The Securities and Exchange Commission says cybercriminals got into the agency’s files last year and accessed information that might have been used to give them a secret edge in trading.

The SEC says it had known about the intrusion in 2016 into its Edgar filing system, but learned this month that “nonpublic information” accessed may have been used for “illicit gain.”

“Edgar houses millions of filings that companies are required to submit to the SEC so that they can be perused by investors,” as noted by Bloomberg.

The agency says the “software vulnerability … was patched promptly after discovery,” and didn’t reveal any personally identifiable information.

A statement by SEC Chairman Jay Clayton notes that potential damage done by cybercrime increases all the time, and that “a large portion of the costs … are borne by investors, consumers and other important constituents.”

Politico reports that Congress has questioned the SEC about Edgar’s security:

“In May 2015, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the SEC for information about EDGAR vulnerabilities after an apparent hoax involving Avon Products Inc.

“In October 2014, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) raised concerns after an academic study revealed that stock prices were moving about 30 seconds prior to public filings being made available on the SECs website.”

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The “Dieselgate” scandal may have dented Volkswagen sales in the U.S., but demand remains strong for two VW products: classic Beetles and vintage buses. Collectors are pushing up prices of both. A small body shop in Williamsport, Md., has played a part in that. Cooker’s Restoration & Fabrication takes vehicles that look like they’re headed for the scrap heap and turns them into showpieces.

Owner Bob Cook says he started paying attention to cars at an early age and was doing full restorations by the time he was 19. His day job was building houses, but he would come home and work into the night on old VWs. When the housing market collapsed in 2009, he bought this little shop in Williamsport and started restoring VWs full time. Word of the shop’s artistry spread, and now he has a 2-year-long list of vintage VW owners waiting for him and his small crew to work their magic.

That magic was on display recently at Cooker’s annual open house. In front of the shop, satisfied clients and VW fans mingled and admired perfectly restored cars. One gem is a midnight blue 1964 Beetle owned by Georgine Casper, from Edison, N.J.

Casper’s love of VWs goes back to her teenage years in the late 1970s.

“I actually had auto mechanics in high school,” Casper says.

Her then-boyfriend Mike, now her husband, had a VW bug back then.

“I always admired Volkswagens,” Casper says. “His brother had one. He had a ’65. You know, in the winter, when it didn’t start, I’d be the one out pushing it. And I said, ‘I want a Volkswagen.’ My mother said, ‘You don’t need a Volkswagen.’ I said, ‘I want a Volkswagen.’ “

So she bought two, the midnight blue ’64 and a 1969 Beetle for $600. She says the floorboard on the ’69 was so rotten that you could almost put your feet out through the bottom. Her mother was not pleased.

“She looked at the two of them. She was like, ‘Oh my god, what did you do? You spent your money on these junks. This is not Sanford and Son’s junkyard,’ ” Casper says. “She was like yelling, and everyday, she’d come home and say, ‘Look at this junk.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not junk.’ Because to me, it wasn’t. It was a diamond in the rough.”

Ultimately, Casper, who became an office manager, not a mechanic, couldn’t do the restoration herself. So she asked Cook and his crew to make her dreams for her car come true. Now Casper’s ’64 Beetle shines like a diamond with four chrome wheels as the setting.

To make this happen, Cook and his crew take the cars apart and restore them piece by piece, either to their original condition or to a modified version. Casper’s car is an understated hot rod with a high-powered engine and roll cage.

The other specialty of Cooker’s is restoring vintage VW buses, like Alvin Ziminsky’s. He brought his to Cooker’s from Cherrytown, Pa. “I found it in a barn near Frederick, Md., in ’95. Paid $100 for it.”

“It was like $2,600 new in 1964,” he says. Asked what his $100 purchase might be worth today, Ziminsky says, “Probably nearing $150,000.”

In just the past few years, the market for vintage VW buses has skyrocketed. Rusted-out buses that people used to pay to have hauled away now sell for $20,000 or more. Why are they in such demand? Partly, it’s just their great design and simplicity. And partly, it’s the stories that go with them, Ziminsky says.

“You can’t go anywhere without getting stopped and talked to,” he says. “You’re on the road, people almost crashing into you, trying to take pictures. I got scared because people were like driving with one hand and snapping pictures while they were beside me.”

David Abruzzi has a story, too. It’s attached to his 1960 VW Single Cab that is part VW bus and part pickup.

