My heart and prayers go out to those affected by hurricane Maria.
How to help those affected by Maria and the other hurricanes.
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Extreme Tech: The World is not ending this coming Saturday, nor is it the beginning of the countdown to 'Doomsday'.
In the extreme case, yet tiny percent chance that it does happen, we know who to blame: Russia.
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I LOVE BetaNews. (It's Tech dopamine for the IT crowd.) The Librem 5 smart phone has both GNOME and Purism in its corner in developing a PRIVACY BASED cell phone.
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| Via: Beta News |
Gizmodo: Equifax Has Been Sending Consumers to a Fake Phishing Site for Almost Two Weeks.
Equifax’s response to its data breach has been a total shitshow, [sic] something the company seems determined to remind us of each and every day.(I can't see Equifax being a viable company for much longer. And - if I were TransUnion and Experian - I'd be target marketing businesses that use Equifax and make every attempt to make that customer mine.)
For nearly two weeks, the company’s official Twitter account has been directing users to a fake lookalike website, the sole purpose of which is to expose Equifax’s reckless response to the breach.
[.]
After announcing the breach, Equifax directed its customers to equifaxsecurity2017.com, a website where they can enroll in identity theft protection services and find updates about how Equifax is handing the “cybersecurity incident.”
But the decision to create “equifaxsecurity2017” in the first place was monumentally stupid. The URL is long and it doesn’t look very official—that means it’s going to be very easy to emulate. Fake versions of the site could be used to phish Equifax customers and steal their personal information, again. A much safer choice would have been to create a subdomain on the Equifax website (equifax.com) and direct users there.
To illustrate how idiotic Equifax’s decision was, developer Nick Sweeting created a fake website of his own: securityequifax2017.com.
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Via TechNews World, from E-Commerce Times: The Internet of Things is a Boon for B2B business. No doubt - this is a hugely untapped market.
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Attention Gamers...From PC World: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW about the new XBox One X.
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Security Week: Apple issuing security patches. (Looks like Apple is going to give MicroSoft some competition in issuing patches):
Apple this week announced the availability of 8 security patches for its iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation users, released as part of the iOS 11 platform upgrade.
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C|Net: $126,000 and change will buy you the 2017 Jaguar F / SVR. Full review of the Jag HERE.
I keep my distance until a straightaway comes up, then cross over the dashed line and unleash the 575-horsepower fury of the F-Type SVR's supercharged V8, sport exhaust turned on for maximum effect.
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It manages to mute vibration even on rough back roads, letting me enjoy the beautiful diamond upholstery on seats and door panels, along with the excellent audio quality from the Meridian-branded 12 speaker 770-watt audio system.
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| The Jag. Image via C|Net. |
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WIRED: Fake meat...that bleeds.
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...in a lab-kitchen hybrid in a Silicon Valley office park, [a] company called Impossible Foods has over the last six years done something not quite impossible, but definitely unlikely: Engineering a plant-based burger that smells, tastes, looks, and even feels like ground beef.
C|Net: Facebook enabled marketers to target ads to "Jew-Haters."
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TechCrunch: Tech giants asked to remove extremism content at a faster pace.
...fining social media firms which fail to meet collective targets for illegal content takedowns has also been floated by the heads of state. Earlier this year the German government proposed a regime of fines for social media firms that fail to meet local takedown targets for illegal content.- - -
The Guardian reports today that the UK government would like to see the time it takes for online extremist content to be removed to be greatly speeded up — from an average of 36 hours down to just two.
That’s a considerably narrower timeframe than the 24 hour window for performing such takedowns agreed within a voluntary European Commission code of conduct which the four major social media platformed signed up to in 2016.
Nextgov: Federal Agencies bewildered by Blockchain. Good!
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New Atlas: Hypersonic flight. Threat or opportunity?
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| Fly faster! Image: NASA |
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Via Information Week; at Dark Reading:
1.9 Billion Data Records Exposed in First Half of 2017
Every second, 122 records are exposed in breaches around the globe, a new report shows. And that's doesn't even include the new Equifax breach data.- - -
More than 10 million data records are pilfered or lost every day around the world, a rate of more than 7,000 per minute: and that's only the numbers from breaches that go public.
WebProNews: Amazon foments bidding wars in 100 cities.
Amazon has publicly solicited bids from cities to become the location of its second home, dubbed as “HQ2.” As a result, cities are now trying their best to outdo each other to come up with enough enticing perks to woo the internet firm.Yeah, that tiny, small market, start-up company...Amazon and it's alien-human hybrid leader Jeff Bezos, need financial business incentives and perks in order to be profitable.
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| Bezos. A human-appearing robot made in Westworld. |
ArsTechnia: Man holds website hostage, demands $10 Grand. They don't pay so he re-directs their URL to a gay p0rn site.
An Arizona man was sentenced Monday to four years of federal probation after he pled guilty to effectively holding a corporate website hostage and redirecting it to a gay porn site for several days in 2015. The defendant, Tavis Tso, was also ordered to pay over $9,000 in restitution.- - -
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...Tso told company staffers that he could help them fix the problem—for the low price of $10,000.
When they refused, he redirected the site to a gay pornographic website. Somehow, after several days—court documents are vague on this point—the company’s site was returned to normal.
ArsTechnia: Mysterious flesh-eating bacteria in Australia on the rise. Big Time.
The infections are caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans, a slow-growing bacterium that causes gaping, palm-sized ulcers. Sometimes called Buruli ulcers, the lesions seem to dissolve skin and gnaw away at tissue. The bacteria are known to lurk around Victoria, but experts don’t know where it lives or how it spreads.- - -
TechCrunch link fixed 9/21/2017
