By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's data-with-the-stars department:
TMZ accosted 68-year-old Steve Wozniak at an airport, according to an article shared by Slashdot reader Iwastheone. TMZ asked Wozniak for his thoughts on whether our devices are listening to us -- and if we're trying to have private conversations, should we be worried?
"I'm worried about everything," Wozniak replied. "I don't think we can stop it, though."
But, everything about you -- I mean, they can measure your heartbeat with lasers now, they can listen to you with a lot of devices. Who knows if my cellphone's listening right now. Alexa has already been in the news alot.
So, I worry, because you're having conversations that you think are private... You're saying words that really shouldn't be listened to, because you don't expect it. But there's almost no way to stop it. People think they have a level of privacy they don't. Why don't they give me a choice? Let me pay a certain amount, and you'll keep my data more secure and private then everybody else handing it to advertisers.
Wozniak was also asked if we should "get rid of Facebook and Instagram..." His reply?
"There are many different kinds of people, and some the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy. But to many like myself, my recommendation is -- to most people -- you should figure out a way to get off Facebook."
"Steve knows what he's talking about," explains TMZ's write-up of their conversation, adding that "the dude co-founded Apple, and he's very much plugged into Silicon Valley and all aspects of tech."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's giant-leaps-for-mankind department:
"From JFK's real motives to the Soviets' secret plot to land on the Moon at the same time, a new behind-the-scenes view of an unlikely triumph 50 years ago," writes schwit1 sharing a new article from Smithsonian magazine titled "What You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Mission."
It's an excerpt from the recently-released book ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon.
The Moon has a smell. It has no air, but it has a smell... All the astronauts who walked on the Moon noticed it, and many commented on it to Mission Control.... Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold warned NASA that the dust had been isolated from oxygen for so long that it might well be highly chemically reactive. If too much dust was carried inside the lunar module's cabin, the moment the astronauts repressurized it with air and the dust came into contact with oxygen, it might start burning, or even cause an explosion. (Gold, who correctly predicted early on that the Moon's surface would be covered with powdery dust, also had warned NASA that the dust might be so deep that the lunar module and the astronauts themselves could sink irretrievably into it.) Among the thousands of things they were keeping in mind while flying to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin had been briefed about the very small possibility that the lunar dust could ignite....
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's accustomed-to-your-faces department:
America's FBI and its Customs Enforcement agency "have turned state driver license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through hundreds of millions of Americans' photos without their knowledge or consent," reports the Washington Post.
They cite thousands of newly-released facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails from the last five years, revealed after a public-records request from researchers at Georgetown University, saying state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) databases have been transformed into "the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure."
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other "biometric data" taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of the majority of a state's residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime. Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool...
Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials... They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact, the records show...
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's data-vs-deductibles department:
Remember when the small town of Lake City, Florida paid $460,000 for a ransomware's decryption key?
As they slowly recover 100 years of encrypted municipal records, the New York Times looks at the lessons learned, arguing that cyberattackers have simply found a juicy target: small governments with weak computer protections -- and strong insurance policies.
The city had backup files for all its data, but they were on the same network -- and also inaccessible... The city's insurer, the Florida League of Cities, hired a consultant to handle the negotiations with the hackers via the email addresses that had been posted on the city server. The initial demands were refused outright, and city technicians raced to find a workaround. "We tried a lot of different solutions," said Joseph Helfenberger, the city manager. None of them worked. "We were at the end of the day faced with either re-creating the data from scratch, or paying the ransom," he said.
The insurer's negotiator settled on a payment of 42 Bitcoins, or about $460,000, Helfenberger said, of which the city would pay a $10,000 deductible. After the payment, the hackers provided a decryption key, and recovery efforts began in earnest.
As it turned out, recovery would not be simple. Even with the decryption key, each terabyte has taken about 12 hours to recover. Much of the city's data, nearly a month after the onset of the attack, has still not been unlocked... In Lake City, the information technology director, blamed for both failing to secure the network and taking too long to recover the data, wound up losing his job.
