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Submission + - CSP 2.0 Patent Troll Datawing Backs Off (theregister.com) 1

Submitted by LeeLynx
LeeLynx writes: From The Register:

The director of a tiny UK company has apologised after sending letters to businesses suggesting they had infringed his patents that he claimed covered an age-old web standard.
...
Datawing Ltd sent a number of letters to small businesses this month claiming to own one UK and one US patent on CSP and its use of a nonce. After an initial wave of alarm and outrage on Twitter when the letters surfaced, The Register tracked down their author: a penitent William Coppock.
...
The letter claimed "our patent has been widely overlooked by companies since the inception of CSP 2.0 in 2014," advertised Datawing's Scriptlock product which "augments CSP 2.0 with new features which greatly reduce the cost of adding CSP support to existing websites," and suggested that if companies weren't interested in Scriptlock, they should "obtain a licence to work the patent."

"Technical information is enclosed with instructions for how to register with us and license fees," it concluded.

Submission + - Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech SE. The largest real-world analysis (PDF) comparing natural immunity — gained from an earlier infection — to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant.

The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered. The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That’s significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. Giving a single shot of the vaccine to those who had been previously infected also appeared to boost their protection. The long-term benefit of a booster dose of the inoculation, which has just recently begun in Israel, is unknown.

Submission + - SPAM: Western Digital Caught Bait-and-Switching Customers With Slow SSDs

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue — which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market — has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they’re buying garbage. I do not use the term “garbage” lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There’s nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there’s nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn’t realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I’ve actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it’s always had a massive performance problem — as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I’d charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It’s not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it’s nowhere near acceptable performance.
Link to Original Source

Comment facts don't matter, apparently (Score 1, Interesting) 423

by davek (#60722178) Attached to: Election Was Most Secure In American History, US Officials Say

"On Monday, I asked Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria about this scenario. If ballots signed by someone else “came through, we would still have the signature match to rely on for identity,” he said. Asked if he was confident the safeguard would identify those ballots, he said, “I’m confident that the process has been working throughout this process.”

"He was wrong. Eight of the nine ballots went through. In other words, signature verification had an 89 percent failure rate in catching mismatched signatures.

source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpoli...

Comment Re:can we stop editorilaizing the headline, please (Score 1) 71

by davek (#57420694) Attached to: Cities Will Sue FCC To Stop $2 Billion Giveaway To Wireless Carriers

Yes. Misrepresenting someone's argument in order to attack it is called the "Straw-man" fallacy.

I also know that the /. headline is simply parroting the ars one. However, just because ars is a hopelessly biased opinion source, doesn't mean that slashdot needs to be also.

Submission + - Wendy's Faces Lawsuit For Unlawfully Collecting Employee Fingerprints (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A class-action lawsuit has been filed in Illinois against fast food restaurant chain Wendy's accusing the company of breaking state laws in regards to the way it stores and handles employee fingerprints. The complaint is centered around Wendy's practice of using biometric clocks that scan employees' fingerprints when they arrive at work, when they leave, and when they use the Point-Of-Sale and cash register systems.

Plaintiffs, represented by former Wendy's employees Martinique Owens and Amelia Garcia, claim that Wendy's breaks state law --the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)-- because the company does not make employees aware of how it handles their data. More specifically, the lawsuit claims that Wendy's does not inform employees in writing of the specific purpose and length of time for which their fingerprints were being collected, stored, and used, as required by the BIPA, and nor does it obtain a written release from employees with explicit consent to obtain and handle the fingerprints in the first place. Wendy's also doesn't provide a publicly available retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying employees' fingerprints after they leave the company, plaintiffs said. The plaintiffs also claim that Wendy's also sends this data to a third-party without their consent.

Submission + - Coding Error Sends 2019 Subaru Ascents To the Car Crusher (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: [A] software remedy can’t solve Subaru’s issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru’s recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents’ B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents’ bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that “there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed.” Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.

Submission + - A revised set of definitions for SETI terms. (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: An ad hoc committee of the IAU has been working for 5 months on revisions and clarifications to the definitions of various terms used in technical and popular discussions of SETI — the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They've published their draft report.

The terms of reference — to account for existing popular and technical uses of the terms — should mean that no major changes in usage occur, but interesting points do emerge from the discussion paper. For example, in discussing the term "extraterrestrial", their proposed definition ("shorthand for life or technology not originating recently on Earth") includes cover for possibilities such as "panspermia" which may be popular in "popular science", but certainly are not popular in the technical discussions. They go on to discuss that

by this definition, life on another planet with a common origin to Earth life but which diverged billions of years ago would be extraterrestrial, but Earth life accidentally brought to Mars on a human-built lander would not.

Waiting for the invasion of the pedants, clutching their feet in their hands.

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