uWalmart Employee In Trouble Over Facebook Video Of Shoplifter Scuffler

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• We’ve told you before of Walmart employees who were fired for intervening in violent or potentially dangerous situations at the store, but here’s a story of a Walmart worker who’s in trouble for not stepping in. Of course, it doesn’t help that he posted video of the incident along with his wisecracking running commentary.

  CBS Dallas has the tale of the Arlington, TX, Walmart employee who posted a video on Facebook of what appears to be a customer attempting to steal items during the self-checkout process. As he films the shopper, the employee mocks her efforts at thievery.

  He then follows along as she tries to leave the store.

  “Have fun,” he taunts, as someone grabs the bag containing the allegedly stolen items. “Have a good day.”

  The cashier-cum-cameraman also got footage of the wannabe shoplifter getting into a scuffle with another woman in the parking lot.

  Other employees stepped in to try to break up the fight while the cashier continued capturing it all on video.

  That’s when he says something that probably sealed his fate at the retailer.

  “Yup, and I let it happen,” he says to his own camera, “on the Walmart clock.”

  Rather than just show the footage to pals privately, the employee posted it on his own Facebook page.

  Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well with Walmart HQ.

  “This type of behavior by a Walmart associate is completely unacceptable,” the company tells CBS. “We are conducting an internal investigation into this matter at this time and will take action as appropriate.”

  The employee who shot the video has apparently “resigned” from his gig at the store. No word on whether or not any other workers will be penalized.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uVerizon Tells Judge: Porn Copyright Troll Is Wasting Everyone’s Time With “Defective” Subpoenasr

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  Porn producer Malibu Media, which has filed more than 4,000 copyright lawsuits since 2009 — several times more than any other company — is currently trying to compel Verizon to reveal the identities of Internet users Malibu believes are illegally sharing its movies. But lawyers for the telecom titan are telling the court they’ve had enough of Malibu’s “defective” and “unenforceable” subpoenas.

  As is the usual tactic with porn copyright trolls, Malibu has filed lawsuits against “Doe” defendants. It has issued subpoenas to Internet service providers like Verizon to get the ISP to translate anonymous IP addresses to actual customer names.

  Once identified, these customers will then be approached by the troll’s legal team with the offer of paying a cash settlement to keep their potentially embarrassing porn predilections out of the public record.

  Verizon, like some other ISPs, is tired of being involved in these questionable legal actions and is telling one federal court that Malibu is abusing the system.

  In a filing [PDF] this week regarding one ongoing Malibu copyright case, Verizon’s lawyers explain to the judge that the company’s time is being wasted on subpoenas from the porn purveyor.

  “Plaintiff’s subpoena of Verizon is defective on its face and would impose an undue burden on Verizon, which has been required to respond to many hundreds of subpoenas from Malibu Media alone,” reads the letter.

  The lawyers accuse Malibu of dumping the subpoena on Verizon less than a week before the deposition date, while also seeking “a wide range of information from Verizon that is not discoverable.”

  Beyond that, Verizon says the subpoena in this case is “unenforceable” as federal rules on subpoenas limit the distance Malibu can compel someone to appear for a deposition.

  In this case, Verizon says Malibu is trying to force Verizon employees who work in the D.C. area to travel to San Angelo, TX, with only a few days notice — and for these employees to bring relevant documents with them to the deposition.

  And Verizon argues that some of the documentation sought by Malibu — correspondence between Verizon and the subscriber, information about the rental of modems or other equipment, and Verizon’s general policies and procedures — is “either irrelevant, more properly sought from a party to litigation, or outside the scope of discovery contemplated by the Cable Act.”

  That law prohibits cable operators from disclosing, among other things, the “extent of any viewing or other use by the subscriber of a cable service or other service provided by the cable operator, or… the nature of any transaction made by the subscriber over the cable system of the cable operator.”

  “This is precisely the information Malibu Media seeks from Verizon,” the company’s lawyers argue. “The information is not discoverable and an extension of the discovery cut-off to pursue it should not be permitted.”

