One cellphone company says it already had begun crediting customers for the lack of service due to outages in Florida counties hit by Hurricane Michael.

(Image credit: David Goldman/AP)

Changes in U.S. Payments Fraud from 2012 to 2016: Evidence from the Federal Reserve Payments Study. October 2018: “The value of fraudulent noncash payments in the United States rose significantly between 2012 and 2015–outpacing growth in noncash payments overall, according to a new report based on Federal Reserve Payments Study data. The study’s survey of depository institutions found that the value of noncash payments fraud rose 37 percent from $6.1 billion in 2012 to $8.3 billion in 2015. Over the same period, the total value of noncash payments rose 12 percent from $161.2 trillion to $180.3 trillion. The report provides estimates of payments fraud totals and rates for payments processed over general-purpose credit and debit card networks, including non-prepaid and prepaid debit card networks, the automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfer system, and the check clearing system. These payment systems form the core of the noncash payment and settlement systems used to clear and settle everyday payments made by consumers and businesses in the United States. The fraud data were collected as part of Federal Reserve surveys of depository institutions in 2012 and 2015 and payment card networks in 2015 and 2016. The types of fraudulent payments covered in the study are those made by an unauthorized third party. Data from the depository institutions survey show that the overall rate of payments fraud, by value, increased from 2012 to 2015 in the United States, driven primarily by card fraud. According to the payment card networks, the rate of card fraud, by value, was nearly flat from 2015 to 2016, with the rate of in-person card fraud decreasing notably and the rate of remote card fraud increasing significantly. Even so, both surveys found that card payments fraud, at less than one-tenth of a percent of all card payments, is rare, and also represents a small fraction of the value of card payments…”

“College students turn to their peers and online versions of trusted newspapers for news at least twice as often as they do to print publications, TV, or podcasts. Those who get their news on social media turn to Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube more often than Twitter. And nine out of ten college students get their news from at least five different sources in a given week. With so many different ways to get news, students face a constant surge that makes it difficult for them to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fake, and in some cases, to trust any news at all, according to a new report from one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of youth media engagement.

“Young people have different ways of consuming news than people born even a decade before them,” said John Wihbey, a Northeastern professor and one of the researchers who conducted the study. “Our report – [How Students Engage With News] suggests that in some ways, we have created for young people an extremely difficult environment of news. We need to figure out ways to guide them so they can navigate it.”

ACLU: “Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy and the fundamental right that underpins all our civil liberties. That’s why it is so important to advance reforms to ensure that all eligible U.S. citizens who want to cast a ballot and participate in our elections are able to do so. One of the measures that states and localities can take to promote access to the ballot box and remove hurdles that make it difficult to vote is online voter registration…”

“EFF is introducing a new Coders’ Rights project to connect the work of security research with the fundamental rights of its practitioners throughout the Americas. The project seeks to support the right of free expression that lies at the heart of researchers’ creations and use of computer code to examine computer systems, and relay their discoveries among their peers and to the wider public. To kick off the project, EFF published a whitepaper today, “Protecting Security Researchers’ Rights in the Americas” (PDF), to provide the legal and policy basis for our work, outlining human rights standards that lawmakers, judges, and most particularly the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, should use to protect the fundamental rights of security researchers. We started this project because hackers and security researchers have never been more important to the security of the Internet. By identifying and disclosing vulnerabilities, hackers are able to improve security for every user who depends on information systems for their daily life and work…”

"My withdrawal comes in the wake of personal attacks that, left undefended, would have made my leading USAG a liability for the organization," Mary Bono said in her resignation letter on Tuesday.

(Image credit: Cliff Owen/AP)

lifehacker: “If the past few years have taught us as a nation nothing, it’s that we all should not only vote, but be informed about what we’re voting about. With all the information out there, figuring out what every item on the ballot means can be a daunting proposition. Vote Save America has created explainers on ballot initiatives on every state which can potentially make that research a tiny bit easier. To check out the ones in your area you just go to the site and enter your address. If you’re a complete newbie to politics, the site will briefly explain what each position people are running for actually does as well. For instance, here’s an explanation for the U.S. House of Representatives…

Where the site really shines is with the ballot initiatives. We have 12 of them on the ballot in California in November covering everything from housing programs to daylight savings time. For each measure, the site gives you a “deep dive” which is actually just a few paragraphs on what the measure actually is and then explains who supports it as well as who opposes it. It also spells out in super simple terms what your yes or no vote means…”

 

Gizmodo: “When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she’s never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use “Do Not Track” to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We’ve got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: “Do Not Track” is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.

