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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Google knows a whole lot about you. Here's how to make it forget

Google collects a staggering amount of information about you -- maybe even more than you realize. Google remembers every search you perform and every YouTube video you watch. Whether you have an iPhone ($699 at Amazon) or Android phone, Google Maps logs everywhere you go, the route you take to get there, when you arrive and what time you leave -- even if you never open the app. When you really take a look at everything Google knows about you, the results can be shocking -- maybe even a little frightening. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do about it.

As a spate of data leaks and privacy violations continues to weaken the public's trust in big tech companies, Google has responded by creating a privacy hub that lets you access, delete and limit the data Google collects on you. Navigating all the various settings can get confusing, however, and it's not always clear what you're giving Google permission to do.

What's worse, whenever you make a change that would restrict how much or for how long Google tracks you, Google warns that its services won't work as well without unfettered access to your data. How true that may be isn't very clear.

Despite Google's best efforts to increase transparency, recent revelations that the search giant was secretly sharing users' private data with third-party advertisers have challenged the public's trust in the company, whose Google Home ($99 at Walmart) and Google Nest lines of smart speakers seek to put microphones and cameras in the most private of settings -- your home.

We're going to cut through all the clutter and show you how to access the private data Google has on you, as well as how to delete some or all of it. Then we're going to help you find the right balance between your privacy and the Google services you rely on by choosing settings that limit Google's access to your information without impairing your experience.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There's long been much handwringing around Halloween around the prospect of pins, needles and razor blades being hidden in candy and passed out to children. On the very rare occasion this does happen, the outcome is normally little more than some superficial cuts. However, for 2019, [MG] has developed an altogether different surreptitious payload to be delivered to trick or treaters.

Consisting of a small USB device named DemonSeed, it's a HID attack gadget in the genre of the BadUSB devices we've seen previously. When plugged in, the unit emulates a USB keyboard and can be programmed to enter whatever keystrokes are necessary to take over the machine or exfiltrate data. Files are available on Github for those looking to replicate the device.

The trick here is in the delivery. [MG] has produced a large quantity of these small devices, packaging them in anti-static wrappers. The wrappers contain a note instructing children to insert them into their parent's work computers to access "game codes", and to share them with their friends while hiding them from adults.

The idea of children brazenly plugging hostile USB devices into important computers is enough to make any IT manager's head spin, though we suspect [MG] doesn't actually intend to deploy these devices in anger. It serves as a great warning about the potential danger of such an attack, however. Stay sharp, and keep your office door locked this October 31st!

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Without giving the least of technical details, it was noted that Nordic and Baltic stock markets were halted by technical problems twice on Friday.

"Due to technical disturbances, Nasdaq Nordic Equity and Nasdaq Nordic Index and Equity Derivatives markets (have been) halted again," operator Nasdaq said in an emailed statement.

The company operates bourses in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Also at The Local se and The Washington Post

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Waymo finally let a reporter ride in a fully driverless car

It's been almost two years since Waymo first announced that it was testing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. Not long afterwards, the company said it planned to offer a fully driverless service to the public by the end of 2018.

The rollout has been a lot slower than expected. Over the course of 2018, most of Waymo's cars continued to have drivers behind the wheel. When Waymo launched its commercial service in December 2018, every car had a driver behind the wheel.

But now Waymo seems to be cautiously moving forward with fully driverless technology. Last month, Waymo told people in its closed testing program that they'd start getting rides in driverless vehicles. Now in a new piece for Techcrunch, Ed Niedermeyer reports on his own experience riding in a fully driverless car.

Original Submission

chrisM writes:

Down in Timaru, New Zealand, a new LED street light outside a family home had some really bad effects on a resident. His father, an astronomer, did lighting tests over the next two years and made some interesting discoveries about blue light. https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/116865102/effects-of-led-streetlights-on-autistic-son-led-damien-mcnamara-on-dark-sky-campaign

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Airbnb bans 'party houses' after five die in Halloween shooting

Airbnb has said it will ban "party houses" after a mass shooting at a California home rented through the company left five people dead.

CEO Brian Chesky said in a tweet the company would take steps to "combat unauthorized parties and get rid of abusive host and guest conduct". "We must do better, and we will. This is unacceptable," Mr Chesky added.

Three people died at the house, in the city of Orinda, near San Francisco, and two more died later in hospital. The house was reportedly booked under a pretence for a small group, before being publicised on Instagram as the venue for a Halloween party which eventually drew a crowd of more than 100 people. The host did not authorise the party, Airbnb said.

