Navy SEALs disciplined for Medal Of Honor: Warfighter involvement

Seven SEALs under investigation for revealing secrets during Warfighter's development have been disciplined.

Back in September while under investigation for his novel No Easy Day, former U.S. Navy SEAL and  author Matt Bissonnette also fell under further government scrutiny for his involvement with Electronic Arts and developer Danger Close’s military shooter Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Although Bissonnette had since left the service, his contributions as an adviser to that game and the details of his book both came under investigation by the Department of Defense for potentially releasing classified information regarding how the SEALs operate. Along with Bissonnette, seven other active duty Navy SEALs also served as consultants for the game. 

A new report now suggests that those seven SEALs have been disciplined, and all those involved are under further investigation regarding their role in the game’s development.

According to CBS News, the Navy SEALs in question (at least one of which served on the successful mission which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden) served as paid consultants for Warfighter, and may have revealed military secrets while assisting EA with the game. There has been no word on what specific secrets were revealed, and in all likelihood that information will never be released. The report indicates that all seven SEALs have received letters of reprimand — a major impediment to future promotion– and have had half their salaries docked for two months.

News of The Department of Defense taking an interest in the SEALs’ involvement with Warfighter first hit the wire in September, but focused primarily on Bissonnette. His book No Easy Day, which he wrote  under the pseudonym Mark Owen, gave a firsthand account of the raid that targeted bin Laden. Although the market is no stranger to first hand accounts of military missions told by those that participated in them, all such projects are supposed to first be submitted to the Pentagon for approval to ensure that no classified information is released. In the case of both Bissonnette’s book and with the SEALs that worked on Warfighter, no approval was ever sought, although Bissonnette’s lawyer claims that the book was properly vetted by a special operations attorney prior to release. At the time, EA indicated that it wasn’t aware the SEALs’ required any government oversight for their role with the game. 

Leading up to and after its October 23 release, Warfighter‘s marketing has promoted the game’s ties to real-world military experts and well-known military scenarios – including an upcoming map pack for the game called “Zero Dark Thirty” that recreates the SEAL Team Six raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Investigation finds children as young as 14 working at Foxconn

An internal investigation at Foxconn, prompted by the media, has confirmed at least 50 children under 16 have been found working in one of its factories.

More controversy has hit Foxconn this week, as workers under the age of 16 have been found working in one of its factories, breaking not only Chinese labor laws, but also Foxconn’s own regulations.

Rather than the news being broken through a series of leaks or by an undercover expose, the scandal was confirmed through an internal investigation carried out by the Hon Tai Precision Industry, Foxconn’s parent company. This wasn’t solely done out of the goodness of its heart though, but after Chinese media and the China Labor Watch group accused the company of employing underage workers.

A group of interns aged between 14 and 16 were found to be working at the Foxconn factory in the Yantai province, and had been there for around three weeks. Recently, Foxconn had appealed for extra workers in the area, after it found itself needing 19,000 extra personnel to cover a staff shortage.

Although the report doesn’t state how many underage workers were found in the plant, Chinadaily.com says that Foxconn has sent 56 interns back to their schools. A statement from the company says it takes “full responsibility for these violations” and it has “apologized to each of the students for [its] role in this action.

A statement from China Labor Watch says schools are as much to blame as Foxconn, as that’s who sent the underage interns to the company in the first place. Foxconn however, did not check the IDs of these young interns, or failed to recognize fakes.

Interns, conditions and child labor at Foxconn

Foxconn’s interns are essentially trainees, who must complete a one to three-month course before becoming fully fledged employees, which includes instruction on the company’s ethos and expectations, plus 10-hours work a day on the production line. The Chinadaily.com report says interns usually earn less than 2,000 yuan per month, which is around $320.

This isn’t the first time Foxconn has been found to employ underage workers, as Apple discovered 91 children below the age of 16 working there during an audit in 2010. Apple stopped working with the factory that employed almost 50-percent of those workers, and according to its Supplier Responsibility code of conduct, hasn’t found evidence of underage workers since.

NBC.com says the Yantai plant doesn’t produce Apple hardware, and a source speaking to Chinadaily.com says the workers were assembling gamepads for the Nintendo Wii. As a company, Foxconn builds products for Dell, Sony, Intel, Acer and many others.

