The EU wants to save all your data, or as much as possible for as long as possible. To insult the victims of crime, they say that they want to do this to fight crime. How do you feel about the EU being turned into a surveillance society? Leave your voice in the link below.
Source: Data retention by service providers for criminal proceedings – impact assessment
Smart home device maker Futurehome is forcing its customers’ hands by suddenly requiring a subscription for basic functionality of its products.
Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.
“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.
You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.
After June 26, customers had four weeks to continue using their devices as normal without a subscription. That grace period recently ended, and users now need a subscription for their smart devices to work properly.
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The indebted company promised customers that the subscription fee would allow it to provide customers “better functionality, more security, and higher value in the solution you have already invested in,” reported Elektro247, a Norwegian news site covering the electrical industry, according to a Google-provided translation.
The problem is that customers expected a certain level of service and functionality when they bought Futurehome devices. And as of press time, Futurehome’s product pages don’t make the newfound subscription requirements apparent. Futurehome’s recent bankruptcy is also a reminder of the company’s instability, making further investments questionable.
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Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”
Futurehome’s move has become a common strategy among Internet of Things companies, including smart home hub maker Wink. These companies are still struggling to build sustainable businesses that work long-term without killing features or upcharging customers.
Source: Futurehome smart hub owners must pay new $117 subscription or lose access – Ars Technica
And you see this happening a lot with all kinds of companies. The thing is, these products are supposed to work without contacting a central server – the company selling you this is not supposed to be seeing or handling your data at all. They don’t need to, as it’s all in your home and the functionalities don’t require huge compute power.
Fortunately, the Futurehome Home Assistant add-on (on Github) is a complete drop-in replacement for the official Futurehome app, with support for all device types compatible with the Futurehome hub. See the FAQ for more details. – which means you can operate the stuff you bought without the subscription
Credit reporting giant TransUnion has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 4.4 million customers’ personal information.
In a filing with Maine’s attorney general’s office on Thursday, TransUnion attributed the July 28 breach to unauthorized access of a third-party application storing customers’ personal data for its U.S. consumer support operations.
TransUnion claimed “no credit information was accessed,” but provided no immediate evidence for its claim. The data breach notice did not specify what specific types of personal data were stolen.
In a separate data breach disclosure filed later on Thursday with Texas’ attorney general’s office, TransUnion confirmed that the stolen personal information includes customers’ names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers.
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TransUnion is one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the United States, and stores the financial data of more than 260 million Americans. It’s the latest U.S. corporate giant to have been hacked in recent weeks following a wave of hacks targeting the insurance, retail, and transportation and airline industries.
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Source: TransUnion says hackers stole 4.4 million customers’ personal information | TechCrunch
Well done Transunion. In 2023 it lost a massive data dump (which they accept and then say no, wasn’t us) and in 2017 it got it’s customers to download malware (and again said, yes it was us but it wasn’t). You would think that at some point they would learn, but the penalties are apparently too small to care.
And considering it actually says that they verify personal identities, and sell identity protection services – and who knows if those “customers” actually know that that they are customers – the quantity and scale of these breaches is simply unacceptable. The company can obviously not handle it’s tasking and should by now be broken down.
A new paper in the journal Nature catalogs how several “abrupt changes,” like the precipitous loss of sea ice over the last decade, are unfolding in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing one another and threatening to send the continent past the point of no return—and flood coastal cities everywhere as the sea rises several feet.
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Scientists define abrupt change as a bit of the environment changing much faster than expected. In Antarctica these can occur on a range of time scales, from days or weeks for an ice shelf collapse to centuries and beyond for the ice sheets. Unfortunately, these abrupt changes can self-perpetuate and become unstoppable as humans continue to warm the planet.
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A major driver of Antarctica’s cascading crises is the loss of floating sea ice, which forms during winter. In 2014, it hit a peak extent (at least since satellite observations began in 1978) around Antarctica of 20.11 million square kilometers, or 7.76 million square miles. But since then, the coverage of sea ice has fallen not just precipitously but almost unbelievably, contracting by 75 miles closer to the coast. During winters, when sea ice reaches its maximum coverage, it has declined 4.4 times faster around Antarctica than it has in the Arctic in the last decade.
Put another way: The loss of winter sea ice in Antarctica over just the past decade is similar to what the Arctic has lost over the last 46 years.
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While scientists need to collect more data to determine if this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in Antarctica, the signals so far are ominous. “We’re starting to see the pieces of the picture begin to emerge that we very well might be in this new state of dramatic loss of Antarctic sea ice,” said Zachary M. Labe, a climate scientist who studies the region at the research group Climate Central, which wasn’t involved in the new paper.
