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Amazon exposed customer names and emails in a 'technical error'
Amazon exposed some customers' names and emails due to a "technical error," according to emails the company sent to affected customers. Several people shared screenshots of the emails online Wednesday morning. BetaNews first reported the incident.
In a statement, Amazon said, "We have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted."
Despite the exposure, Amazon told the affected customers they did not need to change their passwords. But even with just their names and emails exposed, people could attempt to reset their accounts or target their emails for phishing attacks.
Also at The Register.
US Christmas sales predicted to surpass $1 trillion for the first time this year
Christmas holiday retail sales in the U.S. are expected to climb above the $1 trillion mark for the first time this year, on the back of low unemployment, solid income growth and higher consumer confidence, according to a study released Tuesday.
Total retail sales in the U.S. will hit $1.002 trillion during the holiday period — which it defines as spanning November 1 and December 31 this year — an increase of almost 6 percent from the previous year, marking the "strongest growth since 2011," data from market research firm eMarketer showed.
[...] The research said the sector would see a 4.4 percent gain year-on-year in in-store sales, rising to $878.38 billion, and that brick-and-mortar would be a "bright spot" for the retail industry as a whole for the 2018 Christmas holiday period. [...] E-commerce continues to grow in market share, however, and will capture 12.3 percent of the total sales figure this year, according to eMarketer. Online retail sales are predicted to rise 16.6 percent from the previous year, to $123.73 billion, the study said.
See also: Amazon reverses decision to block international sites in Australia
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 23 2018, @02:50AM
In Portland specifically there are quite a few newly-constructed building that have really creative architecture.
Landlords have to pay extra for the design and construction of really creative buildings so as to compete effective for tenants, both residential and commercial.
Portland's population is skyrocketing, largely due to Mobile App and Mobile Websites hiring vast quantities of new employees from out of state; that leads the locals to have a special hatred for new Oregonians who came from California. Similarly skyrocketing rents and housing prices, as well as Oregon's No-Fault Eviction law which landlord-friendly legislators have so far defeated every attempt to overturn, have resulted in a huge increase in the homeless population.
The Point-In-Time Count, a census of the homeless, takes place every two years throughout the United States on a certain specific day. The PIC Count in Portland, ranged from 3,801 to 4,655 since 2009. Looking at the 2011 and 2017 reports at first led me to believe the homeless population has been roughly stable, but the City Of Portland, Multnomah County, the State Of Oregon and the Federal Housing and Urban Development Administration all together have worked aggressively to get more homeless into housing in recent years.
My own "Permanent Supportive Housing" enables me to live rent-free for the rest of my life if I so choose. I do _not_ so choose, so whenever I have a client, I pay 30% of my gross personal income towards rent. My apartment is mostly paid for by Community Services Northwest's "Housing First" Program [csnw.org], CSNW gets its housing funding from the Vancouver Housing Authority [vhausa.org], VHA gets its funding from HUD, and HUD gets its funding from most of _you_.
I once said to my housing case manager Jason that "I do not feel comfortable with not paying my own rent".
"That's because you're a Working Man," Jason replied.
To get VHA-funded housing one is required to be referred by some other agency that works with the homeless, in my case that was CSNW's PACT Team - Program for Assertive Community Treatment [csnw.org]. I was also on a PACT Team in Vancouver, British Columbia.
PACT is increasingly popular in recent years, because it is demonstrably more effective at keeping us wingnuts out of The Funny Farm and The Slammer than are other approaches to treating the chronically mentally ill. In particular, PACT case workers interact with PACT clients such as myself much more frequently than the far-more common County Mental Health Clinics do.
In my case, the PACT staff was always wanting to drive me around to wherever I needed to go, but I _always_ insisted on taking the bus unless I was fetching some stuff from my storage locker that was too big to carry on buses.
I mentioned to Jason that I found it helpful to spend some time in a cafe _every_ _single_ _day_ so as to avoid becoming isolated. Social Isolation is far far worse for the mentally ill [warplife.com] than is not taking our medicine, as there is no one to correct us when we say something that is born of delusion. (I regard severe depression as a profoundly delusional state, that is just as bad as thinking one is the Emperor Of France.) After I mentioned that, Jason and CSNW's Employment Case Manager started taking me to Starbucks one day each week.
But I just digressed by twelve parsecs...
Portland's booming population results in a booming population of school-age children; it's schools are way overcrowded, not because of any lack of funding but because there simple aren't enough schools.
And the booming economy, as well as the $$$ paid by landlords and real estate developers for all that creative architecture has led to steadily rising wages for skilled trades workers which result in it become...
... prohibitively expensive to build new schools.
But AC assures me that I'm the worst kind of scammer; in reality, the economy is _not_ booming. To the extent Portland's population is rising, that's because all those Mobile Code companies are employing illegal immigrants to write apps and websites under the table for far less than minimum wage.
So rather than get a regular job, I started my own company. For AC to do the same, he'd rather starve than sell his skills to contract programming clients. I do not yet understand why he refuses to write a Mobile App, because many successful ones have no advertising of any sort, some of them don't even have their own websites.
Given that I'm the worst kind of criminal, I'll be turning myself in to the Clark County Jail in Downtown Vancouver, after which time I'll beg for mercy from the judge when he sentences me to the Crime Against Humanity I committed by building Soggy Jobs.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]