The discovery of more children working at Foxconn is another in a string of scandals to hit the company in the last few weeks alone, following on from reports of strikes due to intolerable living conditions, riots and earlier in the year, suicide threats too. Despite this, a report by the Fair Labor Association says conditions at some of Foxconn’s factories are improving.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Google blacklists sites run by family of British politician

Google has placed almost twenty websites owned and operated by the wife, sister and mother of a prominent British politician on a black list after an investigation has found that they have been illegally harvesting other people's content in order to increase search rankings and hit rate.

Here’s a story for those who feel letdown by American politicians and the moral standing of same: While it’s true that our elected officials have been known to cheat, lie and generally fail to live up to the standards that they themselves try and portray themselves of possessing in order to win our votes, we can at least take some small amount of solace in the fact that none have yet found themselves embarrassed by Google announcing that it has blacklisted their family following revelations of copyright infringement. Somewhere in the United Kingdom, Conservative politician – and newly named co-chairman of the entire Conservative Party – Grant Shapps only wishes that he could say the same.

Shapps has found himself facing the public embarrassment of Google placing a network of up to nineteen separate sites officially owned and operated by numerous members of his family (His wife, his sister and in a somewhat unlikely turn of events, his 75-year-old mother) on a blacklist after it has been discovered that the sites engage in a process known as “spinning and scraping” to steal content from other sites in order to increase their own Google Search rankings.

To make matters more embarrassing for the politician, a company that he himself founded has been revealed to sell software that allows others to do the same thing. The Guardian newspaper last week revealed that for just $497, TrafficPaymaster would create websites that would do well in Google rankings – by spinning and scraping their way to something resembling success.

Although company policy prevents Google from officially commenting directly on the Shapps situation, the company did release a statement in which it said that it “take[s] copyright very seriously and invest significant time and money in keeping advertisers and publishers that violate our policies out of our network,” adding that it “bans ads and advertisers involved in activities that infringe on copyright from using our systems and prohibits publishers that violate copyright from participating in AdSense.”

In addition from being blacklisted from future AdSense or related advertising programs, an anonymous source within Google has also said that the sites owned and operated by the Shapps will “be naturally demoted by our search algorithms.”

Responding to the news, a spokesman for Shapps sought to distance the politician from the charges. “Grant Shapps derives no income, dividends, or other income from this business, which is run by his wife, Belinda, with a registered office in Pinner in north-west London,” the spokesman explained. “He is quite simply not involved in this business. Mrs Shapps runs her own online business, uses freelancers, moderators and programmers to post on forums, generate products and maintain a help desk.” For her part, Shapps’ wife Belinda didn’t exactly help matters by refusing comment and redirecting all questions on the matter to Conservative Party headquarters.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Feds investigate alleged hacking of Romney’s tax returns

Quite possibly a giant waste of time for the Secret Service, an investigation has been launched into threats of stolen tax returns.

Covered by Venturebeat earlier today, the United States Secret Service is looking into a claim that hackers stole several years worth of Mitt Romney’s tax returns from the offices of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Franklin, Tennessee. Posted on Pastebin earlier this week, the hacking team that allegedly stole Romney’s tax returns detailed an account of the theft. According to the account, the thieves gained access to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office on August 25 through the third floor of the office building. Moving down to the second floor, the group allegedly accessed the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office in question and copied scans of all available Romney tax returns to a USB drive. After leaving the offices, the hacking team allegedly copied the documents onto three USB drives. They had flash drives delivered to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office as well as the local branches of the Republican and Democratic party.

After the group threatened to release all files to the public on September 28, they posted a follow-up threat on September 4 regarding payment by Bitcoins. Detailed in the second Pastebin post, the group claims to have accessed the network file servers at the Tennessee office of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and copied the tax documents. The second threat states that all major news organizations will be sent an encrypted copy of the files and the key to unlock Romney’s tax returns will be distributed on September 28. 

However, the group setup two separate Bitcoin addresses in an attempt to force a bidding competition between parties that want to see the Romney’s old tax returns and parties that want to keep the tax returns out of the public’s eye. According to the group, they want $1,000,000 million in Bitcoin currency in order to make any decision prior to September 28. The group doesn’t seem to care if the entire amount comes from a single donor or multiple donors, nor are they particularly interested in either outcome. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers released a statement that denied the hacking attempt on the servers as well as the theft from the office building. Regarding the threats, company representatives stated “We are aware of the allegations that have been made regarding improper access to our systems. We are working closely with the United States Secret Service, and at this time there is no evidence that our systems have been compromised or that there was any unauthorized access to the data in question.”

