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Bank info, driver's license copies and more found, report researchers

A now-defunct mobile app for loaning money to small business owners has been pinned down as the source of an exposed archive containing roughly 500,000 personal and business financial records.…

McGruber shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters. On Tuesday, multiple Facebook users reported on Twitter that they found themselves unable to post articles from certain news outlets including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Times of Israel. It's not clear exactly what has gone wrong, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment. Alex Stamos, an outspoken former Facebook security exec, speculated that it might be caused by Facebook's shift to automated software after it sent its human content moderators home. "It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire," he wrote on Twitter. "Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't [work from home] due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the machine learning going nuts with less human oversight. In a tweet, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said: "We're on this -- this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back."

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Swedish Scandi-BSOD, anyone?

Börk!Börk!Börk! In these trying times it is good to see Windows occasionally matching the global mood with a sad face in The Register's series of BSODdery. Welcome to Scandi-Bork.…

The axe prepares to fall on Global Tech Services staffers, including former Lloyds and Vodafone peeps that TUPED across

Exclusive IBM has put 1,248 heads in its UK Global Technology Services (GTS) division at risk of redundancy with a little over one fifth of those ultimately facing the long walk down the company corridors to collect their P45s.…

Sonic the Hedgehog's latest weekend total allowed it to surpass Detective Pikachu and become the highest-grossing video game movie ever in the US. TheRichest reports: Sonic has now amassed $145.8 million domestically, while Detective Pikachu managed $144.1 million by the end of its run. Sonic has definitely taken a hit as it only brought in $2.58 million last weekend to limp past Detective Pikachu's record. As for the worldwide record, it seems as if that will belong to Detective Piakchu for the foreseeable future. That's the one element of Sonic's success that has been affected by the worldwide pandemic we are in the midst of. The movie's release has been delayed in China and as it stands as brought in $306.5 million worldwide. That's a long way off the $433 million record set by Detective Pikachu.

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Ad watchdog puts telco on the naughty step over range extender promotion

BT has been told to stop claiming its Wi-Fi discs work in “every room” of the home after complaints from rivals and the public alike.…

Plus: Intel ditches forthcoming Cooper Lake single, dual-socket 14nm Xeons from its roadmap

Marvell this week teased its forthcoming server-grade ThunderX3 processor, which can, we're told, sport up to 96 Arm CPU cores and 384 hardware threads per socket.…

Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has received Category 1 certification from NASA, meaning it is authorized for use on more important missions, opening up a whole new revenue stream for the growing launch provider. TechCrunch reports: The certification was largely based on the success of "This One's for Pickering" in late 2018, the company's fourth commercial launch, which took a batch of NASA cubesats into orbit as part of the ELaNa-19 mission. This experimental mission was undertaken as part of NASA's Venture Class Launch Services initiative to test out newer and smaller launch vehicles using non-critical payloads. Certification categories go from 1-3, from "high risk" to "low risk," based largely on successful launches, which as you might imagine is something of a catch-22: You need the launches to get the certification, but you need the certification to get the launches. Fortunately, one can break the cycle with non-essential missions like small experimental satellites -- which is sort of the purpose of the VCLS program. Category 2 certification is in process, but is of course even more stringent and requires six consecutive successful missions with the same rocket configuration. Rocket Lab has 10 in a row at present, but there's likely a lot of paperwork involved as well.

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Israel is up for it. America, Iran, Thailand may be, too. China is there already, natch

Pervasive surveillance through digital technologies is the business model of Facebook and Google. And now governments are considering the web giants' tools to track COVID-19 carriers for the public good.…

Googler publishes plans for Arduino-based equipment to help hospitals

As more and more people are hospitalized due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, there may not be enough ventilators to sustain critical patients who need breathing assistance. That has prompted various individuals and groups, for better or worse, to look at MacGyvering their own airway support equipment.…

Microsoft drops some more detail of fourth-gen console: The Series X

Microsoft has revealed some more specs for its forthcoming Xbox Series X, the fourth generation of its gaming console.…

We get the lowdown on the lockdown from a BPO operator in the heart of Manila

The government of the Philippines has introduced “enhanced community quarantine” rules that restrict movement and have therefore deleted the ranks of workers in the nation’s flotilla of contact centres, causing customer service degradation in other countries.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The coronavirus has now been identified in all 50 U.S. states, and more than 100 deaths in the country have been linked to the illness. Those known deaths, all from the past three weeks, come as the number of diagnoses has surged into the thousands as the virus has spread and as testing has expanded significantly. On Tuesday evening, West Virginia became the 50th state to report its first case. As of Tuesday evening, at least 5,587 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories, have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 101 patients with the virus have died. Several hundred new cases are now being identified each day, including about 700 on both Saturday and Sunday and nearly 900 on Monday. The pace of diagnosis is expected to quicken as the virus spreads and testing becomes more widely available. More state and private labs have started running tests for the coronavirus in recent days, increasing the capacity to identify new patients after weeks of delays and test kit shortages. For comparison, a total of 70 cases were reported in the U.S. at the start of the month. "Since then, new cases have poured in, including more than 200 announced on Monday in New York State alone," the report adds. "More than 2,200 cases have been announced nationwide since Friday morning, and the virus is now spreading in parts of the country where it had not been identified as recently as a week ago."

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AI flagged good content as bad content, and it took the founder of Godwin's Law to point it out

One whole day after telling the world it was going to do its very best to ensure that only high-quality COVID-19 content from proper sources would spread on Facebook, The Social Network has mistakenly identified just such content as violating its community standards.…

Tubi, a leader in the fast-growing free ad-supported streaming category, is being purchased by Fox for about $440 million. It's paying for the acquisition using cash from the sale of a minority stake in Roku. Deadline reports: Tubi brings Fox an expanded consumer offering with a sizable, younger-skewing and directly connected user base that spends over 160 million hours per month watching content on the service. Tubi is available on more than 25 digital platforms in the U.S. with some 20,000 titles and 56,000 hours of film and episodic television programming from over 250 content partners. Fox plans to continue to run Tubi as an independent service and said it will evaluate opportunities to expand its offering -- not through original content but in a "more cost-effective manner by leveraging our expertise in national and local news and sports programming." Tubi founder and CEO Farhad Massoudi will continue to lead the service. "Tubi will immediately expand our direct-to-consumer audience and capabilities and will provide our advertising partners with more opportunities to reach audiences at scale. Importantly, coupled with the combined power of Fox's existing networks, Tubi provides a substantial base from which we will drive long-term growth in the direct-to-consumer arena," said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch.

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And 3D-printed valve for breathing machine sparks legal threat

Remember Theranos? The blood-testing company worth billions whose CEO Elizabeth Holmes became a celebrity right up until the point when it became clear its revolutionary testing machines didn’t actually work as described?…