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(credit: Peter Kaminski)

A former senior finance manager for Oracle claims the software maker fired her for not inflating revenues in its cloud services division. In a whistleblower and wrongful termination lawsuit, Svetlana Blackburn also claims that Oracle ultimately inflated the numbers without her assistance.

"The data, she knew, would end up in SEC filings and be touted on earnings calls, used to paint a rosier picture than actually existed on the ground," Blackburn says in her nine-page lawsuit. (PDF)

The Silicon Valley software maker, having a market cap of roughly $165 billion, said it fired the woman for inadequate work.

Jeff Williams floats into the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module on Monday morning. (credit: NASA)

A little more than a week after NASA astronaut Jeff Williams successfully expanded a new module on the International Space Station, he and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka finally entered it on Monday morning. The expandable module, Williams told mission control in Houston, looked "pristine."

After entering, Williams collected air sample data from the module, which was nominal. He then began to download data from three Deployment Dynamic Sensor units inside that recorded vibration data during the expansion process. Later this week, Williams will also install radiation, impact detection, and temperature sensors before closing the hatch again.

The successful expansion marks a pivotal moment for Bigelow Aerospace, which built the module and has been at the forefront of trying to commercially develop expandable space habitats. In January, the company had to lay off as much as one third of its 150 employees as it sought to pare back expenses.

Playtonic Games

Yooka's the lizard; Laylee's the bat.

7 more images in gallery

In May of 2015, a gaggle of ex-developers from the game studio Rare made the crowd-funding rounds with dreams of resurrecting the 3D-platformer genre—and the results have finally begun to bear fruit. Yooka-Laylee, the debut project from Playtonic Games, looks like a blatant love letter to N64 classic Banjo-Kazooie. This week the game has finally been received a proper video reveal almost exactly a year after the dev team concluded its $3.2 million campaign.

The trailer, seen below, was apparently saved to help fans swallow the hard pill of a game delay. Yooka-Laylee has been pushed back from its original October 2016 promise to "Q1 2017." New publisher Team 17 (of Worms fame) will handle the game's Xbox One, PS4, Wii U, and Steam releases next year.

From the look of things, Playtonic seems dead-set on making a third Banjo-Kazooie (Banjo Three-ie?) in everything but name and main characters. Lizard and bat combine to double-jump, float, roll, and transform into other temporary creatures while traversing what appear to be some large, incredibly colorful worlds. Floating blocks, magically appearing platforms, and races (including a roll through a tunnel and a Donkey Kong Country-esque mine cart ride) fill out the brief preview footage found in an official trailer and a Eurogamer eyes-on preview.

Jacob Appelbaum in Berlin in 2014. (credit: re:publica)

Former Tor Project "Core Team" member Jacob Appelbaum took to Twitter on Monday morning to slam sex-related accusations against him that developed over the weekend. He also denounced the matter as a "calculated and targeted attack has been launched to spread vicious and spurious allegations against me."

"I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false," he wrote.

The Tor Project is the Massachusetts-based nonprofit that maintains Tor, the well-known open-source online anonymity tool.

Google's DeepMind AI division will face off against humanity's number one Go player, Ke Jie, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Ke Jie is currently the top-ranked Go player in the world.

DeepMind's Go-playing program AlphaGo played against Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol in March. Lee lost to the computer 4-1. Although Lee was the world's top-rated Go player between 2007 and 2011 and is widely considered to be one of the greatest Go players the world has ever seen, he was only ranked number four in the world when he played against AlphaGo.

For the last couple of years the world's best Go player (by Elo score) has been Ke Jie, a Chinese child prodigy. Back in March, after AlphaGo had won the first game of the match with Lee, Ke said that “I don’t want to compete with AlphaGo because judging from its matches with Lee, AlphaGo is weaker than me. I don’t want AlphaGo to copy my style." He did some bragging on his Weibo account, too: “Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Se-dol, it can’t beat me."

A hacker or hacking group going by the name of "OurMine Team" briefly took control of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts, apparently using information from a major LinkedIn security breech that occurred in 2012.

According to OurMine Team, the passwords to Zuckerberg's little-used Pinterest and totally dormant Twitter accounts were apparently the same as those for his LinkedIn login ("dadada"). Both Twitter and Pinterest rapidly restored control of the accounts over the weekend, and the rogue posts have now been removed—though not before they were screencapped:

Ouch. Mark Zuckerberg's social media accounts have been hacked pic.twitter.com/KvVmXOIg5s

— Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) June 5, 2016

LinkedIn's 2012 breach was significant and embarrassing for the company, and resulted in the theft of millions of passwords and other user information. Users were warned at the time to change their LinkedIn passwords, and those on any other platform on which they were reused. This is clearly evergreen advice, as it isn't hard for a determined hacker to cross-reference someone's username and password information with other sites.