The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would "lead to system crashes."

The NYPD has also invested heavily in an IBM DB2 data warehouse operation with the help of IBM Professional Services, so in theory they should be able to perform much of the analytics off-line without "crashing" the PETS system—with a little more consulting help.

Thousands of HP printers around the world started to show error messages on the same day, the 13th of September 2016.

It’s very unlikely that a firmware update caused the issues and the only other logical explanation is that HP programmed a date in its firmware on which non-HP cartridges would no longer be accepted.

A temporarily workaround is flashing firmware from 2014 but, according to 123inkt, this can’t be easily performed by regular consumers. The retailer calls for HP to at least make the old firmware available to its customers.

The London office is a key part of Skype’s history, since it was the primary engineering site and headquarters of the company before Microsoft acquired it, and it also survived Skype’s strange interlude under the ownership of eBay before it was acquired by the big M.

Post-acquisition, Microsoft has also done a lot of product work on Skype, with plenty of integration with Office 365 and a number of feature introductions that bring it closer in line with Slack.

Instead of making it easy for folks to pay online using their credit cards, the digital payments company directs them to buy stuff with their PayPal balances and checking accounts. The end result has been both profitable for PayPal (because it avoids credit card networks' higher fees) and a pain for shoppers looking to rack up points or frequent flyer miles.

Becoming more ubiquitous is critical for PayPal, especially since it spun off of eBay last year and now needs to transform itself from being a mostly eBay-centric service to a much broader one.

Today, that leftover tape can now help us stave off a webcam hack—at least an attack that secretly films unsuspecting computer users. That's what James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Wednesday. In April, he told Americans that he puts tape on his webcam.

Tape probably won't stop a nefarious hacker from listening to you, however. And toward that advanced goal, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has also covered his computer microphone with tape. However, there's still no consensus among security experts about how effective that measure is, because adjusting a microphone's gain may still allow attackers to pick up ambient sounds.

Gmail went down Wednesday across the world for millions, with people in the US and UK apparently hit the hardest.

By 9 a.m. PT, service for a few Gmail for Work users had returned, but remained down on Google's App Status Dashboard. The company said it had identified the cause of the problem and was working on a potential fix.

In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.

Terahertz imaging is still a relatively young technology, however, and researchers are constantly working to improve both the accuracy of detectors and the power of the radiation sources, so deeper penetration should be possible.

For some reason, however, Paramount Pictures is not happy with seeing the popular operating system on torrent sites. In a notice sent out by the movie studio’s anti-piracy partner a few days ago, Google is asked to remove an Ubuntu torrent download page on ExtraTorrent.

Despite the obvious non-infringing status of the Ubuntu release, Google moved ahead and removed the page from its search index. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the volume of requests that the company has to process.

According to Sophos, Seagate Central devices contain a public folder accessible to all users, even anonymous non-logged-in users, which can't be deactivated or deleted.

One of the files it copies is called Photo.scr, a script file that malware coders have modified to use a standard Windows folder icon.

Because Windows has a bad habit of hiding file extensions, whenever the device owner accesses their NAS, they see this file as a folder, fooled by the fake icon.

The image, taken by AP photographer Nick Ut, showed a young girl, naked and in agony from severe burns on her back, running in terror from a U.S. napalm attack on her village in Vietnam. That photo, and a few others from that war, changed many people's opinions about the war and may even have helped speed up the peace process.

Facebook also removed all discussion of its decision and it then blocked the people who didn't agree with its decision and had the nerve to mention it. One such person was the prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, who was blocked for sending a complaint to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This move toward punishment is where Facebook shows its true colors. It is not a reliable news source, and it cannot be as long as it tries to silence those who don't conform to the standards enforced by its algorithms.