Free Urdu English Islamic, IT, Urdu Story , Ebooks Library | PDF Docx Format | Learn Online

( afagen ) In the last few years, tax return fraud has become a serious problem at the state and federal levels, thanks to the growth of e-filing and security holes in IRS and third-party tax software systems. Is the IRS to blame for this trend? There are really only two options: the IRS is either broke or incompetent. CNN puts it in slightly different terms , asking whether the agency is broke or unable to allocate the budget that it has to protect all of the data that it collects about us. The agency has 10% fewer employees than it did five years ago, but processes more tax returns and also has even more work since the Affordable Care Act was implemented, processing health insurance information and assessing penalties when needed. While maybe better technology could help the IRS finish more work quickly, there’s a catch: they still have computers running 13-year-old Windows XP, and even their fraud-catching software is two decades old. The agency employs fewer cybersecurity staf...

( JeepersMedia ) Three weeks after Sally Beauty first said it was looking into whether it’d been the victim of a hack attack , the company says it’s confirmed that criminals used malware on some of its point-of-sale systems, possibly exposing payment information for customers who used cards at some of its U.S. stores. Criminals deployed the malware at certain stores during “varying times” between March 6 and April 17, the company said in a press release , though it’s unclear how many stores or how many customers were affected. Although payment information may have been at risk for some customers, Sally Beauty says it has “no reason to believe, and has no information to suggest that debit card PINs may have been impacted.” It says it’s eliminated the malware from all Sally Beauty point-of-sale systems. “We regret any inconvenience this incident may have caused our customers, and we want to reassure them that protecting our customers is our priority,” said Chris Brickman, President...

McDonald’s is trying all kinds of new things to attract younger customers and sling fries at them, but we’re not so sure about their plan to increase drive-thru traffic in the United Kingdom by bending the laws of physics. “Please use both lanes to place your order,” a new sign says. Both? An Alert Twitter user somewhere in the UK shared this confusing notice while visiting only one of the drive-thru lanes. @daraobriain McDonalds drive thru now suggesting we order using Quantum Theory? #quantumdrivethru http://pic.twitter.com/LEotITZ7pg — Nick Cook (@hockeynick13) May 28, 2015 Yes, yes, we know what the sign is supposed to mean, but that has never stopped us from following an amusing premise through to a conclusion. Perhaps there is a hole in the universe centered on this McDonald’s that allows customers to be in two places at once, doubling drive-thru revenue. Seems like a waste of a perfectly nice wormhole. Of course, bending the laws of physics is nothing new in marketi...

( [RAWRZ!] ) You might recall a story from about a year back where a man with the first name “God” had a little dispute with credit-reporting agency Equifax , namely that the company wouldn’t recognize his moniker as legitimate. He’s now come out on top in his battle with Equifax, which has agreed he and his financial history do exist, and have granted him a shiny new credit score. The Russian native and Brooklyn resident sued the credit-reporting agency last year in federal court claiming that the snag in his Equifax report that rejects his first name has kept him from buying a car, despite his credit scores of more than 720 at other agencies. He claimed a customer service representative even suggested he change his first name to make everything easier. The New York Post reports that God and Equifax have reached a settlement where Equifax has agreed to enter his name into its database, as well as giving him an undisclosed payout. With his new healthy credit score, God says he’s ...

( basykes ) If you don’t know who Bubbles the Chimpanzee was, you should probably just stop reading now. For the rest of you who may have a spare $100 million burning a hole in your pocket, Michael Jackson’s famed Neverland Ranch is on the market under a new name. Sycamore Valley Ranch, as the late Jackson’s estate is now called, no longer has carnival rides or primate pals, but the floral clock still spells “Neverland” by the train station ands its train tracks, and a llama lives on the property, reports the Wall Street Journal . All told, the property has about 22 structures on its 2,700 acres, with the six-bedroom house with attached staff quarters measuring 12,000 square feet. Then there are all the things associated with celebrity homes: A swimming pool with a cabana, a basketball court and a tennis court, a 50-seat movie theater with a private viewing balcony and a place for magic shows — do we really need to go on? Michael Jackson lived here, it’s super expensive — you get ...