Mark A. Orlando, the chief technology officer for Raytheon Intelligence Information and Services, tells the Times it's unrealistic to expect cities to never pay the ransom. "Anyone who said that has never been in charge of a municipality that has half their services down and no choice."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's travelling-through-time department:
"Researchers in a warming Arctic are discovering organisms, frozen and presumed dead for millennia, that can bear life anew," reports the Washington Post:
These ice age zombies range from simple bacteria to multicellular animals, and their endurance is prompting scientists to revise their understanding of what it means to survive... Mosses have forged a tougher path. They desiccate when temperatures plummet, sidestepping the potential hazard of ice forming in their tissues. And if parts of the plant do sustain damage, certain cells can divide and differentiate into all the various tissue types that comprise a complete moss, similar to stem cells in human embryos... Thanks to these adaptations, mosses are more likely than other plants to survive long-term freezing, said Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey. On the heels of evolutionary biologist Catherine La Farge's Canadian moss revival, Convey's team announced it had awakened a 1,500-year-old moss buried more than three feet underground in the Antarctic permafrost...
While the elderly mosses discovered by La Farge and Convey are remarkable, the clique of ice age survivors extends well beyond this one group of plants... A microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya drills deep into the Siberian permafrost to map the web of single-celled organisms that flourished ice ages ago. She has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look "very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments (today)," she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya's team announced an "accidental finding" -- one with a brain and nervous system -- that shattered scientists' understanding of extreme endurance.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's bad-bugs department:
"Windows 10 continues to be a danger zone," writes Forbes senior contributor Gordon Kelly:
Not only have problems been piling up in recent weeks, Microsoft has also been worryingly deceptive about the operation of key services. And now the company has warned millions about another problem. Spotted by the always excellent Windows Latest, Microsoft has told tens of millions of Windows 10 users that the latest KB4501375 update may break the platform's Remote Access Connection Manager (RASMAN). And this can have serious repercussions.
The big one is VPNs. RASMAN handles how Windows 10 connects to the internet and it is a core background task for VPN services to function normally. Given the astonishing growth in VPN usage for everything from online privacy and important work tasks to unlocking Netflix and YouTube libraries, this has the potential to impact heavily on how you use your computer. Interestingly, in detailing the issue Microsoft states that it only affects Windows 10 1903 - the latest version of the platform.
The problem is Windows 10 1903 accounts for a conservative total of at least 50M users.
Microsoft estimates they'll have a solution available "in late July," adding that the issue only occurs "when a VPN profile is configured as an Always On VPN (AOVPN) connection with or without device tunnel. This does not affect manual only VPN profiles or connections."
That support page also offers a work-around which involves configuring the default telemetry settings in either the group policy settings or with a registry value.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's bag-of-chips department:
"AMD is unleashing an arsenal of products today," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid.
Hot Hardware writes:
The Zen 2-based AMD Ryzen 3000 series is easily one of the most anticipated product launches in the PC space in recent memory. AMD has essentially promised to address virtually all of the perceived shortcomings of the original Zen-based Ryzen processors, with the Ryzen 3000 series, while continuing to aggressively challenge Intel on multiple fronts -- performance, power, price, you name it.
MojoKid summarizes their analysis:
In the benchmarks, performance has been improved across the board. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X offered superior single and multi-thread performance versus their second-gen counterparts, and better latency characteristics, that allowed them to occasionally overtake processors with more cores / threads in a few multi-threaded tests. On a couple of occasions, the 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X even outpaced the 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper 2950X. Performance versus Intel is more of a mixed bag, but the Ryzen 3000 series still looks strong. Single-thread performance is roughly on-par with Intel's Coffee Lake based Core i9-9900K, depending on the workload. Multi-threaded scaling is a dogfight strictly in terms of absolute performance, but because AMD offers more cores per dollar, the Ryzen 3000 series is the clear winner here.
Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi-powered graphics cards are set to take on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX offerings in the midrange
There's more details in the original submission, and PC World writes that AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards "represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before." But they're not the only site offering a detailed analysis.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's Congress-vs-cryptocurrency department:
"Staffers challenge Facebook's happy talk about its digital currency in a briefing," reports the American Prospect, introducing a new article in a series written anonymously by Congressional staffers, this time a House Democratic aide "who attended a briefing last Thursday with executives who are developing Libra..."
"Such briefings are commonplace to convince staffers who write legislation (and by association the members they serve) of the righteousness of corporate causes."
The briefing was fascinating. The lead representative, the head of policy for Libra, kicked it off by admitting that the whole endeavor required a "suspension of disbelief." They were asked about the timeline, and said they hoped to have Libra operational in about a year, which they kept suggesting was a prolonged timeline, but didn't seem lengthy to anyone in the room.
