"In 2016 North Korean hackers planned a $1bn raid on Bangladesh's national bank," reports the BBC, "and came within an inch of success — it was only by a fluke that all but $81m of the transfers were halted, report Geoff White and Jean H Lee...

"It all started with a malfunctioning printer..." It was located inside a highly secure room on the 10th floor of the bank's main office in Dhaka, the capital. Its job was to print out records of the multi-million-dollar transfers flowing in and out of the bank. When staff found it wasn't working, at 08:45 on Friday 5 February 2016, "we assumed it was a common problem just like any other day," duty manager Zubair Bin Huda later told police. "Such glitches had happened before." In fact, this was the first indication that Bangladesh Bank was in a lot of trouble. Hackers had broken into its computer networks, and at that very moment were carrying out the most audacious cyber-attack ever attempted. Their goal: to steal a billion dollars.

To spirit the money away, the gang behind the heist would use fake bank accounts, charities, casinos and a wide network of accomplices.... When the bank's staff rebooted the printer, they got some very worrying news. Spilling out of it were urgent messages from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York — the "Fed" — where Bangladesh keeps a US-dollar account. The Fed had received instructions, apparently from Bangladesh Bank, to drain the entire account — close to a billion dollars. The Bangladeshis tried to contact the Fed for clarification, but thanks to the hackers' very careful timing, they couldn't get through... The bank's HQ in Dhaka was beginning two days off. And when the Bangladeshis began to uncover the theft on Saturday, it was already the weekend in New York... And the hackers had another trick up their sleeve to buy even more time. Once they had transferred the money out of the Fed, they needed to send it somewhere. So they wired it to accounts they'd set up in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. And in 2016, Monday 8 February was the first day of the Lunar New Year, a national holiday across Asia...

They had had plenty of time to plan all of this, because it turns out the Lazarus Group had been lurking inside Bangladesh Bank's computer systems for a year... Once inside the bank's systems, Lazarus Group began stealthily hopping from computer to computer, working their way towards the digital vaults and the billions of dollars they contained... But they still had one final hurdle to clear — the printer on the 10th floor. Bangladesh Bank had created a paper back-up system to record all transfers made from its accounts. This record of transactions risked exposing the hackers' work instantly. And so they hacked into the software controlling it and took it out of action.

With their tracks covered, at 20:36 on Thursday 4 February 2016, the hackers began making their transfers — 35 in all, totalling $951m, almost the entire contents of Bangladesh Bank's New York Fed account.
There's more to the story — it's a whole episode on a 10-episode BBC World Service podcast which they're calling an example of "the new front line in a global battleground: a murky nexus of crime, espionage and nation-state power-mongering. And it's growing fast."

The story has a surprise ending — but alongo the way, the BBC's article points out that the consequences for the bank's governor were almost instant. "He was asked to resign," says U.S.-based cyber-security expert Rakesh Asthana. "I never saw him again."

Amid worries that technological advances may someday eliminate jobs, the Associated Press reports on a new experimental universal basic income program in upstate New York: During the pilot program, funded by private donations, 100 county residents making less than $46,900 annually will get $500 a month for a year. The income threshold was based on 80% of the county's average median income, meaning it includes both the poor and a slice of the middle class — people who face financial stress but might not ordinarily qualify for government aid based on income.

For researchers, the pilot could give them a fuller picture of what happens when a range of people are sent payments that guarantee a basic living... Basic income programs elsewhere tend to focus on cities. In contrast, this upstate program stretches out over a mix of places: a city, small towns and remote areas many miles from bus lines and supermarkets. "Showing that this approach will work not just in urban areas, but for rural parts of the country — which we know is one of our big national problems — I think there's great opportunity there," said Ulster County Executive Patrick Ryan... Center for Guaranteed Income Research co-founder Stacia West, who is evaluating more than 20 such pilot programs, is interested in seeing how spending compares to cities like Stockton, California, where more that a third went for food. "Knowing what we know about barriers to employment, especially in rural areas, we may see more money going toward transportation than we've ever seen before in any other experiment," said West, also a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work...

