Donald Faison, Stacey Dash Reunite on The Exes 14 Years After Clueless

Former Clueless costars Donald Faison and Stacey Dash reunite in the July 10 episode of TV Land's The Exes. Credit: Evans Vestal Ward/TVLand
Eighteen years after Donald Faison and Stacey Dash first played impassioned high school sweethearts Murray Duvall and Dionne Davenport in the movie Clueless, the former costars will reunite in the July 10 episode of TV Land's The Exes. Dash plays a recommitted virgin who gets picked up by Phil (Faison).

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Dash isn't the only actress guest starring in the episode: Missi Pyle plays a sex addict who seduces Stuart (David Alan Basche).

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Both Faison, 39, and Dash, 46, appeared in the Clueless TV series that ran for three seasons from September 1996 to May 1999. The duo reunited with their former costars -- including Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd and Breckin Meyer -- for an April 2012 Entertainment Weekly cover. In the accompanying interview, the cast shared some of their memories from the set of the cult classic comedy. "I was 27, and I was playing this high school student," said Dash, "and I had a son at home who was 6 years old."

Credit: Paramount/Everett Collection

Donald Faison and Stacey Dash in CLUELESS
Faison -- who is currently expecting a baby with wife CaCee Cobb -- added that expectations for the film were low. "When we were making the movie, you don't think the movie's going to be good," he admitted to the magazine. "You think, 'I'm making the next License to Drive.' You think this movie's going to be just for teenagers and that's it."

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Dash's guest appearance on The Exes airs Wednesday, July 10, at 10:30 p.m. EST on TV Land.

Alleged Shadowcrew member extradited to U.S. 9 years after cybercrime forum takedown

A 30-year-old Bulgarian was extradited to the U.S. from Paraguay in order to face charges related to his alleged involvement in Shadowcrew, a large cybercrime forum that was dismantled by U.S. authorities in 2004.

Aleksi Kolarov is charged with one count each of conspiracy, transferring false identification documents and offering access devices without authorization.

He is one of 19 indicted for their roles in the operation of Shadowcrew, which with around 4,000 members was the largest cybercrime forum of its time. Three of those charged remain at large.

According to the indictment, Kolarov used the online alias APK and was a Shadowcrew "vendor"—a member that sold illicit merchandise including stolen credit card, debit card and bank account information, as well as counterfeit passports, drivers' licenses, birth certificates, Social Security cards and other identification documents.

Kolarov was arrested on June 14, 2011, in a hotel in Asunción, Paraguay and had in his possession hundreds of thousands of dollars in various currencies, counterfeit payment cards and electronic devices for re-encoding cards.

After being incarcerated in Paraguay, he was extradited to the U.S., where he arrived Friday escorted by U.S. Marshals. On Monday he appeared in front of a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

If convicted, Kolarov faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on the conspiracy count, 15 years in prison on the identification documents count and 10 years in prison on the access device count. He could also receive a maximum $250,000 fine on each count.

U.S. authorities estimate that Shadowcrew members collectively trafficked and misused over 1.5 million stolen credit card details, resulting in losses of over $4 million to credit card companies, financial institutions and card holders.

Albert Gonzalez, the American hacker who's currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for masterminding the theft of millions of credit card details from TJ Maxx, Heartland Payment Systems and other companies, is believed to have played an important role in the Shadowcrew takedown.

Gonzalez was a high-ranking member of Shadowcrew, where he used the alias CumbaJohnny, but at the same time he served as an informant for the U.S. Secret Service.

Fred Armisen Confirms He's Leaving SNL After 11 Years

Fred Armisen is leaving Saturday Night Live after 11 years.

Fred Armisen's Saturday Night Live days are over. The celebrated cast member, 46, confirmed he won't be returning for new episodes of NBC's live sketch comedy show during a June 28 interview with Splitsider. (Around the time Bill Hader announced he was leaving SNL just before its May 18 season finale, Armisen was rumored to be quitting, too.)

"I didn't do any kind of official announcement, but I really felt like it was obvious," said Armisen, who was once married to Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss and later dated former SNL cast member Abby Elliott. "An ending that was a love letter to all the music I grew up with, and also to my friends and to SNL and to [creator Lorne Michaels] and to the cast. There was a lot of emotion attached to it, but it was a very positive emotion."

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(During the May 18 episode, the final sketch featured Armisen, Hader, Jason Sudeikis and Taran Killam playing a British rock band saying their goodbyes on the final night of a tour. Armisen's Portlandia costar, Sleater-Kinney rocker Carrie Brownstein, also joined the group on stage.)

