Southwest ending some Oklahoma, California and Florida routes out of Love Field
Southwest Airlines will stop flying routes to Oklahoma City, San Francisco and Jacksonville, Fla., out of Dallas Love Field starting Jan. 6, 2020 as the carrier continues to alter its network.
The changes come as Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE: LUV) extended its flight schedule last week through March 6, 2020.
“We are making some changes in some markets based on extensive performance reviews to end nonstop service between these city pairs,” said Dan Landson, a Southwest spokesperson.
Customers…
Two Women Arrested After Baby Found on Floor of Car Covered in Ants and Wearing Soiled Diaper
LONDON, Ky. — Two women are behind bars after deputies said they found a 16-day-old baby on the floorboard of their car, covered in ants and wearing a soiled diaper.
According to a press release, deputies attempted to pull over the infant’s mother, Rebecca Jean Fultz, 32, and her grandmother, Charolette Simpson, 69, during a traffic stop Thursday. The pair kept driving and finally stopped about a quarter mile up the road.
Deputies then learned that both women had bench warrants and were immediately arrested.
The baby was taken to the hospital for dehydration and has since been released into the care of social services.
Fultz and Simpson are facing multiple charges including criminal abuse.
CyrusOne Approached by Investor Group, Weighs Options
CyrusOne Approached by Investor Group, Weighs Options
Interest in buying the company highlights a trend of hyperscalers leasing data center capacity to keep up with cloud demand
Data center developer CyrusOne reportedly is working with an adviser as the Dallas-based real estate firm considers its options after being approached by an investor group interested in acquiring the company.
Analysts with Synergy Research Group reported this month that in the first half of 2019, there 52 data center-oriented M&A deals that closed with an aggregate value of more than $65 billion. That is 18% higher than the first half of last year and more than the total for all of 2016. The analysts listed CyrusOne as among a number of “serial acquirers” in the market that also includes Iron Mountain and NTT.
Oakland Raiders’ Luke Willson finally gets to play another game in Canada
Luke Willson figures he’ll have a smooth travel day when his Oakland Raiders head to Winnipeg for Thursday’s NFL pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers.
“I think I’m going to have the easiest time going through the border compared to everybody else,” the veteran tight end from LaSalle, Ont., said in a phone call after a weekend practice in Napa, Calif.
“It’s very exciting. Obviously, being Canadian, I think the more NFL stuff that can head up there is a great thing.”
The game will mark the first NFL contest in Canada since the Buffalo Bills completed a run of eight games in Toronto with a regular-season clash against the Atlanta Falcons in December 2013.
It’s Willson’s first trip to Winnipeg and first football game in his home country since his high school days in LaSalle, which is near Windsor, Ont.
He played five seasons with the Seahawks, getting into every game in his rookie 2013 season as Seattle captured the Super Bowl against Denver. He spent last season across the border from home with the Detroit Lions and signed with Oakland in March.
Willson is battling for playing time with Raiders tight ends Brandon Barnes, Paul Butler, Derek Carrier and projected starter Darren Waller.
It’s his 86 career games, including 45 starts, that he says might give him an edge.
“I think experience definitely helps when it comes to identifying defences,” said the team’s only Canadian-born player.
Willson has caught 102 career passes for 1,216 yards with 11 touchdowns. With Detroit last season, the six-foot-five, 254-pound tight end got into 14 games and had 13 receptions for 87 yards.
He missed Oakland’s first pre-season game because of a minor injury, but played in the team’s second victory last week in Arizona and had one catch for four yards.
He expects to play in the Week 3 game versus Green Bay (1-1) at IG Field, home of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Oakland (2-0) is the home team.
“It’ll be competitive,” Willson predicted. “I can’t speak for Green Bay, but there’s a lot of guys here who have a lot to prove. All these pre-season games mean a lot as far as making the team and guys’ careers.
“Obviously, the starters won’t play the whole game, but they’ll be some hard-nosed football going on up there.”
However, two of the game’s big drawing cards may not play at all.
Green Bay star quarterback Aaron Rodgers didn’t play last week because of tightness in his back and was held out of Sunday’s practice.
Meanwhile, new Oakland receiver Antonio Brown is recovering from frostbitten feet he got during cryotherapy in France last month. He also recently lost a grievance to wear his old, uncertified helmet.
