117752298
submission
amxcoder writes:
Many AT&T Wireless customers have started experiencing voicemail issues recently, and the problem appears to be spreading. According to AT&T's own help forum, the problem was first reported by a user on Oct 1, 2019, in which users can not retrieve their voice mail messages. When attempting to check voicemail, users are greeted with silence, then a recorded message to the effect of "this service is unavailable, please try again later". While callers can still leave a voicemail message, the problem is experienced by the owner of the voicemail box, they cannot gain access to listen to messages--Its offline completely for the owner of the VM account. Since then, many others chimed in that they were also experiencing the problem. On Oct 9th, a post was made that said that a "vendor's server was having issues". In the 11 days since then, instead of the problem being resolved, more people have reported the problem is spreading. After contacting Tech Support on Oct 20th, it appears that Level 1 tech support is not aware of the problem, and Level2 report the problem is affecting Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Maryland, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee. However California and possibly other states seem to be affected as well. Because AT&T is being tight-lipped about this outage, even to it's own customers that it is affecting, it's difficult to know how many customers this is impacting. No official statement is being sent to customers, nor are customers being updated on progress or an ETA on resolving the problem. Some online chatter is wondering if AT&T is trying to keep this "under the radar" as long as they can because of something more nefarious, such as a data breach, hacked servers, or even ransomware. Anyones guess is a good as another without official public statement from AT&T.
100544454
submission
amxcoder writes:
A US citizen working at a US consulate located in Guangzhou, China has reported experiencing "abnormal" sounds (and pressures) for the past several months, starting in late 2017 until Apiril of 2018. Upon medical evaluation, the worker has been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury symptoms. The US Embassy is conducting an investigation into the issue, and is issuing warnings to all US citizens in China. The symptoms and several other similarities has drawn comparison to a similar event last year in a different US Embassy in Cuba. Officials can not link the two events together at this point, but the US State Department is working with Chinese authorities to investigate the issue further.
96462677
submission
amxcoder writes:
Researchers at Google were able to create little stickers with 'psychedelic' looking patters on them that could trick computer AI image classifying algorithms into mis-classifying images of objects that it would normally be able to recognize. The images on the stickers were created by the researchers using knowledge of features and shapes, patterns, and colors that the image recognition algorithms look for and focus on. The patterned stickers work by tricking the image recognition algorithm into focusing on, and studying the little pattern on the small sticker and ignoring the rest of the image, including the actual object in the picture. Image recognition algorithms work by attempting to weigh importance to parts of an image as higher than other parts so it can determine the subject object in the image. These stickers were created so that the algorithm finds them 'more interesting' than the rest of the image and will focus most of it's attention on analyzing the pattern and giving the rest of the image content a lower importance, thus ignoring it or confusing it.
93184365
submission
amxcoder writes:
Code42, the company behind the popular Crashplan online backup service has announced that will be discontinuing all of it's personal and family backup plan offerings to focus on business backup service plans only. In the letter sent to existing personal plan customers, it says that next year will be the cutoff date for personal plans and all existing personal plan holders will have to upgrade their subscriptions to more expensive business plans or leave for another provider after current subscription runs out. Crashplan personal and family services were one of the best (and most affordable) options available for online backup, providing features that other rivals do not, including backup options for cloud, external local drives, and to other friends/family member's drives (trusted offsite). Looking at Carbonite services (who Code42 is recommending existing personal subscribers switch to), does not offer many of the options and features in their backup software, including multiple backup sets, unlimited deleted file retention, the trusted offsite options and any type of 'family subscription' offerings. Here is the statement from the Code42 CEO Joe Payne: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crashplan.com%2Fen-u...
60283453
submission
amxcoder writes:
A recent bill making it's way through the California Legislature, reaffirms the 4th amendment for NSA style wiretapping of cell phones and computer records, and declares that the NSA's data collection methods and practices are unconstitutional in the state's opinion. The bill has passed the California Senate with only a single opposing vote. The bill seems to be a reaction to information about NSA's wiretapping and data collection methods revealed by Edward Snowden, and would require a warrant issued by a Judge to be issued before the state's law enforcement and other departments can assist federal agencies in obtaining these records. There are several other bills in other states similar to this that are going through various state legislatures, but California's is the furthest along in the process. With the methods the NSA gathers much of it's data, using data center taps, and secret deals with private enterprises, it is unknown how much this will actually hamper the NSA's data mining schemes, but at the least, it establishes that the state of 38 million people are not happy with the NSA's spying methods and breach of individual's privacy. There is also a federal bill in the works that accomplishes similar goals, this could be a catalyst to help keep that moving through Congress.
