понедельник, 20 июля 2015 г.
пятница, 17 июля 2015 г.
u10 People Confirmed Sick From Contaminated Stuffed Chicken Breastsr
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There are two recalls going on right now for stuffed chicken breasts because of the risk that they might be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have figured out who is sick from what: seven of the documented infections resulting from these foods so far are only from the Barber Foods recall, and three are from the larger Koch Foods recall.
One example of a frozen chicken breast package that’s part of this recall.
Experts know this because they’re able to match bacteria found in the chicken dishes to bacteria found in people who are sick. One strain matches to the three people in Minnesota who are known to be sick from the Koch Foods chicken, and the other seven cases in Minnesota and Wisconsin trace back to the Barber Foods strain.
Check your freezer for frozen chicken breasts with USDA establishment numbers:
P-4230A (a similar recall of Omaha Steaks chicken products)
P-1358 (Aspen Foods)
P-276 (Barber Foods)Food poisoning outbreaks typically make more people sick than companies and the government announce, since samples are taken only from patients who visit a doctor or who are hospitalized. Some people have no symptoms from Salmonella infections. Typically, they have fever and abdominal distress for four to seven days, but children, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems can become more seriously ill and should seek medical attention.
Multistate Outbreak of Salmonella Enteritidis Infections Linked to Raw, Frozen, Stuffed Chicken Entrees Produced by Barber Foods [CDC] (via Food Safety News)
PREVIOUSLY:
2 Million More Stuffed Chicken Breasts Recalled For Possible Salmonella
1.7 Million Pounds Of Barber Foods Chicken Products Recalled For Possible Salmonella
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uIn India And China, You Can Buy Your Next Home Without Leaving Homer
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Depending on how you feel about the way real estate works now, the idea of sticking a house in your Internet shopping cart and clicking “Buy” may or may not appeal to you. Advances in technology mean that you can buy a new house without even going outside, and get a discount for doing so…in India.
Homebuilders’ websites work like a showroom or a demo unit, with three-dimensional walkthroughs available on the screen. The discounts for doing this can be huge: one builder offers 12% off an apartment that costs about $102,000, for example.
E-commerce company Alibaba also worked with a developer to sell houses on the company’s Taobao marketplace, which is pretty much the equivalent of buying a condo on Amazon. Shoppers in India use sites like Housing.com and even the e-commerce site SnapDeal, where you can also buy clothes, toys, and other regular old merchandise.
One realtor in India told Bloomberg News that it will be impossible for online real estate sales to replace its real-life counterpart, but online sales have been a great way for the housing market in India to deal with some excess housing in new developments that had been delayed.
Indians Are Spending Millions Buying Homes Online [Bloomberg]
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uSingle Ladies In 50s And 60s Prime Targets For Online Romance Scammersr
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Single ladies in their fifties and sixties are really in demand on dating websites. Unfortunately, they’re not popular in the way they might prefer. They’re prime targets for scammers, and victims typically lose $40,000 to $100,000. Once they realize what happened, they’re often ashamed to tell their families. That means word about this crime doesn’t get out.
On the Internet, no one knows you’re a grifting cat. (Vincent Verdult
The money goes straight into the pockets of scammers, who generally work in sophisticated rings in developing countries. Armed with stolen photos, they find good prospects through dating sites or Facebook, and type sweet nothings at them in chats and e-mails. (It probably helps to have multiple lovers going at once: lots of copy and paste.
The scheme targets people of both sexes and all ages, but older women can be lucrative and less savvy targets. The lover usually says that he (or she) is from an English-speaking country but working abroad for some important reason, sometimes even military deployment. After establishing the relationship, they begin asking for money: it could be for a work crisis, a medical emergency, or simply to travel to meet the target.
The scammer might also ask for a financial favor that turns out to be an advance fee scheme, or use their address to receive stolen goods.
You can get an intimate look at how one of these scams works in an episode of the podcast “Criminal,” where a son has some trepidation about his widowed mother’s new long-distance boyfriend.
Be careful out there. Be sure to warn people you know who don’t read stories online much, even if it might be uncomfortable to talk to your mom about her online dating life. One important step to remember is to perform a reverse image search on any photos you receive to see whether they’re stolen: you can do that at TinEye or Google.
Swindlers Target Older Women on Dating Websites [New York Times]
EPISODE TWENTY: GIL FROM LONDON (5.15.2015) [Criminal]
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u“Incorrect Keystroke” Allows Comcast To Withdraw $500 From Non-Customer’s Bank Accountr
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We’ve told you before about Comcast not really paying attention to the payments it receives — like the woman who accidentally sent them her rent check and found that it had been deposited in the cable company’s account — but here’s a story of a man who isn’t even a Comcast customer but found that $500 had been taken out of his bank account anyway.
The man tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer that not only isn’t he a Comcast subscriber, but the cable giant doesn’t serve his area.
But there it was on his bank statement: $500 paid to Comcast.
His bank, Huntington, didn’t appear to give him too much of a hassle, crediting the money to his account after he filled out the proper documents. But how did this happen?
The bank pinned the blame on an “incorrect keystroke,” but as the Plain Dealer’s Teresa Dixon Murray notes it could also be fraud.
All one needs to process an electronic bank-to-bank check (aka an “Automated Clearing House” or ACH payment) is the bank account number, and the account’s relevant bank routing number. This information is available on your standard printed check, so anyone who gets their hands on an old check has everything they need.
