Month: December 2015

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. (credit: Michael Vadon)

The Democratic National Committee has cut off the Bernie Sanders campaign's access to a voter database after allegations that Sanders staff members improperly viewed confidential information gathered by the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

The Sanders campaign fired the staff member who was responsible for accessing the data, according to multiple media reports. The breach was made possible by a bad patch applied by the software vendor that operates the database.

"The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters," The Washington Post reported today. "The DNC maintains the master list and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by their rivals."

(credit: Uber)

SAN FRANCISCO—On Thursday, a federal judge admonished Uber over its questionable newly issued labor agreement. He also ruled that the new agreement does not affect members of the certified class of California drivers who are currently suing Uber over whether they should be considered employees.

Uber’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous, said the company believed it was within its right to suddenly send out the new document last Friday, which drivers had to agree to in order to continue driving for the company.

"Whatever your intent, I'm going to tell you my intent, I had no intent to say go ahead and issue notices," US District Court Judge Edward Chen said during the hearing in O'Connor v. Uber, which was over two hours long.

The billboard, advertising Construct 2 game creation platform, was made with MS Paint. The billboard is by South Bermondsey station in south-east London at the intersection of Rotherhithe and Ilderton road.

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It ain't easy to stand out nowadays, especially if you're a small company: you either have to do something crazy enough that the media notices you, or market something so wonderfully novel that the media has to write about you. In this case, it seems that London-based software company Scirra decided to go with the former.

The billboard you see above is currently on display near South Bermondsey train station in south-east London, at the intersection of Rotherhithe and Ilderton roads. It was drawn entirely in MS Paint, and at 36 square metres this might just be the largest piece of MS Paint artwork in the world.

We spoke to Tom Gullen, co-founder of Scirra and the artist behind this MS Paint masterpiece, about the billboard. "The picture itself took me about 15-20 minutes to design and I was pretty happy with the result. I'm a Web developer by trade so this sort of advertising is all new to me."

Ho ho ho.

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What do you get if you combine an Arduino, knitting, a fair amount of DIY chutzpah, and a genetic and/or epigenetic predisposition towards falling asleep while watching TV? Netflix socks, of course.

A few months ago, some enterprising types at Netflix created The Switch—essentially a single button to dim the lights, silence your mobile phone, order takeaway, and start streaming your favourite show or film. Netflix shared the schematics and parts list for The Switch so that you could make your own.

Now they've done it again with a pair of socks that automatically pauses your stream if you fall asleep.

In an attack aping the work of the infamous Lizard Squad hacking group, the similarly titled Phantom Squad has claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on Microsoft's Xbox Live service. While the service is now currently back up, some users experienced problems logging in overnight. Sony's PlayStation Network was not affected.

The attacks follow threats issued by Phantom Squad on its now suspended Twitter account. The group threatened to take down both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network over the Christmas period for as long as a week. Responding the criticism over the threats, the group said: "Why do we take down PSN and Xbox Live? Because cyber security does not exist," and "Some men just want to watch PSN and Xbox Live burn."

This was followed by a tweet yesterday reading "Xbox Live #Offline," coinciding with the reported Xbox Live problems. "Maybe if you guys didn't talk shit about us, we would not hit Xbox Live this early," read another tweet. The group then threatened to take down PlayStation Network next, before its Twitter account was taken offline.