Things To Do In SW Florida

Jon Healey | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.

The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.

“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X. read more

NASA officials said Wednesday they are holding off the decision of whether to send two astronauts who flew up to the International Space Station on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner home with the spacecraft or to wait for a ride home with SpaceX next year.

“I want to set expectations first. We don’t have any major announcements today,” said Ken Bowersox, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “We’re reaching a point where that last week in August, we really should be making a call, if not sooner.”

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams flew up to the ISS on Starliner arriving on June 6 one day after launching from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket. The original plan was for the duo to stay on board for about eight days as part of the Crew Flight Test mission, the first human spaceflight of Starliner.

But the spacecraft had thruster failures on the way to the ISS as well as helium leaks that led NASA and Boeing to keep Starliner docked, delaying indefinitely the return flight from the ISS as they tried to recreate the issues with ground tests. To date, they don’t have a 100% take on why the thrusters failed, but have identified a likely culprit that would be addressed on future flights. However, nothing can be done to the thrusters already on the spacecraft at the ISS. read more

The business of buying and selling a home in Florida could be turned on its head as new rules for how real estate agents get paid go into effect Saturday.

The changes were prompted by a series of antitrust lawsuits filed against the National Association of Realtors that claim it enforced practices that made it more expensive to sell a home. The industry group is also facing a $418 million settlement.

For decades, sellers have used money from the home sale to pay a commission fee that gets split between their agent and the buyer’s agent. Typically the fee is around 5-6%, though the National Association of Realtors says that number has always been negotiable.

This long-running practice could be wiped out by two new rules from the National Association of Realtors that set stricter standards for how commission is determined.

Some speculate this could lead to lower earnings for agents, sparking an exodus from the industry.

“This is really a revolutionary change,” said MaryDell Penney, a market manager for Redfin who oversees agents in Tampa and Orlando. “It’s going to require everyone to have a mindset shift.” read more

Gregory Korte | (TNS) Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are in a tax policy arms race, copying and one-upping each other’s proposals in a bid to court key battleground state voting blocs ahead of a looming battle in Washington to rewrite the tax code.

The duel highlights the central place of the economy in November’s vote, with American households battered by high costs and the campaigns seeking to emphasize pocketbook issues.

The back-and-forth over taxes has escalated in recent days. In an interview with CBS News over the weekend, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance tried to outflank Democrats by floating a $5,000-per-child tax credit — $3,000 more than the size of the current credit and even larger than President Joe Biden has proposed.

Harris, rallying supporters in Nevada, endorsed a version of Trump’s own promise to exempt tipped wages from taxes.

Her pitch, in the same battleground state where Trump made his proposal two months ago, drew the ire of the Republican presidential nominee, who accused his Democratic rival of stealing his idea. read more