  [via TorrentFreak]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uChicago Residents Want City To Buy Their Homes, Claiming Living Near O’Hare Airport Is A Noisy Nightmarer

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  A group of residents living near O’Hare International Airport are suing the city of Chicago, seeking to make the city buy their homes. They claim their houses have become unlivable after a spike in jet noise from O’Hare, after a new runway opened two years ago.

  About 50 homeowners have joined the cause, saying that since the new runway opened, there’s been a major shift in flight patterns that has forced them to live with the drone of jets flying above their homes night and day.

  “They now have a volume of eight or nine hundred planes literally coming over the treetops of their houses,” the homeowners’ attorney tells CBS Chicago. The noise from a “constant barrage” of jumbo jet airliners, cargo carriers and commercial aircraft has turned their lives into a nightmare, he added.

  The area had few planes overhead before the new runway opened in October 2013, prompting new flight patterns at O’Hare that have sent hundreds of flights over their homes, which don’t lie within the existing O’Hare noise contour map. That guide hasn’t been revised since the first new runway opened at O’Hare in 2008. Those homeowners included within the contour map qualify for taxpayer funded soundproofing.

  They can’t sell their homes because of the near constant jet noise, the group’s attorney says, so Chicago should buy them out.

  “You’re saying the city essentially condemned your property without giving you compensation,” the lawyer said. “The city of Chicago has essentially wreaked havoc on their lives, and diminished the property value, and just made the area unlivable.”

  The lawsuit seeks to force the city to buy their homes at fair market value — based on what they were worth before the new runway was installed — at a cost estimated at between $10 million to $15 million.

  Bensenville Residents Sue City, Claim O’Hare Noise Makes Homes Unlivable [CBS Chicago]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uHospital Doesn’t Know The Difference Between Copay And Deductible, Sticks Patient With $3,900 Billr

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  When a California man checked with the hospital about the copay for his daughter’s treatment, the hospital told him it would $500. Except what they meant to tell him was that his insurance deductible would be $500, but that he’d be stuck with a bill for nearly $4,000.

  The man tells the L.A. Times’ David Lazarus that he got the $500 copay estimate in writing from UCLA Medical Center.

  But after his daughter’s first treatment, a simple injection administered by a nurse, he received a bill for $3,908.

  Making matters worse, his 9-year-old daughter’s full treatment would require multiple visits. At this rate, he’d be looking at a final bill of closer to $20,000.

  After Lazarus got involved, a rep for UCLA explained that the problem was an “error in our insurance verification process,” and that the father should have been told that he’d still have the pricey copay on top of his deductible.

  UCLA defended the high price of the treatment by saying that the hospital adds “our overhead expenses to the wholesale cost [of the drug] which was paid to our supplier.”

  But as Lazarus notes, the hospital may be grossly overpaying for this medication. It put a price tag of $19,827 on a single injection, but the drug can be found elsewhere at the still-expensive-but-not-outrageously-so price of between $5,000 and $7,500 for the same dose.

  The father says had UCLA not misled him about the copay, he would have looked around for other providers to make sure he wasn’t getting taken for a ride. Now that he knows how much UCLA charges, he says he’s looking elsewhere for the remainder of his daughter’s injections.

  Even after realizing it screwed up, UCLA continued to tell the dad that he needed to pay the full $3,908. It wasn’t until after the L.A. Times got involved that the hospital agreed to only charge him the $500 it had put in the estimate.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uCrowdfunding Site Patreon Hacked, 15GB Of Donor Info Dumped Onliner

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• Patreon, a website that allows donors to give regularly to sites, artists, projects and other creators, yesterday evening that it’d been hit by a hack attack that accessed some registered names, email addresses and mailing addresses. And according to reports, 15GB of data was then dumped online, exposing information about donors and the projects they’ve funded.

  Hackers published almost 15 gigabytes’ worth of password data, donation records, and source code snagged during the attack, reports Ars Technica. Patreon said on Wednesday that someone had managed to access a “debug version” of the website that was accessible to the public, but that all payment information was safe as full credit card numbers aren’t stored on its servers.