Brown missed Sunday’s practice and Raiders general manager Mike Mayock told reporters he was a no-show because he was still upset about the helmet issue. The GM said it’s time for Brown “to be all-in or all-out.”
Willson said he hasn’t followed ticket sales for the Winnipeg game, which are at about half the stadium’s 33,000-seat capacity. Tickets were priced at $75 to $340 before taxes and fees, with recently reduced end-zone tickets costing a total of $94.25.
When asked if he’d be surprised it wasn’t a sellout, he said a lot of factors impact that.
“To be honest with you, it kind of depends on the game and market,” Willson said. “Obviously, Winnipeg has the Blue Bombers, I’m sure that’s the No. 1 team up there.
“I don’t know if there’s a bunch of Packers fans in Winnipeg, possibly. Might be a few Seahawks fans. I don’t know if there’s a ton of Raider Nation in Winnipeg, so I’m sure that plays into it.
“And it’s a pre-season game, so I get that maybe not everything is sold out right now. But I’m sure there will be a lot of football fans in the Winnipeg area that are happy, regardless, and excited to come out and watch.”
Judy Owen, The Canadian Press
A Throwback to Some 50 Years of Cybercrime
It goes without saying that cyberspace is a dangerous place. Lurking within it are criminals seeking out unfortunate victims in order to steal their money, sensitive data, and sometimes even identity. Malware, pharming, phishing, cryptojacking and spamming are just a few of the weapons in the formidable arsenal of these perpetrators.
Interestingly, though, cybercrime actually began rather innocently with a few young engineers who had a passion for model railroads about 50 years ago. These guys had altruistic intentions, but they unwittingly provided the foundation for people with more malevolent plans to do harm. So what happened half a century ago? Let’s take a look.
The Birth of Hacking
During the 1960s, the term “hacking” did not even involve computers. It referred to how members of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) modified their toy trains to improve performance without having to re-engineer the entire system.
It all started with Peter Samson and other club members who used to wander around the university halls prodding and poking wires, switches, and telephone junctions, trying to make sense of how things worked. Then one day they discovered the Electronic Accounting Machinery room in Building 26, with its gleaming multi-million dollar IBM mainframe computer.
Access to the computer was severely restricted, but Samson and his group would regularly sneak into the room and program the machine to compute ways for their model railroad switching systems to be more efficient. This is how Samson created the primary objective of what would later become the hacker’s first order of business — access to the computing device.
Samson defined the divide that separated the officially sanctioned users, who merely used the machine to speed up computing tasks, from the hackers who were looking to innovate and push the computer to its limits. As a result, a new breed of hackers was born, taking their talents from the miniature train tracks to the new toy they suddenly had their hands on.
The Virus Rises
Not long after, a programmer at a company called BBN Technologies would invent the next step toward enabling cybercrime. In 1971, Bob Ross created what is considered the first computer virus. The program, called Creeper, would print out a message on the computer screen, copy itself onto another hard drive it found on the network and then erase itself from the original storage device.
It was totally harmless. Ross merely wanted to prove the theory that a computer program could successfully replicate itself on to other machines, based on a paper published by John Von Newman back in 1949. He succeeded. The term “computer virus”, though, would not be coined until a decade later, in 1986, by a Ph.D. student named Fred Cohen.
The Cybercrime Outburst
The original model train hackers defined hacking as “a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement.” Gaining access to computers was necessary to accomplish this. But it was only a matter of time before the hacker’s motivation for obtaining entry into systems transformed into malicious intent and material gain.
The first computer virus attempted to prove a concept, and it provided the perfect mechanism for attackers to secretly infect computers, propagate itself through systems, and disrupt their operations. Encouraged by these developments, people evolved other methods of assaulting these systems. And very soon phishing, pharming, cyber stalking, computer worms, identity theft and fraud, salami slicing and other such threats emerged. Cybercrime had arrived.
By 2018, securing and protecting computers and networks had become a $116.5 billion industry. It’s expected to grow even more in the coming years, given the importance of computing devices and the Internet in our world today. With the inevitable arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the rapid development in artificial intelligence (AI), protecting and securing computing resources will certainly cause CSOs, IT departments and cybersecurity teams more sleepless nights.
“The road to perdition is paved with good intentions,” so goes the old saying. Peter Samson and Bob Ross certainly had not intended to do any harm with their seminal computer experiments. But they had inadvertently set the Information Age on a course that would see people with less benevolent intentions exploit the possibilities made evident by their discoveries.
