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Tag: #Surveillance

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

The Digital ID Issue No One Is Talking About

The Digital ID Issue No One Is Talking About

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

“Dozens of organizations had data stolen in Oracle-linked hacks,” TechCrunch reported. “Google said in a corresponding blog post that the hacking campaign targeting Oracle customers dates back to at least July 10, some three months before the hacks were first detected. Oracle conceded this week that the hackers behind the extortion campaign were still abusing its software to steal personal information about corporate executives and their companies. Days earlier, Oracle’s chief security officer claimed in the same post — since scrubbed — that the extortion campaign was linked to previously identified vulnerabilities that Oracle patched in July, suggesting the hacks were over.”

For the record, this hack “can be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password.”

The Discord Hack Is Every Users Worse Nightmare. “Around 70,000 users’ personal data at risk. Hackers targeted a third-party company…in an effort to extort a ‘ransom,’ Discord said,” noted The Independent.  Both users ID photos and data were stolen. Read More...

The Deep State of Tech

The Deep State of Tech

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Last week was Tech Week in New York and since AI is the fastest growing technology in human history, of course the calendar of events was all AI, all the time. We watched as audiences listened with rapt attention to speakers as they expounded upon the world of difference that various AI technologies and their applications would make to the human condition.

Once again, we will remind you that what man cannot remember he is doomed to repeat. Unfortunately, with AI in the mix, it will be repeated on steroids.

When the Age of Social dawned and Facebook, Google and the likes were establishing their beachheads, we warned back then that these were not mere platforms but rather nation-states with larger populations than any single country on the planet. Or even continent, for that matter. Those platforms are now AI-enabled – more and more so every day – and it seems that there’s no escaping that matrix. Read More...

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

Aileen Lee’s Look at the Unicorn Club, Ten Years After She Coined the Term

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

It was Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures who coined the term ‘unicorn.’ Now she has taken a fresh look: Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later. A lot changes in ten years, especially in tech.

As Lee observed, ten years ago, the majority of unicorns were consumer focused. Now, the pendulum has swung hard to enterprise, and the herd is about to be thinned – for now -, as many a so-called unicorn is a ‘papercorn.’ Capital efficiency has dropped precipitously, Silicon Valley is no longer the unicorn hub (“The Bay Area is still the largest unicorn pasture, but lost a lot of ground”). She also predicts that AI will be a superunicorn.

Facebook was the standout beast in 2013, but our question is, how good is a unicorn’s eyesight? One would think or at least hope that unicorns are visionaries in some way (preferably in a good way), but the two terms are hardly interchangeable. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs certainly was that square peg in the round hole who was crazy enough to think that he could change the world – in a good way – and he did. The iPod, the iPhone. The NeXt cube, that changed computers forever. Jobs was no doubt a visionary, and a design genius. Read More...

Hanging by a Thread: A Double Entendre?

Hanging by a Thread: A Double Entendre?

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 Unless you’ve been under a rock – or unplugged due to an extended Independence Day holiday – you do know that Meta has released ‘Twitter killer’ Threads. Thirty million people signed on Day One, and it’s easy to join. No special invite required. No early adopter wait list. All you need is an Instagram account and click on the icon. You’re in!

Ah, but can you just as easily get out?

Long answer: no.  Not without deleting your Instagram account and even then, who knows what data capture threads Meta has left behind. Read More...

On Apples, Oranges and Mangos: An End of Summer Compote

On Apples, Oranges and Mangos: An End of Summer Compote

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This week is the last hurrah of summer, so something different this time: a look at what’s been happening in Big Tech at large, primarily with  a number of the FAANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, for those playing the home version – or more appropriately now MAANG, since Facebook is now Meta – and for our purposes here, MAANGO, as we’re including Oracle and some information that recently came to light. Plus, mangos are very much a summer fruit, after all.

Oracle

Speaking of just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water (not!):  Class-Action Lawsuit Accuses Oracle of Tracking 5 Billion People. “Oracle stands accused of collecting detailed dossiers on 5 billion people, with the information gathered including names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity,” PC Mag reported.

“This claim is backed up by a video on the ICCL website(Opens in a new window) of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison describing how the company’s real-time machine learning system collects this information and confirms the 5 billion profiles stored in the “Oracle Data Cloud.” The profiles are referred to as a “Consumers Identity Graph.”” Read More...

Tech’s Insatiable Appetite

Tech’s Insatiable Appetite

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While we’ve all had a lot of fun being distracted by Elon Musk and his Twitter takeover, which may or may not be on hold, at least for now, there are a few things that you might have missed. We may also be at the juncture of a new era in tech.

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Wee the People

Wee the People

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Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

We were half joking last week when we suggested that, in many cases in tech, so-called terms of service be renamed ‘terms of servitude.’ Given the amount of data scraping and surveillance we’ve seen because of the lockdowns (think the enormous spike in Amazon and Walmart online orders, while mom and pops were forced to close). It’ll be interesting to see what fresh hell comes next. The New Normal? Might want to think New Police State.

Or something like that.

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The New Apple, to the Core

The New Apple, to the Core

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Apple recently announced that they’re going to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, “drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused, including by governments looking to surveil their citizens,” according to Yahoo News.  

Apple is all about protecting children, as we well know. After all, Apple knew a supplier was using child labor but took 3 years to fully cut ties, despite the company’s promises to hold itself to the ‘highest standards,’ report says. “Ten former members of Apple’s supplier responsibility team (said) the company has refused or has been slow to stop doing business with suppliers that repeatedly violate its labor policies when doing so would hurt its profits.”  

So, obviously Apple is not driven by protecting children, although claiming so does tend to pull at the heartstrings and move people to quickly surrender yet another aspect of their privacy/allow surveillance. As Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out in the Yahoo piece, “abuses could include government surveillance of dissidents or protesters…”What happens when the Chinese government says, ‘Here is a list of files that we want you to scan for,’” Green asked. “Does Apple say no? I hope they say no, but their technology won’t say no.”   Read More...

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

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We know that the lockdowns with the Covid flu went far in enriching the coffers of the tech cartel at an (even more) accelerated rate than usual (World’s Richest People Smashed Wealth Records This Week). At some point, it’s no longer about money: it’s about what that largesse can bring and in case you missed it, NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director. “This is the very NSA chief (Keith B. Alexander) who was the face of the agency’s mass sweeping up of Americans’ communications exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled the invasive NSA program was “illegal” and that US officials lied about it… For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.” ZeroHedge reported, and it’s a must-read, and note to self: “Crucially his tenure as Director of the National Security Agency went for nearly a decade, from August 2005 to March 2014. From there he founded a cybersecurity technology company in 2014, of which he’s still leads as Co-CEO and president, called IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc.”

The hire came “Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter (in the Washington Post, which, like Amazon, is also owned by Jeff Bezos) slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft.”

Never mind that Amazon Web Services is now authorized to host the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive data, including top secret Pentagon and NSA information (as of 2017) and also has “a monopoly on many services on the internet,” as Esha (@eshaLegal) noted, and “Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker ‘Halo’ promises to scan users’ bodies and track emotions in their voice,” RT reported, Read More...