“Do Not Track,” as it was first imagined a decade ago by consumer advocates, was going to be a “Do Not Call” list for the internet, helping to free people from annoying targeted ads and creepy data collection. But only a handful of sites respect the request, the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium. (Pinterest won’t use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who’s elected not to be tracked, while Medium won’t send their data to third parties.) The vast majority of sites, including this one, ignore it…”

Motherboard: A former Slack employee and the company’s current chief information security officer say that Slack’s paying customers aren’t that interested in end-to-end encryption.
“End-to-end encryption—where keys are stored on individual devices by users, meaning only the intended recipients can read message content—is continuing to spread across messaging platforms. But work communication service Slack has decided against the idea of having end-to-end encryption due to the priorities of its paying customers (rather than those who use a free version of the service.) Slack is not a traditional messaging program—it’s designed for businesses and workplaces that may want or need to read employee messages—but the decision still highlights why some platforms may not want to jump into end-to-end encryption. End-to-end is increasingly popular as it can protect communications against from interception and surveillance. “It wasn’t a priority for exec [executives], because it wasn’t something paying customers cared about,” a former Slack employee told Motherboard earlier this year. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak about internal company deliberations…”

For the first time, a writer from Northern Ireland has won the prestigious award. The story draws on Burns' own experiences during "the troubles."

(Image credit: WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Washington Post: “Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves. The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study’s authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.

“This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call — a clarion call — that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” said David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with this research. He added: “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”..

The New York Times – One out of every 10 students lived in temporary housing during the last school year. “Tonight, about one out of every 10 students in New York City will sleep in a homeless shelter or in the homes of relatives. That’s more children than at any other time since city records have been kept. In the morning, those same children will fan out across the city to go to school, some crossing multiple boroughs to get there. Last year, the number of city students in temporary housing topped 100,000 for the third consecutive year, according to state data released Monday by Advocates for Children of New York, a group that provides legal and advocacy services for needy students Those students are the most vulnerable victims of homelessness, an issue that has dogged Mayor Bill de Blasio since he took office in 2014. But as the number of homeless children continues to swell, there hasn’t been a significant increase in public or private dollars spent to support these students. Here’s a look at the issue of homelessness in the city’s schools, and what is — and isn’t — being done to reduce it..”

He was best known as a legal pimp whose business was profiled on a reality TV show that aired on HBO. He had recently turned to politics, running for state assembly in Nevada.

(Image credit: Steve Marcus/Reuters)

The Twitter CEO talks with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson about how the social media service is different today than 12 years ago.

Archer, Deborah N., Political Lawyering for the 21st Century (April 18, 2018). Denver Law Review (Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3164868 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3164868

“Legal education purports to prepare the next generation of lawyers capable of tackling the urgent and complex social justice challenges of our time. But law schools are failing in that public promise. Clinical education offers the best opportunity to overcome those failings by teaching the skills lawyers need to tackle systemic and interlocking legal and social problems. But too often even clinical education falls short: it adheres to conventional pedagogical methodologies that are overly narrow and, in the end, limit students’ abilities to manage today’s complex racial and social justice issues. This article contends that clinical education needs to embrace and reimagine political lawyering for the 21st century in order to prepare aspiring lawyers to tackle both new and chronic issues of injustice through a broad array of advocacy strategies.”

Saudia Arabia has long seen its role as keeping the turbulent Gulf region steady and calm. But under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom has become far more aggressive.

(Image credit: Leah Mills/AP)

A year after sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein kicked off the #MeToo movement in the U.S., women in India are using Facebook and Twitter to tell their stories.

(Image credit: Rafiq Maqbool/AP)

The synagogue is "very important," says an archaeologist, "not only for Jews but all people living in Lithuania." Just 3,000 Jews are left in the capital, compared to some 70,000 before World War II.

(Image credit: Collection of Zusya Efron, Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem )

Nick Hague, the NASA astronaut onboard the Soyuz rocket that failed after takeoff last week, recounts his experience inside the capsule.

In 2003, Paul Allen created an institute to figure out how the human brain works. That institute has already made contributions that may turn out to be part of his greatest legacy.

(Image credit: Kum Kulish/Corbis/Getty Images)