Alexandre Francois is a serial entrepreneur and tech enthusiast who believes that knowledge about innovations and emerging technologies should be easily understandable and available to everyone. Walking the talking, he is also the publishing director of Techslang — a tech awareness resource where cybersecurity and IT is explained in plain English.
The post A Throwback to Some 50 Years of Cybercrime appeared first on SiteProNews.
Chinese pop stars publicly back Beijing on Hong Kong
HONG KONG – At least eight pop stars from mainland China and one each from Taiwan and Hong Kong are publicly stating their support for Beijing’s one-China policy, eliciting a mixture of disappointment and understanding from fans.
Many of the statements came after protesters opposed to Beijing’s growing influence over semi-autonomous Hong Kong removed a Chinese flag and tossed it into Victoria Harbour earlier this month.
Lay Zhang, Jackson Wang, Lai Kuan-lin and Victoria Song were among the K-pop singers who recently uploaded a Chinese flag and declared themselves as “one of 1.4 billion guardians of the Chinese flag” on their official Weibo social media accounts. Wang is from Hong Kong and Lai is from Taiwan.
Some see the public pronouncements as the latest examples of how celebrities and companies feel pressured to toe the line politically in the important Chinese market. Yet they also coincide with a surge in patriotism among young Chinese raised on a steady diet of pro-Communist Party messaging.
Song and Zhang, a member of popular group EXO, have shown their Chinese pride on Instagram, in Song’s case by uploading an image of the Chinese flag last week with the caption “Hong Kong is part of China forever.” Such posts would only be seen by their international fans because Instagram, like most Western social media sites, is blocked by the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s censors.
For over a decade, South Korean entertainment agencies have been grooming Chinese singers to be part of their Korean pop, or K-pop, bands in an attempt to win over the massive mainland Chinese market. Only a few made it to a much-coveted debut. But a number of Chinese K-pop stars – citing unfair treatment – left their K-pop groups to pursue lucrative solo careers in mainland China.
K-pop fans reacted swiftly to the avowals of allegiance to China. Some called it shameful, while others were more understanding.
Erika Ng, a 26-year-old Hong Kong fan of Jackson Wang, was not surprised by his statement. She said he “values the China market more than the Hong Kong market” because of his large presence in the mainland.
Wang, a member of the group Got7, used to carry a Hong Kong flag and wear a hat with the city’s symbol, a bauhinia flower. Lately, he has been carrying a Chinese flag on his concert tour and was wearing a China flag hoodie in his music video.
Ellyn Bukvich, a 26-year-old American who has been an EXO fan for five years, said many young fans will probably support Zhang and his message because of his status as a K-pop idol.
“It’s spreading propaganda and it’s very effective,” Bukvich said.
The one-China policy maintains that there is only one Chinese government, and it is a key diplomatic point accepted by most nations in the world, including the U.S. It is mostly aimed at the democratic island of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary.
In the case of Hong Kong, a former British colony handed back to Chinese control in 1997, Beijing maintains a “one country, two systems” policy in which the city is guaranteed greater freedoms than those on the mainland until 2047.
China’s government and entirely state-controlled media have consistently portrayed the Hong Kong protest movement as an effort by criminals trying to split the territory from China, backed by hostile foreigners.
International brands – from fashion companies to airlines – have been compelled to make public apologies for perceived breaches of that policy, such as listing Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries on their websites or on T-shirts.
Zhang terminated his partnership with Samsung Electronics last week, accusing the South Korean mobile giant of damaging China’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
The statement in a Weibo post was prompted by Samsung having separate language options for users in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan on its global website. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters instead of the simplified ones used in mainland China, and Hong Kong also has English as an official language. Samsung declined to comment on whether it will continue to provide different language options for Taiwan and Hong Kong.
It can be difficult to know whether loyalty vows to Beijing are heartfelt or for commercial reasons. The past is littered with examples of celebrities, both Chinese and foreign, who saw their business in China destroyed after the party objected to a statement or an action.
In 2016, Taiwanese K-pop star Chou Tzu-yu made a public apology for waving the Taiwanese flag while appearing on a South Korean television show. A Chinese vilification campaign against her led to a backlash among some Taiwanese, who at the time were in the midst of a presidential election eventually won by Tsai Ing-wen, who is despised by Beijing for her pro-independence stance.
