Linking ideas with the world
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[…]
Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015. In a statement to CBC News, Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak. The records stated that manufacturing Read more about Boeing falsified records for 787 jet sold to Air Canada. It developed a fuel leak[…]
Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO defense ministers met this week. The name of this new Dutch-German military internet is the Tactical Edge Networking, or TEN, for short. This is Read more about Germany and the Netherlands to build the first ever joint military internet, some contractor wins huge and achieves massive vendor lock in[…]
If you bought an ebook through Microsoft’s online store, now’s the time to give it a read, or reread, because it will stop working early July. That’s right, the books you paid for will be literally removed from your electronic bookshelf because, um, Microsoft decided in April it no longer wanted to sell books. It Read more about This weekend all Microsoft e-books will stop working. A gentle reminder that through DRM you don’t own what you think you own.[…]
Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum. Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams. They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, Read more about New property of light discovered, plus recently discovered properties you probably didn’t know about[…]
Researchers from the Yokohama National University have teleported quantum information securely within the confines of a diamond. The study has big implications for quantum information technology—the future of sharing and storing sensitive information. The researchers published their results on June 28, 2019, in Communications Physics. “Quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information into an Read more about Researchers teleport information within a diamond[…]
The accuracy of the neural network is judged by how similar its outputs were to the ones created by two more traditional N-body simulation systems, FastPM and 2LPT, when all three are given the same inputs. When D3M was tasked with producing 1,000 simulations from 1,000 sets of input data, it had a relative error Read more about That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It’s that its creators don’t know why it works so well[…]
A group of policy experts assembled by the EU has recommended that it ban the use of AI for mass surveillance and mass “scoring of individuals”; a practice that potentially involves collecting varied data about citizens — everything from criminal records to their behavior on social media — and then using it to assess their Read more about EU should ban AI-powered citizen scoring and mass surveillance, say experts[…]
According to tech statistics website Built With, more than 650,000 websites are already using reCaptcha v3; overall, there are at least 4.5 million websites use reCaptcha, including 25% of the top 10,000 sites. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking Read more about Google’s new reCaptcha forces page admins to put it on EVERY page so Google can track you everywhere[…]
Eight of the world’s biggest technology service providers were hacked by Chinese cyber spies in an elaborate and years-long invasion, Reuters found. The invasion exploited weaknesses in those companies, their customers, and the Western system of technological defense. […] The hacking campaign, known as “Cloud Hopper,” was the subject of a U.S. indictment in December that Read more about 8 of worlds top tech companies pwned for years by China[…]
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceivingusers into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enableexperts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shoppingwebsites, which often use dark patterns these to influence users Read more about Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (note, there’s lots of them influencing your unconsious to buy!)[…]
If you notice the ads being served to you are eerily similar to stuff you were just browsing online, it’s not all in your head, and it’s the insidious truth of existing online without installing a bunch of browser extensions. But there’s now a tool that, while comically absurd in execution, can stick it to Read more about Mozilla Has a New Tool for Tricking Advertisers Into Believing You’re Filthy Rich[…]