Armisen joined the cast of SNL during its 28th season in 2002. He is the second-longest tenured cast member behind Seth Meyers, who will take over as the host of Late Night in 2014. Armisen said his decision to leave felt "very natural."

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"I love Saturday Night Live, and I really feel like people who have left before me have always stayed with the show. They never really quite left, which is nice. Everyone kind of stays close," he explained. "For example, like when [Kristen Wiig] left, we saw her again. And [Andy Samberg] and [Tina Fey] and Amy Poehler and [Maya Rudolph]. On one level, we stay in each other's lives, but also the show. I feel like people don't really just leave in a cold way. I think people stay around in their own way."

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The other factor that made Armisen want to walk away from SNL? IFC's Portlandia, which was recently renewed for two more seasons. "Portlandia started to pull me away more and more, schedule-wise, and I just felt like it'd be nice to focus on it a little more and go into the fall a bit more with shooting," Armisen said. "So it was because of that. And also it was just a feeling. . . I was there for a long time and I also felt like I came away from Saturday Night Live feeling very well represented. I felt, and I still feel like, they let me do so much stuff that I wanted to do. Stuff that I almost didn't even know what it was. I was like, this is kind of a little bit of an experiment, or this is just a band thing, this is just a music thing. They just let me do so much, so I felt very fulfilled."

He added that the new cast members made him "feel really good" about leaving. "It was a combination of everything, between Portlandia and the feeling of real satisfaction and happiness," Armisen said. "I was like, 'I'm enjoying this so much, this'll be a good time to kind to go to the next phase.'" Armisen said what he'll miss most is writing the sketches with his fellow cast members.

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In addition to Portlandia, Armisen said he hopes to create other projects. "I just want to keep making things. Just keep going. I love doing it," he told Splitsider. "I want to make more and more things. It just makes me happy."

Scott Feinberg: Why This Year's Academy Invitations Give Me Hope (Analysis)

The Academy has been harshly criticized in recent years for being predominately composed of white male senior citizens. (A 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation found the average age of an Oscar voter was 62 -- and that the Academy was 94 percent white, and 77 percent male.) But the only ways for the Academy to quickly change that makeup would be for it to eliminate from its roster some of its older members who are no longer active in the industry, or add a considerable number of newer and more demographically diverse members to the rolls.

Last October, the Academy's Board of Governors met and seemed to endorse the latter idea by eliminating a 2004 rule capping the number of new members that each of the Academy's 16 branches could add each year. The rule had kept the number of overall Academy membership around 6,000. Today the Academy announced its invitation of 276 new members, 100 more than last year. (178 were invited in 2011; 135 in 2010; 134 in 2009; and 105 in 2008.) The selections clearly indicate that the Academy of the future will not look anything like the Academy of the past.

As has always been the case, a chunk of the newly invited members are probably on the list this year largely because they were nominated for -- and in some cases won -- Oscars last year. They include best actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), the oldest woman ever nominated in that category, who probably should have been invited decades ago; best director and best adapted screenplay nominee Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild); the directors of three best foreign language film nominees, Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair), Pablo Larrain (No), and Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg (Kon-Tiki); Chris Terrio (Argo), scribe of best adapted screenplay winner Argo; John Gatins, scribe of best original screenplay nominee Flight; and Rich Moore, director of best animated feature nominee Wreck-It Ralph, among others.

And -- again -- as has always been the case, this year's invitation list includes a number of veterans who clearly should have been invited in years past, but were overlooked. This year, many of those names come from the documentary branch, which invited 42 new members  -- more than any other. That represents about a quarter of its current membership. Last year the branch invited only 10, presumably due to the Academy's since-abolished quotas. This year's newcomers include 87-year-old Claude Lanzmann, best known for the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), which the Academy famously overlooked; 85-year-old Marcel Ophuls, director of the classic best documentary feature nominee The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and best documentary feature winner Hotel Terminus (1988); and 85-year-old Agnes Varda, who has been making narrative and documentary features since 1955, was a staple of the French New Wave and continues to work to this day. (Granted, the Academy was far less international when those filmmakers were in their primes, and the same goes for Riva.)