( frankieleon ) If it feels like we hear a whole lot of stories about retail data breaches here in the U.S., well, that’s because we do. Americans are super duper popular targets for card hacks and fraud, and it’s for one simple reason: our credit card security is bad and should feel bad. Quartz reports this week on a new report from British-based international megabank Barclays, and it’s bad news for consumers on this side of the Atlantic. American credit cards represent about a quarter — 24% — of all cards in use in the world. But when it comes to fraud, American cards represent nearly half — 47% — of cards that have been subject to fraud. The main culprit is one we’ve covered many times before: in the U.S., where magnetic stripe technology is still the dominant way payment cards are accepted, we are vulnerable to software incursions and theft. Simply put, we are low-hanging fruit . Intruding into a system like Target or Home Depot and making off with usable data for tens of m...

The love triangle between the parent company of online retailer ThinkGeek and its two suitors continues to heat up, with Geeknet now telling original suitor Hot Topic it has until Monday to match or exceed the higher bid from a new mystery rival . Because like so many real life dating situations, it all comes down to an ultimatum. The choice facing Hot Topic now is whether to top the unnamed rival’s offer of $20 per share — after originally offering $17.50 a share — or walk away, ostensibly broken-hearted and ready to hit the booze and ice cream aisles hard. Geeknet noted then that its board of directors still has to approve the undisclosed suitor’s offer. Today the company says in a statement [ PDF ]that while it hasn’t changed its recommendation in favor of the Hot Topic buyout, the new bid is a superior deal and Hot Topic has just three days to match it. While Geeknet says it’s required and “intends to” negotiate in “good faith with Hot Topic” during the match period, which last...

If you feel your energy flagging at work today, don’t worry: as of Monday, Dunkin’ Donuts has a new doughnut for afternoon eating. Starting Monday, they’re starting a partnership with Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy brand to turn doughnuts into an all-day food. The Chips Ahoy doughnut has two versions: there’s a plain version with chocolate frosting and cookie crumbs on top, and then a filled version with the same toppings and the addition of cookie dough-flavored buttercream inside. Sounds tasty, but is that valid as an afternoon snack, which is how Dunkin’ Donuts has been marketing it? Well, maybe an occasional treat. The frosting-filled doughnut is 380 calories, and the non-filled version is 310 calories. Maybe they’ll have the same Dunkin’ is also testing mini-doughnuts (which are separate from doughnut holes, of course.) “As doughnuts become more of a culinary treat across the industry, I think we see an opportunity to expand our doughnuts in the afternoon,” the company’s vice president o...

( Mike Mozart ) Seven months after the Federal Trade Commission sued AT&T’s wireless division for allegedly misleading customers about “unlimited” data plans , and nearly two months after a judge denied AT&T’s attempt to dismiss the case , the Death Star is still trying to choke the government’s lawsuit into submission. By way of background: In 2011, AT&T began getting rid of the unlimited data plans that it had used to lure in millions of customers when it had the exclusive on the iPhone. Customers with those plans were allowed to keep them, but the users who consumed the most data would have their connection speeds throttled after passing a certain threshold each month. Since this restriction effectively limits access to supposedly unlimited data, customers complained. Some even sued, though AT&T’s terms of use prevent subscribers from taking their complaints to court or banding together in a class action. The FTC eventually sued AT&T in 2014, not over the t...