According to CNET, both the Democratic and Republican offices within Williamson County received a package last week with a black Cruzer 4GB USB drive, a letter with the first threat that was eventually posted on Pastebin and a stamp of Mitt Romney’s signature.

Peter Burr, the chairman of the county’s Democratic Party headquarters, noted that they found the envelope dropped through the mail slot. People within the office didn’t take the package seriously and it apparently caused quite a bit of laughter as the package was passed around the office.

Also mentioned in the Tennessean, representatives at the GOP office in Williamson County were equally skeptical. Executive director Jean Barwick jokingly stated “A million dollars seemed kind of low. If you’re going to go for a million, why not go for $100 million?” Neither office attempted to access any information on the flash drives and both drives have been turned over to representatives with the United States Secret Service.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Samsung promises to review Chinese labor practices

Samsung plans to inspect 150 Chinese supplies for labor law violations after an investigation uncovered problems at Huizhou's HEG Electronics.

Apple isn’t the only major electronics manufacturer facing questions about the labor practices of its Chinese suppliers. South Korean electronics giant Samsung says it plans to inspect some 250 Chinese companies that supply components or manufacture its products to ensure no labor laws are being broken.

The announcement comes after Samsung announced results of an auditn into labor practices at an HEG Electronics facility in Huizhou, in southern China. Earlier this month, the U.S.-based human rights group China Labor Watch accused HEG Electronics of employing child laborers and exploiting student labor, claiming student labor makes up as much as 80 percent of HEG’s workforce, and that investigators believed as many as 50 to 100 child workers were being employed in various departments in the factory.

Samsung says its audit does not confirm China Labor Watch’s claims. According to Samsung, there are workers in the factory under age 18, they are all over 16 and are student workers or interns and therefore legal under Chinese law. Samsung says it was not able to identify any underage workers are the HEG site, although it notes the factory’s high turnover rate (some 30 percent per month) limited the extent of their audit.

Samsung did find other problems at the HEG Electronics facility, including potentially unsafe practices, improper safety measures, overtime in excess of nine hours per week, and a system of fins to punish workers for tardiness or absences.

“Samsung has demanded that HEG immediately improve its working conditions,” the company said in a statement. “If HEG fails to meet Samsung’s zero tolerance policy on child labor, the contract will be immediately severed.”

Samsung plans to conduct direct inspections of 105 Chinese companies that product goods solely for Samsung by the end of September, and conduct documentation reviews of an additional 144 suppliers by the end of the year. Samsung says it will require corrective action be taken for any violation of its policies; if a company continues to be found in violation of Samsung policies, Samsung will terminate the contract.

[Image: Samsung's president Information Technology and Mobile Communication Shin Jong-kyun at IFA 2012 Berline, via Samsung.]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Facebook-Instagram deal gets green light from FTC

The US Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday it had finished its investigation into Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and would not be taking any further action, paving the way for the deal to be sealed.

Facebook’s acquisition of photo-sharing app maker Instagram came another step closer on Wednesday when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it had completed its antitrust investigation and would not be taking any further action.

Facebook said in a statement that it was “pleased” with the FTC’s decision though it gave no indication as to when the deal might be completed.

Back in April, a month before the social networking giant floated on the stock exchange, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it intended to buy Instagram for $1 billion. The deal struck between the two companies meant Instagram would receive $300 million in cash and just under 23 million shares.

Of course, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom had been hoping to see the value of Facebook shares hit the roof after the company went public in May. However, it’s gone the other way, with shares in the social networking company currently worth just half of their original $38 IPO price. This means the Facebook-Instagram deal is currently valued at just over $747 million.

The news in April of Facebook striking a deal with Instagram came as a surprise to many, not least the Facebook board. Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly sorted the deal all by himself, meeting Systrom at his Palo Alto home over three days, whittling the Instagram boss down to $1 billion from his original asking price of $2 billion. It’s thought Zuckerberg wanted to act fast in order to stop another company getting in first, with Facebook keen to find ways to increase its presence in the mobile space.

Instagram is a hugely popular free photo-sharing app that allows users to make fast and stylish edits to their snaps before sharing them on the Web. It currently has 80 million users, a figure impressive by any standards, but even more so when you consider it launched less than two years ago.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com