But this year's list is also younger, and much more diverse -- not just in terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of their work in genres that the Academy has not historically embraced: comedy, action and sci-fi. Consider the following, who will be familiar to most moviegoers: actors Jason Bateman (Juno), Rosario Dawson, Lucy Liu (the Kill Bill films), Paula Patton (Precious), Michael Pena (End of Watch), Jason Schwartzman (Moonrise Kingdom), Chris Tucker (Silver Linings Playbook); directors Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and Todd Phillips (the Hangover films); and writers Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), Ava Duvernay (Middle of Nowhere) and Rian Johnson (Looper).

Some will look at these choices and claim that the Academy is pandering to the masses -- who don't watch the Oscars anyway, and who would, if they had their way, turn Hollywood's most iconic night into the MTV Movie Awards, and elevate films like Twilight instead of films like Argo. I think that's hyperbolic nonsense. The Academy doesn't have to, shouldn't, and, I believe, won't abandon its demand for greatness in order to reconnect more with the public. It just needs to expand its notion of what greatness means.

Yes, a comic book adaptation (The Dark Knight) actually can, in the right hands, be more worthy of a nomination than a Holocaust drama (The Reader), to cite the famous 2009 example of Academy close-mindedness, which provoked the rule changes and category contractions and expansions of the past few years. Members need to be open to all sorts of films and evaluate them based on how well they achieved what they set out to achieve. A more diverse membership makes that more likely.

Sure, one can quibble with the merits of a few of this year's invitees -- to be perfectly candid, I'm not sure about Milla Jovovich (the Resident Evil films) or Jennifer Lopez, who stopped pushing herself as an actress sometime back in the 20th century -- but that's true of any year. And I, for one, am far happier with an Academy that embraces excellence and diversity of all sorts, like this one did today by inviting the other aforementioned folks -- plus Julie Delpy (the Before films), Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame and Twelve Years a Slave), Emily Mortimer (an indie queen), Sarah Polley (Away from Her and Stories We Tell) and so many others -- than I was with the old white man's club that used to reign supreme.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Report: NSA collected US email records, Internet use for years

The U.S. National Security Agency collected the email and Internet use records of some U.S. residents for about a decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to documents published Thursday by the U.K. newspaper the Guardian.

 

The NSA's collection of email and Internet use metadata was authorized by former President George W. Bush after 9/11 and continued for two years under President Barack Obama, according to the Guardian's report.

 

The Guardian published two secret documents on the so-called Stellar Wind collection program, a March 2009 NSA inspector general's report on the program and a November 2007 U.S. Department of Justice memo defending the collection.

 

The inspector general's report says the White House, including members of then-Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, pushed the NSA to collect more information on U.S. residents in the days following the terrorist attacks. When General Michael Hayden, the NSA's director at the time, said he didn't believe the NSA had the authority to collect U.S. communications, the White House granted the NSA additional authority.

 

Shawn Turner, spokesman for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the program stopped in 2011. "The Internet metadata collection program authorized by the FISA court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted," he said by email. "The program was discontinued by the executive branch as the result of an interagency review."

 

The new revelations of NSA surveillance on U.S. residents follow news reports earlier this month that the NSA is currently collecting all telephone records from Verizon Communications. The agency is also collecting email and Internet communications from nine Web companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, with some U.S. communications swept up along with foreign targets, according to news reports.

 

The NSA inspector general's report says 92 percent of the targets in the collection program from 2001 to 2007 were email addresses and phone calls outside the U.S. There were just over 3,000 targets in the U.S. during that time frame, according to the report.

 

The 2007 DOJ memo, from Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein, defended the program, saying it doesn't violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment protecting U.S. residents against unreasonable searches and seizures.

 

"We conclude that a person has no such expectation, however, in dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information that does not concern the substance, purport, or meaning of communications," Wainstein wrote. "We note that the analysis of information legally within the possession of the Government is likely neither a 'search' nor a 'seizure' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."

 

The NSA's collection of telephone and Internet communications metadata included "routing, addressing, and signaling information that does not concern the substance" of the underlying communications, wrote Wainstein, now in private practice.

 

Wainstein didn't immediately respond to a request for a comment on the memo he authored. The DOJ memo came in response to an NSA request seeking to clarify that it had authorization to collect Internet metadata from U.S. residents.

 

NSA critics have said that the collection of metadata, including the recipients of phone calls and email and the time of the calls and emails, can tell a great deal about a person and is a privacy violation.

 

The NSA U.S. collections are "pretty outrageous," digital rights activist Sina Khanifar said in an email. "Anyone who claims that the NSA's surveillance hasn't been in violation of our Fourth Amendment rights is going to have a much harder time making that argument in light of this news."