[...] Mr Chesky said Airbnb would create a dedicated "party house" rapid response team and expand manual screening of high-risk reservations. The company, which is expected to float on the stock market in 2020, would also take action against users who violated its policies, he said.

See also: Here's Why Airbnb's Latest Losses Won't Necessarily Hurt Its 2020 IPO

Related: Airbnb is Suing NYC to Keep From Sharing Host Data
Family Finds Hidden Camera in Airbnb's Smoke Alarm
Airbnb Host? Don't Pay Business Taxes? City Digs Up Your Sewer and Water.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

[Ed note: In Europe the clocks changed last weekend 26/27 Oct. And, as an aside, the EU is proposing scrapping the entire idea of changing clocks forwards/backwards which is receiving a lot of support.]

Daylight Saving Time - innocently conceived by the notorious early riser Benjamin Franklin, was not instituted in the United States until 1918 (because the Germans did it two years earlier and were already up taking advantage of the extra hour of daylight, so the hyper-competitive USA just had to do it also), has a variety of downsides (more prevalent in the Spring) including - Disrupted Sleep, Car Crashes, Stress, Heart Problems, Disrupted internal Clocks, and a variety of negative effects related to these (Obesity, depression, reduced performance, reduced alertness, increased blood pressure, inflammation, harsher sentencing, etc. etc.)

It is Fall however, and this Sunday is the better half of the DST coin where we gain an extra hour of sleep, and on Monday potentially smile briefly at our co-workers before staggering eerily towards the break room muttering cooofffeeeeeeee.

This Sunday, people across the United States can rest easy, literally, as they'll get an extra hour of sleep because daylight saving time comes to an end.

The change happens at 2 a.m. local daylight time on Nov. 3. While most wireless devices will "fall back" on their own, it's up to you to switch manual clocks — including those on microwaves, ovens and wristwatches — one hour back.

This means that as soon as the clock ticks to 2 a.m. on Sunday, it can be turned back to 1 a.m.

Daylight saving (not savings, as it's sometimes called) time won't start again until March 8, 2020, when the United States will, once again, "spring forward" an hour. [Daylight Saving Time 2019: A Guide to the When, Why, What and How]

So enjoy it for now, but unless our government suddenly decides to randomly do something that would be hugely popular across constituencies, inexpensive, relatively non controversial, and generally beneficial for the populace, know that you'll pay again for this brief respite in a few short months.

Previous Coverage

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow

Government and military hit by WhatsApp hack

More details are emerging about this year's WhatsApp hack, revealing that senior government officials in multiple US-allied countries were targeted.

According to those familiar with the company's on-going investigation, a “significant “ portion of the known victims of the hack are either high-profile government or military officials in at least 20 countries on five continents.

This means that the WhatsApp hack could have much broader political and diplomatic consequences than previously thought.

WhatsApp recently filed a lawsuit against the Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group which it believes built and sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in its servers to enable others to hack into the smartphones of at least 1,400 users of the company's messaging app.

At this time, it is still unclear as to who used the NSO Group's software to hack the smartphones of government and military officials but the firm has said that it sells its spyware exclusively to government customers.

According to people familiar with the investigation, some victims are in the US, UAE, Bahrain, Mexico, Pakistan and India. A dozen journalists and human rights activists in India have also come forward to say they were targeted.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow

14-Year-Old Genius Solves Blind Spots

Using some relatively inexpensive and readily available technology you can find at any well-stocked electronics store, Alaina Gassler, a 14-year-old inventor from West Grove, Pennsylvania, came up with a clever way to eliminate the blind spot created by the thick pillars on the side of a car's windshield.

Gassler's actually too young to have a driver's license in most states and has never experienced the frustration of trying to see around those pillars while driving, but that didn't stop her from tackling a problem that automakers have largely ignored. Her solution involves installing an outward-facing webcam on the outside of a vehicle's windshield pillar, and then projecting a live feed from that camera onto the inside of that pillar. Custom 3D-printed parts allowed her to perfectly align the projected image so that it seamlessly blends with what a driver sees through the passenger window and the windshield, essentially making the pillar invisible.

Her invention was part of a project called "Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots," which Gassler presented at this year's Society for Science and the Public's Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars) science and engineering competition. (It's basically a next-level science fair minus the cheesy papier-mâché volcanoes.) Her ingenuity was enough to earn her the competition's top honor, the Samueli Foundation Prize, which also netted Gassler $25,000.