Abruzzi drove it to the open house from Paw Paw, W.Va. The pickup belonged to his grandfather, who used it on his farm in North Dakota in the 1960s.

“He died in 1974. It was pulled into a barn, and it sat there until 1987,” Abruzzi says. “I went up and, with the help of a great uncle, got it running and drove it all the way back to New Mexico.”

It sat for 27 years in the New Mexico sun until Abruzzi brought it to West Virginia, where he lives now. “People were stopping by my house and said, ‘If you’re going to restore it, you’ve got to take it to Cooker’s,’ ” he says.

Abruzzi says he has a vivid memory of something that happened one day when the truck was being used to haul sod.

“I thought it would be fun to get up in the bed and throw pieces of sod on [my grandfather’s] back,” Abruzzi says. “He says, ‘If you do that again, you’re going to get a whuppin’. And you know, being a 5-year-old and that’s your grandpa, what do you do? You do it again. I do not remember the spanking, but I remember my grandma making him apologize to me because it’s not the thing a grandpa ever does.”

Cooker’s repaired the rusted spots on the old pickup, matching the original faded blue paint that covers 80 percent of the vehicle. It’s more valuable with the original paint on it. But, for Abruzzi, the truck’s monetary value isn’t the point. What’s priceless for him is his grandfather’s name and address still stenciled on the doors: W.E. Skalicky, Battleview, N.D.

NPR’s Les Cook contributed to this report.

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A couple of high-tech entrepreneurs thought they’d put a personable name on an impersonal product.

Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, formerly of Google, unveiled a box this week with glass doors, stocked with nonperishable items, that people can unlock with their cellphones while a camera records what they take and charges them.

It’s essentially a tech-connected vending machine. But the entrepreneurs chose a name for their venture that many people found offensive: Bodega.

The name is taken from small neighborhood shops, usually in New York, stocked with products people run out of or suddenly crave: candy, gum, soda, and yes, cigarettes, newspapers, lottery tickets, condoms, tampons and soap.

Many bodegas are in Hispanic neighborhoods, run by Hispanic and Asian shopkeepers. They become a stop for people out to walk their dogs, or take a stroll from their apartments, who decide to linger for a few minutes to buy a magazine or candy bar and talk to other people about how bad the Mets are, how nice the weather is, and kvetch about politicians, landlords and the Number 7 train from Flushing.

Bodegas are often the place sixth-graders stop after school to buy a Coke or a candy bar. The bodega owner knows their name and tells them, “Run home and do your homework.” The bodega owner will often let a good customer just take something they need if they have no money until they get their paycheck.

There is no app for that.

Real bodegas are small, affordable businesses you don’t need a stock offering to open. But if the high-tech-minibar-faux bodega takes off, it could be at the expense of bodegas owned by real people, who keep a cat on the counter and become vital characters in a neighborhood.

“To me it’s like sacrilegious — you wanna take this name and use it to make money off it?” Frank Garcia, who chairs the state Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, told the New York Post.

The instant reaction on social media was so sharp that Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan had to quickly write on Medium, “We did some homework — speaking to New Yorkers, branding people, and even running some survey work asking about the name and any potential offense it might cause. But it’s clear that we may not have been asking the right questions of the right people.

“Despite our best intentions and our admiration for traditional bodegas, we clearly hit a nerve,” said the entrepreneurs, “we intended only admiration.”

But their statement leaves a question unanswered. Will the name stay?

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Note: This episode originally ran in 2015.

Most companies reward hard work. This is why people get paid overtime, and why full-time workers make more than part-time ones.

But, if you think about it, hard work alone says nothing about how much value you create. You could be toiling day and night, and be mostly useless to your employer. To your employer’s bottom line, what really matters isn’t how much you put in, but what you deliver.

There’s one company that takes this idea to its logical conclusion: Netflix. It’s run like a sports team. Whether you’re yesterday’s hire or one of the first employees, you’re out the minute you stop justifying your presence.

It wasn’t always like this. Right after the dot-com bubble burst, Netflix was like any other company. But, to survive, it had to cut non-essential staff. Patty McCord, who was in charge of hiring and firing, had to seriously reevaluate what each person was contributing. She laid off a third of the company, and what she found was that the company didn’t just do fine, but was performing better than before. That experience gave rise to a philosophy that became an influential PowerPoint presentation that over 16 million people have viewed.

