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Account-draining malware masterminds charged but remain in motherland

US prosecutors have slapped a $5m bounty on the heads of two Russian nationals they claim are part of the malware gang behind the banking trojans ZeuS and Dridex.…

Learning points, not an instruction manual

Black Hat 2019 Faking digital evidence during a cyber attack – planting a false flag – is simple if you know how, as noted infosec veteran Jake Williams told London's Black Hat conference.…

Comms provider switched 118 people to its services without their consent

Imagine a telco kicking down your front door, yelling "all your bills are belong to us" then leaving. In the industry parlance, it's known as "slamming" and Ofcom has fined Onestream £35,000 for the practice.…

The past few years have been a turning point for our oceans. Viral footage of beached whales with plastic in their stomachs, turtles with straws jammed up their noses, and crabs stuck in plastic cups have travelled the world. 

We’re all waking up to the damage plastic is having on our environment. As a result, a wave of public outrage led to a host of commitments and pledges from supermarkets to reduce plastic. 

But how much was actually done? Greenpeace UK and the Environmental Investigation Agency investigated their commitments, and how their promises on plastic measured up to actual achievements.

The results are shocking. Supermarkets now put over 900,000 tonnes of plastic packaging on their shelves a year. Like most plastic, it finds its way into our oceans or goes into landfill. 

Last year Greenpeace published its first league table ranking UK supermarkets’ plastic footprint. In this year’s updated league table there have been some shifts in the ranking, some backtracking, and more hopefully, some breakthroughs.

Supermarkets are creating a sea of plastic that just keeps getting bigger

The big news is that supermarkets put even more plastic than ever before on their shelves this year. Seven of the 10 supermarkets ranked increased their plastic footprint. All of this at a time when over 1.5 million people have called on them to make dramatic reductions! 

There are no real winners or losers in our league table – across the board we are seeing far too much single-use plastic hitting the shelves. This is plastic that customers have overwhelmingly said “no thanks” to – sometimes literally, at the tills.

The bottom performers are yet to embrace refillable and reusable packing at scale and grew their overall plastic footprint from the year before. 

The percentage ranking was decided from scores across four categories: Promises made on reduction and reuse, Future plans on reduction and reuse, Recyclability/recycled content, Influencing suppliers and Transparency.

Sainsbury’s were one of the big climbers this year. Having come bottom of the league last year, they now sit more comfortably (but far from perfect) at third place. Sainsbury’s announced plans to reduce plastic by 50%, and introduced reusable produce bags for loose fruit and vegetables. This came as tens of thousands of outraged customers took action against them – the UK’s second biggest supermarket business – for their plastic apathy. 

Topping the leaderboard this year we have Waitrose and Morrisons – they’re there because of their enthusiastic approach toward refillable and reusable packaging. Waitrose also achieved an actual decrease in their plastic footprint this year, along with Tescos and Sainsbury’s. Morrisons have also made their loose and refillable ranges cheaper than packaged counterparts.

If refill stations and reusable packaging were introduced in all supermarkets, it would lead to a dramatic reduction in supermarket plastic. 

Bags for life are bad for life in our oceans

One area all supermarkets could improve on easily is plastic bags. While the 5p charge may have driven down demand for carrier bags, it’s just shifted the problem. Supermarkets sold 1.5 billion “bags for life” last year – roughly 54 per UK household! That’s not a bag for life, that’s a bag for a week. 

This is a solvable problem. By charging more for bags for life, giving discounts to those who reuse them or bring in their own reusable bags, supermarkets can reduce demand. 

Supermarkets need to be doing much more on throwaway packaging. They pumped out roughly 58 billion pieces of plastic packaging last year – and our oceans mustn’t be where they end up.

Shoppers show supermarkets the way

Thanks to ordinary people, speaking up and taking action, there is hope. Whether you’re tweeting your supermarket about ridiculous plastic-wrapped bananas, or taking in tupperware and reusable bags when you shop, supermarkets are taking notice. 

Because of you, pumping out pointless plastic is becoming less and less viable for supermarkets. We need to see a refillable revolution hitting the shop floors, and more productive measures to reduce plastic. Thanks to you, supermarkets know what they need to do, now they need to get on with it. 

Join over 1.5 million people and tell supermarkets to ditch pointless plastic packaging!

The post Despite their slick spin, supermarkets put more plastic than ever on their shelves this year appeared first on Greenpeace UK.

Another $0.51 dividend for shareholders, exec pay OK'd, but no say for employees

There was good news for investors and perhaps bad news for employees during Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting.…

You say 20H1, they say 2004, let's call the whole thing off

Microsoft has emitted a fresh build of next year's Windows 10 to both the Slow and Fast rings of the Windows Insider programme and goodness, those guinea pigs weren't keen on Notepad-In-The-Store.…

Billionaire accuses execs of running scared for jobs amid $33.5bn bid

Corporate raider Carl Icahn isn't quietly accepting HP's rejection of Xerox's hostile $33.5bn takeover bid - he has accused the board of using delay tactics to keep their jobs and warning it can be done in a nice or not-so-nice way.…

ZeroCleare wipes up where Shamoon left off

An Iran-based hacking crew long known to target energy facilities in neighboring Middle Eastern countries is believed to be launching new attacks.…

What's that when it's at home? Oh, they mean pixel binning

Motorola has updated its mid-range lineup with the announcement of the Android 10-powered One Hyper.…

Ready to go, but beware 'unfortunate breaking change' in Windows Forms

Microsoft has released .NET Core 3.1 – a significant milestone as, unlike version 3.0, it is a long-term support (LTS) release, suggesting that the company believes it's fit for extended use. It is accompanied by Visual Studio 16.4, also an LTS release.…

What now? A pre-election porky? Heaven forfend…

Conservative Party claims they may review the extension of IR35 tax rules to the UK private sector have been called into question by a tax expert.…

Pretty fly for a Wi-Fi...

The long-awaited future of super-fast wireless is here, with the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) claiming speeds of 700Mbps in a real-world environment using the Wi-Fi 6 standard.…

Distributed acoustic sensing turns old glass cabling into seismic sensors

Old, unused fiber optic cables buried underground can be refashioned into seismometers, helping scientists monitor earthquakes, according to new research.…

Advice based on feedback from Register readers and insights from Box

Webcast Financial institutions across the board are wrestling with how to engage more closely with customers and work better across internal teams. Too often, the cause is ill-fitting content and document management systems, designed for another time. Meanwhile, cloud-based platforms can both help and hinder, delivering short-term benefit but adding complexity and fragmentation.…

The great .uk foist is still rumbling along

Two months after promising customers that its past practices of automatically registering, and charging, customers for .uk domains was all a big misunderstanding, pushy registrar 123-Reg is at it again, charging at least one punter for .uk domains they never ordered and don’t want.…

Collaborating with other companies is such a drag

re:Invent AWS CEO Andy Jassy, asked about the future role of Kubernetes (K8s) in cloud infrastructure, told The Register that "I don’t believe in one tool to rule the world."…

Exposed private cert key may also be an issue for IBM Aspera

Twitter security celeb SwiftOnSecurity on Tuesday inadvertently disclosed a zero-day vulnerability affecting enterprise software biz Atlassian, a flaw that may be echoed in IBM's Aspera software.…

In-memory malware a first for suspected Nork hacking crew

The Lazarus group, which has been named as one of North Korea's state-sponsored hacking teams, has been found to be using new tactics to infect macOS machines.…

Like most online poker rooms or networks, 888poker has its version of the jackpot Sit-and-Go called BLAST Poker. Recently, the poker room adjusted the structure of these quick Sit-and-Go’s to bring them a bit more in line with those of its competitors.

A chair has been removed

BLAST poker games are now three-handed, super-turbo contests. Like always, the prize pool is determined before the game starts, based on a pre-determined probability table that varies depending on the buy-in.

At the lowest prize pool multipliers (2x, 3x, 5x), the BLAST games are winner-take-all. When the prize pool is 10x or 25x the buy-in, the top two finishers win money, and above that, all three players get something.

The primary differentiator that remains for BLAST Sit-and-Go’s is that after a certain amount of time, everybody remaining in the match is put all-in. The higher the prize pool multiplier, the longer players have before they are forced to go all-in.

In FAST BLAST games, the time to all-in is reduced, hence the name.

BLAST Poker games were previously four-handed, a characteristic that separated them from the pack. When questioned as to why the site decided to make the chance, an 888 rep on 2+2 said, “We wanted games to start faster.”

It makes sense. Reducing the field by 25 percent should make games end more quickly and thus new games will start sooner.

Payout structure tweaks

888poker has also changed the payout structure of the BLAST Poker games. In the old games, the possible multipliers were 2, 5x, 10x, 100x, 1,000x, and 10,000x the buy-in. Now 888poker has inserted a 3x multiplier and swapped out the 1,000x multiplier for one that is just 25x. The 888poker’s New Jersey site has not made the changes yet, so the differences can be seen if you bring up both BLAST Poker pages.

Using the $5 BLAST Poker table as an example, the odds of hitting the highest multiplier has been reduced significantly, from 10 in 1,000,000 to just 1 in 1,000,000. The percentage is still virtually zero, but that’s still large difference on a relative scale. There is now a 91.4 percent chance of hitting a multiplier of 5x or lower, compared to 95.9 previously. Of course, that 3x multiplier was inserted and most of probability of the old 5x multiplier has been shifted to the new 3x multiplier.

The odds of hitting the 10x multiplier have increased eight-fold, but the chances are still very low. It moved from 5,000 out of 1,000,000 to 40,390 out of 1,000,000. On the flip side, the chances of hitting a 100x multiplier have been slashed from 400 in 1,000,000 to 75 in 1,000,000.

Probabilities vary as you go up the buy-in scale, but the top three multipliers – 10,000x, 100x, and 25x – all stay the same. The differences per buy-in level are in how the probabilities are shuffled in the lower multipliers, but none of those differences are all that significant.

The post 888 Changes BLAST Poker Structure appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Hey, no looking, that paperwork's private, says network operator

Angry AT&T customers have asked a judge to force America's trade watchdog, the FTC, to hand over the information it used to reach a $60m settlement with the cellular network for throttling “unlimited data” plans.…