First time accepted submitter jaeztheangel writes Ecuador's government has approved plans to start a new Digital Currency backed by the state. With defaults in recent history, and dwindling oil reserves it will be interesting to see how this decision turns out. From the article: "Congress last month approved legislation to start a digital currency for use alongside the U.S. dollar, the official tender in Ecuador. Once signed into law, the country will begin using the as-yet-unnamed currency as soon as October. A monetary authority will be established to regulate the money, which will be backed by 'liquid assets.'”

v3rgEz (125380) writes As part of MuckRock's Drone Census, the San Jose Police twice denied having a drone in public records requests — until the same investigation turned up not only a signed bid for a drone but also a federal grant giving them money for it. Now, almost a full year after first denying they had a drone, the department has come clean and apologized for hiding the program, promising more transparency and to pursue federal approval for the program, which the police department had, internally, claimed immunity from previously.

MojoKid (1002251) writes "China seems to be on a mission to isolate itself from the world, at least in terms of technology. After banning Windows 8 on government PCs and raiding several of Microsoft's offices in China as part of an anti-trust investigation, Chinese officials have now prohibited purchase of several Apple products for government use. The list of banned Apple products include the iPad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and half a dozen other items, all of which were left off of a final government procurement list distributed in July. This is a potentially big hit to Apple, which generated around 16 percent of its $37.4 billion in revenue last quarter from China. Apple saw its iPad sales jump 51 percent and Mac sales boosted 39 percent in China."

New submitter socheres (1771002) writes I keep a Slackware server hosted at various datacenters on leased hardware for personal / freelance business use. I have been doing this for the last 10 years and during this time I moved my stuff to several datacenters, some small and some big name companies. No matter the hosting company, since I choose to install my own OS and not take a pre-installed machine, I always got the hardware delivered with the previous guys' data stored on the hard drives. It was also the case with spare drives, which were not installed new if I did not ask specifically for new ones. Has this happened to you? How often?

netbuzz (955038) writes The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations, including a page about a notorious Irish bank robber and another about an Italian criminal gang. "We only know about these removals because the involved search engine company chose to send notices to the Wikimedia Foundation. Search engines have no legal obligation to send such notices. Indeed, their ability to continue to do so may be in jeopardy. Since search engines are not required to provide affected sites with notice, other search engines may have removed additional links from their results without our knowledge. This lack of transparent policies and procedures is only one of the many flaws in the European decision." Wikimedia now has a page listing all notifications that search listing were removed. itwbennett also wrote in with Wikimedia news this morning: the Wikimedia foundation published its first ever transparency report, detailing requests to remove or alter content (zero granted, ever) and content removed for copyright violations.

I Ate A Candle (3762149) writes Aaron's Law, named after the late internet activist Aaron Swartz, was supposed to fix U.S. hacking laws, which many deem dated and overly harsh. But the bill looks certain to wither in Congress, thanks to corporate lobbying, disagreements in Washington between key lawmakers and a simple lack of interest amongst the general population for changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Representative Zoe Lofgren blamed inactivity from the House Judiciary Committee headed up by Representative Bob Goodlatte, which has chosen not to discuss or vote on Aaron's Law. There is still an appetite for CFAA reform, thanks to complaints from the security community that their research efforts have been deemed illegal acts, perversely making the internet a less secure place. But with the likes of Oracle trying to stop it and with Congress unwilling to act, change looks some way away.

New submitter Rigodi (1000552) writes "The New York Times reported on August 5th that a massive collection of stolen email passwords and website accounts have been accumulated by an alleged Russian "crime ring". Over 1.2 billion accounts were compromised ... the attack scheme is essentially the old and well known SQL injection tactic using a botnet. The Information has been made public to coincide with the Blackhat conference to cause a debate about the classic security account and password system weaknesses, urging the industry to find new ways to perform authentication. What do Black Hat security conference participants have to say about that in Vegas?

Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with the chilling, but not really surprising, news that the U.S. government is aware that many names in its terrorist suspect database are not linked to terrorism in any way. From the article: Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government's widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept. Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government's Terrorist Screening Database — a watchlist of "known or suspected terrorists" that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments — more than 40 percent are described by the government as having "no recognized terrorist group affiliation." That category — 280,000 people — dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

An anonymous reader writes with the news that Hackaday published an article on the poor security of the add-on modules that Tektronix sells as expensive add-ons to unlock features in certain of its oscilloscopes. The reader writes: "It has come to attention of Tek's legal eagles and they now want the article to be taken down. Perhaps they can ask Google to forget that page?"