Today on the show, hear how Patty McCord turned Netflix into a sports team, and just how far the company took that principle.

We’ve also got an update on a brand new business that was sparked by this episode and has adapted some of the Netflix principles.

Music: “Feels So Good” “We are Better Together” and “Midnight.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook. Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts or PocketCast.

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The Department of Transportation released its revised guidelines on automated driving systems Tuesday, outlining its recommended — but not mandatory — best practices for companies developing self-driving cars. The first such guidelines released under the Trump administration, the Vision for Safety 2.0 scales back some of the recommendations outlined last year under President Obama.

In a statement released Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao lauded the possibilities of automated driving systems, saying “we can look forward to a future with fewer traffic fatalities and increased mobility for all Americans.”

“In addition to safety,” Chao said, “ADS technology offers important social benefits by improving access to transportation, independence and quality of life for those who cannot drive because of illness, advanced age or disability.”

As Forbes reports, the prevailing difference between last year’s version and the one released Tuesday is one of slimmed scale and extent. For instance, the new guidelines trim a 15-point safety assessment proposed last year, which would be conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration if manufacturers submit to one. The proposed evaluation is down to 12 points.

Though, as a voluntary exercise, the number of points on the assessment is likely less important than whether manufacturers submit to one at all — and Deborah A.P. Hersman, president and CEO of National Safety Council, points out that “DOT has yet to receive any Safety Assessments, even though vehicles are being tested in many states.”

The new guidelines make clear again that manufacturers are not required to submit to voluntary assessments — though they are “encouraged” — and that those assessments are “not subject to Federal approval.”

“Voluntary guidelines will serve the developers of new technologies to ensure they can move quickly, but they serve public safety best if all the players agree to comply with them,” Hersman said in a statement Tuesday.

“Mandating additional safety measures such as a clear disclosure, robust validation processes prior to deployment and data sharing requirements will now fall to the Congress as both the House and Senate move their bills,” she said.

The new guidelines also no longer apply to Level 2 vehicles — or vehicles with partial automation, in facets such as acceleration and steering, that still require drivers to “remain engaged with the driving task.”

David Friedman, former interim head of NHTSA, says the timing of Chao’s announcement should raise some eyebrows. On the same day the new plan relaxed guidance on Level 2 vehicles, the National Transportation Safety Board faulted a Tesla automated driving system for playing a “major role” in a collision that killed its test driver last year.

According to the NTSB assessment, the cause of the crash was a combination of the “driver’s inattention” and the Tesla automation system that “permitted the car driver’s overreliance on the automation.”

“System safeguards, that should have prevented the Tesla’s driver from using the car’s automation system on certain roadways, were lacking and the combined effects of human error and the lack of sufficient system safeguards resulted in a fatal collision that should not have happened,” NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt III said in a statement.

Friedman says the new guidelines will do little to rectify the kinds of problems that led to the crash — in fact, he says, just the opposite: “Now it’s back to the wild, wild west for those systems.”

“Just as the NTSB says the government and industry should be stepping up its efforts to ensure the safety of Level 2 automated vehicles,” he added, “the Department of Transportation and Secretary Chao are rolling back their responsibility in that space.”

Nevertheless, the Department of Transportation says the development of this technology will do much to reduce the number of serious automobile crashes, 94 percent of which it says are due to human error.

And the agency says these new guidelines are just part of an evolving approach to automated driving systems. “In fact,” it says, “DOT and NHTSA are already planning for 3.0.”

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Journalist Franklin Foer worries that we’re all losing our minds as big tech companies infiltrate every aspect of our lives.

In his new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Foer compares the way we feel about technology now to the way people felt about pre-made foods, like TV dinners, when they were first invented.

“And we thought that they were brilliant because they did away with pots and pans — we didn’t have to go to the store to go shopping every day — and then we woke up 50 years later and realize that these products had been basically engineered to make us fat,” Foer says. “And I worry that the same thing is happening now to the things that we ingest through our mind.”

Interview Highlights

On why tech companies’ control of the market is problematic

They pose as these neutral marketplaces, yet when they have their own things to sell, they give them special advantages. We saw this with Yelp and Google, where Yelp was this great way to get recommendations about what restaurant to go to, and it used to be when you type in a restaurant name into Google, the Yelp review was the first thing that came up. Well, Google saw that this was a good business to be in and so they started to publish their own user reviews of restaurants, and suddenly, those leap-frogged over Yelp.