The Boston Fed has taken point on the project, joining with MIT in an initiative on whether the central bank should establish its own digital coin targeted at making the payments system more effective. Fed Governor Lael Brainard has been a strong advocate of the effort, though several other officials, including Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles, have cast doubts. Advocates such as Brainard say a central bank digital currency's benefits include getting payments quickly to people in times of crisis and also providing services to the unbanked. "We think it's really important that the central bank maintain a stable currency and payments system for the public's benefit. That's one of our jobs," he said. He noted the "transformational innovation" in the area of digital payments and said the Fed is continuing to do work on the matter, including its own FedNow system expected to go online in 2023. The test for a CBDC, he said, is "are there clear and tangible benefits that outweigh any costs and risks."

Some concerns even have been raised that if the Fed does not act more aggressively, the dollar's position as the global reserve currency could be challenged. Powell noted the dollar's position in the world and said the Fed is "in a good place" to make a decision on whether to implement its own digital currency. He expressed some concern about the regulatory landscape and said the Fed likely will need congressional permission should it decide to proceed. "Where the public's money is concerned, we need to make sure that appropriate regulatory protections are in place, and today there really are not in some cases," Powell said.

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from Ars Technica: A US intelligence officer traveling in India earlier this month with CIA director William Burns reported experiencing a mysterious health incident and symptoms consistent with so-called Havana syndrome, according to a report by CNN. The officer received immediate medical care upon returning to the US. The case raises fears that such incidents are not only increasing, but potentially escalating, unnamed officials told CNN and The New York Times. The new incident within Burns' own team reportedly left the CIA chief "fuming" with anger.

The director's schedule is tightly guarded, and officials do not know if the affected intelligence officer was targeted because the officer was traveling with the director. If the health incident was an attack carried out by an adversarial intelligence agency -- as feared -- it's unclear how the adversarial agency learned of the trip and was able to prepare an attack. It's also possible, however, that the officer was targeted for other reasons and without knowledge that the officer was traveling with the director. The report notes that this incident is the second high-profile case in less than a month. "On August 24, another so-called 'anomalous health incident' affecting US embassy staff in Hanoi, Vietnam, came to light," reports Ars Technica. "It is still unclear how many staff members were affected in that incident, but NBC News reported that two US personnel were medevaced out of the country."

em1ly shares a report from Motherboard, which obtained leaked training videos Apple made for its authorized repair partners, showing how the company trains repair technicians to undermine third party companies and talk customers into buying more expensive first party repairs. From the report: "I cracked the glass on my phone and I'm comparing costs. How much for just that part?" One man acting the part of the customer asks in one of the videos.
"I can show you the cost for just the part before we begin," another man, playing the part of repair technician says.
"Whoa," the customer says, holding out his hands. "That's way more than the shop down the street. Why is it so expensive here?"
"This quote's for a genuine Apple part," the technician says.
"What do you mean by genuine?" the customer asks, his hands making scare quotes. "I'd like to save some money. Aren't they really the same part?"

After this, the technician launches into an explanation of why it's best for people to replace broken iPhone parts with genuine Apple products. "A genuine Apple part has to pass AppleCare engineering criteria," the technician says, explaining that a screen from Apple will be tested as if it had just come off the factory floor. "With a genuine Apple display, all the features you've come to rely on behave seamlessly...that's not the case with third party displays."

Six of the eight videos are dedicated to training repair techs on how to deal with customers worried about the huge costs of repairing an Apple device. One three-minute video is dedicated to helping customers understand why a genuine Apple screen is often better than one from a third party.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Virgin Media subscribers receiving letters accusing them of movie piracy may find that settling their cases will be a costly affair. TorrentFreak understands that settlement demands run to several thousand pounds, a massive uplift on the several hundred usually requested in similar cases. Interestingly, however, some subscribers could be immune from being sued. [...] At this stage it's too early to definitively say what factors are being considered when assessing the settlement amount. However, if earlier methodology is deployed it's possible that Voltage's anti-piracy monitoring company (believed to be MaverickEye) will take the BitTorrent swarm size (the number of people sharing the movie at the same time) and multiply that by the price of the Ava movie.

As previously reported, this system has serious flaws. However, for people who simply want to settle and move on, paying Voltage a few thousand pounds should make the whole thing go away -- at least in respect of this particular accusation. But what about those who wish to contest the claims being made? At the core of the letters is the assumption that the person who pays the Virgin Media bill is the person who downloaded and shared the movie 'Ava' without permission. 'Assumption' is key here since Voltage acknowledges that may not be the case and someone else in a household could be liable. If the bill payer did not carry out the infringement and did not authorize/allow someone else to do so, under the Copyright Designs and Patent Act they are not liable. This means that they can issue a direct denial to Voltage but that would not prevent the company from filing a claim if it believes it has a case. At this point it's important to note that any claim by Voltage would be actioned in a civil court where cases are decided on the balance of probabilities -- 51% confidence of infringement could tip a case in the company's favor, resulting in a damages award. That's in addition to the associated legal costs of a failed defense. Given that Voltage is setting the bar so high with demands for multi-thousand-pound settlements, it seems likely that defendants who can afford to mount a defense will do so.

[T]he High Court states that Voltage may not initiate legal proceedings against a minor, which means anyone under the age of 18 in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. This means that if a parent pays the bill and a 17-year-old illegally downloaded and shared the movie, Voltage cannot bring a case against them. Furthermore, the High Court says that Voltage cannot pursue cases against an infringer who is a pensioner. The retirement age in the UK is currently 66 and according to the High Court's instructions, "anyone over the age of 65" can not have proceedings brought against them. In addition, anyone who is considered "vulnerable' will not have to face proceedings either.

The Data Protection Commission in Ireland, Facebook's lead privacy regulator in Europe, has asked Facebook to demonstrate than an LED indicator light on its pair of "smart" Ray-Ban sunglasses -- which lights up when the user is taking a video -- is an effective way of putting other people on notice that they are being recorded by the wearer. TechCrunch reports: Italy's privacy watchdog, the Garante, already raised concerns about Facebook's smart glasses -- but Ireland has an outsized role as a regulator for the tech giant owing to where the company's regional base is located. The first Facebook Ray-Ban-branded specs went on sale earlier this month â" looking mostly like a standard pair of sunglasses but containing two 5 MP cameras mounted on the front that enable the user to take video of whatever they're looking at and upload it to a new Facebook app called View. (The sunglasses also contain in-frame speakers so the user can listen to music and take phone calls.) [...] The specs also include a front-mounted LED light which is supposed to switch on to indicate when a video is being recorded. However European regulators are concerned that what the DPC describes as a "very small" indicator is an inadequate mechanism for alerting people to the risk they are being recorded. Facebook has not demonstrated it conducted comprehensive field testing of the device with a view to assessing the privacy risk it may pose, it added.

"While it is accepted that many devices including smart phones can record third party individuals, it is generally the case that the camera or the phone is visible as the device by which recording is happening, thereby putting those captured in the recordings on notice. With the glasses, there is a very small indicator light that comes on when recording is occurring. It has not been demonstrated to the DPC and Garante that comprehensive testing in the field was done by Facebook or Ray-Ban to ensure the indicator LED light is an effective means of giving notice," the DPC wrote. Facebook's lead EU data protection regulator goes on to say it is calling on the tech giant to "confirm and demonstrate that the LED indicator light is effective for its purpose and to run an information campaign to alert the public as to how this new consumer product may give rise to less obvious recording of their images."

Twitter on Monday said it has agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit that accused the social network of violating securities laws by misleading investors about its prospects for growth. CNET reports: The settlement stems from a 2016 lawsuit that alleged Twitter and its executives misled shareholders in November 2014 about user growth, promising an increase in monthly active users to 550 million in the "intermediate" term and more than a billion "over the longer term." But Twitter's user growth remained flat, causing steep declines in its stock price, according to the lawsuit. Twitter stopped reporting monthly active users in April 2019 (at last count it reported 330 million). The company now looks at daily users who see ads as its key metric. In July, Twitter reported that its mDAU, or monetized daily active users, grew to 206 million for the quarter that ended in June. The user growth helped the company, which makes most of its revenue from ads, post a 74% increase in quarterly revenue, to $1.19 billion. The settlement agreement, which doesn't include any admission of wrongdoing by Twitter, is subject to court approval.

An anonymous reader quotes the Record: An Irish man who ran a cheap dark web hosting service has been sentenced today to 27 years in prison for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material. Eric Eoin Marques, 36, from Dublin, operated the Freedom Hosting service between July 2008 and July 2013, when he was arrested following an FBI investigation.

"The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material," the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques' sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement," officials said.
Flashback to 2013: [T]he FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas.

It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale...

Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."

Foreign Policy magazine explores just what happened after El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal currency and launched its official government-approved bitcoin wallet Chivo: Chivo launched just after midnight on Sept. 7. The system started failing at three a.m. Server capacity was increased, and app installations were not re-enabled until 11:30 a.m. Transactions failed through the day; customer service lines were jammed; Chivo ATMs ran out of cash. Shortly after ten a.m., the price of bitcoin crashed by $10,000 in three minutes...

