firehose

PUBLIC ALERT: MAN POSING AS AN UNDERCOVER POLICE OFFICER

News Release from Portland Police Bureau Posted on FlashAlert: January 14th, 2014 2:30 PM The Portland Police Bureau would like to make the public aware of an incident where a man posing as an undercover police officer stopped a woman and searched her car.

On January 12, 2014, at approximately 1:30 a.m., a 33-year-old woman (who has asked not to be identified publicly) stopped at the Plaid Pantry convenience store located at Southeast Grand Avenue and East Burnside Street. After she drove out of the parking lot, she noticed that she was being followed by an unknown vehicle. The victim told police that the driver of the vehicle was flashing its headlights and using a phone with a flashing white and possibly blue light.

The victim drove to the area of North Vancouver Avenue and Ainsworth Street near a friend's house, stopped, and got out to confront the driver.

After she got out of her car, the man in the car following her got out and flashed a badge in a wallet at her and identified himself as an undercover police officer. The victim told police that the man explained that he saw her talking to a drug dealer outside of Plaid Pantry and then asked to search her car, which she allowed him to do. The victim watched the man search her car and appear to put something into his pocket.

The victim asked the man for his business card, which he did not provide, and the man drove away. The victim then noticed that she was missing a small amount of money from her purse.

The victim described the suspect as a white male, 40 to 50 years old, short-in-stature with a skinny build.

The vehicle was described as a white 1990s Buick.

The Portland Police Bureau would like to remind community members that officers performing traffic stops would very rarely be in a vehicle without clear police markings or official lights. All police officers encountering the public will have a badge and a photo ID from the issuing agency identifying themselves as sworn police officers.

Community members suspecting that someone is impersonating a police officer should immediately call 9-1-1.

Anyone with information about this case is asked to provide it to crimetips@portlandoregon.gov.

Margo Martindale will be in “several” episodes of the second season of The Americans, despite her commitment to the CBS sitcom The Millers, according to executive producer Joel Fields at the show’s Television Critics Association winter press tour panel. No firm number was placed on Martindale’s commitment to season two, but the news that she will be in more than one will surely come as a relief to fans of the show and to the Emmy-nominating committee, who gave Martindale a nomination as best guest actress in a drama series for her work as “Claudia,” a Soviet handler keeping careful, cantankerous watch over her charges, KGB spies posing as normal couples in American suburbia. In particular, this should mean Martindale will get to face off at least a couple more times with Keri Russell, as scenes between the two were highlights of the first season.

Other than that, there ...

An image of the near-final custom Mac Pro, or the "Trash Pro" as I've come to call it.

TonyMacx86

Jokes that Apple's new Mac Pro looked a bit like a trash can began almost as soon as the computer was announced, but one person has taken the comparison to its logical extreme: he has built a "Hackintosh" out of standard PC components and stuffed all of them into a bathroom trashcan with more than a passing resemblance to the actual Mac Pro.

Fitting everything inside the trashcan required a fair number of custom parts.

TonyMacx86

The images from the German DIY-er responsible for the project were posted to the TonyMacx86 forums earlier this month and dug up by 9to5Mac earlier today—TonyMacx86 is a popular resource for users who like to get OS X running on standard PC hardware. The build begins with a Gigabyte z78n Wi-Fi mini-ITX motherboard mounted to a couple of stands and a ribbon cable that allows the AMD Radeon HD 7750 graphics card to be mounted parallel to the main board. Additional stands hold the device's two 2.5-inch drives (one SSD and one HDD, possibly in a Fusion Drive configuration). Fans mounted inside the case at the top and the bottom help with airflow. The whole computer is about 26cm high and 18cm in diameter, not far from the 25.1cm height and 16.7cm diameter of the actual Mac Pro.

It goes without saying that this machine's performance will come nowhere near that of a fully decked-out Mac Pro. It uses a dual-core Haswell Core i3 chip instead of a four-, six-, eight-, or 12-core Ivy Bridge Xeon; it uses one standard gaming GPU instead of two FirePro workstation GPUs; it lacks the Mac Pro's dual Ethernet ports and six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports; and it uses standard SATA storage and consumer DDR3 rather than the PCI express storage or 1866MHz ECC DDR3 of the Mac Pro. The DIY version also has at least four fans spinning inside, rather than the single fan used in the real thing.

This is the Lukeville, AZ border crossing where Cotterman's laptop was seized.

