What I'm reading 2/4/2020

Slashdot - FBI Catches Hacker That Stole Nintendo's Secrets For Years -

FBI agents confronted Hernandez about his hacking in 2017, according to a prosecution press release, and secured a promise from Hernandez "to stop any further malicious activity." But the hacking continued in 2018 and 2019, according to the indictment, until a June 2019 FBI raid that obtained hard drives with thousands of proprietary Nintendo files.

 Reuters - Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources - 

Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state attorneys general to discuss their investigations of search and advertising giant Google, according to sources familiar with the plans.

 Yahoo - The Navy Is Arming Nuclear Subs With Lasers. No One Knows Why. -

Open-source budget documents, the earliest of which date back to 2011, show the Navy’s plans to arm Virginia-class nuclear subs with high-energy laser weapons. It’s a strange idea seeing as laser weapons definitely do not work underwater. Submarines are also quiet recluses by design, rarely popping their heads above water.

But despite these glaring contradictions, experts talking to Popular Mechanics say a laser sub makes more sense than you might think.

 Ars Technica -New ransomware doesn’t just encrypt data. It also meddles with critical infrastructure -

A ransomware strain discovered last month and dubbed Ekans contains the usual routines for disabling data backups and mass-encrypting files on infected systems. But researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that actively seeks out and forcibly stops applications used in industrial control systems, which is usually abbreviated as ICS. Before starting file-encryption operations, the ransomware kills processes listed by process name in a hard-coded list within the encoded strings of the malware.

 Reuters - California lawmaker introduces bill to make PG&E a publicly owned utility -

“Today I’m introducing legislation to force PG&E to become a publicly owned utility,” California State Senator Scott Wiener said on Monday, adding it was time for a new approach at the utility company. 

"PG&E has failed. It's failed on safety & reliability. PG&E has forfeited its privilege to operate as an investor-owned monopoly in California," he said in a tweet https://bit.ly/2v317Ik

 Naked Capitalism - Bernie Sanders’ GND Plan Will Nationalize Power Generation in the U.S.-

The plan has rightly been likened to nationalizing electric power generation. Chris Hayes noted this fact in his recent interview with Sanders, calling the Sanders plan “a federal takeover of the whole thing,” to which Sanders essentially agrees (see video at the top). Other writers have said the same. For example, In These Times, under the headline “Bernie Sanders Calls To Seize the Means of Electricity Production” accurately describes the plan as “moving toward 100% public ownership of power.”