They kept selling Libra as a means of providing banking services to 1.7 billion unbanked people around the world. When challenged on how they were going to do that, and asked directly whether they'd figure out how exactly a digital currency would be an answer for people who can't access credit currently, they said, "The short answer is no." The phrase "the miracle of blockchain" was used at one point...
Because Facebook is proposing to take over a role traditionally under the purview of central banks, not private companies, we should expect the skepticism we heard in the room from staffers to be publicly aired by House Financial Services Committee members on July 17.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's don't-use-our-service department:
"KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has an unusual message for its customers: Maybe don't take that flight," reports Quartz:
In a June 29 open letter from its CEO, Pieter Elbers, the airline invited air travelers to make "responsible decisions about flying," and encouraged customers to invest in the airline's carbon offsetting scheme, CO2ZERO... It's all part of KLM's new "Fly Responsibly" campaign, which includes a website with information on its commitment to sustainable fuel and practices. A short video poses three questions to customers: Do meetings always have to take place face-to-face? Could you take the train instead? And could you contribute by compensating your CO2 emissions or packing light? "We all have to fly every now and again," it concludes. "But next time, think about flying responsibly..."
Environmentally conscious customers, especially in Europe, are increasingly opting out of flying, which contributes about 2.5% of global emissions. (Few personal actions are quite so harmful for the environment.)
The article also notes that planes with more business and first-class seats "have a greater carbon footprint, relative to the number of people they are able to transport" -- and that by that standard, KLM is already one of the most fuel-efficient airlines in the world.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's unknown-and-unwanted-callers department:
CNBC reports on the latest revelations from America's Federal Trade Commission about the tactics used by the robocall industry:
In some cases, robocalls proliferate through programs that resemble multilevel marketing schemes, where business founders push robocall packages on "members" to spur quick growth. In one case, an organization known alternately as "8 Figure Dream Lifestyle," "Millionaire Mind" and "Online Entrepreneur Academy" enticed consumers to buy memberships to gain access to a "franchise-like opportunity" to sell the organization's "proven business model" or "blueprint for success" downstream. Members paid between $2,395 and $22,495 to join, and the business claimed they could earn $5,000 to $10,000 in the first two weeks, followed by similarly large sums...
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's making-movies department:
One of the scientists who worked on the black hole picture is now pursuing an even more ambitious visualization, this time for the super-massive black hole at the center of our own galaxy.
Long-time Slashdot reader Esther Schindler shares this report from Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Insights blog:
Lia Medeiros, a physicist, astrophysicist, and National Science Foundation fellow, is working to put together a movie of sorts of a black hole, using data from the Event Horizon Telescope, a global telescope array that gave scientists the data needed to capture that first black hole image. And she's going to do it using machine learning... Scientists basically will be pitting Einstein's theory of general relativity, which tells us what we know, or think we know, about gravity, against the most powerful gravitational forces in the universe. It's about comparing these new black hole observations with predictions based on our mathematical models of them. And if general relativity doesn't fully hold up at the event horizon, then the theory may need to be rethought.
Her work also could tell us more about how quantum mechanics, which is still quite mysterious to the best physicists, interacts with the theory of gravity... Having a black hole movie could be a scientific game changer because they are one of the only types of objects in the universe that scientists need both theories to explain. Black holes, simply put, live at the intersection of quantum and gravity. Movies of a black hole could give scientists the information they need to see if they behave the way we expect them to, helping them figure out the complicated intersection of two major scientific theories.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's dark-pattern-themes department:
Design firm Baggar writes:
A user assumes certain actions to be in a certain place or color because interface designers worldwide have been collaboratively educating users and feeding them these design-patterns. But what happens if we poke all good practice with a stick and stir it up? What if we don't respect our self-created rules and expectations, and do everything the other way around?
That's exactly why we created User Inyerface: An interface that expects you to do the hard work instead of doing it for you. We created a simple interface, that isn't your friend. An interface that doesn't want to please you. An interface that has no clue and no rules.
The task is simple: complete the forms as fast as you can. It might suck the life out of you, but it is possible if you simply look and forget everything you have grown accustomed to.