In the aftermath of a recent two-part investigative report on the conditions in the nail salon industry , Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office worked with lawmakers to create a multi-agency task force aimed at fighting abuses in the workplace. At a task force event today in New York City, Cuomo and other public officials said that after working with nail salon employees to educate them on their rights and talking to business owners, the final, most powerful step is up to consumers. Joining Cuomo at today’s Nail Salon Industry Task Force event were public advocate Letitia James, Secretary of State Cesar Perales and Assemblyman Ron Kim, who all pledged to help fight the abuse that finds many workers laboring in unsafe conditions, inhaling dust and chemicals while often not making minimum wage or earning overtime. Cuomo stressed the point that such abuses aren’t restricted to the nail salons in New York, but anywhere that has a vulnerable workforce who don’t think they have rights — often in...

( Studio d’Xavier ) “I feel like I’m gonna be a senior citizen rather than a high school senior by the time I get them,” one student wrote about their photos. That’s an important part of the business when you’re a school photographer: delivering students’ photos to them, preferably before they graduate. One school photo company in California failed to do that this school year, and families are upset. Unlike, say, weddings, school photography is a business where a photographer can expect their customer (the school) to come back every year. However, another photographer told CBS Sacramento, that won’t happen if a company fails to deliver the pictures as promised. While students at one school, Modesto High School, at least have their photo proofs, they don’t have the prints that they ordered. This kind of delay would have been unacceptable even back before most students brought their own high-resolution cameras to school every day. Families filed complaints with the Better Business ...

( Bart ) Verizon isn’t a cable company. Its FiOS product doesn’t spring from decades of guaranteed local monopolies , which means most FiOS customers can, if they get annoyed enough, jump ship to a competitor. But you leaving is bad news for Verizon. They want to keep their subscribers. And they have an enormous mountain of highly personalized data on hand to try to do it with. Quartz points us to a presentation a Verizon executive gave this week at a conference of, basically, data nerds. Data is great! It’s cool! It tells you all sorts of things that you can then use to improve your business and how it operates. But there’s a line somewhere, a border separating “useful” from “creepy.” That line is “privacy,” and Verizon’s customer behavior tracking at the very least seems to tap-dance right along that line. When you call FiOS to complain, downgrade, or cancel, the rep on the other end of the line can now argue back at you with all of your own data: how much you download in a mo...

(Photo: Josh Benteman/Facebook ) Imagine you’re at a fast food joint and you’re taking your young child to the bathroom. Of all the possible things you could find in the lavatory, one of the least-expected would probably be whole trays of buns for hamburgers and hot dogs. For a man visiting a Sonic Drive-In in Topeka, KS, this wasn’t an imaginary scenario, but a reality that he documented with his camera and posted to Facebook. “Welcome to the bathroom in Sonic,” he wrote in the caption to the photo . The customer, who says he and his family left the restaurant without ordering anything , was later told that the Sonic’s maintenance folks had moved the buns into the bathroom. The company tells the Topeka Capital-Journal that this was an “innocent mistake” and that these buns were thrown out after the storage issue had been brought to their attention. [ via Eater ] by Chris Morran via Consumerist

( Neal Fowler ) Cars increasingly drive themselves. If tech companies have their way, then entirely autonomous vehicles will be the future as soon as possible. But that future isn’t exactly primed to be glorious for everyone. For those of us at all prone to motion sickness, that future — despite being lower on accidents and higher on energy efficiency — is not going to be fun. Quartz reports on a recent study conducted at the University of Michigan that points out something many of us have been avoiding: if you’re not driving the car, you’re going to need to do something else with that time. And if you’re reading, watching a video, or doing a whole host of other stuff, you’re drastically upping the chances of a motion sickness episode. Most people who are prone to motion sickness have more trouble as passengers than as drivers. When we’re controlling the car and focusing our attention ahead of us, we mainly do okay. But when we’re passengers in a vehicle of whatever sort, the dis...