The end goal for a number of advocates is a universal basic income, or UBI, which would distribute cash payment programs for all adults... Critics of cash transfer programs worry about their effectiveness and cost compared to aid programs that target funds for food, shelter or for help raising children. Drake University economics professor Heath Henderson is concerned the programs miss needier people less likely to apply, including those without homes. While there are times people might benefit from a cash infusion, the money is unlikely to address the structural issues holding people back, like inadequate health care and schools, he said.

"If we keep thinking about remedying poverty in terms of just throwing cash at people, you're not thinking about the structures that kind of reproduce poverty in the first place and you're not really solving the problem at all," Henderson said.

"On January 15, a hacker tried to poison a water treatment plant that served parts of the San Francisco Bay Area," reports NBC News: It didn't seem hard. The hacker had the username and password for a former employee's TeamViewer account, a popular program that lets users remotely control their computers, according to a private report compiled by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center in February and seen by NBC News. After logging in, the hacker, whose name and motive are unknown and who hasn't been identified by law enforcement, deleted programs that the water plant used to treat drinking water.

The hack wasn't discovered until the following day, and the facility changed its passwords and reinstalled the programs. "No failures were reported as a result of this incident, and no individuals in the city reported illness from water-related failures," the report, which did not specify which water treatment plant had been breached, noted.

The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of a growing number of cyberattacks on U.S. water infrastructure that have recently come to light. The Bay Area attack was followed by a similar one in Oldsmar, Florida, a few weeks later. In that one, which made headlines around the world, a hacker also gained access to a TeamViewer account and raised the levels of lye in the drinking water to poisonous levels. An employee quickly caught the computer's mouse moving on its own, and undid the hacker's changes... The usernames and passwords for at least 11 Oldsmar employees have been traded on the dark web, said Kent Backman, a researcher at the cybersecurity company Dragos...

[A] number of facilities have been hacked in the past year, though most draw little attention. In Pennsylvania, a state water warning system has reportedly alerted its members to two recent hacks at water plants in the state. In another previously unreported hack, the Camrosa Water District in Southern California was infected with ransomware last summer. Whether hacks on water plants have recently become more common or just more visible is impossible to tell, because there is no comprehensive federal or industry accounting of water treatment plants' security... Unlike the electric grid, which is largely run by a smaller number of for-profit corporations, most of the more than 50,000 drinking water facilities in the U.S. are nonprofit entities.

Some that serve large populations are larger operations with dedicated cybersecurity staff. But rural areas in particular often get their water from small plants, often run by only a handful of employees who aren't dedicated cybersecurity experts, said Bryson Bort, a consultant on industrial cybersecurity systems. "They're even more fragmented at lower levels than anything we're used to talking about, like the electric grid," he said. "If you could imagine a community center run by two old guys who are plumbers, that's your average water plant."
NBC News also a spokesperson for America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who shared an internal survey conducted earlier this year. As many as 1 in 10 water and wastewater plants reported they'd recently found a critical cybersecurity vulnerability — and more than 80% of their major vulnerabilities were software flaws discovered before 2017.

"In a bid to bolster its claims as a crime-fighting tool, Ring deployed a tactic popular in the business world: influencer marketing," reports the Los Angeles Times. "It selected a cadre of brand ambassadors, rewarded them with free gadgets and discount codes, and urged them to use their connections to promote the Santa Monica security camera startup via word of mouth.

"In this case, the brand ambassadors were Los Angeles Police Department officers." "You are killing it, by the way. Your code has 14 uses, eleven more and I will be sending you every device that we sell," a Ring employee wrote to one officer in a 2016 email. "Do you have any community meetings or crime prevention fairs coming up?"

Ring provided at least 100 LAPD officers with one or more free devices or discount codes and encouraged them to recommend the company's web-connected doorbells and security cameras, emails reviewed by The Times reveal. In more than 15 cases, emails show that officers who received free gadgets or discounts promoted Ring products to fellow police officers or members of the public... [P]articipating officers got tens of thousands of dollars' worth of free and discounted electronics and helped establish a network of personal surveillance cameras that the LAPD could tap into with much less red tape than the typical means of obtaining video.

The practice, privacy and criminal justice experts warn, raises the question of whether LAPD officers were serving the public in their interactions with Ring, or if they were serving a private business and themselves...

It's unclear whether LAPD officers disclosed their arrangements with Ring to the public or fellow officers.

Twitter has "deliberately" defied and failed to comply with India's new social media rules, according to the country's technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Reuters reports that the rules, which became effective in late May, make social media companies "more accountable to legal requests for swift removal of posts and sharing details on the originators of messages. The rules also require big social media companies to set up grievance redressal mechanisms and appoint new executives to coordinate with law enforcement." A senior government official told Reuters that Twitter may no longer be eligible to seek liability exemptions as an intermediary or the host of user content in India due to its failure to comply with new IT rules. "There are numerous queries arising as to whether Twitter is entitled to safe harbour provision," Prasad tweeted. "However, the simple fact of the matter is that Twitter has failed to comply with the Intermediary Guidelines that came into effect from the 26th of May."

Twitter, Prasad added, had chosen the "path of deliberate defiance when it comes to the Intermediary Guidelines."

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment though it said on Monday it was keeping India's technology ministry apprised of the steps it was taking. "An interim Chief Compliance Officer has been retained and details will be shared with the Ministry directly soon," it said. "Twitter continues to make every effort to comply with the new guidelines.

New Delhi-based digital advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said it was only up to courts, and not the government, to decide whether companies such as Twitter remained intermediaries for alleged non-compliance such as appointment of executives.

As California approaches the biggest state tax rebate in U.S. history, Bloomberg News co-founder Matthew A. Winkler questions its reputation as a state doomed by over-regulation and high taxes.

In fact, California "has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds." By adding 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls since April last year — equal to the entire workforce of Nevada — California easily surpassed also-rans Texas and New York. At the same time, California household income increased $164 billion, almost as much as Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No wonder California's operating budget surplus, fueled by its surging economy and capital gains taxes, swelled to a record $75 billion...

While pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business, reality belies them. In a sign of investor demand, the weight of California companies in the benchmark S&P 500 Index increased 3 percentage points since a year ago, the most among all states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Faith in California credit was similarly superlative, with the weight of corporate bonds sold by companies based in the state rising the most among all states, to 12.5 percentage points from 11.7 percentage points, according to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index. Translation: Investors had the greatest confidence in California companies during the pandemic. The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state's gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30% more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden.

Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China...

Corporate California also is the undisputed leader in renewable energy, with 26 companies worth $897 billion, or 36% of the U.S. industry, having reported 10% or more of their revenues derived from clean technology. No state comes close to matching the 21% of electricity derived from solar energy. Shares of these firms appreciated 282% during the past 12 months and 1,003%, 1,140% and 9,330% over two, five and 10 years, respectively, with no comparable rivals anywhere in the world, according to BloombergNEF. The same companies also increased their workforce 35% since 2019, almost tripling the rate for the rest U.S. overall and four times the global rate...

California companies invested 16% of their revenues in R&D, or their future, when the rest of the U.S. put aside just 1%...

Much has been made of the state reporting its first yearly loss in population, or 182,000 last year. Had it not been for the Trump administration preventing new visas, depriving as many as 150,000 people from moving to California from other countries annually, the 2020 outcome would have been more favorable.

"Modern technology makes it so much harder to commit a crime of passion and get away with it," writes long-time Slashdot reader knaapie, summarizing a story from the Guardian: A Greek pilot claiming he and his wife were robbed, and his wife strangled by the assailants, has now admitted that he himself killed his wife. Police were already suspicious of him and found evidence from phones and the watch of the deceased that implicated him.
In staging the scene of a crime, the suspect even tied up his own hands and those of his dead wife — and strangled their dog. And he'd insisted on his version of the story for five weeks, according to the Guardian.

But then... A pulse monitor on the watch showed his wife was dead at a time before he claimed the raid had taken place, while a fitness app on his phone proved he was moving around the house at the time he said he had been blindfolded and tied up.

In both cases, the findings conflicted with the timeline of events the professional pilot had previously given. A memory card removed at 1.20am from the security camera of the couple's home, several hours before 4.30am when he claimed the thieves had broken in, provided further evidence.

A weakness in the algorithm used to encrypt cellphone data in the 1990s and 2000s allowed hackers to spy on some internet traffic, according to a new research paper. Motherboard: The paper has sent shockwaves through the encryption community because of what it implies: The researchers believe that the mathematical probability of the weakness being introduced on accident is extremely low. Thus, they speculate that a weakness was intentionally put into the algorithm. After the paper was published, the group that designed the algorithm confirmed this was the case. Researchers from several universities in Europe found that the encryption algorithm GEA-1, which was used in cellphones when the industry adopted GPRS standards in 2G networks, was intentionally designed to include a weakness that at least one cryptography expert sees as a backdoor. The researchers said they obtained two encryption algorithms, GEA-1 and GEA-2, which are proprietary and thus not public, "from a source." They then analyzed them and realized they were vulnerable to attacks that allowed for decryption of all traffic.

When trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, the researchers wrote that (to simplify), they tried to design a similar encryption algorithm using a random number generator often used in cryptography and never came close to creating an encryption scheme as weak as the one actually used: "In a million tries we never even got close to such a weak instance," they wrote. "This implies that the weakness in GEA-1 is unlikely to occur by chance, indicating that the security level of 40 bits is due to export regulations." Researchers dubbed the attack "divide-and-conquer," and said it was "rather straightforward." In short, the attack allows someone who can intercept cellphone data traffic to recover the key used to encrypt the data and then decrypt all traffic. The weakness in GEA-1, the oldest algorithm developed in 1998, is that it provides only 40-bit security. That's what allows an attacker to get the key and decrypt all traffic, according to the researchers.

On Friday, Volkswagen disclosed a data breach that it said affected 3.3 million customers and interested buyers. On Monday, hackers put the data stolen from the car maker on sale on a notorious hacking forum. From a report: In the sales listing reviewed by Motherboard, a hacker that goes by 000 wrote that the data included email addresses and Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN). The hacker also posted two samples of the data, which included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers. The type of data seems to align with what Volkwagen admitted was stolen. In a website set up by a cybersecurity vendor on behalf of the car maker, Volkswagen said that "the majority" of affected data included: "first and last name, personal or business mailing address, email address, or phone number. In some instances, the data also included information about a vehicle purchased, leased, or inquired about, such as the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), make, model, year, color and trim packages."

But for 90,000 victims, the data also included "more sensitive information relating to eligibility for a purchase, loan, or lease. Nearly all of the more sensitive data (over 95%) consists of driver's license numbers," according to the company, which added that the majority of data pertains to Audi customers and interested buyers in the US and Canada only. The company also said it believes the data was left unsecured by a vendor. (Audi is owned by the Volkswagen Group.) "There were also a very small number of dates of birth, Social Security or social insurance numbers, account or loan numbers, and tax identification numbers," the website read.

Apple would be prohibited from pre-installing its own apps on Apple devices under antitrust reform legislation introduced last week, said Democratic Representative David Cicilline, who is leading a push to pass new regulations for U.S. technology companies. From a report: Cicilline told reporters Wednesday that a proposal prohibiting tech platforms from giving an advantage to their own products over those of competitors would mean Apple can't ship devices with pre-installed apps on its iOS operating platform. "It would be equally easy to download the other five apps as the Apple one so they're not using their market dominance to favor their own products and services," the Rhode Island Democrat said. The proposal is part of a package of bipartisan bills that would impose significant new constraints on how tech companies operate, restricting acquisitions and forcing them to exit some businesses. The House Judiciary Committee will mark up the five bills in a hearing next week, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee's chairman, said.

Amazon is blocking Google's controversial cookieless tracking and targeting method. From a report: Most of Amazon's properties including Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com and Zappos.com are preventing Google's tracking system FLoC -- or Federated Learning of Cohorts -- from gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research in Amazon's vast e-commerce universe, according to website code analyzed by Digiday and three technology experts who helped Digiday review the code. As Google's system gathers data about people's web travels to inform how it categorizes them, Amazon's under-the-radar move could not only be a significant blow to Google's mission to guide the future of digital ad tracking after cookies die -- it could give Amazon a leg up in its own efforts to sell advertising across what's left of the open web. Further reading: Nobody is Flying To Join Google's FLoC.

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."

Irish police will have the power to compel people to provide passwords for electronic devices when carrying out a search warrant under new legislation. From a report: The change is part of the Garda Siochana Bill published by Irish Justice Minister Heather Humphreys on Monday. Gardai will also be required to make a written record of a stop and search. This will enable data to be collected so the effectiveness and use of the powers can be assessed. Special measures will be introduced for suspects who are children and suspects who may have impaired capacity. The bill will bring in longer detention periods for the investigation of multiple offences being investigated together, for a maximum of up to 48 hours. It will also allow for a week's detention for suspects in human trafficking offences, which are currently subject to a maximum of 24 hours detention.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday gave Microsoft's LinkedIn another chance to try to stop rival hiQ Labs from harvesting personal data from the professional networking platform's public profiles -- a practice that LinkedIn contends threatens the privacy of its users. From a report: The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had barred LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to the information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available. At issue is whether companies can use a federal anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, to block competitors from harvesting or "scraping" vast amounts of customer data from public-facing parts of a website. The justices sent the dispute back to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider in light of their June 4 ruling that limited the type of conduct that can be criminally prosecuted under the same law. In that case, the justices found that a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.

NBC reports that America's "Teamsters" labor union was hit by a ransomware attack demanding $2.5 million back in 2019.

"But unlike many of the companies hit by high-profile ransomware attacks in recent months, the union declined to pay, despite the FBI's advice to do so, three sources familiar with the previously unreported cyberattack told NBC News." Personal information for the millions of active and retired members was never compromised, according to a Teamsters spokesperson, who also said that only one of the union's two email systems was frozen along with other data. Teamsters officials alerted the FBI and asked for help in identifying the source of the attack. They were told that many similar hacks were happening and that the FBI would not be able to assist in pursuing the culprit.

The FBI advised the Teamsters to "just pay it," the first source said. "They said 'this is happening all over D.C. ... and we're not doing anything about it,'" a second source said.

Union officials in Washington were divided over whether to pay the ransom — going so far as to bargain the number down to $1.1 million, according to the sources — but eventually sided with their insurance company, which urged them not to pony up... The Teamsters decided to rebuild their systems, and 99 percent of their data has been restored from archival material — some of it from hard copies — according to the union's spokesperson.

The FBI's communications office did not reply to repeated requests for comment. The FBI's stance is to discourage ransomware payments.
NBC News draws a lesson from the fact that it took nearly two years for this story to emerge. "An unknown number of companies and organizations have been extorted without ever saying a word about it publicly."

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.

A set of "neuro-rights" should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York's Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards. Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies — rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people," Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.

"This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

"Apple paid a multimillion dollar settlement to a woman after iPhone repair techs posted risque pictures from her phone to Facebook," reports the Washington Post, citing legal documents obtained by the Telegraph.

An unnamed Oregon college student "sent her phone to Apple for repairs after it stopped working" in 2016, and the iPhone ended up at Apple-approved repair contractor Pegatron... Two iPhone repair technicians in Sacramento, uploaded "10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video" to her Facebook account, resulting in "severe emotional distress" for the young woman, according to the Telegraph's review of legal records. Pegatron, a major Apple manufacturer with facilities across the globe, had to reimburse Apple for the settlement and face insurers who didn't want to pay for it, according to the news outlet...

The settlement isn't the first time Apple has had to handle the misdeeds of employees. In 2019, a California woman alleged that an Apple store employee had texted a private picture on her phone to himself. That employee was no longer working for the company after Apple conducted its investigation. Apple store employees at a Brisbane, Australia, location were fired in 2016 for taking candid pictures of female employees and customers' bodies and stealing photos from consumers' phones to rank their bodies.
"Apple keeps a firm grip on the repair of its devices, arguing that allowing only approved retailers and vendors to repair its products ensures the privacy of its customers," the article points out.

"The revelation of the lawsuit pokes holes in the company's stance that only authorized retailers can keep customer information secure."

A security camera installation worker for ADT was sentenced Wednesday to a little more than four years in federal prison for illegally accessing the security cameras of more than 200 North Texas customers, reports the Dallas Morning News: Telesforo Aviles, age 35, faced a maximum of five years in prison for computer fraud under the terms of his plea agreement, in which he admitted to accessing customer accounts over 9,600 times since 2015.

He was cuffed and taken into custody to begin serving his sentence after the hearing.

The quiet and introverted technician, a senior supervisor with 17 years at ADT, was caught last year after the company was alerted by a customer to suspicious activity, said his lawyer, Tom Pappas. Aviles, who is married with five children, turned himself in when he was asked to, Pappas said. "He's mortified by what he did," Pappas said. "He sees what he did as a betrayal of himself, too." Of the nearly 10,000 images Aviles accessed, about 40 were "sexual in nature" and none involved children, Pappas said.

An ADT spokesman said the company had no comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sid Mody had asked Starr to give Aviles the maximum sentence, saying that while 217 accounts were accessed, the total number of victims is much higher given that each household had multiple family members. That violation, he said, destroyed "in the worst way" their sense of feeling safe and secure at home... Starr said he considered Aviles' cooperation with authorities and lack of a criminal history as well as the fact that the conduct involved a "lengthy period of time." Aviles noted the homes that had "attractive women" and repeatedly logged into their accounts to view the footage, prosecutors said...

ADT has since been hit with class-action lawsuits from customers over the breach.
The article also notes the story of one woman who filed a federal lawsuit last month against ADT. She'd told the court Aviles persuaded her to install cameras in her bedrooms after she'd specifically questioned whether it was truly necessary. "Aviles told her that it was necessary because a burglar could enter the house through the bedroom windows, and the cameras would monitor that," her lawsuit says. "Of course, Aviles' placement of the cameras had nothing to do with potential burglars."

In a statement filed with the court, one female homeowner reportedly wrote that "This deliberate and calculated invasion of privacy is arguably more harmful than if I had installed no security system and my house had been burglarized."

Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. "We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago," the governor said. "That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Nearly 12 years later, "a $929-million federal grant for the California bullet train project was restored Thursday," reports the Los Angeles Times, "reversing a decision by the Trump administration to terminate the funding." But their story (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1) notes this grant has a very long history: The grant was originally made in 2010 after other states backed out of high-speed rail projects and declined to take the federal support. The California project already had won another $2.5-billion grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Trump action to take back the money was highly controversial, and federal grant experts said such terminations were rare in cases that did not involve fraud but were merely behind schedule.

Ronald Batory, then chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, cited California's multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, among other problems, in taking the action. Along with House Republicans from California, Trump officials were highly critical of the California project, with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao calling it a "bait and switch" on promises made to taxpayers. Chao and Trump had issued an even bigger threat, to claw back the much larger $2.5-billion grant that had already been spent. Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration never made an attempt to get back the funds.

The $929 million is part of a planned $22.8-billion effort aimed at building a 171-mile partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced [part of the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles], as well as completing environmental planning and making some high-speed rail investments in Southern California and the Bay Area.
In a statement, America's Federal Rail Agency said the settlement "reflects the federal government's ongoing partnership in the development of high-speed rail." And they called their restoration of funding "an important step in advancing an economically transformational project in California."

The Times adds that "Some bullet train advocates believe $10 billion or more from the state and federal government could be added to the project, allowing an expansion of the current construction. But even that much money would not close a roughly $80-billion shortfall needed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco."