That was an omission that baffled me. Why wouldn't you stagger the deployment regardless of how confident you were with your testing?
I have noticed my phone being warmer than usual, which on my previous phone indicated a battery drain.Reality Check wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 12:23 pm Since I updated my iPhone XR to iOS 17.6 the other day my battery life seems to have gone to pot. Has anyone else experienced this?
The Most Chilling Words Today: I’m from NewsGuard and I am Here to Rate you
Jonathan Turley
July 29, 2024
Here are is the column:
- Below is my column in The Hill on the recent notice that this blog is now being formally “reviewed” by NewsGuard, a company that I just criticized in a prior Hill column as a threat to free speech. The questions from NewsGuard were revealing and concerning. Today, I have posted the response of NewsGuard’s co-founder Gordon Crovitz as well as my response to his arguments.
Recently, I wrote a Hill column criticizing NewsGuard, a rating operation being used to warn users, advertisers, educators and funders away from media outlets based on how it views the outlets’ “credibility and transparency.”
Roughly a week later, NewsGuard came knocking at my door. My blog, Res Ipsa (jonathanturley.org), is now being reviewed and the questions sent by NewsGuard were alarming, but not surprising.
I do not know whether the sudden interest in my site was prompted by my column. I have previously criticized NewsGuard as one of the most sophisticated operations being used to “white list” and “black list” sites.
My new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” details how such sites fit into a massive censorship system that one federal court called “Orwellian.”
For any site criticizing the media or the Biden administration, the most chilling words today are “I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you.”
Conservatives have long accused the company of targeting conservative and libertarian sites and carrying out the agenda of its co-founder Steven Brill. Conversely, many media outlets have heralded his efforts to identify disinformation sites for advertisers and agencies.
Brill and his co-founder, L. Gordon Crovitz, want their company to be the media version of the Standard & Poor’s rating for financial institutions. However, unlike the S&P, which looks at financial reports, NewsGuard rates highly subjective judgments like “credibility” based on whether they publish “clearly and significantly false or egregiously misleading” information. They even offer a “Nutrition Label” for consumers of information.
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/07/29/t ... -rate-you/
WhatsApp Lets Script Execution On Windows Devices Go Without Warnings
written by Abeerah Hashim
July 31, 2024
As observed, WhatsApp for Windows does not block Python or PHP script execution on Windows systems. This behavior threatens users as it potentially allows malicious scripts.
WhatsApp Lets Script Execution On Windows Devices Go Without Warnings
Meta’s WhatsApp chat platform exhibits a weird feature that raises security concerns. According to the researcher Saumyajeet Das, WhatsApp for Windows does not generate security warnings when downloading Python files from WhatsApp chats. Thus, it becomes possible for an adversary to send malicious scripts to a target WhatsApp Windows user.
While WhatsApp usually blocks most file types, such as .exe and .bat files, generating warning prompts to prevent security risks, it does not include three file types: .PYZ (Python ZIP app), .PYZW (PyInstaller program) and .EVTX (Windows event Log file).
Following Das’s report, Bleeping Computer further investigated the matter and confirmed the researchers’ findings. In fact, Bleeping Computer also observed similar leniency from WhatsApp for PHP scripts, demonstrating their findings in a video.
Meta Doesn’t Deem It A Security Issue Upon discovering this security issue, Das responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to Meta via their bug bounty program. However, the tech giant refused to acknowledge it as a flaw.
According to their statement to Bleeping Computer, Meta officials do not consider this WhatsApp behavior a security flaw. Instead, they seem content with WhatsApp’s existing alert system. Moreover, they also put the onus of safety on the users, reiterating how they warn users not to open or interact with files received from untrusted sources.
https://latesthackingnews.com/2024/07/3 ... -warnings/
Company Paid Record-Breaking $75 Million to Ransomware Group: Report
Zscaler is aware of a company that paid a record-breaking $75 million ransom to the Dark Angels ransomware group.
ByEduard Kovacs
July 31, 2024
Zscaler is aware of a company that paid a record-breaking $75 million ransom to the Dark Angels ransomware group, the cybersecurity firm revealed in its ThreatLabz 2024 Ransomware Report.
Data collected by the company between April 2023 and April 2024 shows an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks, according to the report.
As for the record-breaking ransom payment, the company said it was paid by an unnamed victim in early 2024. According to Zscaler, $75 million is nearly double the highest publicly known ransom payment.
The list of companies that reportedly paid large ransoms in the past include CNA Insurance ($40 million), CDK Global ($25 million) and Change Healthcare ($22 million).
