Linking ideas with the world
Almost a third (30%) of the world’s top virtual private network (VPN) providers are secretly owned by six Chinese companies, according to a study by privacy and security research firm VPNpro. The study shows that the top 97 VPNs are run by just 23 parent companies, many of which are based in countries with lax Read more about Top VPNs secretly owned by Chinese firms[…]
Amazon wants the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to give it the go-ahead to launch 3,236 satellites that would be used to establish a globe-spanning internet network. Seeking Alpha reported that Amazon expects “to offer service to tens of millions of underserved customers around the world” via the network, which the company is developing under the Read more about Amazon Seeks Permission to Launch 3,236 Internet Satellites – awesome! more trash metal in low earth orbit![…]
Slack is one of many Silicon Valley unicorns going public this year, but it’s the only one that has admitted it is at risk for nation-state attacks. In the S-1 forms filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Uber, Lyft, Pinterest and Snapchat addressed threats that could lower the price of their stock — including Read more about What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?[…]
There’s an interesting and troubling attack happening to some people involved in the OpenPGP community that makes their certificates unusable and can essentially break the OpenPGP implementation of anyone who tries to import one of the certificates. The attack is quite simple and doesn’t exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes Read more about OpenPGP Certificate Attack Worries Experts, due to same symptoms bothering other Open Source projects – not enough contributors[…]
A former patient at the University of Chicago Medical Center is suing UChicago, the medical center, and Google, accusing them of violating the privacy rights of patients at UChicago Medicine through the sharing of patient records containing identifiable information. The class action lawsuit, filed by Matt Dinerstein in the Northern District of Illinois on Wednesday, claims Read more about UChicago and Google Sued in Federal Class Action Suit for Patient Data Sharing between 2009 – 2016[…]
Last week, the LightSail 2 officially made its first contact with Earth. The solar-powered spacecraft will be sailing around Earth’s orbit for the next year, all part of a mission to prove that solar sailing is a viable mode of space exploration. If successful, the hope is that solar sailing could be used in other Read more about How to Track the LightSail 2 as It ‘Sails’ Around Earth[…]
Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society. The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose. The current unrest concerns a proposed change to Hong Kong’s extradition laws that would allow island fugitives to be transferred to Taiwan, Macau, and mainland Read more about Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society[…]
Windows 10 continues to be a danger zone. Not only have problems been piling up in recent weeks, Microsoft has also been worryingly deceptive about the operation of key services. And now the company has warned millions about another problem. Spotted by the always excellent Windows Latest, Microsoft has told tens of millions of Windows Read more about Microsoft Issues Warning For 50M Windows 10 Users – VPNs are now broken[…]
The remarkable ability of plants to respond to their environment has led some scientists to believe it’s a sign of conscious awareness. A new opinion paper argues against this position, saying plants “neither possess nor require consciousness.” Many of us take it for granted that plants, which lack a brain or central nervous system, wouldn’t Read more about Are Plants Conscious? Researchers Argue, but agree they are intelligent.[…]
Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), [is] a trade group representing the likes of Walmart, Target, Dollar General, Coca Cola and other world-swallowing corporations […] RILA, as it turns out, is feeling just as freaked out by the dominance of a handful of tech giants as the rest of us, and in a letter today to Read more about RILA (big retailers) Calls to Break Up Big Tech[…]
3 July 2019: The CMA has launched a market study into online platforms and the digital advertising market in the UK. We are assessing three broad potential sources of harm to consumers in connection with the market for digital advertising: to what extent online platforms have market power in user-facing markets, and what impact this Read more about UK Gov launches study into Online platforms and digital advertising market and possible monopolies antitrust[…]
Next time you use Amazon Alexa to message a friend or order a pizza, know that the record could be stored indefinitely, even if you ask to delete it. In May, Delaware Senator Chris Coons sent Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos a letter asking why Amazon keeps transcripts of voices captured by Echo devices, citing privacy Read more about Amazon Confirms It Keeps Alexa Transcripts You Can’t Delete[…]
Facebook resolves day-long outages across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger Facebook had problems loading images, videos, and other data across its apps today, leaving some people unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp. Facebook said earlier today it was aware of the issues and was Read more about Facebook, Instragram, Whatsapp, Oculus, Google Cloud go down and Cloudflare reroutes large portions of the internet to nothing – twice[…]
In order to create what it calls “the world’s lightest gaming mouse,” the engineers at peripheral maker Glorious PC Gaming Race took a mouse and put holes all in it. The result is the Model O, a very good gaming mouse that weighs only 67 grams and may trigger trypophobia. “You’ll barely feel the holes,” Read more about The Secret To The World’s Lightest Gaming Mouse Model O Is Lots Of Holes[…]
YouTube, under fire since inception for building a business on other people’s copyrights and in recent years for its vacillating policies on irredeemable content, recently decided it no longer wants to host instructional hacking videos. The written policy first appears in the Internet Wayback Machine’s archive of web history in an April 5, 2019 snapshot. Read more about YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled, looks like they want you to not learn about cybersecurity[…]
Spotify has changed the way artists can upload music, now prohibiting individual musicians from putting their songs on the streaming service directly. The new move requires a third party to be involved in the business of uploads. The company announced the change on Monday, saying it will close the beta program and stop accepting direct Read more about Spotify shuts down direct music uploading for independent artists, forces them to 3rd parties and also allows these 3rd parties into your personal account[…]
The authority on personal data has reprimanded the ING Bank over plans to use payment data for advertising. The authority has told other banks to examine their policies for direct marketing. ING Bank recently changed their privacy statement, stating that the bank will use payment data for direct marketing offers. As an example they said Read more about Dutch ING Bank wants to use customer payment data for direct marketing, privacy watchdog says NO! whilst Dutch Gov wants more banking data sharing with everyone![…]
In new research published Tuesday and shared with TechCrunch, Dardaman and Wheeler found three security flaws which, when chained together, could be abused to open a front door with a smart lock. Smart home technology has come under increasing scrutiny in the past year. Although convenient to some, security experts have long warned that adding Read more about Zipato Zipamicro smart home hub totally pwned[…]
Superhuman is one of the most talked about new apps in Silicon Valley. Why? The product — a $30 per month email app for power users hoping for greater productivity— is a good alternative to many popular and stale email apps, nearly everyone who has used it says so. Even better is the company’s publicity Read more about Silicon Valley’s Hottest Email App Superhuman sends emails that track you and your location without your knowledge[…]
https://ufdc.ufl.edu/baldwin/all/ It’s amazing collection showing the values placed on children through the ages
Jeremy Horwitz@horwitz July 2, 2019 9:10 AM Image Credit: Gizmochina Apple’s Memoji may have become the more popular 3D avatar feature for smartphones, but Xiaomi wants people to know that its similarly named version — Mimoji — came first, despite increasingly confusing overlap between the apps’ names and features. Moreover, it’s apparently threatening legal action Read more about Turns out Apple’s Memoji is another product copy, this time from Xiaomi and Samsung. If you can’t create, duplicate.[…]
The New York Times reported today that guards working the border with Krygyzstan in the Xinjiang region have insisted on putting an app called Fengcai on the Android devices of visitors – including tourists, journalists, and other foreigners. The Android app is said to harvest details from the handset ranging from text messages and call Read more about We are shocked to learn that China, an oppressive surveillance state, injects spyware into visitors’ phones[…]
In yet another example of absent security controls, troves of police body camera footage were left open to the world for anyone to siphon off, according to an infosec biz. Jasun Tate, CEO of Black Alchemy Solutions Group, told The Register on Monday he and his team had identified about a terabyte of officer body Read more about Cop a load of this: 1TB of police body camera videos found lounging around public databases[…]
ProPublica recently reported that two U.S. firms, which professed to use their own data recovery methods to help ransomware victims regain access to infected files, instead paid the hackers. Now there’s new evidence that a U.K. firm takes a similar approach. Fabian Wosar, a cyber security researcher, told ProPublica this month that, in a sting Read more about Sting Catches Another Ransomware Firm Negotiating With “Hackers” when claiming to decrypt[…]
Mold spores commonly found aboard the International Space Station (ISS) turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being. Based on experiments by a team of researchers led by Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, the new study Read more about ISS is home to super-tough molds that laugh in the face of deadly radiation[…]