Someone made a tombstone to mark Internet Explorer’s end-of-support date

When Microsoft effectively discontinued support for Internet Explorer earlier this week, one person decided to mark the occasion with a bit of humor. Per Reuters, software Jung Ki-young spent 430,000 won (about $330) to design and order a headstone for…

NASA begins fourth Artemis 1 rocket ‘wet dress rehearsal’ fueling test today

With repairs complete and the rocket in place at its designated launch pad, NASA is ready to once again attempt a critical fueling test of its next-generation Space Launch System. Per Space.com, the Artemis 1 “wet dress rehearsal” will begin at 5PM ET today with a call to stations for ground personnel at Kennedy Space Center.

Over the next 48 hours, technicians will attempt loading the rocket’s first and second stages with cryogenic fuel. Provided there aren’t major setbacks, they will then try to load it with propellant starting Monday morning. If the test is successful, the Artemis 1 mission could get underway as early as July 26th.

For the oft-delayed SLS, this is its second trip to historic Launch Pad 39B. Following an initial attempt at the wet dress rehearsal on April 1st, NASA tried to complete a modified version of the fueling test on April 14th, but that was cut short after the agency discovered a hydrogen leak in the rocket’s mobile launch tower. NASA eventually decided to move the SLS back to the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs and to give a critical nitrogen supplier time to complete capacity upgrades.

Once the wet dress rehearsal is complete, NASA can finally move forward with Artemis 1. The mission will send an unmanned Orion capsule on a flight around the Moon. The next two Artemis missions would feature human astronauts, with an eye toward a lunar landing sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Former Amazon engineer convicted in 2019 Capital One data breach

A Seattle jury has found Paige Thompson, a former Amazon software engineer accused of stealing data from Capital One in 2019, guilty of wire fraud and five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer. The Capital One hack was one of the biggest security breaches in the US and compromised the data of 100 million people in the country, along with 6 million people in Canada. Thompson was arrested in July that year after a GitHub user saw her post on the website sharing information about stealing data from servers storing Capital One information. 

According to the Department of Justice, Thompson used a tool she built herself to scan Amazon Web Services for misconfigured accounts. She then allegedly used those accounts to infiltrate Capital One’s servers and download over 100 million people’s data. The jury has decided that Thompson violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by doing so, but her lawyers argued that she used the same tools and method also used by ethical hackers.

The Justice Department recently amended the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to protect ethical or white hat hackers. As long as researchers are investigating or fixing vulnerabilities in “good faith” and aren’t using the security holes they discover for extortion or other malicious purposes, they can no longer be charged under the law.

US authorities, however, disagreed with the assertion that she was only trying to expose Capital One’s vulnerabilities. The Justice Department said she planted cryptocurrency mining software onto the bank’s servers and sent the earnings straight to her digital wallet. She also allegedly bragged about the hack on online forums. 

“Far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer security, she exploited mistakes to steal valuable data and sought to enrich herself,” US Attorney Nick Brown said. Thompson could be sentenced with up to 20 years of prison time for wire fraud and up to five years for each charge of illegally accessing a protected computer. Her sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 15th.

Former Amazon engineer convicted in 2019 Capital One data breach

A Seattle jury has found Paige Thompson, a former Amazon software engineer accused of stealing data from Capital One in 2019, guilty of wire fraud and five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer. The Capital One hack was one of the biggest security breaches in the US and compromised the data of 100 million people in the country, along with 6 million people in Canada. Thompson was arrested in July that year after a GitHub user saw her post on the website sharing information about stealing data from servers storing Capital One information. 

According to the Department of Justice, Thompson used a tool she built herself to scan Amazon Web Services for misconfigured accounts. She then allegedly used those accounts to infiltrate Capital One’s servers and download over 100 million people’s data. The jury has decided that Thompson violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by doing so, but her lawyers argued that she used the same tools and method also used by ethical hackers.

The Justice Department recently amended the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to protect ethical or white hat hackers. As long as researchers are investigating or fixing vulnerabilities in “good faith” and aren’t using the security holes they discover for extortion or other malicious purposes, they can no longer be charged under the law.