  “Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key,” Jack Conte, co-founder and CEO of Patreon said, adding that user passwords are cryptographically protected with bcrypt, but that patrons should change their passwords immediately as a precaution.

  Even so, it’s possible that hackers could find programming mistakes that would allow them to crack the hashes eventually, though it’d likely take a lot of time and resources. Access to the source code could expose the encryption key that’s said to protect social security numbers and tax IDs, Ars points out.

  Security researcher Troy Hunt, who’s inspected the contents of the data dump, says it includes a fair amount of private messages sent and received by users.

  “Obviously all the campaigns, supporters and pledges are there too,” he Tweeted. “You can determine how much those using Patreon are making.”

  If you’re a Patreon subscriber, make sure you change your password on that site as well as anywhere else you’ve used it. You should also be aware that it’s very likely that your identity, any project you donated to and possibly private messages you exchanged using the site is now available to the Internet at large.

  Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online [Ars Technica]
  Patreon: Some user names, e-mail and mailing addresses stolen [Ars Technica]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uAT&T Testing Wireless Home Broadband In At Least 4 Statesr

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  AT&T helped grease the wheels for its recent acquisition of DirecTV by promising to bring high-speed wireless broadband to homes in rural America. Now that the merger is official, it’s look like AT&T is beginning to make good on that promise, though a number of questions about the new service still remain.

  Back in March, we were the first to report on the rough details of AT&T’s plan to use “wireless local loop” (WLL) technology to deliver Internet access into customers’ homes.

  Though AT&T said that it needed the AT&T merger would help deploy its WLL offering, it does not use the satellite service to deliver Internet access to customers. Instead, WLL customers get a dedicated receiver and antenna in their homes that connect wirelessly to nearby AT&T towers.

  The idea is to provide service that doesn’t require running an expensive cable/fiber line but which offers a connection that’s more reliable and consistent than a mobile hotspot.

  FierceWireless reports that testing of WLL has begun in parts of at least four states — Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Virginia — and that users there are reporting seeing data speeds of 15-25Mbps.

  That’s not blazing fast, but it’s sufficient for many consumer’s current data needs. The two things we still don’t know — price and whether there are any data caps — will probably determine whether WLL has the legs to succeed.

  In order to make WLL marketable, AT&T would need to charge a heck of a lot less per gigabyte than it does for its LTE wireless data.

  Most home broadband plans include data limits of at least 250GB a month. AT&T’s largest LTE data plan tops out at 50GB and costs $350. That’s $7.50 per gigabyte. The company can’t charge anywhere near that amount — or, conversely, try to limit use to only a few gigabytes per month — and hope to win over the 13 million home broadband subscribers it said it would try to reach.

  [via DSL Reports]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

u8 Items You’ll Find Deals On In Octoberr

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  The season is changing, and that doesn’t just mean pumpkin spice lattes and piles of leaves to jump in. It also means that shoppers can get deals on a mix of products from three different seasons in the coming months, if they know where and when to shop. Fortunately, our pals over at Consumer Reports watch prices on items as well as testing them, and here’s what they say you should shop for in October.

  Bikes: As appropriate biking weather ends in areas of the country with four seasons, you can get great deals on bikes being cleared out for next year.

  Computers: The back-to-school shopping season is over, but some computers are left behind.

  Digital Cameras: We’re not sure why prices on these fall: maybe retailers want to clear out old stock before the holidays? Know your own camera needs and research what type is right for you before you start to shop.

  Gas Grills: Yes, grilling season is over in much of the country: deal with your sadness by shopping for a new one for next year, maybe.

  Lawn Mowers: This, too, will lurk in your garage until needed next year, but the discounts should console you.

  Patio Furniture: They have to clear it out to make way for Christmas decorations, so there are deals to be found.

  Sporting Goods: Items like camping gear and baseball items may be on sale in your local sporting good store.

  Winter Clothing: Using impeccable fashion logic, you need to buy your winter coat long before winter starts. If you need one now, shop now that the first fashion collections of the season have come and gone.

  8 Products on Deep Discount in October [Consumer Reports]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist