Draw an ice­berg and see how it will float.

Icebergs are less dense than wa­ter, so they al­ways float with about 10% of their mass above the wa­ter. But which way up? An ice­berg would­n’t float ex­actly like on this page in re­al­ity. Its three-di­men­sional dis­tri­b­u­tion of mass and its rel­a­tive den­sity com­pared to the wa­ter are both sig­nif­i­cant fac­tors that are only ap­prox­i­mated here.

Today I chan­neled my en­ergy into this very un­of­fi­cial but pas­sion­ate pe­ti­tion for sci­en­tists to start draw­ing ice­bergs in their sta­ble ori­en­ta­tions. I went to the trou­ble of paint­ing a sta­ble ice­berg with my wa­ter­col­ors, so plz hear me out.

(1/4) pic.twit­ter.com/​rtk­CYub38b

— Megan Thompson-Munson (@GlacialMeg) February 19, 2021

Today we are pleased to an­nounce Total Cookie Protection, a ma­jor pri­vacy ad­vance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection con­fines cook­ies to the site where they were cre­ated, which pre­vents track­ing com­pa­nies from us­ing these cook­ies to track your brows­ing from site to site.

Cookies, those well-known morsels of data that web browsers store on a web­site’s be­half, are a use­ful tech­nol­ogy, but also a se­ri­ous pri­vacy vul­ner­a­bil­ity. That’s be­cause the pre­vail­ing be­hav­ior of web browsers al­lows cook­ies to be shared be­tween web­sites, thereby en­abling those who would spy on you to “tag” your browser and track you as you browse. This type of cookie-based track­ing has long been the most preva­lent method for gath­er­ing in­tel­li­gence on users. It’s a key com­po­nent of the mass com­mer­cial track­ing that al­lows ad­ver­tis­ing com­pa­nies to qui­etly build a de­tailed per­sonal pro­file of you.

In 2019, Firefox in­tro­duced Enhanced Tracking Protection by de­fault, block­ing cook­ies from com­pa­nies that have been iden­ti­fied as track­ers by our part­ners at Disconnect. But we wanted to take pro­tec­tions to the next level and cre­ate even more com­pre­hen­sive pro­tec­tions against cookie-based track­ing to en­sure that no cook­ies can be used to track you from site to site as you browse the web.

Our new fea­ture, Total Cookie Protection, works by main­tain­ing a sep­a­rate “cookie jar” for each web­site you visit. Any time a web­site, or third-party con­tent em­bed­ded in a web­site, de­posits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is con­fined to the cookie jar as­signed to that web­site, such that it is not al­lowed to be shared with any other web­site.

In ad­di­tion, Total Cookie Protection makes a lim­ited ex­cep­tion for cross-site cook­ies when they are needed for non-track­ing pur­poses, such as those used by pop­u­lar third-party lo­gin providers. Only when Total Cookie Protection de­tects that you in­tend to use a provider, will it give that provider per­mis­sion to use a cross-site cookie specif­i­cally for the site you’re cur­rently vis­it­ing. Such mo­men­tary ex­cep­tions al­low for strong pri­vacy pro­tec­tion with­out af­fect­ing your brows­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.

In com­bi­na­tion with the Supercookie Protections we an­nounced last month, Total Cookie Protection pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive par­ti­tion­ing of cook­ies and other site data be­tween web­sites in Firefox. Together these fea­tures pre­vent web­sites from be­ing able to “tag” your browser,  thereby elim­i­nat­ing the most per­va­sive cross-site track­ing tech­nique.

To learn more tech­ni­cal de­tails about how Total Cookie Protection works un­der the hood, you can read the MDN page on State Partitioning and our blog post on Mozilla Hacks.

Total Cookie Protection touches many parts of Firefox, and was the work of many mem­bers of our en­gi­neer­ing team: Andrea Marchesini, Gary Chen, Nihanth Subramanya, Paul Zühlcke, Steven Englehardt, Tanvi Vyas, Anne van Kesteren, Ethan Tseng, Prangya Basu, Wennie Leung, Ehsan Akhgari, and Dimi Lee.

We wish to ex­press our grat­i­tude to the many Mozillians who con­tributed to and sup­ported this work, in­clud­ing: Selena Deckelmann, Mikal Lewis, Tom Ritter, Eric Rescorla, Olli Pettay, Kim Moir, Gregory Mierzwinski, Doug Thayer, and Vicky Chin.

Total Cookie Protection is an evo­lu­tion of the First-Party-Isolation fea­ture, a pri­vacy pro­tec­tion that is shipped in Tor Browser. We are thank­ful to the Tor Project for that close col­lab­o­ra­tion.

We also want to ac­knowl­edge past and on­go­ing work by col­leagues in the Brave, Chrome, and Safari teams to de­velop state par­ti­tion­ing in their own browsers.

I’m a 19-year-old girl in Gaza, Palestine study­ing Computer Engineering who just was se­lected for a sum­mer in­tern­ship at Google and Repl.it. I never imag­ined this is pos­si­ble. I am shar­ing my story hop­ing it will help peo­ple in any way!

I be­came pas­sion­ate about pro­gram­ming in high school. My teacher se­lected me for a ro­bot­ics com­pe­ti­tion. We built a line fol­lower ro­bot us­ing Arduino. I to­tally loved the logic be­hind pro­gram­ming.

I started tak­ing on­line courses to learn how to pro­gram: an Edx class called “Introduction to Computer Science” and I also joined Technovation, a cod­ing com­pe­ti­tion for high school girls. We built an app us­ing App Inventor which is sim­i­lar to Scratch. Gaza Sky Geeks con­nected us to men­tors to help us with build­ing the app. It helped phys­i­cally abused women reach spe­cial­ists for help. I loved build­ing some­thing so use­ful.

I was re­ally ex­cited to study Computer Engineering in uni­ver­sity but I was ner­vous about find­ing a job af­ter uni­ver­sity. In Gaza, there is such high un­em­ploy­ment. Even Computer Engineering grad­u­ates face un­em­ploy­ment.

The uni­ver­sity pro­gram was mostly fo­cused on the­o­ret­i­cal fun­da­men­tals about tech­nol­ogy and com­put­ers. I thought I needed some­thing more prac­ti­cal. Lucky me I saw a Facebook post for a full­stack soft­ware de­vel­op­ment boot­camp called RBK in Jordan. It used a Silicon Valley based Hack Reactor cur­ricu­lum and was fo­cused on hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence and it had a schol­ar­ship from Anera.

I ap­plied and was thrilled to be one of 30 who were ac­cepted with the schol­ar­ship out of an ap­pli­cant pool of ~800. I don’t know if you know how un­usual it is for an 18-year fe­male to leave Gaza. Thankfully my fam­ily was sup­port­ive and we were able to get the per­mits.

At RBK I built 3 full­stack apps us­ing the MERN stack us­ing ag­ile de­vel­op­ment. I loved work­ing with my scrum team and I think we learned a lot about soft skills, how to work with a team and meet dead­lines.

I came back to Gaza and lucky me, I saw an­other Facebook post in one of the tech face­book groups for Gazans. The post was about Manara which con­nects peo­ple in Palestine and the Middle East to jobs or in­tern­ships at global tech com­pa­nies. I thought “Is that even pos­si­ble?”!

I got ex­cited and ap­plied and got in. We started the first two months with tech­ni­cal prep. Doing Leetcode, Pramp, and weekly lec­tures and home­work on Data Structure and Algorithm as­sign­ments. I used to think that solv­ing cod­ing prob­lems was tor­ture. But I started en­joy­ing this kind of chal­lenge. I com­peted with my class­mates to see who could solve more, and dis­cussing our so­lu­tions. It was re­ally in­ter­est­ing to see how dif­fer­ent peo­ple solved the same prob­lem.

We also got ac­cess to Educative.io course “Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions” which re­ally helped me or­ga­nize all the learn­ing.

Here it comes the in­ter­est­ing part, we had the chance to e-meet with Silicon Valley en­gi­neers and prac­tice in­ter­views with them. That re­ally made a dif­fer­ence. I prac­ticed their ad­vice every day. They were all so nice and sup­port­ive. Some of them even told me how dif­fi­cult in­ter­views used to be when they started prac­tic­ing.

The study­ing was very in­tense but I felt mo­ti­vated be­cause of my class­mates, men­tors, mock in­ter­view­ers, and the Manara staff. Most of my class­mates got a “hire” rec­om­men­da­tion on a mock in­ter­view be­fore I did. That mo­ti­vated me to work even harder!

In October 2020 Manara pro­vided re­fer­rals to Repl.it and Google. It was amaz­ing. I knew I would ap­ply to Google but I did­n’t know about Repl.it. Repl.it is my best friend as a de­vel­oper. I use it every day. I did­n’t re­al­ize I could work there!

In November 2020, my ap­pli­ca­tions for Google and Repl.it were both ac­cepted and the in­ter­views were sched­uled soon af­ter. I had my midterm ex­ams with uni­ver­sity dur­ing that time so I asked if it is pos­si­ble to resched­ule Google in­ter­views for two more weeks so I have the time to pre­pare. The re­cruiters are so un­der­stand­ing and my in­ter­views were resched­uled.

