How Lion Air’s Boeing 737 Max Experienced a Near-Crash The Day Before 2018’s Fatal Crash

ABC News tells the story of Indonesia-based budget airline Lion Air, which had ordered over 200 Boeing 737 MAX 8s at a cost of $22 billion — and what happened on a flight the day before a fatal crash on October 29th, 2018: [A]fter its first flight in May 2017, the 737 MAX 8 went 17 months without incident. Then, on…

Body Found In Canada Identified As Neo-Nazi Spam King

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally…

After 5 Years, Australia Finally Cracked a Drug Kingpin’s BlackBerry

“An encrypted BlackBerry device that was cracked five years after it was first seized by police is poised to be the key piece of evidence in one of the state’s longest-running drug importation investigations,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald: In April, new technology “capabilities” allowed authorities to probe the encrypted device, which was used by one of the alleged kingpins and…

Suspect Is Arrested In Grisly Killing of Tech CEO Fahim Saleh

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The former personal assistant of a young tech entrepreneur found decapitated and dismembered in his Manhattan apartment was arrested early on Friday and was expected to be charged in the killing, according to three officials briefed on the matter. The entrepreneur, Fahim Saleh, 33, was discovered dead on Tuesday afternoon…

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm

In what may be the first known case of its kind, a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit. From a report: On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling…

The detective aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover

Mars is a long way from 221B Baker Street, but one of fiction’s best-known detectives will be represented on the Red Planet after NASA’s Perseverance rover touches down on Feb. 18, 2021. SHERLOC, an instrument on the end of the rover’s robotic arm, will hunt for sand-grain-sized clues in Martian rocks while working in tandem with WATSON, a camera that will…

Disney Forces Explicit Club Penguin Clones Offline

“Disney has ordered unauthorized copies of its Club Penguin game to close, after the BBC found children were being exposed to explicit messages,” the British publication reports. The social network was shut down by Disney in 2017, causing unofficial clones of the website to launch on private servers using stolen or copied source code. The BBC reports: Visits to fan-run Club…

An Adult Cam Site Exposed 10.88 Billion Records

CAM4, a popular adult platform that advertises “free live sex cams,” misconfigured an ElasticSearch production database so that it was easy to find and view heaps of personally identifiable information, as well as corporate details like fraud and spam detection logs. According to Wired, the database exposed 7 terabytes of names, sexual orientations, payment logs, and email and chat transcripts –…