Month: January 2016

George Thompson settles a federal civil rights lawsuit for $72,500 after being arrested for filming the police. (credit: YouTube)

A Massachusetts man charged with wiretapping in 2014 for filming a local police officer with his iPhone is settling a federal civil rights lawsuit for $72,500.

According to court documents, a Fall River man named George Thompson saw a police officer outside his house cursing into his mobile phone while working traffic detail. The lawsuit said that Thompson began filming the officer, Thomas Barboza, with his mobile phone. The officer eventually pushed Thompson, 53, to the ground and handcuffed him, according to the lawsuit (PDF). Thompson spent a night in jail.

The arresting officer received a one-day suspension for conduct unbecoming of an officer—that is speaking profanities in public. The Fall River police erased the footage from the phone by typing in wrong passwords at least 10 times, which prompted the iPhone to restore to factory settings. That erasure was among the reasons the authorities dropped the wiretapping charges against Thompson, as the alleged evidence had been destroyed.

Leo Perrero has sued his former employer, The Walt Disney Company. He says the company gave him 90 days to train his replacement, who had an H-1B visa. (credit: WWSB)

Two former IT workers at Disney have sued, saying that Disney broke the law when it hired cheaper foreign replacements, then fired its current IT department. Disney IT employees were told they would be kept on for 90 days in order to train their replacements, who were H-1B visa holders, according to the complaints. The workers were told "if they did not stay and train they would not get a bonus and severance, which most employees reluctantly accepted."

Both lawsuits are proposed class-actions, filed in federal court in Florida. The suit filed by Dena Moore (PDF) names Disney and labor contractor Cognizant Technology Solutions, while a complaint filed by Leo Perrero (PDF) names Disney and HCL, another labor contractor.

They make a novel claim, saying that Disney violated the anti-racketeering RICO statute by engaging in a "conspiracy to displace US workers." The plaintiffs allege that Disney and the contractors weren't truthful when they filled out immigration documents, thus violating a section of the RICO law that bars "fraud and misuse of visas, passports, and other documents."

(credit: Jeremy Brooks )

Congressional oversight leaders are requiring most federal agencies to audit their networks to see if they use Juniper-manufactured firewalls that for four years contained an unauthorized backdoor for eavesdropping on encrypted communications.

Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform gave the agencies until February 4 to produce documents showing whether they use Juniper's NetScreen line of firewall appliances. The committee is also requiring agency heads who used the vulnerable devices to show how they learned of the eavesdropping threat and whether they fixed it prior to the release of last month's patch. That update removed the unauthorized code from ScreenOS, the operating system that manages NetScreen firewalls.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the chief oversight body for the US House of Representatives, with broad authority to investigate most matters pertaining to federal agencies. Committee members informed agency heads of the eavesdropping-related investigation involving Juniper hardware in letters dated late last week.

Greetings, Arsians!

Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share that will change how you work and play for the better. One of the highlights is the Dell Latitude 15 3000 laptop that you can now get for just slightly more than $700. Originally $1,227, this laptop features an Intel Core i7 processor, a 15.6-inch HD display, 8GB of RAM, and a 2GB Nvidia GPU to help you get work done as efficiently as possible.

On the flip side, there are also deals on games for when you need a break, including a $370 PS4 bundle and $20 of games, including Fallout 4, Deadpool, and others.

(credit: Jeffrey)

Over 90 percent of the heat energy added to Earth’s climate system by human activities has gone into the ocean, in part because, well, it's awfully big.

That awful-bigness makes monitoring all that heat energy a real challenge. A new study led by Peter Gleckler and Paul Durack at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory compiled as much data as possible and compared it to climate model simulations. The comparison not only shows that the ocean's warming can only be explained by human impacts (surprise!) but also highlights just how quickly global warming is occurring outside of our view.

Although a large number of automated floats have been measuring temperatures in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean for over a decade now, ship-based measurements from the past are more sparse. And the deeper the water, the fewer the available measurements. Because of this, studies analyzing the cause of ocean temperature changes have mainly stuck to the upper 700 meters. For this study, the researchers pulled together some more data—including the Challenger Expedition from the 1870s—in order to make deep ocean comparisons more worthwhile.