Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Ring Fired Employees for Watching Customer Videos

The price of Bitcoin SV is pumping once again on developments regarding the Craig Wright vs Kleiman court case. Rumors are now circulating that the final key missing from the mysterious Tulip Trust has now been delivered to the Satoshi Nakamoto claimant.

Bitcoin SV, the cryptocurrency championed by Craig Wright himself, has reacted quite positively to the news, moving from a weekly low of around $160 to more than $200 at the time of publishing.
Missing Bitcoin Key Appears: Craig Wright's 'Shadowy Courier' Reportedly Delivered


Man deported to China for 'economic crimes' spent time in jail 

 A man who the Chinese government claims was the first Australian visa holder to be repatriated back to China over “economic crimes” was deported because he was unable to renew his visa after being sent to prison.

The man was sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Australia of at least 12 months, requiring him to be removed from the country.

Things go from strange to stranger when we think about justification




Twitter will soon let you choose who can reply to your tweets - VentureBeat: “During a press briefing at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, executives from Twitter outlined policy changes that’ll affect the social network’s over 330 million users in the months to come. Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour focused on three core tenets in his presentation: health, conversations, and interest. “Public conversation is only valuable if it’s healthy enough that people would want to participate in the first place,” he said. “[We need to] ensure the integrity of the information that people are consuming on the platform is high


Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues January 12, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss, highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: FBI, Homeland Security warn of Iranian terror and cyber threat in new intelligence bulletin; Police are buying hidden cameras disguised as rocks, trees, tombstones; ‘Shattered’: Inside the secret battle to save America’s undercover spies in the digital age; and Cities, states face costly cybersecurity landscape after attacks spiked in 2019.

Visual guide to Australia’s bushfires raging across the country - The Guardian – “Bushfires have swept large parts of Australia since October, leaving more than 20 people dead, destroying thousands of homes and devastating wildlife. Unprecedented bushfires continue to ravage south-east Australia, with at least 24 people confirmed dead so far and almost 2,000 homes destroyed. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes in New South Wales and Victoria, in some cases only with help from the Australian navy…The fires have had catastrophic effects on the local wildlife, killing millions of animals and threatening the survival of entire species. Smoke plumes posed a significant health threat even to those living miles away, as the wind carried heavily polluted air to Sydney and Canberra, and as far as New Zealand. Wildfire smoke contains poisonous gases such as carbon monoxide and fine particles known as PM2.5 which pass through the lungs and can harm virtually every organ in the human body. A monitoring site in the Monash suburb of Canberra measured an air quality index of 5,185 on Friday, more than 20 times the level that is considered hazardous…” 


Accountants will save the planet



I finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox and you should too - Digital Trends – “The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well. But that didn’t happen overnight. Since Firefox’s 2017 overhaul, Mozilla has been pushing updates around the clock. Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don’t have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It’s rare that I’m forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro’s fans don’t blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop’s fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years. One of the recent major performance updates arrived in May when Mozilla natively integrated a handful of clever optimizations for which users previously had to rely on third-party extensions…”

RECALIBRATING: Fitting personal life into the few hours between getting home and bedtime is the main source of today’s time-squeeze.



San Diego’s massive, 7-year experiment with facial recognition technology appears to be a flop – “Since 2012, the city’s law enforcement agencies have compiled over 65,000 face scans and tried to match them against a massive mugshot database. But it’s almost completely unclear how effective the initiative was, with one spokesperson saying they’re unaware of a single arrest or prosecution that stemmed from the program…Now, after the California legislature instituted a three-year ban on police use of mobile facial recognition technology, one of the nation’s most overhyped and least well-understood policing tools has been switched off…”



Ring Fired Employees for Watching Customer Videos - Vice: “Amazon-owned home security camera company Ring has fired employees for improperly accessing Ring users’ video data, according to a letter the company wrote to Senators and obtained by Motherboard. The news highlights a risk across many different tech companies: employees may abuse access granted as part of their jobs to look at customer data or information. In Ring’s case this data can be particularly sensitive though, as customers often put the cameras inside their home.

“We are aware of incidents discussed below where employees violated our policies,” the letter from Ring, dated January 6, reads. “Over the last four years, Ring has received four complaints or inquiries regarding a team member’s access to Ring video data,” it continues. Ring explains that although each of these people were authorized to view video data, their attempted access went beyond what they needed to access for their job…”