( Mike Mozart ) When you buy a jug of mayonnaise or a mammoth pack of toilet paper rolls at Costco, you understand that you’re saving by buying in bulk. But then there are the $4.99 rotisserie chickens that you don’t have to buy by the dozen to get that low price. In fact, Costco is the one getting the short end of that deal, missing out on millions a year by keeping the price low. Speaking this week to analysts about the wholesale club’s quarterly earnings, Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti answered a question about the company’s philosophy on the cheap chickens. “I can only tell you what history has shown us: When others were raising their chicken prices from $4.99 to $5.99, we were willing to eat, if you will, $30 to $40 million a year in gross margin by keeping it at $4.99,” he explained, according to the Seattle Times . “That’s what we do for a living.” In 2014, Costco sold 76 million of these chickens, just about one per club cardholder. Just like the $1.50 hot...

( Adam Fagen ) One feature of ride-hailing app Uber that’s meant to keep riders from acting like complete jerks is mutual rating: passengers rate their drivers, sure, but drivers also rate passengers. Secretly. Users can’t see their own ratings, but they could prevent someone from being picked up at a busy time. The company has promised to clarify its privacy policy and allow passengers to see their own ratings. They aren’t doing this to win over new riders or just for funsies: it’s at the recommendation of an outside law firm’s review of their privacy policies. Last year, people began to have some very understandable concerns after the existence of what’s called “God mode” within available to select employees. This mode serves as a sort of Marauder’s Map of real life, showing where every user of the service is in real time. Last year, people began asking questions about Uber’s privacy policies after one of the company’s executives answered a reporter’s questions about the service...

( Ruby Nguyen ) The 21st century has not been kind to the trademark texture of Emmental cheese. To Americans, that’s Swiss cheese: the stuff with all the holes in. But the holes have been vanishing and the cheese becoming smoother over time. Scientists determined to find out why. The answer? Modern cheese is just too clean. The AP reports that a Swiss government-funded agricultural institute delved into the mystery of the nation’s most famous cheese and found that holes need hay. Or, more specifically, that “microscopically small hay particles” that make their way into the milk are responsible for the holes when that milk becomes cheese. When a dairy farm is all manual labor, with people doing their best to keep rooms clean but using pre-industrial tech, some of those airborne particles will make their way into milk and there’s nothing you can do about it. But the transition from traditional milking methods into fully-automated industrial systems means there’s less stuff in the a...

( Nazra Z ) Amazon really, really wants to be your everything store. They do tech, they do digital goods, they do groceries, they even do same-day delivery . So perhaps it seems inevitable that they’re no longer just interested in selling other people’s stuff, but coming up with their own house brand for everyday items too. The Wall Street Journal reports that, like basically every grocery and big box store out there, Amazon is planning to launch its own in-house store-brand line of items under the Amazon Elements label. Amazon’s first foray into the Amazon Elements brand was not without its challenges. They started late last year with diapers and baby wipes , but had to yank the diapers off the virtual shelves less than two months in to the experiment because customers basically hated them and said they didn’t work properly. (And if there is one baby care product you really, really want to work properly, it is a diaper.) At this point, the only Elements-branded product Amazon...

Here are eleven of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness. ( Freaktography ) ( Eric BEAUME ) ( Michael G. Chan ) Erin Nekervis ( C x 2 ) ( Rich Renomeron ) ( Rick Drew ) ( Great Beyond ) ( Kevin Cardosi ) ( Jason Cook ) ( Eric BEAUME ) Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here , and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool. by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Maybe save this post until you’re done eating your salad. It turns out that fleeing to Canada won’t keep you safe from the Salad Beetle Scourge. You may remember the Iron Cross Blister Beetles turning up in organic salads and pakages of leafy greens across the United States. We learned today of three more discovered in different parts of North America, two of which were in Canada. HERE IS YOUR WARNING THAT THERE’S A PICTURE OF ONE OF THE BEETLES BELOW In Canada, two beetles found in greens this week made the news: Erin found our site while researching the creature she found in her salad greens and sent us this picture: She also appeared on TV news this morning to talk about her find . Maybe the experience wasn’t as novel as the CBC thought, though: just a few hours later, another CBC story appeared out of the province of Saskatchewan , featuring another woman who found the same type of beetle in her salad: this one from Earthbound Organics. The company told the CBC in a statem...