 

Khanifar helped launch the website StopWatching.us two weeks ago, and the site has collected more than 512,000 signatures of people calling on the U.S. government to stop spying on them.

 

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Silvio Berlusconi Sentenced to 7 Years in Jail, Lifetime Politics Ban

ROME -- Three-time Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to seven years in jail with a lifetime ban from politics for having paid for sex with an underage woman and abusing his power in trying to cover it up.

The billionaire media tycoon is sure to appeal the verdict. But the case is significant as the harshest verdict yet for the 76-year-old, who has been hounded by legal woes since he first entered politics nearly 20 years ago.

The conviction is Berlusconi's third in nine months.

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Last October, Berlusconi was sentenced to four years behind bars on charges of tax evasion in connection with the Mediaset television and cinema giant he controls. And in December another judge sentenced him to a year in jail in a wiretap case connected to the Milan daily Il Giornale, which is run by his younger brother, Paolo Berlusconi. Both cases are already under appeal.

In this case, Berlusconi was charged with paying an underage girl, erotic dancer Karima el-Mahroug -- best known by her stage name "Ruby the Heartstealer" -- for sex and then lying to police to get her let off on minor shoplifting charges. Though the underage sex charges have attracted the most attention, the abuse of power allegations were the most serious.

Prosecutors claim they could prove Berlusconi paid el-Mahroug at least €2,000 ($2,560) each time the two met and that he also gave her a cash gift of up to €5 million ($6.4 million).

STORY: Prosecutors Request Six Years in Jail, Ban From Politics in Silvio Berlusconi Sex Trial

Surprisingly, el-Mahroug was never called on to testify in the trial, though both she and Berlusconi denied having had sexual relations and that Berlusconi made a large cash gift. At one point, Berlusconi attorney Niccolo Ghedini argued that the smaller gifts to el-Mahroug showed Berlusconi was "humane" toward a young girl with financial difficulties.

Berlusconi's lawyers also dismissed the abuse of power accusations -- Berlusconi was reported to have claimed that the Morocco-born el-Mahroug was the niece of then-Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak -- by saying he thought the claims he made at the time were true.

El-Mahroug, along with former newsman Emilio Fede, ex-talent agent Lele Mora and Nicole Minetti a former centerfold girl and parliamentarian.

The Italian press reported the news aggressively, breaking into scheduled television programs and running banner headlines on news sites. Reaction ran along political lines, with Il Giornale calling it a "Shameful Sentence," but the left-leaning La Repubblica declaring, "Justice, Finally."

Despite the ongoing legal woes, Berlusconi has been splitting time between his defense, his role as a key supporter of the new Italian government of Enrico Letta (Letta is himself the nephew of key Berlusconi lieutenant Gianni Letta), and his stewardship of Mediaset. Berlusconi has left the day-to-day operations of Mediaset in the hands of his 44-year-old son, Pier Silvio Berlusconi, and the company has thrived with that setup. Shares closed Monday, before the verdict, at €2.43 ($3.13), down slightly on the day but more than double their all-time low of €1.16 ($1.50) from December.

Ten years in the shadow of the Power Mac G5

Apple

Ten years ago, Apple introduced the Power Macintosh G5, the first of a new generation of Macs based on IBM’s PowerPC G5 architecture. Unveiled by Steve Jobs during the 2003 World Wide Developer’s Conference, the G5 replaced the aging Power Mac G4 and carried the banner for the ultra high-end Mac market until Apple released the Intel-based Mac Pro in 2006.

 

At the time of its debut, Apple claimed the G5 was the “world’s fastest personal computer,” a controversial statement that held up with mixed success in lab tests at the time of its release. But it was fast, no doubt, and capable: The high-end model shipped with dual 2GHz CPUs, and as Apple’s first 64-bit computer, the Power Mac G5 could utilize up to 8GB of RAM. To add extra oomph, each of the three introductory G5 models featured a front-side bus clocked at half the CPU clock rate, including an astoundingly speedy 1GHz FSB for the 2GHz model.

Ten years of the same design in Apple-Land is pretty much unheard of. The design must have served Apple very well.
Aside from its 64-bit CPU, the Power Macintosh G5 debuted a few other firsts for the Mac platform. It was the first Mac to integrate Serial ATA hard drives, which provided a significant speed advantage over its parallel cousins (it did retain a Parallel ATA interface for its DVD-burning SuperDrive). It was also Apple’s first computer to include USB 2.0 ports, which had already become standard in the Windows world.