“They don’t need your name or address or ZIP code or anything else,” writes Dixon Murray. “So if someone wants to pay for something online or by phone with an ACH… he or she could pick a bank and find its routing number, which is easy. And then pick an account number with the correct number of digits. Gold!”
ACH transactions are monitored by NACHA — The Electronic Payments Association — but that’s no guarantee that errors and fraud won’t happen.
Someone fraudulently using another person’s account info for ACH transactions will likely be caught in the long, but only if the victim spots the bogus transactions. As the man in this story noted, if he hadn’t caught the questionable statement entries himself, his accountant probably would have assumed it was a legitimate purchases.
“My accountant would have no idea whether Comcast was my internet provider and, if I had not checked, it would have been written off as a business expense,” he explains.
The best you can do is to be careful about not sharing your account info — Dixon Murray even suggests having a smaller, secondary checking account for writing checks to people or businesses you don’t necessarily trust — and to remain vigilant about checking your accounts for signs of potential errors or fraud.
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uShirtless Guy Climbs Two Fences At San Diego Airport, Runs Onto A Runwayr
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Though it’s no easy feat to scale a fence (at least, not easy for me), authorities at San Diego International Airport say a man managed to climb not one, but two security fences and ran onto a runway Thursday night.
The man is believed to have been under the influence, though it’s unclear what substance he may have consumed before making his way over an outside perimeter fence with barbed wire on top, and then climbing something called a “blast fence” next to the area where planes prepare for takeoff.
“A maintenance worker saw him right away” and called San Diego Harbor Police, an airport authority spokesman said, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
It took about five minutes to take the man into custody, but he was eventually arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and two trespassing charges, one relating to the airport in general and one for being in a secure airport area.
Though officials didn’t say whether he was injured or not, one might imagine that going shirtless over a barbed wire fence might leave a few scratches.
His shenanigans caused incoming and outgoing flights to be temporarily put on hold for about seven minutes while law enforcement were arresting him. We cant imagine any plane crews making that announcement… “Sorry folks, looks like we’re 14th in line for takeoff, right after this guy without a shirt on.”
From Consumerist’s Very Full Hall Of Airport Fence Climbing Infamy: Failed Stowaway Tries To Hide In Plane’s Wheel Well For Free Ride From Orlando To NYC; Woman Climbs Airport Fence To Try To Stop Her Cheating Husband From Flying Away; Serial Stowaway Arrested After Flying From San Jose To Los Angeles Without A Ticket; Teen Stowaway Somehow Survives 5-Hour Flight Hidden In Wheel Well; Man Throws Himself A Little Pants-Off Dance-Off Party On German Chancellor’s Jet; JFK Airport’s $100 Million Security System Thwarted By Lone Jet Skier Swimming Ashore
Man scales 2 fences, runs onto Lindbergh tarmac [San Diego Union-Tribune]
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uComcast Exec: Netflix Thrives Because Cable Is Too Expensive, Is Company’s “Ultimate Frenemy”r
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This is a weird time to be a cable company. On the one hand, everyone’s watching more content than ever before. And on the other hand, they’re watching cable less than ever before. That’s bad for cable companies, except that cable companies are also broadband companies. The push and pull is a reality almost all of us live in, but it’s something that the cable folks don’t really talk about much. Until they do.
Speaking this week at an industry conference in New England, Multichannel News reports, Comcast’s favorite executive mouthpiece David L. Cohen conceded that the Netflix giveth, and the Netflix taketh away.
Cohen admitted what cable executives basically never say, but consumers know too well: viewers have flocked to Netflix because cable prices are too dang high.
“Netflix is the ultimate frenemy,” Cohen said, adding, “Part of this is a self-inflicted wound. We have made video too expensive.”
Just over the last few years, broadband has gotten fast and reliable enough, and software algorithms good enough, that HD streaming content is now a simple, easy, affordable option — and it’s everywhere. Given the option to cut the cord and walk away from cable, consumers are, leaving cable companies scrambling to follow.
Netflix, now up to 65 million subscribers, is the gorilla in the room when it comes to players on the streaming scene, but traditional broadcast and cable networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz, and CBS are hopping on board too.
Pay-TV competition is erupting, but it’s not coming from cable. Instead it’s from the likes of PlayStation and Dish. Everyone is still watching TV in prime-time, but they’re not touching their TV tuner. They’re just streaming it, instead.
This leaves Comcast in a somewhat awkward but ultimately favorable position: because they provide the broadband pipes as well as the cable conduit, they are poised for one half of their business to soar even as the other half deflates. And although the era of over-the-top streaming programming might be creating a robust marketplace for programming access, the broadband market is still starved for competition.
That’s where the “frenemy” aspect comes in.
“Remember, you can’t get Netflix without broadband service. Those are 3 million customers of our broadband service,” Cohen told his audience, referring to the New England market he was speaking in.
Netflix not only keeps Comcast customers forking over cash for broadband connections, but also, Cohen pointed out, benefits the company in another way. Because they also own film and programming content, in the form of NBCUniversal, Netflix adds a revenue stream to Comcast when they sign contracts for the library.
In the meantime, of course, Comcast is not simply going to let other businesses make the money from over-the-top content while their own subscriber numbers dwindle: their first attempt at a streaming service launched at the start of the week.
Cohen: Netflix is ‘Ultimate Frenemy’ [Multichannel News]
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