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A video posted online is responsible for charges being leveled Wednesday against two Baltimore school cops, one of whom is seen in the brief clip smacking a student in the face and then kicking him in the back.

The video, recorded March 1 by a fellow student at REACH Partnership School, shows an officer yelling at the 16-year-old student to "go the fuck home" and "get the fuck out of here."

Anthony Spence, 44, is accused of second-degree assault and misconduct in office. Another cop, Saverna Bias, 53, is charged with second-degree child abuse. The video shows a second cop, allegedly Bias, standing idly by during the brief beating. The pair have been placed on leave and were released on $50,000 bond Wednesday. Spence's attorney said his client was under the impression that the boy was trespassing before the altercation occurred. The boy, however, was a student at the school in the Clifton Park neighborhood.

A botched security fix released for the Java software framework 30 months ago has left millions of users vulnerable to attacks that Oracle had claimed were no longer possible, a security researcher said.

The bypass code, which was released Thursday by Polish security firm Security Explorations, contains only minor changes to the original proof-of-concept, according to an e-mail posted to the Full Disclosure security list. Security Explorations released the original exploit in October 2013 following the release of a patch from Oracle. Thursday's bypass changes only four characters from the 2013 code and uses a custom server to work. The bypass means that millions of Java users have remained vulnerable to the flaw, categorized as CVE-2013-5838, despite assurances from Oracle that the attacks were no longer possible.

"We implemented a Proof of Concept code that illustrates the impact of the broken fix described above," Security Explorations researchers wrote in a report. "It has been successfully tested in the environment of Java SE Update 97, Java SE 8 Update 74, and Java SE 9 Early Access Build 108. In all cases, a complete Java security sandbox escape could be achieved."

This has been a big week and a big year for small autonomous vehicle startups. This morning, General Motors announced that it had purchased Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley-based autonomous vehicle startup of 40 people that already has a permit from the California DMV to test its systems on public roads in that state. And on Wednesday, Toyota hired all 16 employees of Jaybridge Robotics, a Massachusetts-based self-driving car company.

In GM’s case, Re/code reports that anonymous sources say the American automaker spent more than $1 billion to acquire Cruise, which will remain in Silicon Valley while it works under GM’s umbrella. Cruise had previously raised $18.8 million in funding, and it recently released a $10,000 after-market system that would make an Audi A4 or S4 self-driving.

GM is hardly being under-the-radar about its self-driving car ambitions. Earlier this year, the automaker pledged $500 million to Lyft to partner with the ride-sharing company in autonomous taxi research. A few weeks later, it also bought the defunct ride-sharing service Sidecar.

Not the message you want from your Web security firm.

A Web security company's systems are offline this morning after an apparent intrusion into the company's network. The servers and routers of Staminus Communications—a Newport Beach, California-based hosting and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection company—went offline at 8am Eastern Time on Thursday in what a representative described in a Twitter post as "a rare event [that] cascaded across multiple routers in a system wide event, making our backbone unavailable."

That "rare event" appears to have been intentional. A data dump of information on Staminus' systems includes customer names and e-mail addresses, database table structures, routing tables, and more. The data was posted to the Internet this morning, and a Staminus customer who wishes to remain anonymous confirmed his data was part of the dump. The authors of the dump claim to have gained control of Staminus' routers and reset them to factory settings.

The dump, in a hacker "e-zine" format, begins with a note from the attacker. Sarcastically titled "TIPS WHEN RUNNING A SECURITY COMPANY," this details the security holes found during the breach:

(credit: Michael Saechang)

If the federal government enacted just three gun-control laws—requiring universal background checks for firearms, background checks for ammunition, and firearm identification—gun deaths could fall by as much as 90 percent according to a new study.

The study, published in the The Lancet, tried to tease apart the independent effects that 25 state gun control laws implemented in various states in 2009 had on firearm related deaths (including homicides and suicides) between 2008 and 2010. The analysis, led by researchers at Boston University, also took into account factors related to gun deaths such as unemployment rates and levels of gun ownership.

However, some skeptics of the study wonder if the limited data of just a few years and correlations are enough to draw definitive links. The authors themselves admit that impacts of gun legislation could take several years to unfold in the statistics. And various other factors influencing gun death rates—such as suicide prevention efforts, law enforcement implementation, and demographics—may also skew the analysis.

Last night's debate near Miami, Florida. (credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Earlier this year, a group of Florida mayors that are dealing with problems caused by sea level rise sent a letter to the Republican presidential candidates that hailed from the same state. "We call on you to acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change," the letter said. But Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, both of whom have been ambiguous at best about that reality, ignored the letter.

With Bush since departing the race, it was left to Marco Rubio to field that request at last night's Republican debate in Florida. "Senator Rubio, the Miami mayor has endorsed you," moderator Jake Tapper noted. "Will you honor his request for a pledge and acknowledge the reality of the scientific consensus of climate change and pledge to do something about it?"

Rubio's response distilled down to "no," but he made a complete hash of its details.

A TP-Link router. (credit: TP-Link.)

Networking hardware vendor TP-Link says it will prevent the loading of open source firmware on routers it sells in the United States in order to comply with new Federal Communications Commission requirements.

The FCC wants to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications that cause radios to operate outside their licensed RF (radio frequency) parameters. The FCC says it doesn't intend to ban the use of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT; in theory, router makers can still allow loading of open source firmware as long as they also deploy controls that prevent devices from operating outside their allowed frequencies, types of modulation, power levels, and so on.

But open source users feared that hardware makers would lock third-party firmware out entirely, since that would be the easiest way to comply with the FCC requirements. The decision by TP-Link—described by the company in this FAQ—shows that those fears were justified. (Thanks to Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo for bringing it to our attention.)