Wikipedia/Grm wnrPower Mac G5, with dual 1.8 GHz G5 processors.
From design perspective, the Power Mac G5 was Apple’s first computer to ship in an aluminum enclosure. The anodized chassis sported a sleek, monolithic design that carried with it a significant footprint: At 20 by 8.1 by 18.7 inches in dimension, the Power Macintosh G5 remains one of the tallest and largest Macs Apple has ever produced. The 39-pound beast was also one of the heaviest sans-CRT Macs ever made.
For such an excess of volume, you’d think the G5 would contains an excess of expansion potential, but in fact, most of the case was dedicated to heat dissipation.

AppleThe Power Mac G5 product page from Apple.com (click to enlarge).
Apple spent a large portion of the Power Mac G5’s 2003 introductory keynote explaining how it engineered around the PowerPC G5 CPU’s hotplate nature with four separate “thermal zones” and no less than nine internal cooling fans that, if run together, sounded not dissimilar to a jet taking off when things got a bit too toasty. (In general, the machine stayed relatively quiet considering the amount of thermal energy piping through its innards.)
That Apple’s engineers had to bend over backwards and upside down to accommodate the thermal profile of IBM’s G5 CPU must have been powerful evidence for Apple’s executive staff that the company had to change direction in CPU architecture—as it did three years later with the switch to Intel CPUs.
But in between all that G5 cooling apparatus, Apple did find room for a single 5.25-inch bay, two 3.5-inch hard drive bays, and eight DIMM slots for RAM inside the Power Mac’s case. For internal expansion, the initial G5s included one 133 MHz 64-bit PCI-X slot and two 100 MHz 64-bit PCI-X slots.
By modern standards, that’s a surprisingly inefficient use of space: three bays and three slots in a case that could swallow 36 modern Mac Minis in cubic volume. But such was the price for appeasing the G5 heat monster.
Over the next three years of its lifespan, the Power Macintosh G5 continued on to bigger and hotter heights, increasing clock speed and memory until it maxed out in late 2005 with a model containing two dual core 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP CPUs (four cores total) and a liquid cooling system.

AppleThe Mac Pro made its debut in 2006.
By then it was painfully obvious that the PowerPC architecture, which had failed to break the promised 3GHz barrier for over two years, was proving too limiting for Apple. In 2006, Apple unveiled the previously unthinkable: Intel-based Macs.
But even after that switch to Intel, one thing remained the same: Apple’s then-new Mac Pro retained the dimensions and general exterior design of the Power Mac G5. Only now, a decade after the G5’s introduction, is Apple finally ditching the aluminum beast for a mysterious dark cylinder.
Think about it: Ten years of the same design in Apple-Land is pretty much unheard of. The design must have served Apple very well—as well, at least, as it did the millions of professional users who have used the Power Mac G5 and its spiritual descendants over the previous decade. Happy birthday, G5.
 

Enron chief sentence cut to 14 years

21 June 2013 Last updated at 20:15 GMT  Skilling was originally jailed in 2006 for 24 years for his part in the Enron fraud The prison sentence for the former boss of scandal-hit Enron has been reduced on appeal from 24 to 14 years.

Jeffrey Skilling presided over Enron when it became embroiled in one of the biggest corporate frauds in US history.

In return for the more lenient sentence, Skilling, who has been in prison since 2006, has agreed to stop appealing against his conviction.

Thousands of workers lost their jobs and retirement savings when energy firm Enron collapsed in 2001.

The company's implosion came amid revelations executives had covered up the shoddy state of its finances with accounting trickery and shady business deals.

The agreement between Skilling and federal prosecutors also allows more than $40m (£26m) seized from him to be distributed to the victims of the Enron fraud.

His prison term is now set to expire in December 2020.

He was able to push for a sentence reduction after an appeals court ruled in 2009 that a sentencing guideline had not been correctly applied in the original trial.
Corporate collapse
Jeffrey Skilling worked for Enron for 20 years and was chief executive for just six months, leaving the company four months before bankruptcy.

A jury in Houston, Texas convicted him in May 2006 on 19 counts of securities fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors.

The jury also found his predecessor as chief executive, Kenneth Lay, guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Lay died in July 2006 of a heart attack.

Enron's former chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, testified against both Skilling and Lay and was sentenced to six years in prison.

He was released in December 2011. He declined to comment on Skilling's re-sentencing.

Enron was part of a series of corporate accounting scandals at the turn of the century that led directly to a raft of reforms, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.