Public support for Beijing hasn’t been limited to pop stars.
Liu Yifei, the Chinese-born star of Disney’s upcoming live-action version of the film “Mulan,” weighed in on the situation in Hong Kong, where protesters have accused police of abuses.
“I support the Hong Kong police,” Liu, a naturalized U.S. citizen, wrote on her Weibo account. “You can all attack me now. What a shame for Hong Kong.”
Some questioned her motives, wondering if the post was calculated to ensure her film is released widely in China – the world’s largest film market. Among Hong Kong protesters, there were swift calls for a boycott of the film when it is released next year.
Juwon Park, The Associated Press
Nebraska Boy Sentenced to Prison for Iowa Man’s Slaying
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) – A 16-year-old Nebraska boy has been sentenced to 10 to 50 years in prison for the slaying of a man in western Iowa.
Pottawattamie County District Court records say Xavier Smith-Catchings, of Omaha, was sentenced Thursday. He’d entered a written plea of guilty Wednesday to a charge of second-degree murder. Prosecutors lowered the charge in exchange for his plea. He and three men were charged with killing Adam Angeroth in January.
The judge had ruled that Smith-Catchings’ case remain in in district court because it was unlikely he’d be rehabilitated in the juvenile system. He was 15 when Angeroth was stabbed and beaten to death.
Iowa residents Nicholas Haner, of Harlan; Ryan McDonald, of Glenwood; and Liam Stec, of Omaha, Nebraska, were sentenced earlier last week to 35-50 years. They all pleaded guilty to second-degree murder after prosecutors lowered the charges.
Child Dies After Gun Discharged Inside Minnesota Home
LAKE HERON, Minn. (AP) – Authorities in southern Minnesota say a child died after being shot inside a home.
According to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, officers responded Wednesday to a 911 call in Heron Lake about an injured child.
Authorities learned that a weapon was discharged inside the home and that the bullet struck the child.
The child was taken to a Windom hospital but died.
The shooting is under investigation.
Trump Keeps the Focus on China
Trump Keeps the Focus on China
The president says Apple CEO Tim Cook made a good case against tariffs
China remains at the center of President Trump’s economic and international affairs policies, including those focused on technology. After speaking with Tim Cook this week, Trump said the Apple CEO made a strong argument that the U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made products unfairly favor rival Samsung. Meanwhile, the president said he doesn’t want the United States to do business with giant Chinese tech company Huawei.
At the same time, Trump told reporters over the weekend that he doesn’t want to allow U.S. companies to sell products to Huawei. Lawmakers for years have seen Huawei and similar Chinese companies as national security threats over fears that the Chinese government may put secret back doors into Huawei products to steal secrets and spy on the United States. The Trump administration is considering extending a grace period for Huawei, enabling it to buy products from U.S. companies for existing customers. How Trump’s comments may impact the decision regarding an extension for Huawei is unclear.
“At this moment it looks much more like we’re not going to do business,” Trump said about Huawei. “I don’t want to do business at all because it is a national security threat and I really believe that the media has covered it a little bit differently than that.”
REUTERS: Apple Warns Trump About China Tariffs, Samsung Competition
Dildo, N.L., warns against trespassing in excitement over Hollywood-like sign
DILDO, N.L. – Days after a Hollywood-style sign went up over Dildo, N.L., officials have had to post warnings to deter people from clambering through private yards and scaling a steep hill to take photos with it.
The community of about 1,200 has been bustling with visitors after late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel televised his tongue-in-cheek campaign for mayor of the “magical place” that shares its name with a sex toy.
The sign, a gift from Kimmel, was unveiled on a hill above the picturesque community during a segment of Jimmy Kimmel Live last Thursday.
Andrew Pretty, committee member for the local service district, says “no trespassing” signs were hastily assembled and put on properties after about 20 people tried to climb up the hill for photos.
Pretty says the sign spelling out Dildo’s name in large capital letters is located behind private residences, and having tourists trek through the properties is an invasion of homeowners’ privacy.
The warnings went up on the weekend, but Pretty says some people are disregarding them to make the dangerous climb of about 45 metres.
Pretty says the town is encouraging people enjoy the Dildo sign from the road, but if the trespassing doesn’t stop, the new landmark will have to come down.
The Canadian Press