A YouTube video of this invention in use is available.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

They say that hindsight is 20-20, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in academic research.

"We've all had the experience of standing up to present a novel set of findings, often building on years of work, and having someone in the audience blurt out 'But we knew this already!,'" says Prof. Stefano DellaVigna, a behavioral economist with joint appointments in the Department of Economics and Berkeley Haas. "But in most of these cases, someone would have said the same thing had we found the opposite result. We're all 20-20, after the fact."

DellaVigna has a cure for this type of academic Monday morning quarterbacking: a prediction platform to capture the conventional wisdom before studies are run.

Along with colleagues Devin Pope of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and Eva Vivalt of the Research School of Economics at Australian National University, he's launched a beta website that will allow researchers, PhD students, and even members of the general public to review proposed research projects and make predictions on the outcome.

[...]Their proposal, laid out in a new article in Science's Policy Forum, is part of a wave of efforts to improve the rigor and credibility of social science research. These reforms were sparked by the replication crisis -- the failure of reproduce the results of many published studies -- and include mass efforts to replicate studies as well as platforms for pre-registering research designs and hypotheses.

"We thought there was something important to be gained by having a record of what people believed before the results were known, and social scientists have never done that in a systematic way," says DellaVigna, who co-directs the Berkeley Initiative for Behavioral Economics and Finance. "This will not only help us better identify results that are truly surprising, but will also help improve experimental design and the accuracy of forecasts."

Journal Reference:

Stefano DellaVigna, Devin Pope, Eva Vivalt. Predict science to improve science. Science, 2019; 366 (6464): 428 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz1704

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow

New York Supreme Court dismisses Uber's challenge to vehicle caps

Uber's bid to overturn New York City's ride-hailing caps didn't last long --New York's Supreme Court has dismissed the company's request to annul the cap law implemented in August 2018. The court rejected Uber's claim that NYC had overstepped its bounds. There have been far less specific delegations of power that have passed muster before, according to the Supreme Court. It also rebuffed Uber's assertion that other laws preempted the caps.

Uber told Engadget it was "disappointed" with the outcome, claiming that it "punishes" drivers who are obligated to rent cars. In the past, it has argued that the caps would hurt outer boroughs (with less access to mass transit) and wouldn't fix NYC's problems with traffic congestion.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

[Editor's Note: This is a little different from our usual offerings, but if you have 10 minutes to spare, it is an interesting read. It explains how users of Limewire - a file sharing program popular 20 or so years ago - were unintionally leaking personal and private data which gave one person an idea that just grew and grew.]

Long, interesting story on cyber-security, in The New Yorker magazine.

Before Robert Boback got into the field of cybersecurity, he was a practicing chiropractor in the town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He was also selling used cars on eBay and flipping houses purchased at police auctions. The decision to branch out into computers came in 2003, after he watched a "60 Minutes" report by Lesley Stahl about pirated movies. For years, while digital piracy was devastating the music industry, Hollywood had largely been spared; limitations on bandwidth curtailed the online trade in movies. But this was changing, Stahl noted: "The people running America's movie studios know that if they don't do something, fast, they could be in the same boat as the record companies.

The story gets more interesting. Bob visits Langley.

Inside, the head of the Directorate of Science and Technology was joined by an official representing In-Q-Tel, a corporation that the C.I.A. had set up to fund new technologies. (The "Q" refers to the technician in James Bond films.) A follow-up call from one of the participants led to more trips to D.C., and suddenly Boback and Hopkins were journeying through the shadow world of the post-9/11 national-security establishment.

And, file-sharing detection as a service.

Tiversa's prominent supporters quickly helped Boback assemble an impressive client list: Capital One, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, American Express. The companies were paying for a monthly monitoring service, in which Tiversa scanned for breached corporate information, or the personal data of top executives. By this time, EagleVision X1 could access more than a million users, and its capabilities were expanding. Because peer-to-peer networks were constantly in flux, as people turned their computers on and off,
Hopkins had designed a stable repository for the system, which became known as the Data Store. EagleVision X1, programmed with search terms that were set for clients (for instance, "Lloyd Blankfein," for Goldman Sachs), would scour the networks, then deposit what it found in the Data Store. Each file was labelled to indicate when it was downloaded and what I.P. address it came from, so that its behavior could be tracked—if it remained in the same location, or if it was being shared, or if it suddenly vanished.