I still did­n’t feel I was ready. I stud­ied 10 hours a day. And that’s when I got my first “hire” rec­om­men­da­tion on a mock in­ter­view, just a few days be­fore my Google in­ter­view. I started feel­ing more con­fi­dent and that mo­ti­vated me to work even harder.

In December 2020, I had my in­ter­views at both com­pa­nies.

At Google there were in­ter­views ex­actly like what Manara pre­pared us for: data struc­tures & al­go­rithms prob­lem-solv­ing. Each in­ter­view was an hour long and they were on the same day with an hour break be­tween. The in­ter­view­ers were su­per nice and that helped me through the in­ter­view. I was able to dis­cuss the think­ing process out loud while cod­ing. I can say that I had a re­ally fun time mak­ing the in­ter­views.

Repl.it’s in­ter­views were re­ally dif­fer­ent. First they gave me an op­er­a­tional trans­for­ma­tion home­work as­sign­ment. This was com­pletely new for me. The in­ter­viewer talked to me about the as­sign­ment and again it felt more like we were hav­ing a dis­cus­sion, shar­ing ideas we had. I felt well-pre­pared for the ques­tions I re­ceived dur­ing the in­ter­view, they were just like the home­work as­sign­ment.

For my sec­ond in­ter­view, about two weeks later, I had to pre­pare a pre­sen­ta­tion with ideas to im­prove the prod­uct. Manara con­nected me to a men­tor to prac­tice my pre­sen­ta­tion and that gave me the con­fi­dence that I was ready.

At Repl.it the in­ter­viewer was the same per­son each time, and he was re­ally smart & funny!

On January 1, 2021, I re­ceived an email from Repl.it let­ting me know that I had been se­lected. That was the BEST new year’s day I’ve ever had!

Later in January I re­ceived an email from my Google re­cruiter to in­form me that I got pos­i­tive feed­back on the in­ter­views and had passed the Google hir­ing com­mit­tee. That was a feel­ing that I will never for­get!

At Google I still had to find a team. A few days later, my re­cruiter emailed me be­cause there was a po­ten­tial team in­ter­ested in me. I had a 30-minute “intern place­ment in­ter­view call.” The call was noth­ing tech­ni­cal, it was to get to know the team’s mis­sion and find out if the in­tern is in­ter­ested in join­ing, and to let the team know about my skills.

A few days later, my re­cruiter in­formed me that I got matched with the team and that I had reached the fi­nal step of the process which is ob­tain­ing ap­proval for my of­fer! HOW AMAZING — I al­most could­n’t be­lieve it!!

Now, here I am, with of­fers from two of the most fa­mous tech com­pa­nies in the world! I got a lit­tle stressed ac­tu­ally… I wanted to do both but they said I can’t be­cause they’re both dur­ing the sum­mer.

What I loved about Repl.it was the feel­ing that I could ex­plore dif­fer­ent ar­eas: fron­tend, back­end, in­fra­struc­ture. I’m still young and I’m not re­ally sure yet what I’ll want to do so a com­pany that lets me ex­plore like this would be ideal! I also re­ally liked the re­cruiter and the en­gi­neer who in­ter­viewed me and felt like I fit into the team.

I chose Google be­cause they will send me to Europe for the in­tern­ship. Having the chance to spend the sum­mer in Europe will be life-chang­ing for me. I’ve never been on an air­plane be­fore. My only time out of Gaza was when I went to RBK in Jordan! And I think I will learn a lot at Google.

I’m also re­ally ex­cited about earn­ing money. I want to help my par­ents pay for my younger broth­er’s ed­u­ca­tion and maybe I can help oth­ers too.

I am so proud to say that 4 out of 6 peo­ple who ap­plied to Google from my Manara co­hort got of­fers there. We will meet for the first time in Europe this sum­mer! The other 3 class­mates (Muath, Mohammed, and Hamza) live in the West Bank. I live in Gaza. It’s not far away but I can’t go to the West Bank and they can’t come here. I can’t wait to take a selfie in front of the Google of­fice to­gether and share it with every­one at Manara. :-)

I trav­eled close to the West Bank once when I was go­ing to Jordan for RBK but the per­mit I had only let me go straight to the bor­der, I was­n’t al­lowed to stop on the way.

I am so thank­ful for every­thing and every­one that helped through this jour­ney and es­pe­cially every­one at Manara!! Thank you to all the men­tors, mock in­ter­view­ers, and staff!

Subscribe

Sign in

Sign up or lo­gin to join the dis­cus­sions!

Sign up to com­ment and more

Sign up

Citibank just got a $500 mil­lion les­son in the im­por­tance of UI de­sign

Citibank was try­ing to make $7.8M in in­ter­est pay­ments. It sent $900M in­stead.

A fed­eral judge has ruled that Citibank is­n’t en­ti­tled to the re­turn of $500 mil­lion it sent to var­i­ous cred­i­tors last August. Kludgey soft­ware and a poorly de­signed user in­ter­face con­tributed to the mas­sive screwup.

Citibank was act­ing as an agent for Revlon, which owed hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to var­i­ous cred­i­tors. On August 11, Citibank was sup­posed to send out in­ter­est pay­ments to­tal­ing $7.8 mil­lion to these cred­i­tors.

However, Revlon was in the process of re­fi­nanc­ing its debt—pay­ing off a few cred­i­tors while rolling the rest of its debt into a new loan. And this, com­bined with the con­fus­ing in­ter­face of fi­nan­cial soft­ware called Flexcube, led the bank to ac­ci­den­tally pay back the prin­ci­pal on the en­tire loan—most of which was­n’t due un­til 2023.

On Flexcube, the eas­i­est (or per­haps only) way to ex­e­cute the trans­ac­tion—to pay the Angelo Gordon Lenders their share of the prin­ci­pal and in­terim in­ter­est owed as of August 11, 2020, and then to re­con­sti­tute the 2016 Term Loan with the re­main­ing Lenders—was to en­ter it in the sys­tem as if pay­ing off the loan in its en­tirety, thereby trig­ger­ing ac­crued in­ter­est pay­ments to all Lenders, but to di­rect the prin­ci­pal por­tion of the pay­ment to a “wash ac­count”—“an in­ter­nal Citibank ac­count… to help en­sure that money does not leave the bank.”

The ac­tual work of en­ter­ing this trans­ac­tion into Flexcube fell to a sub­con­trac­tor in India. He was pre­sented with a Flexcube screen that looked like this:

The sub­con­trac­tor thought that check­ing the “principal” check­box and en­ter­ing the num­ber of a Citibank wash ac­count would en­sure that the prin­ci­pal pay­ment would stay at Citibank. He was wrong. To pre­vent pay­ment of the prin­ci­pal, the sub­con­trac­tor ac­tu­ally needed to set the “front” and “fund” fields to the wash ac­count as well as “principal.” The sub­con­trac­tor did­n’t do that.

Citibank’s pro­ce­dures re­quire that three peo­ple sign off on a trans­ac­tion of this size. In this case, that was the sub­con­trac­tor, a col­league of his in India, and a se­nior Citibank of­fi­cial in Delaware. All three be­lieved that set­ting the “principal” field to an in­ter­nal wash ac­count num­ber would pre­vent pay­ment of the prin­ci­pal. As he ap­proved the trans­ac­tion, the Delaware su­per­vi­sor wrote: “looks good, please pro­ceed. Principal is go­ing to wash.”

But the prin­ci­pal was­n’t go­ing to wash. When the sub­con­trac­tor con­ducted a rou­tine re­view the next morn­ing, he no­ticed there was some­thing dras­ti­cally off about the pre­vi­ous day’s fig­ures. Citibank had ac­tu­ally sent out al­most $900 mil­lion, not the $7.8 mil­lion it was try­ing to send.

Citibank then scram­bled to get the funds back, no­ti­fy­ing each cred­i­tor that the prin­ci­pal pay­ments had been made by mis­take. Some of the cred­i­tors sent the money back. But oth­ers re­fused, leav­ing Citibank out $500 mil­lion.

Ordinarily, pay­ing back a loan early would­n’t be a big deal, since the par­ties could sim­ply ne­go­ti­ate a new loan on sim­i­lar terms. But in this case, some of the lenders were not on good terms with Revlon and Citibank.

Earlier in the year, as the pan­demic was ac­cel­er­at­ing, Revlon ex­pe­ri­enced fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties and sought to bor­row more money. To do that, Revlon con­vinced a ma­jor­ity of its pre­vi­ous cred­i­tors to al­low it to trans­fer col­lat­eral from its old loan to a new one.

The strong-arm tac­tic an­gered the other cred­i­tors, who felt that the re­duced col­lat­eral could leave them hold­ing the bag if Revlon ran out of money. That’s more than a the­o­ret­i­cal con­cern: Bloomberg’s Matt Levine re­ports that Revlon’s debt is “trading at around 42 cents on the dol­lar.” But un­der the terms of the loan, the mi­nor­ity lenders did­n’t have a way to force early re­pay­ment.

So Citibank’s screwup al­lowed Revlon’s cred­i­tors to claw back cash that it might oth­er­wise have never got­ten back. And it could leave Revlon in a pre­car­i­ous fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion if the com­pany can’t get the money back from the old lenders and can’t find new lenders will­ing to re­place the funds. Though given its screwup, Citibank could pos­si­bly end up as Revlon’s new cred­i­tor.

Citibank sued, ar­gu­ing that it was en­ti­tled to get the money back since the cash was sent out by mis­take. Ordinarily, the law would be on Citibank’s side here. Under New York law, some­one who sends out an er­ro­neous wire trans­fer—for ex­am­ple, send­ing a pay­ment to the wrong ac­count—is en­ti­tled to get the money back.

But the law makes an ex­cep­tion when a debtor ac­ci­den­tally wires money to a cred­i­tor. In that case, if the cred­i­tor does­n’t have prior knowl­edge the pay­ment was a mis­take, it’s free to treat it as a re­pay­ment of the loan. Judge Furman ruled that that prin­ci­ple ap­plies here, even though Citibank no­ti­fied its cred­i­tors of the mis­take the very next day. The de­fen­dants noted that the amounts they re­ceived matched the amounts Revlon owed down to the penny, mak­ing it rea­son­able for them to as­sume it was an early re­pay­ment of the loan.

Furman also ar­gued that it was rea­son­able for the cred­i­tors to as­sume that a bank as so­phis­ti­cated as Citibank would­n’t send out such a large amount of money by ac­ci­dent.

“To be­lieve that Citibank, one of the most so­phis­ti­cated fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions in the world, had made a mis­take that had never hap­pened be­fore, to the tune of nearly $1 bil­lion—would have been bor­der­line ir­ra­tional,” he wrote.

The case is­n’t over, how­ever. Furman has or­dered the cred­i­tors to keep the funds in es­crow to give Citibank time to ap­peal his rul­ing.

“We strongly dis­agree with this de­ci­sion and in­tend to ap­peal,” Citibank said in a state­ment. “We be­lieve we are en­ti­tled to the funds and will con­tinue to pur­sue a com­plete re­cov­ery of them.

Timothy B. Lee

Timothy is a se­nior re­porter cov­er­ing tech pol­icy, blockchain tech­nolo­gies and the fu­ture of trans­porta­tion. He lives in Washington DC.

JavaScript is not avail­able.

We’ve de­tected that JavaScript is dis­abled in this browser. Please en­able JavaScript or switch to a sup­ported browser to con­tinue us­ing twit­ter.com. You can see a list of sup­ported browsers in our Help Center.

Daft Punk, the Parisian duo re­spon­si­ble for some of the most pop­u­lar dance and pop songs ever made, have split. They broke the news with an 8-minute video ti­tled “Epilogue,” ex­cerpted from their 2006 film Electroma. Asked if Daft Punk were no more, their long­time pub­li­cist Kathryn Frazier con­firmed the news to Pitchfork but gave no rea­son for the breakup.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo formed Daft Punk in Paris in 1993, help­ing to de­fine the French touch style of house mu­sic. Their de­but al­bum, 1997’s Homework, was a dance mu­sic land­mark, fea­tur­ing clas­sic sin­gles “Around the World” and “Da Funk.” By the re­lease of its fol­low-up, Discovery, in 2001, the duo had taken to mak­ing pub­lic ap­pear­ances in the ro­bot out­fits that be­came their trade­mark. The sin­gles “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” ce­mented them as global su­per­stars. Their im­print in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion con­tin­ued to deepen in sub­se­quent years, with records in­clud­ing third al­bum Human After All, live LP Alive 2007, and the Tron: Legacy sound­track al­bum.

Twenty years into their ca­reer, Daft Punk blew up once more with “Get Lucky,” the lead sin­gle of their 2013 al­bum Random Access Memories. The ubiq­ui­tous track sold mil­lions of copies around the world and won two Grammys for the duo and guests Nile Rodgers and Pharrell Williams, both of whom also fea­tured on fol­low-up sin­gle “Lose Yourself to Dance.” Random Access Memories earned Daft Punk a fur­ther three Grammys, in­clud­ing Album of the Year, and the cer­e­mony hosted one of the last stag­ings of their spec­tac­u­lar live show. “When you know how a magic trick is done, it’s so de­press­ing,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in a 2013 Cover Story. “We fo­cus on the il­lu­sion be­cause giv­ing away how it’s done in­stantly shuts down the sense of ex­cite­ment and in­no­cence.”

The year of Random Access Memories’ re­lease, Daft Punk were also cred­ited with co-pro­duc­tion on sev­eral tracks from Kanye West’s Yeezus, in­clud­ing the for­mi­da­ble open­ing trio of “On Sight,” “Black Skinhead,” and “I Am a God.” They would go on to col­lab­o­rate with the Weeknd on the 2016 sin­gle “Starboy”—Daft Punk’s first Billboard sin­gles chart top­per—as well as a sec­ond hit, “I Feel It Coming.”

Beyond the sin­gles, their vi­sual iden­tity, in­ter­stel­lar mys­tique, and party-mu­sic ethos in­spired gen­er­a­tions of artists across gen­res. LCD Soundsystem’s break­out song, “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” cap­tured the duo’s para­dox­i­cal em­bod­i­ment of hip­ster cool even as their sin­gles dom­i­nated air­waves. They re­leased sev­eral batches of in­cred­i­ble hol­i­day merch. They were sam­pled by R&B greats Janet Jackson and Jazmine Sullivan, par­o­died in Family Guy and Powerpuff Girls, and cel­e­brated in art gal­leries around the world. Watch their farewell video be­low.

This ar­ti­cle was orig­i­nally pub­lished on Monday, February 22 at 9:40 a.m. Eastern. It was last up­dated on February 22 at 11:37 a.m. Eastern.

Build smaller, faster, and more se­cure

desk­top ap­pli­ca­tions with a web fron­tend­com­pat­i­bil­ity with any front-end frame­work means you don’t have to change your stack­re­li­cens­ing is pos­si­ble with Taurisize of a Tauri App can be less than 600KBis the Tauri-Team’s biggest pri­or­ity and dri­ves our in­no­va­tion­are here to help you choose im­por­tant fea­tures with sim­ple con­fig­u­ra­tioncom­pi­la­tion al­lows to bun­dle bi­na­ries for ma­jor desk­top plat­forms (mobile & WASM com­ing soon)No­tice: This roadmap is sub­ject to change. Generate, de­velop and build Tauri apps from the com­mand line.Fi­nal­ize, au­dit, write doc­u­men­ta­tion and cre­ate ex­am­ples for the smoke-tests.Bun­dle for all ma­jor desk­tops from na­tive sys­tems.Use a splash­screen while the main con­tent is load­ing.Build your Web ap­pli­ca­tion as a Tauri bi­nary for MacOS, Linux and WindowsOpt-in fea­ture en­abling for iframe di­a­log with Tauri and the na­tive API.Run a com­mand that is no longer avail­able af­ter first run.Man­u­fac­ture WASM bundler for use in web­sites.Sta­ble on On all Platforms.Go, Nim, Python, C++ and other bind­ings are pos­si­ble with the sta­ble API.A de­com­piler and threat an­a­lyzer for Tauri Apps, us­ing Frida.Something miss­ing? Got a great idea? We want you to help us make it hap­pen.

Program ScheduleKJZZ’s Here and NowPodcastsStories You Don’t Want to MissAbout

Latest News On COVID-19 | Map: Cases And Deaths In Arizona | FAQ About Vaccines In Arizona

Whistleblowers: Software Bug Keeping Hundreds Of Inmates In Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates

According to Arizona Department of Corrections whistle­blow­ers, hun­dreds of in­car­cer­ated peo­ple who should be el­i­gi­ble for re­lease are be­ing held in prison be­cause the in­mate man­age­ment soft­ware can­not in­ter­pret cur­rent sen­tenc­ing laws. KJZZ is not nam­ing the whistle­blow­ers be­cause they fear re­tal­i­a­tion. The em­ploy­ees said they have been rais­ing the is­sue in­ter­nally for more than a year, but prison ad­min­is­tra­tors have not acted to fix the soft­ware bug. The sources said Chief Information Officer Holly Greene and Deputy Director Joe Profiri have been aware of the prob­lem since 2019.The Arizona Department of Corrections con­firmed there is a prob­lem with the soft­ware.As of 2019, the de­part­ment had spent more than $24 mil­lion con­tract­ing with IT com­pany Business & Decision, North America to build and main­tain the soft­ware pro­gram, known as ACIS, that is used to man­age the in­mate pop­u­la­tion in state pris­ons.One of the soft­ware mod­ules within ACIS, de­signed to cal­cu­late re­lease dates for in­mates, is presently un­able to ac­count for an amend­ment to state law that was passed in 2019.Hear Jimmy Jenkins’ Interview With Host Steve Goldstein On The Show

Your browser does not sup­port the au­dio el­e­ment.

Senate Bill 1310, au­thored by for­mer Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, amended the Arizona Revised Statutes so that cer­tain in­mates con­victed of non­vi­o­lent of­fenses could earn ad­di­tional re­lease cred­its upon the com­ple­tion of pro­gram­ming in state pris­ons. Gov. Ducey signed the bill in June of 2019.But de­part­ment sources say the ACIS soft­ware is not still able to iden­tify in­mates who qual­ify for SB 1310 pro­gram­ming, nor can it cal­cu­late their new re­lease dates upon com­ple­tion of the pro­gram­ming.“We knew from day one this was­n’t go­ing to work” a de­part­ment source said. “When they ap­proved that bill, we looked at it and said ‘Oh, s–-.’”Af­ter re­peated in­ter­nal warn­ings, em­ploy­ees sent a re­port to de­part­ment lead­er­ship in October, 2020, specif­i­cally de­tail­ing the soft­ware bug.Bug re­ports de­tail­ing the Department of Corrections’ in­abil­ity to cal­cu­late SB 1310 re­leases.Bug re­ports de­tail­ing the Department of Corrections’ in­abil­ity to cal­cu­late SB 1310 re­leases.“Cur­rently this cal­cu­la­tion is not in ACIS at all,” the re­port states. “ACIS can cal­cu­late 1 earned credit for every 6 days served, but this is a new cal­cu­la­tion.”In­stead of fix­ing the bug, de­part­ment sources said em­ploy­ees are at­tempt­ing to iden­tify qual­i­fy­ing in­mates man­u­ally. Ari­zona Department of Corrections spokesper­son Bill Lamoreaux said the de­part­ment has been able to iden­tify 733 in­mates that are po­ten­tially el­i­gi­ble to take part in the early re­lease pro­gram­ming, who are not cur­rently en­rolled in a pro­gram.“AD­CRR is pri­or­i­tiz­ing those el­i­gi­ble for this type of re­lease,” Lamoreaux said, “and will put them in pro­gram spaces as soon as an open­ing be­comes avail­able based on re­lease time­line.”But sources say the de­part­ment is­n’t even scratch­ing the sur­face of the en­tire num­ber of el­i­gi­ble in­mates.“The only pris­on­ers that are get­ting into pro­gram­ming are the squeaky wheels,” a source said, “the ones who al­ready know they qual­ify or peo­ple who have fam­ily mem­bers on the out­side ad­vo­cat­ing for them.”Even if in­mates are iden­ti­fied and they are able to com­plete the re­quired pro­gram­ming for SB 1310 re­leases, de­part­ment sources say the soft­ware is pre­vent­ing the pris­on­ers from get­ting the time they de­serve taken off their sen­tences.“We can’t find peo­ple to get them into the pro­grams, and af­ter they com­plete the pro­grams, we still can’t get them out the door,” a source said. “These peo­ple are lit­er­ally trapped.”→ Bill Would Allow Prison Releases During Public Health EmergenciesLamoreaux said “ADCRR is work­ing with the ven­dor to up­date the soft­ware with the method­ol­ogy and logic pro­grammed for this new re­lease cri­te­ria.”In the mean­time, Lamoreaux con­firmed the “data is be­ing cal­cu­lated man­u­ally and then en­tered into the sys­tem.”De­part­ment sources said this means “someone is sit­ting there crunch­ing num­bers with a cal­cu­la­tor and in­ter­pret­ing how each of the new laws that have been passed would im­pact an in­mate.”“It makes me sick,” one source said, not­ing that even the most dili­gent em­ploy­ees are ca­pa­ble of mak­ing math er­rors that could re­sult in ad­di­tional months or years in prison for an in­mate. “What the hell are we do­ing here? People’s lives are at stake.”

’Just The Tip Of The Iceberg’While the prob­lems with sen­tence cal­cu­la­tions are con­cern­ing, de­part­ment sources say those pro­gram­ming is­sues are “just the tip of the ice­berg.”Ac­cord­ing to the sources, the en­tire in­mate man­age­ment soft­ware pro­gram, known as ACIS, has ex­pe­ri­enced more than 14,000 bugs since it was im­ple­mented in November of 2019.“It was Thanksgiving week­end,” one source re­called. “We were killing our­selves work­ing on it, but every per­son as­so­ci­ated with the soft­ware roll­out begged (Deputy Director) Profiri not to go live.”But mul­ti­ple sources in­volved in the roll­out said they were in­structed by de­part­ment lead­er­ship to “not say a word” about their con­cerns. “We were told ‘We’re too deep into it — too much money had been spent — we can’t go back now.’”Since the roll­out, de­part­ment sources say sev­eral other pro­grams have failed to per­form cor­rectly, in­clud­ing mod­ules that track in­mate health care, head counts, in­mate prop­erty, com­mis­sary and fi­nan­cial ac­counts, re­li­gious af­fil­i­a­tion, se­cu­rity clas­si­fi­ca­tion, and gang af­fil­i­a­tions.“We have put peo­ple in cells to­gether who are in con­flict­ing gangs with­out re­al­iz­ing it,” a source said. “We can’t keep the right med­ica­tion with se­ri­ously ill in­mates when they are trans­ferred to a new unit. We’re putting peo­ple in dan­ger. It’s only a mat­ter of time be­fore some­one gets killed or dies.”The sources said the ACIS soft­ware also makes it dif­fi­cult for em­ploy­ees to cor­rect er­rors once they have been iden­ti­fied.“In one in­stance there was a dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion er­ro­neously en­tered on an in­mate’s record,” a source said. “But there’s no way to back it out. So that guy was pun­ished and he was­n’t able to make a phone call for 30 days. Those are the kinds of things that eat at you every day.”

“We have a cou­ple mod­ules they spent mil­lions of dol­lars on that we can’t use at all,” a de­part­ment source said. “The pro­gram that tracks in­mate prop­erty is not work­ing. So they went back to the old fash­ioned way of track­ing it by hand with pa­per be­cause the soft­ware was­n’t do­ing what it was sup­posed to.”The ACIS soft­ware sys­tem re­placed an older pro­gram called AIMS that had been in op­er­a­tion for more than three decades. According to a 2019 pre­sen­ta­tion to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, the Department of Corrections has spent more than $24 mil­lion re­plac­ing the in­mate man­age­ment sys­tem. A de­part­ment spokesper­son tes­ti­fied that re­quire­ments for the pro­ject were poorly scoped from the be­gin­ning, re­sult­ing in a con­tract that went mil­lions of dol­lars over bud­get.A Department of Corrections con­tract amend­ment with the IT com­pany Business & Decision for mil­lions of dol­lars of ad­di­tional ser­vicesA 2020 au­dit of the Department of Corrections by the Arizona Department of Auditor General found nearly $1 mil­lion in un­rec­on­ciled in­mate trust ac­counts. According to the au­dit, the de­part­ment blamed the un­re­solved ac­counts on the tran­si­tion to the new soft­ware sys­tem.“Dur­ing the data mi­gra­tion from AIMS, a lot of records that should have not been trans­ferred to the new sys­tem did, caus­ing com­pli­ca­tions and a lot of man­ual work to re­solve the con­ver­sion is­sues,” the au­dit states. “As with any new sys­tem, the lack of enough knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence of the staff, led to post­ing er­rors that ad­di­tion­ally de­lays and com­pli­cates the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion process.”One de­part­ment whistle­blower said the num­ber of prob­lems with the ACIS sys­tem was un­prece­dented in their pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence. “I have never in my life run across an ap­pli­ca­tion like this,” they said. “It’s just been one big clus­ter.”All of the sources that spoke to KJZZ em­pha­sized the need for more pro­gram­ming hours from the ven­dor that could be used on main­te­nance and sup­port.“When they leg­is­late these things, they need to be ap­pro­pri­at­ing enough money to make sure they work,” a source said. They es­ti­mated fix­ing the SB1310 bug would take roughly 2,000 ad­di­tional pro­gram­ming hours.There are cur­rently sev­eral bills in the Arizona Legislature that would ex­pand el­i­gi­bil­ity for earned re­lease cred­its to even more in­mates than the stan­dard set by SB 1310.Department of Corrections sources claim poor lead­er­ship is ul­ti­mately to blame for the con­tin­ued IT prob­lems. “There are choices be­ing made like busi­ness de­ci­sions,” a source said, “when they need to be think­ing about what’s in the best in­ter­est of the staff, and ul­ti­mately, what’s in the best in­ter­est of the in­mates.”An­other source said they were “disgusted” with the way the de­part­ment has dealt with the soft­ware prob­lems. “I’m em­bar­rassed to be as­so­ci­ated with peo­ple that don’t care enough to make these things a pri­or­ity,” the source said. “It’s ab­solutely in­hu­mane to keep peo­ple in prison longer than they are sup­posed to be.”In re­sponse to this re­port, a Department of Corrections spokesper­son said claims of in­mates be­ing held be­yond re­lease dates were false, but ad­mit­ted the ACIS sys­tem “does not cur­rently cal­cu­late re­lease dates in ac­cor­dance with the pa­ra­me­ters es­tab­lished by Senate Bill (S.B.) 1310.” The de­part­ment main­tains this has not de­layed the re­lease of any in­mates.

An opera singer who traded the stage for the kitchen dur­ing the pan­demic.

What ques­tions do you have about the Valley and the state we call home?

For ques­tions about pro­gram­ming, mem­ber­ship or any­thing else about KJZZ, please visit kjzz.org/​con­tact.

Sign me up for KJZZ’s Stories You Don’t Want To Miss newslet­ter.

Please don’t pub­lish my name.

This ques­tion is for test­ing whether or not you are a hu­man vis­i­tor and to pre­vent au­to­mated spam sub­mis­sions.

Solve this sim­ple math prob­lem and en­ter the re­sult. E.g. for 1+3, en­ter 4.