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Whatever you do, don't pay the ransom

Analysis WannaCry – the file-scrambling ransomware that infamously locked up Britain's NHS and a bunch of other organisations worldwide in May 2017 – is still a live-ish threat to this day, infosec researchers reckon.…

Bed down for the night with tech's great and good at Action for Children fundraiser

That sound you can hear is the clock ticking down on your chance to register for this year’s Byte Night sleep out.…

Doh! It only gives us the right answer half of the time

Forest fires have apparently ravaged over four million acres of land across the United States so far this year, and the problem is only getting worse with global warming. Enter technology's hottest solution: Machine learning.…

Farewell to St Paul's telco treasury

Geek's Guide to Britain The BT Centre is an unremarkable-looking building just north of St Paul's Cathedral, nine storeys of Portland stone with straight unadorned 1980s lines softened by curved corners. The headquarters of the UK's largest telco could be mistaken for an apartment block if it wasn't for the company's logo.…

Symantec says Tortoiseshell crew ransacked suppliers

Miscreants are hacking into Saudi Arabian IT providers in an attempt to compromise their real targets: said providers' customers, according to Symantec.…

Extensions used by nearly 2m people a week pretend to be legit add-ons, stuff cookies to make bank

On Wednesday, Google nuked two ad-blocking Chrome extensions that appear to have been designed to conduct affiliate-marketing fraud.…

Both sides have different interpretations of the rules

The infosec duo cuffed during an IT penetration test that went south last week are out of jail, though not necessarily out of the woods.…

Remanufactured kit never as reliable, complainants claim

A judge in California has OK'd a class-action lawsuit against Apple for alleged breaches of its AppleCare warranty schemes.…

Virgin Hotels, as the name would imply, is a hotel company, and a small one at that, with only three properties currently open. It is not a gaming company. As such, it could probably use some assistance when Virgin Hotels Las Vegas opens late next year. On Tuesday, Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment (MGE) announced that it has forged a multi-year deal with Virgin to operate the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas casino.

MGE operates several casinos, but it is most notable for its flagship Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. With this partnership, MGE is making its first foray into Las Vegas.

“MGE’s brand presence in the world’s most exciting entertainment environment will establish the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut, MGE’s owner, as the first Native American Tribe to operate in the Las Vegas Strip resort corridor,” the company said in a press release.

The property, currently still the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, is situated just off the Las Vegas Strip, east of Paris and Planet Hollywood.

Richard “Boz” Bosworth, is the president and chief executive officer of JC Hospitality LLC, the joint venture between Bosworth Hospitality Partners LLC, the Virgin Group, and Juniper Capital Partners that bought the Hard Rock last year. In a statement, he naturally gushed about the new relationship with MGE:

Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment, as an extension of the Mohegan Tribe, pride themselves on traditional principles, in sync with modern values. We are excited that Virgin Hotels Las Vegas will be their first entry in the Las Vegas market. MGE further expands on our commitment to partner with best-in-class operators for the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas transformation.

There are still questions surrounding the transition of the Hard Rock to Virgin, specifically as to how much, if any, of the music theme will remain. Richard Branson, head of the Virgin Group, already said the iconic guitar sign will likely come down.

Renovations will be extensive. Virgin originally planned to do a phased renovation over a four-month period and then shut the place down completely for another four months. It was announced last month, though, that the plan just wasn’t going to work and the property would close after the Super Bowl in February 2020 and not re-open until everything was done late in the year.

“We determined that a phased closing of four months, followed by a total closure of four months was not efficient from a construction process nor could we provide a hospitality service experience our guests deserve,” said Bosworth.

With the closure date just a few months away, current Hard Rock employees are likely scrambling to secure positions at other Las Vegas-area casinos. To try to keep as many on board as possible, Virgin has launched the “Stick Around and Come Back” program, which will give employees a bonus of up to ten weeks pay if they stay until the final day in February.

Then, if any Hard Rock employees want to work at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas when it opens next fall or winter, they will be able to get their jobs back without having to re-interview.

The post Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment to Manage Virgin Hotels Las Vegas Casino appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Angry cable subscriber sues, claims 'never-ending' deal actually lasted just three years

Maintaining its hard-won reputation for being one of the most-hated companies in America, Comcast has seemingly redefined the meaning of the word “lifetime” – and received a lawsuit in response.…

The 2019 World Poker Tour (WPT) Borgata Poker Open Main Event is into Day 3 as the survivors from the first two starting flights came together for Day 2 on Tuesday. Leading the remaining 145 players is Jonathan Jaffe with 1.035 million chips.

Just one other player goes into Day 3 with more than a million chips. That man would be Victor Ramdin with 1.016 million. After Ramdin there is a drop-off to a group of five players who have 848,000 chips or fewer.

Once registration closed after the first two levels on Tuesday, the total field was announced as 1,156. Of course, since there were unlimited re-entries, that number is total “entries” and not “players,” but it is still a great number. The $3 million guaranteed prize pool was easily overtaken, with the total prize pool ending up at $3,700,356. The tournament will pay to 145 places with a min-cash of $5,797. First place will win $616,186 and the entire six-handed final table will score six-figure cashes.

The chip leader, Jonathan Jaffe, is no stranger to amassing chips in a World Poker Tour event. He has made three final tables on the World Poker Tour and won partypoker.net WPT Montreal during the 2014-2015 season. And that’s three six-handed final tables that he made; Jaffe also has an eighth and ninth place finish on the Tour, which would be final tables in most major tournaments.

Jaffe’s career World Poker Tour earnings are $1,328,252. He has earned $2 million more than that in live tournaments overall. His top cash did not come in a victory, but rather a second place finish in the 2008 World Poker Finals Championship Event, for which he earned $670,636.

One of the more notable players in attendance this week is Vanessa Selbst. Selbst is far and away the all-time leader on the female money list for live tournaments with $11.851 million in earnings. The closest to her is the legendary Kathy Liebert with $6.285 million. Selbst is 64th overall on the all-time money list.

But Selbst left the poker life a couple years ago for a position in the financial sector. As stressful as finance can be, she made the change mainly because poker was too stressful of a lifestyle.

“You have no job security, no health insurance,” she told The New York Times. “You’re traveling constantly. You have no stability in terms of your life. And there are huge swings because if more people now have a chance to win, it’s very easy to have a losing year.”

She now lives in Brooklyn and had some time off before she starts a new job, so she decided to make the trip to Atlantic City to “give it a whirl.”

That whirl has worked out so far, as Selbst made it through Day 2 with 318,000 chips.

2019 World Poker Tour Borgata Poker Open Main Event – Day 2 Chip Leaders

1. Jonathan Jaffe – 1,035,000
2. Victor Ramdin – 1,016,000
3. Arian Stolt – 848,000
4. Jean Gaspard – 835,000
5. Justin Liberto – 818,000
6. Jerry Maher – 808,000
7. Uke Dauti – 806,000
8. Nick Pupillo – 782,000
9. Michael Stashin – 743,000
10. Peter Vitantonio – 734,000

The post 2019 WPT Borgata Poker Open Day 2: Jonathan Jaffe, Victor Ramdin Eclipse 1 Million Chips appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Service Mesh and Cloud Run put existing features in a pretty wrapper

Google talked up new features for Anthos, its take on hybrid cloud, at an event in New York earlier this week.…

Sex assault survivor reveals her two-year fight for justice

Analysis A woman who says she was subjected to a horrific rape at the hands of her Lyft driver has sued the tech biz.…

Blueprints for mobile apps, databases exposed in public GitHub repos

Exclusive Scotiabank leaked online a trove of its internal source code, as well as some of its private login keys to backend systems, The Register can reveal.…

Semmle's flaw-finding queries can be shared and used on multiple projects

On Wednesday, Microsoft's GitHub said it has acquired Semmle, a San Francisco-based software analysis platform for finding vulnerabilities in code. No price was disclosed.…

GCHQ offshoot says be on your guard

Cybercrims are still likely to affect universities and other educational institutions online with ransomware, reckons GCHQ offshoot the National Cyber Security Centre.…

Cash for acquisitions, new hires and data centre expansion

Goldman Sachs has led a $147m funding round in Acronis which values the data recovery and protection vendor at more than a billion dollars – unicorn status.…

Q3 figures = good, Q4 targets = vague

A day after Adobe posted hugely profitable Q3 results, its share price dropped by as much as 5 per cent (~$270) and has been bouncing around the sub 3 per cent mark (~$275) for the remainder of trading.…

Government gave them the deets, so not a hacking charge

The head of Novaestrat, the data analytics company at the centre of the huge leak revealed on Monday involving personal information about more than 20 million Ecuadorian citizens, has been taken into custody.…

By 'eck! Geoffrey Boycott-inspired domain sees off tat bazaar challenge

eBay and Gumtree have lost a legal fight to kill off a British wannabe rival thanks to Geoffrey Boycott's usage of a well-known Yorkshireism.…