100 thieves steal $13m in three hours from cash machines across Japan
‘Police believe that as many as 100 people, none of whom have been apprehended, worked together using forged credit cards containing account details illegally obtained from a bank in South Africa. The culprits used the fake cards at 1,400 convenience store automated teller machines on the morning of 15 May, according to police. Each made a single withdrawal of 100,000 yen – the maximum allowed by the cash machines.’ 1,600 forged/stolen credit card credentials from a single bank, then a synchronised attack made possible by the eventually-consistent ledger model of ATM accounting. (via William Gibson)
Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet
Automated DMCA takedowns used to fraudulently censor online content.
In fact, no copyright infringement had occurred at all. Instead, something weirder had happened. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled “Home Improvement Tips and Tricks”. The post, headlined “Buildteam interior designers” was backdated to September 14 2015, three months before Narey had written it, and was signed by a “Douglas Bush” of South Bend, Indiana. The website was registered to someone quite different, though: Muhammed Ashraf, from Faisalabad, Pakistan. Quite why Douglas Bush or Muhammed Ashraf would be reviewing a builder based in Clapham is not explained in “his” post. BuildTeam says it has no idea why Narey’s review was reposted, but that it had nothing to do with it. “At no material times have we any knowledge of why this false DCMA take down was filed, nor have we contracted any reputation management firms, or any individual or a group to take such action on our behalf. Finally, and in conjunction to the above, we have never spoken with a ‘Douglas Bush,’ or a ‘Muhammed Ashraf.’”
(tags: fraud censorship mumsnet dmca takedowns google automation copyright)
3 Reasons AWS Lambda Is Not Ready for Prime Time
This totally matches my own preconceptions ;)
When we at Datawire tried to actually use Lambda for a real-world HTTP-based microservice […], we found some uncool things that make Lambda not yet ready for the world we live in: Lambda is a building block, not a tool; Lambda is not well documented; Lambda is terrible at error handling Lung skips these uncool things, which makes sense because they’d make the tutorial collapse under its own weight, but you can’t skip them if you want to work in the real world. (Note that if you’re using Lambda for event handling within the AWS world, your life will be easier. But the really interesting case in the microservice world is Lambda and HTTP.)
(tags: aws lambda microservices datawire http api-gateway apis https python ops)
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holy crap, this is dystopian:
The first time Paul Zilly heard of his score — and realized how much was riding on it — was during his sentencing hearing on Feb. 15, 2013, in court in Barron County, Wisconsin. Zilly had been convicted of stealing a push lawnmower and some tools. The prosecutor recommended a year in county jail and follow-up supervision that could help Zilly with “staying on the right path.” His lawyer agreed to a plea deal. But Judge James Babler had seen Zilly’s scores. Northpointe’s software had rated Zilly as a high risk for future violent crime and a medium risk for general recidivism. “When I look at the risk assessment,” Babler said in court, “it is about as bad as it could be.” Then Babler overturned the plea deal that had been agreed on by the prosecution and defense and imposed two years in state prison and three years of supervision.
(tags: dystopia law policing risk risk-assessment northpointe racism fortune-telling crime)
Guillermo Del Toro’s Tweetstorm About John Carpenter
‘Regarding [John] Carpenter: We all talk about inequalities in film. We can add a huge one: Genre inequality. Horror will always be punk rock!’
(tags: horror punk john-carpenter movies film guillermo-del-toro)