The cybersecurity industry and governments often advise against paying a ransom as that only encourages hackers to launch more attacks, and victims that pay up are often targeted a second time.
Dark Angels emerged in May 2022 and is known for operating a data leak site called Dunghill. The ransomware group is known for attacks on major organizations. One of its targets was Johnson Controls, from which the hackers reportedly demanded a $51 million ransom.
The cybercrime group is also known for stealing vast amounts of information from victims — in the case of Johnson Controls, they claimed to have stolen 27 Tb worth of files.
https://www.securityweek.com/company-pa ... up-report/
Senate Passes Kids’ “Safety” Bills Despite Privacy, Digital ID, and Censorship Concerns
Didi Rankovic
July 31, 2024
Two bills combined – the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) – have passed in the US Senate in a 91-3 vote, and will now be considered by the House.
Criticism of the bills focuses mainly on the likelihood that, if and when they become law, they will help expand online digital ID verification, as well as around issues like censorship (removal and blocking of content).
The effort to make KOSA and COPA 2.0 happen was spearheaded by a parent group that was pushing lawmakers and tech companies’ executives to move in this direction, and their main demand was to enact new rules that would prevent cyberbullying and other harms.
And now the main sponsors, senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and Republican Marsha Blackburn are trying to dispel these concerns, suggesting these are not “speech bills” and do not (directly) impose age verification.
Further defending the bills, they say that the legislation does not mandate that internet platforms start collecting even more user data, and reject the notion it is invasive of people’s privacy.
But the problem is that although technically true, this interpretation of the bills’ impact is ultimately incorrect, as some of their provisions do encourage censorship, facilitate the introduction of digital ID for age verification, and leave the door open for mass collection of online users’ data – under specific circumstances – and end ending anonymity online.
https://reclaimthenet.org/senate-passes ... p-concerns
That cyber-heist of 2.9B personal records? There's a class-action lawsuit looming for that
Background check biz accused of negligence
Jessica Lyons
Mon 5 Aug 2024 // 17:58 UTC
A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people's private information, which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace.
California resident Christopher Hofmann filed the potential class-action complaint against Jerico Pictures, doing business as National Public Data, a Coral Springs-based firm that provides APIs so that companies can perform things like background checks on people and look up folks' criminal records. As such National Public Data holds a lot of highly personal information, which ended up being stolen in a cyberattack.
According to the suit [PDF], filed in a southern Florida federal district court, Hofmann is one of the individuals whose sensitive information was pilfered by crooks and then put up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April.
If the thieves are to be believed, the database included 2.9 billion records on all US, Canadian, and British citizens, and included their full names, addresses, and address history going back at least three decades, social security numbers, and the names of their parents, siblings, and relatives, some of whom have been dead for nearly 20 years.
Compromised, published, and then sold on the dark web, due to defendant's negligent and/or careless acts
It's believed that a digital thief using the handle SXUL exfiltrated the files from National Public Data and then passed it along to a criminal gang that goes by USDoD, who acted as the data broker for the stolen goods and assured would-be buyers that none of the purloined info was scraped from public sources.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/ ... a_lawsuit/
Been using it for a while. Sadly many plants are “plant.” I like to upload to iNaturalist. Had one bee there was much debate over.MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Mon Aug 19, 2024 1:32 pm I just learned the coolest iPhone (it works with iPads too) feature yesterday (Android phones may offer this same feature, I don't know.) Anyway, if you want to know what a plant is, what kind of bird you see, what a landmark is, etc. take a picture of it. Then bring up the picture in Photos. The info icon - an i in a circle - will have a little star on it indicating there is more information available. Click on the i and it will tell you what that plant is, what breed of dog it is, etc. Rather than running out now to try it out, look in the photos you already have on your device. If you're like me, you have photos of flowers or wild turkeys or whatever. Check them out. The information is there.
I do have Merlin, which has the identify sound feature, though I do not always trust it. It does help me get an idea of what I am looking for.
Android has a feature "circle to search" in newer versions. Circle the part of the picture you care about and it will try to find it.MN-Skeptic wrote: ↑Mon Aug 19, 2024 1:32 pm I just learned the coolest iPhone (it works with iPads too) feature yesterday (Android phones may offer this same feature, I don't know.) Anyway, if you want to know what a plant is, what kind of bird you see, what a landmark is, etc. take a picture of it. Then bring up the picture in Photos. The info icon - an i in a circle - will have a little star on it indicating there is more information available. Click on the i and it will tell you what that plant is, what breed of dog it is, etc. Rather than running out now to try it out, look in the photos you already have on your device. If you're like me, you have photos of flowers or wild turkeys or whatever. Check them out. The information is there.