Ars Technica collected some screenshots of their favorite screens, calling it "a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web... a gauntlet of nearly impossible-to-parse interactions that are as funny as they are infuriating."
At one point, the site gave me a warning that my chosen password "was not unsafe."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's mod-points-on-steroids department:
Facebook is being applauded for a new "bold experiment" in content decision-making by tech journalist Larry Magid, a founding member (for the last 10 years) of what he describes as "the less powerful Facebook Safety Advisory Board, which is composed of safety experts mostly representing nonprofit organizations in several countries....
"We are not empowered to overrule Facebook's management."
Facebook is a company, not a government, but its user base is bigger than the population of any country in the world and the decisions made by its staff affect people in some of the same ways as decisions made by legislatures and courts in many countries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way Facebook regulates speech. What it allows and forbids affects people's ability to communicate, but also impacts their safety, privacy, security and human rights... [W]hen it comes to some decisions, even Zuckerberg realizes that the stakes are too high for one person or one company to hold all the cards, and that's one of the reason's Facebook is in the process of putting together an Oversight Board for Content Decisions.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's Linux-releases department:
"After 25 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 10 (code name 'buster'), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team."
An anonymous reader quotes Debian.org:
In this release, GNOME defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. Wayland has a simpler and more modern design, which has advantages for security. However, the Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session.
Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 91% of the source packages included in Debian 10 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.
For those in security-sensitive environments AppArmor, a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs' capabilities, is installed and enabled by default. Furthermore, all methods provided by APT (except cdrom, gpgv, and rsh) can optionally make use of "seccomp-BPF" sandboxing. The https method for APT is included in the apt package and does not need to be installed separately... Secure Boot support is included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures and should work out of the box on most Secure Boot-enabled machines.
The announcement touts Debian's "traditional wide architecture support," arguing that it shows Debian "once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system." It ships with several desktop applications and environments, including the following:
Cinnamon 3.8 GNOME 3.30 KDE Plasma 5.14 LXDE 0.99.2 LXQt 0.14 MATE 1.20 Xfce 4.12
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's fugitive-libertarian-presidential-candidates department:
"On the run from U.S. tax authorities, tech guru John McAfee puffs a cigar aboard his towering white yacht in a Havana harbor," reports Reuters, "and says he can help Cuba evade the U.S. government too -- by launching a cryptocurrency that defeats a U.S. trade embargo."
Long-time Slashdot reader Aighearach shared their report:
McAfee in an interview touted the anonymity of the digital currency while also outlining his belief that income tax is illegal and plans to run from Cuba for the Libertarian Party nomination for U.S. president. "It would be trivial to get around the U.S. government's embargo through the use of a clever system of currency," the 73-year-old said Thursday. "So I made a formal offer to help them for free... on a private channel through Twitter." While Cuba had not responded, its Communist government said earlier this week it was studying the potential use of cryptocurrency to alleviate an economic crisis aggravated by tighter U.S. sanctions... Countries under U.S. sanctions such as Iran and Venezuela have floated the idea of using digital currency to trade although no scheme appears to have gotten off the ground.
"You can't just create a coin and expect it to fly. You have to base it on the proper blockchain, have it structured such that it meets the specific needs of a country or economic situation," said McAfee. "There are probably less than 10 people in the world who know how to do that and I'm certainly one of them...."
McAfee said he did not pay income tax for eight years for ideological reasons and was indicted... To avoid trial, he left the United States in January for the Bahamas. He arrived in Cuba a month ago after suspecting that U.S. law enforcement was trying to extradite him from the Bahamas.
"With him on the yacht are his wife, four large dogs, two security guards and seven staff for his campaign 'in exile' for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, McAfee said..."
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's 123-degree-weather department:
"Intense heat waves have killed more than 100 people in India this summer and are predicted to worsen in coming years, creating a possible humanitarian crisis as large parts of the country potentially become too hot to be inhabitable," writes CNN.
An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Heat waves in India usually take place between March and July and abate once the monsoon rains arrive. But in recent years these hot spells have become more intense, more frequent and longer...
India is among the countries expected to be worst affected by the impacts of climate crisis, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that even if the world succeeds in cutting carbon emissions, limiting the predicted rise in average global temperatures, parts of India will become so hot they will test the limits of human survivability...
In June, Delhi hit temperatures of 48 degrees Celsius (118 Fahrenheit), the highest ever recorded in that month. West of the capital, Churu in Rajasthan nearly broke the country's heat record with a high of 50.6 Celsius (123 Fahrenheit)... And forecasters believe it's only going to get worse. "In a nutshell, future heatwaves are likely to engulf in the whole of India," said AK Sahai and Sushmita Joseph, of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, in Pune in an email.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's try()-try()-again department:
Matt Klein, a member of the Go steering committee recently apologized for the angst caused to some people by "the try() kerfuffle... Change is hard, but sometimes it's for the best."
Tech columnist Mike Melanson covers the kerfuffle over the newly-proposed feature, while trying "not to over-dramatize what is happening."
There is disagreement and conflicting views, but working through those views is how the open source sausage is made, is it not? Of course, in the Go community, how the core team receives those opposing views may be a point of soreness among some who vehemently opposed the vgo package versioning for Go and felt that, in the end, it was rammed through despite their objections. As one Gopher points out, it is better to debate now than summarily accept and then later deprecate...
As Go makes its way to Go 2.0, with Go 1.14 currently taking center stage for debate, there is, again, as Klein points out, some kerfuffle about a newly proposed feature called try(), which is "designed specifically to eliminate the boilerplate if statements typically associated with error handling in Go." According to the proposal, the "minimal approach addresses most common scenarios while adding very little complexity to the language" and "is easy to explain, straightforward to implement, orthogonal to other language constructs, and fully backward-compatible" as well as extensible for future needs.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's surveillance-of-shoppers department:
"Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society," writes Reason, adding that "The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose..."
schwit1 shared their report:
[T]ens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.
So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.
What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's pair-of-comfy-genes department:
"Life's information-storage system is being adapted to handle massive amounts of information," reports Scientific American, reports Scientific American, calling it "an alternative to hard drives" and noting that DNA "is already routinely sequenced (read), synthesized (written to) and accurately copied with ease.
"DNA is also incredibly stable, as has been demonstrated by the complete genome sequencing of a fossil horse that lived more than 500,000 years ago. And storing it does not require much energy."
But it is the storage capacity that shines. DNA can accurately stow massive amounts of data at a density far exceeding that of electronic devices. The simple bacterium Escherichia coli, for instance, has a storage density of about 10**19 bits per cubic centimeter, according to calculations published in 2016 in Nature Materials by George Church of Harvard University and his colleagues. At that density, all the world's current storage needs for a year could be well met by a cube of DNA measuring about one meter on a side.
The prospect of DNA data storage is not merely theoretical. In 2017, for instance, Church's group at Harvard adopted CRISPR DNA-editing technology to record images of a human hand into the genome of E. coli, which were read out with higher than 90 percent accuracy. And researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have developed a fully automated system for writing, storing and reading data encoded in DNA. A number of companies, including Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, are working to advance DNA-storage technology... DNA bar coding is now being used to dramatically accelerate the pace of research in fields such as chemical engineering, materials science and nanotechnology.
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By EditorDavid from
Slashdot's very-mobile-money department:
On Monday, 7-Eleven launched a smartphone payment service for its 20,000 stores in Japan. By Thursday $510,000 had been stolen from the people using it -- as many as 900 customers.
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared this follow-up article, which points out that it's also possible that email addresses and birth dates have been accessed from among the new app's 1.5 million registered users:
Tsuyoshi Kobayashi, president of Seven Pay Co., told a press conference in Tokyo that the company will compensate users for the losses caused by fraudulent access and that it has already suspended accepting new users or allowing users of the service to add money to its smartphone application. The estimated amount of losses the company announced is as of 6 a.m. Thursday and the damage could expand...
The parent company said someone, who had accessed their accounts and used the registered numbers of their credit or debit cards, purchased items at its convenience stores. The items included packs of cigarettes, which can be easily converted into cash, it said, adding there was a case in which a huge quantity worth 100,000 yen [$921] was purchased all at once at one of its outlets...
According to Seven & i Holdings, some customers reported their losses on Tuesday and unauthorized access from China and other locations outside Japan was confirmed... Police arrested two Chinese men on Thursday in connection with the problem, investigative sources said. They are suspected of illegally using the ID and password of a customer Wednesday in an attempt to buy electric cigarette cartridges worth around 200,000 yen [$1,843] at a 7-Eleven shop in Tokyo.
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