US authorities, however, disagreed with the assertion that she was only trying to expose Capital One’s vulnerabilities. The Justice Department said she planted cryptocurrency mining software onto the bank’s servers and sent the earnings straight to her digital wallet. She also allegedly bragged about the hack on online forums. 

“Far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer security, she exploited mistakes to steal valuable data and sought to enrich herself,” US Attorney Nick Brown said. Thompson could be sentenced with up to 20 years of prison time for wire fraud and up to five years for each charge of illegally accessing a protected computer. Her sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 15th.

Lawmakers ask Google to stop steering people seeking abortion to anti-abortion sites

A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin is urging Google to “crack down on manipulative search results” that lead people seeking abortions to anti-abortion clinics. In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, the lawmakers reference a study conducted by US nonprofit group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The organization found that 1 in 10 Google search results for queries such as “abortion clinics near me” and “abortion pill” — specifically in states with trigger laws that would ban the procedure the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned — points to crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion instead.

“Directing women towards fake clinics that traffic in misinformation and don’t provide comprehensive health services is dangerous to women’s health and undermines the integrity of Google’s search results,” the lawmakers wrote. CCDH also found that 37 percent of results on Google Maps for the same search terms lead people to anti-abortion clinics. The lawmakers argue in the letter that Google should not be displaying those results for users searching for abortion and that if the company’s search results must continue showing them, they should at least be properly labeled.

In addition, CCDH found that 28 percent of ads displayed at the top of Google search results are for crisis pregnancy centers. Google added a disclaimer for those ads, “albeit one that appears in small font and is easily missed,” the lawmakers note, after getting flak for them a few years ago. “The prevalence of these misleading ads marks what appears to be a concerning reversal from Google’s pledge in 2014 to take down ads from crisis pregnancy centers that engage in overt deception of women seeking out abortion information online,” the letter reads.

Warner, Slotkin and the letter’s other signees are asking Google what it plans to do to limit the appearance of anti-abortion clinics when users are explicitly searching for abortion services. And, if Google chooses not to take action to prevent them from appearing in results, the group is asking whether Google would add user-friendly disclaimers clarifying whether the clinic is or isn’t providing abortion services. You can read the whole letter below:

A Supreme Court draft obtained by Politico in May showed that SCOTUS justices have voted to reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that protected the federal rights to abortion across the country. Senator Ron Wyden and 41 other Democratic lawmakers also previously asked Google to stop collecting and keeping users’ location data. They said the information could be used against people who’ve had or are seeking abortions in states with trigger laws. 

Leaked Amazon memo says the company may run out of available labor by 2024

Amazon is likely to run out of prospective workers for its US warehouses by the year 2024, according to an internal memo that was leaked to Recode. The memo contained internal research from 2021 that predicted a looming labor crisis for the e-commerce giant that would hit some areas faster than others. For example, it estimated that Amazon would exhaust its labor supply in Phoenix, Arizona by the end of 2021 and in California’s Inland Empire by the end of 2022. It calculated the available pool of workers using factors like income levels and proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities.

The report urged the company to take steps to address the future labor gap, such as raising wages to retain its existing workforce and attract more new hires. It also suggested increasing automation in the warehouses. “If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” wrote the authors of the report.

In a statement to Engadget, an Amazon spokesperson said that the leaked document isn’t an accurate assessment of its hiring situation. “There are many draft documents written on many subjects across the company that are used to test assumptions and look at different possible scenarios, but aren’t then escalated or used to make decisions. This was one of them. It doesn’t represent the actual situation, and we are continuing to hire well in Phoenix, the Inland Empire, and across the country,” wrote Rena Lunak, Amazon’s director of global operations and field communications.

Automation is something that Amazon has invested heavily in already by acquiring Kiva Systems in 2012. But according to a Wired investigation from last year, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t capable of handling advanced fulfillment tasks that can only be performed by a human worker.

