Category: Uncategorised

The attorney of an Ohio woman accused of live-streaming the rape of her 17-year-old friend claims she Periscoped the assault to gather evidence of a crime.

The defendant, 18-year-old Marina Lonina, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that include rape, kidnapping, and pandering. Her lawyer, Sam Shamansky, said his client broadcast the February rape in Columbus, Ohio to help convict the alleged rapist, 29-year-old Raymond Gates, according to CBS.

"She does everything possible to contain the situation even to the point of asking while it's being filmed to these Periscope followers, 'What should I do now? What should I do now?'" Shamansky said of Lonina, whose bond was set at $125,000 following her arrest last week. He said his client and the unidentified victim, who attend the same high school, were "preyed upon by this pervert. That's all I can say." (The classmates are naturalized US citizens from Russia, and Lonina's live-streamed comments were in Russian.)

Intel's Q1 2016 financial earnings report was paired with a major announcement of worldwide layoffs that will thin its global employment numbers by "up to 12,000" staffers.

The Tuesday announcement clarified that the staffing cuts will affect approximately 11 percent of Intel's global workforce and that the layoffs were meant to "accelerate [Intel's] evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices." A "majority" of affected employees will learn about their status within 60 days, while other staffers will have to wait until 2017.

The news comes as Intel announced reduced revenue projections for the next full year, along with a search for a new chief financial officer. Current CFO Stacy Smith will take on a new executive role "leading sales, manufacturing, and operations" once his current position has been filled, but Intel didn't clarify the new position's name, nor whether it was a jump up or down the corporate ladder.

We all remember last year's hype surrounding the Ashley Madison dating site's data breach. Hackers exposed identifying information about millions of users of the site that has the tagline, "Life is short. Have an affair."

Then came the lawyers smelling blood in the water—filing proposed class-action suits targeting the cheating site's not-so-perfect "Full Delete" option that was supposed to, and didn't, remove all identifying information from the service for a $19 fee per user. Then it surfaced that the site perhaps made phony profiles of women to attract more men to the site.

The massive litigation has been co-mingled in Missouri, and there are some interesting elements at play. For starters, the judge presiding over the case says that if you want to be a named plaintiff in the litigation, you can't use a pseudonym like "John Doe," and instead you have to use your real name. The judge, in agreeing with Ashley Madison's owners, ruled that only in extraordinary circumstances may civil litigation proceed under fake names, like in cases such as sex crimes and suits about juveniles.

On Tuesday, credit card network Visa announced plans to offer an update to Point of Sale (POS) systems to make using an EMV chip-enabled card faster at the checkout line. (EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the creators of the credit card specification.) Visa is calling the new specification “Quick Chip,” and it says it will bring the time it takes for a terminal to read the card’s chip down to two seconds.

Those seconds mean something. In 2014, Ars argued that the inconvenience of a few extra seconds caused by dipping a card in the terminal at a checkout stand would drive people to use mobile payments like Apple Pay and Android Pay more often. Those payment platforms rely on EMV’s Near Field Communication (NFC) standard, and transactions are much faster because of it. Although it's hard to say if such a shift in preference is occurring, especially with the uneven rollout of EMV-capable terminals, customers trying to use chip cards must dip them into a checkout terminal and leave them there while the transaction is being processed—a serious change of pace and potential source of frustration for Americans used to the speed of swiping a magnetic stripe card.

That time barrier, as well as the fear that customers might be confused as to how to use a chip card, caused merchants to postpone upgrading their terminals to support the EMV standard over the holidays, traditionally the most important time for businesses. But magnetic stripe cards are very fraud-prone, and EMV cards are less so (although not entirely fraud-proof), so card networks are insisting that it’s time to make the change.

With yet another prison sentence, a federal prosecutor in Fresno, California, has continued her aggressive campaign against people who fire laser pointers at airplanes.

On Monday, Pablo Cesar Sahagun was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to firing a one-watt laser at a Kern County Sheriff’s helicopter, known as Air-1, on February 26, 2015. That laser claims to produce a beam approximately 2,000 times more powerful than what is legally allowed.

US District Judge Dale A. Drozd said during sentencing, “This is an egregious case of a laser strike…The circumstances are inexplicable.”