What happens to this respository is one of the interesting, and unanswered, questions in the article. Suffice it to say, it does not end well, to get people to buy data security services, sometimes you have to scare them by stealing or faking a theft of their data. Interesting read.

Original Submission

Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow

Woman Found Dead With A Python Around Her Neck in House Full of 140 Snakes

In a residence purportedly housing 140 other snakes, an Indiana woman was found dead Wednesday evening with an 8-foot-long python hanging around her neck.

According to a report from the Journal & Courier, police are currently investigating the death of Laura Hurst, 36, in Oxford, Indiana, though they have a hunch. “She appears to have been strangled by the snake,” Indiana State Police Sgt. Kim Riley told the Journal & Courier, but that fact remains unconfirmed until results come back from an autopsy scheduled for Friday.

The reticulated python wrapped around Hurst’s neck was apparently one of 20 snakes she kept in the house and visited regularly. It purportedly belongs to Benton County Sheriff Don Munson (Oxford is part of Benton County), a next-door neighbor who was also the first to come across the body. He’d retrofitted the residence into a sort of makeshift snake sanctuary filled with 140 snakes per the J&C report, though exactly how many belong to him remains unclear. According to the report, Munson called Hurst’s death a “tragic accident with loss of human life.”

While captive pythons tend to be less aggressive than their wild counterparts, attacks are still far from uncommon. One study found that at least 16 people in the U.S. have been killed by them between 1978 and 2009. Their sheer size alone can prove challenging for many owners. Reticulated pythons can weigh up to 350 pounds and grow upwards of 20 feet long.

And I just wanted to share this fact because I found it deeply disturbing: Though they usually strangle their prey, there’s been a few rarecases of wild pythons swallowing grown men and women whole. Holy crap.

[H/T Journal & Courier]

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Capital One Fixes Systemwide Outage:

The outage happening on a Friday -- and the first of the month -- makes for some bad timing.

Capital One customers had to wait several hours before they could access their money on Friday. The bank had a massive outage that prevented people from withdrawing or depositing funds.

A tweet from the bank's customer service Twitter account Friday afternoon said the issue affecting its customers in the morning had been resolved. However, some tweeted in response, saying they still couldn't access their direct deposits, or transfer funds.

Friday morning, the Capital One customer service account confirmed the outage after a customer tweeted about being unable to access an account. One apparent customer tweeted that she'd contacted the bank by phone and was told by a representative that it was a systemwide problem.

A company spokesperson said in an email Friday that customers won't be responsible for any late fees associated with this issue.

It's nice that Capital One will not directly charge fees to their customers because of the outage, but what about people who did not have their deposits accepted and saw automated payments bounced? What about the indirect fees their customers incurred as a result?

Previously:
Capital One Target of Massive Data Breach

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Belgian city of Kortrijk in West Flanders is reportedly using data provided by a mobile phone company to count the number of people present in the town and where they come from.

Even more worryingly, local public-service broadcaster VRT has reported that city officials will try to cross-reference this data with credit and debit card databases.

Kortrijk is a popular tourist destination: between July and August, 799,336 people visited the town, almost 20,000 a day when students, employees and residents are excluded.

According to VRT, the city is paying telco Proximus €40,000 a year for data on how many phones are in each part of the city, presumably using cell location data. Proximus then apparently extrapolates data for the rest of the area while taking into account subscribers to other networks and those without mobile phones. We've asked both Proximus and local city officials for comment.

But the Belgian data protection regulator has told The Register that, contrary to reports, it had not approved the scheme and was examining whether or not it breaks Belgian data protection law.

In an email, a spokesperson said:

We did not approve the tracking of mobile phones in Kortrijk. The Privacy Commission (the predecessor of the Belgian Data Protection Authority) had reacted positively to a similar project in 2016; that was three years ago and was not about this precise case. We have heard concerns from citizens about this project, therefore we will look into it. We cannot comment further at the time because we do not have all the details about the project and the processing.

The data will be collected once every three months and analysed to improve marketing campaigns for tourism and commerce.

Data provided to the city apparently includes the nationality of the subscriber or the province or even municipality within Belgium they come from.

The intention is that city hall will then cross-reference this with data from Visa and debit card companies to see how much people are spending. VRT said the first results show sales days bring in more visitors – 49,000 for Whit Sunday. Of these, 79 per cent of local visitors were from West Flanders, 4.82 per cent came from Hainault, and 1.53 per cent from Antwerp. Of foreign visitors, half were French and 14 per cent Dutch.

Original Submission