After protests on Sept. 6, more than 1,000 people marched on the Legislative Assembly on Sept. 7, jumping barriers placed early that morning to keep them out. One group of protestors set some tires on fire. Opposition politicians attended the day's session in "No Bitcoin" shirts. The protests were not against bitcoin itself. People protested the forced acceptance, the complete lack of transparency from the government, and the dysfunctional Chivo payment system — "people are against how things are being done in the name of bitcoin," local businessman Patrick Murray said....

[T]he Bitcoin Law, and the disastrous launch of Chivo, has frightened the bond markets; El Salvador's sovereign debt dropped almost five cents in a single day, ending Sept. 7 trading at 87.6 cents on the dollar. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are already reluctant to supply further funding because of the Bitcoin Law...

Traders were reluctant to accept bitcoin. "I'd rather lose the sale," one trader told La Prensa Grafica. Others didn't trust money they couldn't hold in their hands. Street vendors may not even have phones. Many of their customers are illiterate. Some government offices didn't accept bitcoin payments. Transfers from Chivo to bank accounts were not reliable. The Chivo ATMs didn't work well — one machine had a reported three successful cash withdrawals in a day. Even transfer of bitcoins in and out of Chivo had problems...
"El Salvador's Bitcoin Law Is a Farce," blares the headline on the article, saying El Salvador's system "doesn't work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it."

"Fears of criminals bringing in dirty bitcoins and exchanging them for clean dollars, draining the $150 million trust that was set up as a buffer between bitcoins and dollars, have not come to pass — because Chivo doesn't work well enough."

"Federal prosecutors plan to criminally charge a former Boeing Co. pilot they suspect of misleading aviation regulators about safety issues blamed for two fatal crashes of the 737 Max," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."

Mark Forkner, who was Boeing's 737 Max chief technical pilot during the aircraft's development, is likely to face prosecution in the coming weeks, these people said... Boeing BA, admitted in a criminal settlement reached with prosecutors earlier this year that two of its employees — unnamed in that agreement — conspired to defraud the FAA about 737 Max training issues in order to benefit themselves and the company.
CBS News offers more details: It would, says the Journal, "be the first attempt to hold a Boeing employee accountable" for conduct before the two crashes. [Forkner] was the lead contact between the aviation giant and the Federal Aviation Administration over how pilots should be trained to fly the planes, the Journal said. According to documents published in early 2020, Forkner withheld details about the planes' faulty flight handling system known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS — later blamed for both crashes — from regulators.

The Journal said it wasn't clear what charges Forkner would face... A lawyer for Forkner, David Gerger, didn't respond to requests for comment Thursday from the Journal. Gerger has said in the past that Forkner, a pilot and Air Force veteran, wouldn't put pilots or passengers in danger.

Slashdot reader oumuamua writes that two U.S. nuclear plants owned by Exelon "were almost shutdown prematurely...but were saved at the last minute by the Illinois Senate." The Illinois Senate has approved a clean energy deal which includes a subsidy for Exelon to keep the Byron nuclear plant in operation, after the House passed it last week.

The plan gives Exelon $694 million to keep the Byron and Dresden plants operational. Exelon had previously begun drawing down the Byron plant with an anticipated retirement date of Monday, September 13th, and had warned that once the nuclear fuel had been depleted, it could not be refueled after that date.

Exelon said Monday that with the passage of the bill, it was preparing to refuel both plants.
The company had actually intended to close the Byron plant for some time, according to an earlier article: In February of 2019, a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Exelon said the plant is "showing increased signs of economic distress, which could lead to an early retirement, in a market that does not currently compensate them for their unique contribution to grid resiliency and their ability to produce large amounts of energy without carbon and air pollution." Exelon cited revenue shortfalls in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of declining energy prices and energy rules that allow fossil fuel plants to make cheaper bids at energy auction.
Or, as another article puts it, "Exelon says its Byron and Dresden stations are losing money."

oumuamua adds that "With the urgency of the climate crisis more clear than ever, no nuclear plant should be closed prematurely while coal plants continue operation in the same state. Many celebrated the Senate move, however, others have criticized Exelon's actions. "Exelon first started what we've dubbed the nuclear hostage crisis. It's a pattern where a utility will for whatever reasons threaten closure, which gets the workers very upset, then the local community whose tax base depends on it gets upset, they pressure their legislators, and then the legislators grant bailouts," said Dave Kraft, head of the Nuclear Energy Information Service.

Kraft said rather than continuing to support nuclear energy, Illinois needs to redouble its commitment to wind and solar.