Alan Levine

On Monday, the Supreme Court let stand a March 2013 ruling that established—at least in the Ninth Circuit in the western United States—that extended and sophisticated forensic analysis of a digital device requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

The case, United States v. Cotterman, involves an American man who was driving back into the country from Mexico with his wife in 2007 and had his laptop cursorily searched, with a more advanced search then performed at a government facility 170 miles away. The Supreme Court declined to hear Howard Cotterman's appeal of the legality of the extensive search.

As part of a routine check, a border computer system returned a hit for Cotterman—he is a sex offender convicted on several counts, including child molestation in 1992. The agents then searched his car, finding two laptops and three digital cameras, which they also inspected. Those devices had several password-protected files.

Neutral Milk Hotel has announced a run of West Coast dates up to and around its slot at this year’s Coachella, kicking off April 4 in Seattle and wrapping up with its festival appearance on April 20. The full rundown of all the band’s upcoming dates—including a whole mess of other U.S. stops the group’s in the middle of right now—is below.

Source

Neutral Milk Hotel tour 2014
Jan. 16-17—Orpheum Theatre—Boston, Massachusetts *
Jan. 18—Olympia—Montreal, Quebec *
Jan. 19-20—Kool Haus—Toronto, Ontario *
Jan. 22—The Capitol Theatre—Port Chester, New York *
Jan. 23-25—BAM Howard Gilman Opera House—Brooklyn, New York *
Jan. 27-28—Webster Hall—New York, New York *
Jan. 29—Tower Theatre—Upper Darby, Pennsylvania *
Jan. 30—Union Transfer—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania *
Jan. 31—DAR Constitution Hall—Washington, D.C. *
Feb. 1-2—Cat’s Cradle—Carrboro, ...

Google started dropping hints about its Chrome OS-like plans for Windows 8 back in October. At the time it was merely an experiment in the developer version of Chrome, but today Google is rolling out a new user interface to all Chrome Windows users alongside a noisy tabs tracking feature. The new "Metro" mode essentially converts Chrome for Windows 8 into Chrome OS. Just like Google's full Chrome OS, you can create multiple browser windows and arrange them using a snap to the left or right of the display or full-screen modes. There's even a shelf with Chrome, Gmail, Google, Docs, and YouTube icons that can be arranged at the bottom, left, or right of the screen.

An app launcher is also available in the lower left-hand corner, providing access to search and recent apps. It’s all clearly designed to work well with touch on Windows 8, something that the traditional desktop version of Chrome has not focused on so far. The "Metro" mode presents the keyboard automatically, and also includes the ability to navigate and resize windows within the Chrome OS-like environment. Some UI elements still require some touch optimization, but overall it’s a better experience than the existing desktop version with touch.

While the Chrome browser acts as a Windows 8 application, it's using a special mode that Microsoft has enabled specifically for web browsers. The software maker allows browsers on Windows 8 to launch in its "Metro-style" environment providing they're set as default. The applications are listed in the Windows Store and they're still desktop apps, but the exception allows them to mimic Windows 8 apps and access the app and snapping features of the OS. While Chrome runs in this mode on Windows 8, Microsoft does not permit this type of behavior on Windows RT.

A true Trojan horse

Google’s latest update for Windows 8 is clearly a big step forwards in its Chrome Apps initiative. The search giant is working with developers to create apps that exist outside of the browser and extend Chrome’s reach into more of a platform for third parties to build upon. Having a Chrome OS-like environment directly inside of Windows 8 extends Google’s browser into a Trojan horse to eventually convince users to download more and more Chrome Apps and possibly push them towards Chrome OS in the future.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment on whether Google’s latest Chrome OS update conforms with the Metro-style browser policies, and we’ll update you accordingly.

DOE

Shortly after the US Department of Energy helped broker a deal that would see television set-top boxes save their users a billion dollars' worth of electricity, another branch of the government has decided to undercut energy efficiency efforts. As part of the new budget deal announced today, Congress has voted to eliminate standards for light bulb efficiency, standards that would see incandescent bulbs phased out in favor of technologies that convert far more electricity into light.

These ideas were first enacted during the Bush administration, via the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Incandescent bulbs were unable to meet the standards, so they would eventually be forced off the market in favor of LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs. But Republicans have since soured on the bill, viewing it as an intrusion on the market and attempting to identify it with President Obama. Recent Congresses have tried many times to repeal the standards, but these have all been blocked.

However, US budgets are often used as a vehicle to get policies enacted that couldn't pass otherwise, since having an actual budget is considered too valuable to hold up over relatively minor disputes. The repeal of these standards got attached to the budget and will be passed into law with it.