This extraordinary decline is kicking off a climatic feedback loop. The Arctic is warming around four times faster than the rest of the planet in large part because its reflectivity is changing. Sea ice is white and bright, so it bounces the sun’s energy back into space to cool the region. But when it disappears, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb that energy. So less reflectivity begets more warming, and more warming melts more sea ice, which begets more warming, and on and on. “We now expect that that same process is going to become a factor in the Southern Hemisphere, because we’ve lost this equivalent amount of sea ice,” Abram said.
Bigger and irreversible consequences
Around Antarctica, however, the consequences could be even bigger and more complex than in the Arctic and might even be irreversible. Models predict that if the global climate were to stabilize, so too would Arctic sea ice. “We don’t see that same behavior in Antarctica,” Abram said. “When you stabilize the climate and let these climate model simulations run for hundreds of years, Antarctic sea ice still continues to decline because the Southern Ocean is continuing to take up extra heat from the atmosphere.”
This could spell major trouble for the continent’s enormous cap of ice. That consists of two main parts: the ice sheets, which rest on land, and the ice shelves, which extend from the sheets and float on the sea. The problem isn’t so much about the sun beating down on the sheets, but increasingly warm water lapping at the bottom of the shelves. And the more the surrounding sea ice disappears, the more those waters are warming. Additionally, sea ice acts as a sort of shield, absorbing wave energy that would normally pound these edges of the ice shelves, breaking them apart.
So sea ice supports the ice shelves, which support the ice sheets on land. “When we melt ice shelves, they have a buttressing effect on the ice sheets behind them, so we get an enhanced flow of ice sheets into the ocean,” said Matthew England, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales and coauthor of the paper. One of these, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, could collapse if global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, raising sea levels by more than three meters, or about 10 feet. And it could still partially collapse before that.
As ice shelves melt, they’re also borking a critical ocean system known as the Antarctic Overturning Circulation. When sea ice forms, it rejects salt, creating salty, extra cold seawater that’s denser and therefore sinks to the seafloor, creating circulation. But as ice shelves melt, they dilute the cold salty water, slowing the circulation and bringing more warm water in contact with ice shelves and sea ice. “This amplifying feedback that we’re talking about now is across systems,” England said. “It’s from the ocean back to the ice, and then back into the ocean again, that can trigger a runaway change where we do see the overturning potentially collapse altogether.”
When this circulation brings deeper waters back to the surface, it transports critical nutrients for phytoplankton—tiny photosynthetic organisms that absorb carbon and expel oxygen. Not only are these organisms responsible for sequestering half of the carbon from photosynthesis worldwide, but they also make up the base of the food web, feeding small animals known as zooplankton, which in turn feed bigger organisms like fishes and crustaceans. Sea ice is also a critical habitat for phytoplankton, so they stand to lose both their home and their nutrients.
A chronic sickness for the far south
Emperor penguins, too, establish their breeding colonies on stable sea ice, where their chicks grow up and develop the waterproof feathers they need to glide through the ocean. “That ice is being lost before the emperor penguins have been able to fledge, and when that happens, you have a complete breeding failure for the colony in that season,” Abram said. “We’re seeing those catastrophic breeding failure events happening right around the Antarctic continent.”
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Source: Antarctica Is Unraveling
China’s Salt Typhoon cyberspies hoovered up information belonging to millions of people in the United States over the course of the years-long intrusion into telecommunications networks, according to a top FBI cyber official.
“There’s a good chance this espionage campaign has stolen information from nearly every American,” Michael Machtinger, deputy assistant director for the FBI’s cyber division, told The Register.
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The Beijing-backed spying campaign began at least in 2019 but wasn’t uncovered by US authorities until last fall. On Wednesday, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies along with those from 12 other countries warned the ongoing espionage activity expanded far beyond nine American telcos and government networks. According to Machtinger, at least 80 countries were hit by the digital intrusions.
Around 200 American organizations were compromised by the espionage activity, Machtinger said, including the previously disclosed telecommunications firms such as Verizon and AT&T.
Yesterday’s joint security alert also pointed the allies’ collective finger at three China-based entities affiliated with Salt Typhoon: Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology, Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology, and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology. These companies, and likely others, provide cyber products and services to China’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army, the governments said.
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This indiscriminate targeting, as the FBI and White House security officials have previously noted, allowed Beijing’s snoops to geo-locate millions of mobile phone users, monitor their internet traffic, and, in some cases, record their phone calls. Victims reportedly included President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Machtinger declined to confirm whether Trump and Vance were among those surveilled, but did say that victims included more than 100 current and former presidential administration officials.
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Source: FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned ‘nearly every American’ • The Register
It’s quite telling that you only have to breach 200 organisations to gain information on 350 million Americans.