A collection point
...and some of my own.
Microsoft to permanently close all of its retail stores By Chris Welch: Microsoft is giving up on physical retail. Today the company announced plans to permanently close all Microsoft Store locations in the United States and around the world, except for four locations that will be “reimagined” as experience centers that no longer sell products. Those locations are New York City (Fifth Ave), London (Oxford Circus), Sydney (Westfield Sydney), and the Redmond campus location. The London store only just opened about a year ago. All other Microsoft Store locations across the United States and globally will be closing, and the company will concentrate on digital retail moving forward. CERN approves plans for a $23 billion, 62-mile long super-collider Steve Dent: CERN has approved plans to build a $23 billion super-collider 100 km in circumference (62 miles) that would make the current 27 km 16 teraelectron volt (TeV) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) look tiny in comparison. The so-called Future Circular Collider (FCC) would smash particles together with over 100 TeV of energy to create many more of the elusive Higgs bosons first detected by CERN in 2012. This “Higgs factory” would be key to helping physicists learn more about dark matter and other mysteries of the Standard Model of physics. If they can raise the money, new construction would start in 2038 and would be used to extend the work with elusive Higgs bosons, named after Peter Higgs to explain why particles have mass, learn more about dark matter and answer more questions about the 17 particles in the standard model of physics, however you will need to use CERN issued SSO credentials with 2fa to access the results until they are published publicly. Let's see what Zuck does with this one. The #StopHateForProfit advertising boycott of Facebook by civil rights groups continues to gather steam with over 100 companies joining in: North Face, REI, Patagonia, Starbucks, Coca Cola, Unilever, Hershey, Verizon, Proctor & Gamble. The list of boycotting companies was at 184 when we put this article together. “Let’s send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence,” the website reads. Facebook stock is down $30 a share over the last 5 days. We have not been big proponents of Facebooks security or privacy over the years, so at least for those who continue to use this high risk social media platform, you may get some fact checking in amongst the more controversial stories. Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online. Billions of records exposed. Zack Whittaker: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There’s no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of dollars buying startups to build its very own panopticon of users’ web browsing data. One of those startups, BlueKai, which Oracle bought for a little over $400 million in 2014, is barely known outside marketing circles, but it amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government. BlueKai uses website cookies and other tracking tech to follow you around the web. By knowing which websites you visit and which emails you open, marketers can use this vast amount of tracking data to infer as much about you as possible — your income, education, political views, and interests to name a few — in order to target you with ads that should match your apparent tastes. If you click, the advertisers make money. But for a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle. TechCrunch reviewed the data shared by Sen and found names, home addresses, email addresses and other identifiable data in the database. The data also revealed sensitive users’ web browsing activity — from purchases to newsletter unsubscribes. “There’s really no telling how revealing some of this data can be,” said Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told TechCrunch. BlueKai relies on vacuuming up a never-ending supply of data from a variety of sources to understand trends to deliver the most precise ads to a person’s interests. Marketers can either tap into Oracle’s enormous bank of data, which it pulls in from credit agencies, analytics firms, and other sources of consumer data including billions of daily location data points, in order to target their ads. Or marketers can upload their own data obtained directly from consumers, such as the information you hand over when you register an account on a website or when you sign up for a company’s newsletter. But BlueKai also uses more covert tactics like allowing websites to embed invisible pixel-sized images to collect information about you as soon as you open the page — hardware, operating system, browser and any information about the network connection. This data — known as a web browser’s “user agent” — may not seem sensitive, but when fused together it can create a unique “fingerprint” of a person’s device, which can be used to track that person as they browse the internet. BlueKai can also tie your mobile web browsing habits to your desktop activity, allowing it to follow you across the internet no matter which device you use. Say a marketer wants to run a campaign trying to sell a new car model. In BlueKai’s case, it already has a category of “car enthusiasts” — and many other, more specific categories — that the marketer can use to target with ads. Anyone who’s visited a car maker’s website or a blog that includes a BlueKai tracking pixel might be categorized as a “car enthusiast.” Over time that person will be siloed into different categories under a profile that learns as much about you to target you with those ads. Behind the scenes, BlueKai continuously ingests and matches as much raw personal data as it can against each person’s profile, constantly enriching that profile data to make sure it’s up to date and relevant. But it was that raw data spilling out of the exposed database. TechCrunch found records containing details of private purchases. One record detailed how a German man, whose name we’re withholding, used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site on April 19. The record also contained the man’s address, phone number and email address. Another record revealed how one of the largest investment holding companies in Turkey used BlueKai to track users on its website. The record detailed how one person, who lives in Istanbul, ordered $899 worth of furniture online from a homeware store. We know because the record contained all of these details, including the buyer’s name, email address and the direct web address for the buyer’s order, no login needed. We also reviewed a record detailing how one person unsubscribed from an email newsletter run by an electronics consumer, sent to his iCloud address. The record showed that the person may have been interested in a specific model of car dash-cam. We can even tell based on his user agent that his iPhone was out of date and needed a software update. “Fine-grained records of people’s web-browsing habits can reveal hobbies, political affiliation, income bracket, health conditions, sexual preferences, and — as evident here — gambling habits,” said the EFF’s Cyphers. “As we live more of our lives online, this kind of data accounts for a larger and larger portion of how we spend our time.” The data went back to August 2019. “Whenever databases like this exist, there’s always a risk the data will end up in the wrong hands and in a position to hurt someone,” said Cyphers. “It also makes a valuable target for law enforcement and government agencies who want to piggyback on the data gathering that Oracle already does." “Everyone has different things they want to keep private, and different people they want to keep them private from. When companies collect raw web browsing or purchase data, thousands of little details about real people’s lives get scooped up along the way. Each one of those little details has the potential to put somebody at risk.” IRS Used Cellphone Location Data to Try to Find Suspects The unsuccessful effort shows how anonymized information sold by marketers is increasingly being used by law enforcement to identify suspects. The Internal Revenue Service attempted to identify and track potential criminal suspects by purchasing access to a commercial database that records the locations of millions of American cellphones. The IRS Criminal Investigation unit, or IRS CI, had a subscription to access the data in 2017 and 2018, sold by a Virginia-based government contractor called Venntel Inc. Venntel obtains anonymized location data from the marketing industry and resells it to governments. IRS CI pursues the most serious and flagrant violations of tax law, and it said it used the Venntel database in "significant money-laundering, cyber, drug and organized-crime cases." "The tool provided information as to where a phone with an anonymized identifier (created by Venntel) is located at different times," Mr. Cole said. "For example, if we know that a suspicious ATM deposit was made at a specific time and at a specific location, and we have one or more other data points for the same scheme, we can cross reference the data from each event to see if one or more devices were present at multiple transactions. This would then allow us to identify the device used by a potential suspect and attempt to follow that particular movement." 1,600 Google Employees Demand No Tech for Police At least 1,666 Google employees are demanding the company stop selling technology to police departments, according to a letter shared with Motherboard. “We’re disappointed to know that Google is still selling to police forces, and advertises its connection with police forces as somehow progressive, and seeks more expansive sales rather than severing ties with police and joining the millions who want to defang and defund these institutions,” reads the letter. “Why help the institutions responsible for the knee on George Floyd’s neck to be more effective organizationally?” Leave a Reply. |
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