Human workers were once an ample resource the company. The tech giant is the second-largest private employer in the US, and is the largest private employer in a number of US states and cities. The company announced plans to hire 125,000 workers last fall, which is roughly equivalent to the population of Savannah, Georgia. But the new hires largely appear to be replacing workers who have been terminated or resigned. Amazon’s turnover rate is roughly 150 percent a year, or twice the amount of the retail and logistics industries at large, a New York Timesinvestigation revealed last year.

As Recode notes, Amazon’s attrition rate is even worse in Phoenix and the Inland Empire. It also has to compete with big-box stores like Walmart and Target, which are now offering competitive wages to those with warehouse experience. “We are hearing a lot of [Amazon] workers say, ‘I can just go across the street to Target or Walmart,’” Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-executive director of Inland Empire’s Warehouse Worker Resource Center told Recode.

TikTok says it’s storing US data domestically amid renewed security concerns

TikTok says it’s achieved a “significant milestone” toward its promises to beef up the security of its US users’ data. In a new update, the company says it has “changed the default storage location of US user data.”

As the company notes, it had already stored much of its user data in the United States, at a Virginia-based data center. But under a new partnership with Oracle, the company has migrated US user traffic to a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“Today, 100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We still use our US and Singapore data centers for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete US users’ private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.” Additionally, TikTok says it has made “operational changes,” including a new department “with US-based leadership, to solely manage US user data for TikTok.”

The moves are part of a longstanding effort by TikTok to address US officials’ concerns over how user data is handled by TikTok and parent company ByteDance. The company has been working to separate US user data so that it’s not accessible to China-based ByteDance as US lawmakers eye legislation to curb the influence of Chinese tech companies.

Still, the new safeguards are unlikely to fully sway critics of TikTok, who say the company still hasn’t addressed all potential concerns about how US user data is handled. In fact, just after TikTok published its blog post, BuzzFeed Newspublished a report that raises new questions about how the company handles the data of its US users.

The report, which was based on hours of internal meetings leaked to BuzzFeed, says that “China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.” The recordings, which cover a time period between last September and January 2022, offer new details about the complex effort to cut off Bytedance’s access to US user data.

The report quotes an outside consultant hired by TikTok to oversee some of the work saying that they believed there was “backdoor to access user data in almost all” of the company’s internal tools. It also quotes statements from several employees who say “that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.”

It also notes that while data deemed “sensitive,” like users’ birth dates and phone numbers, will be stored in the Oracle servers, other information about US-based users could remain accessible to ByteDance. “ByteDance’s China-based employees could continue to have access to insights about what American TikTok users are interested in, from cat videos to political beliefs,” the report says.

That may not seem as serious as more personal information like birthdays and phone numbers, but it’s exactly the kind of details that some lawmakers in the US have raised concerns about. US officials have questioned whether the app’s “For You” algorithm could be used as a means of foreign influence.

“We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data,” TikTok said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

FBI warns crypto fraud on LinkedIn is a ‘significant threat’

If you have a tendency to talk to people you don’t know on LinkedIn, you may want to take extra care. According to a CNBC report, the company has acknowledged a “recent uptick of fraud on its platform,” and this time the scams involve persuading users …

The original ‘Pokémon Snap’ comes to Switch Online on June 24th

Are you more interested in playing the original Pokémon Snap than the modern version? You won’t have to pull your Nintendo 64 out of the closet to do it. Nintendo is releasing the N64 game on June 24th for gamers subscribed to Switch Online with the Expansion Pack. It’s still the on-rails (sometimes literally) creature photo safari you remember, complete with tossing fruit to either attract or stun Pokémon in the name of a perfect snapshot.

There’s no mention of any Switch-specific enhancements. The Virtual Console version for the Wii let you post critter pictures on a message board, but that’s not strictly necessary when the Switch lets you capture screenshots to post on Facebook or Twitter.

Pokémon Snap probably won’t persuade you to get the Expansion Pack by itself. Along with classics like Paper Mario and Kirby 64, though, the pattern is clear. Nintendo is still busy fleshing out Switch Online’s extended library with some of the better-known games from the N64 era, and it doesn’t mind adding titles that have present-day counterparts.