Miscellaneous Tech News
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
New Fossil smartwatches are still stuck in the bad old days of Wear OS
Gen 6 watches are slower, costlier, and have older software than a Galaxy Watch 4.
Before Samsung showed up and took over the Wear OS ecosystem, the top Android smartwatch manufacturer was Fossil. Even after Samsung's arrival, Fossil is still going, and today the company announced the Fossil Gen 6 watches. The Gen 6 Fossil watches are the company's first to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 4100+, a 12 nm, Cortex A53-based ARM chip. The "plus" at the end of that 4100 model number means there's a low-power co-process on the SoC now, which can handle things like health tracking without waking up the big cores. It looks like the new SoC is the only upgrade over the gen 5 watches. There's still a 1.28-inch OLED display, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. Fossil doesn't say how big the battery is, but it charges to 80 percent in 30 minutes. The watch has GPS, NFC, Wi-Fi, a PPG heart rate sensor, and is water-resistant.Just got a Gen 5 refurb and can't really complain. One of the guys at work is a die-hard Samsung fan but won't get another one of their watches until they either ditch the Samsung Pay or at least allow their stuff to work with the Google Pay ecosystem.
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Hackers steal $29 million from crypto-platform Cream Finance
Hackers are estimated to have stolen more than $29 million in cryptocurrency assets from Cream Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to loan and speculate on cryptocurrency price variations.
The company confirmed the hack earlier today, half an hour after blockchain security firm PeckShield noticed signs of an ongoing attack. Cream Finance said the hacker used a “reentrancy attack” in its “flash loan” feature to steal 418,311,571 in AMP tokens (estimated at around $25.1 million at the time of the hack) and 1,308.09 in ETH coins (estimated at around $4.15 million). The term “flash loan” refers to a contract (script) that runs on the Etherium blockchain that allows Cream Finance users to take quick loans from the company’s funds and then return them at a later date. -
South Korea law forces Google and Apple to open up app store payments
App store owners won't be able to lock developers into their 30 percent fees.
South Korea will soon pass a law banning Apple's and Google's app store payment requirements. An amendment to South Korea’s Telecommunications Business Act will stop app store owners from requiring developers to use in-house payment systems. The law also bans app store owners from unreasonably delaying the approval of apps or deleting them from the marketplace, which the country fears is used as a method of retaliation. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the law has passed South Korea's National Assembly (the country's Congress equivalent), and President Moon Jae-in is expected to sign the bill into law. -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
South Korea law forces Google and Apple to open up app store payments
App store owners won't be able to lock developers into their 30 percent fees.
South Korea will soon pass a law banning Apple's and Google's app store payment requirements. An amendment to South Korea’s Telecommunications Business Act will stop app store owners from requiring developers to use in-house payment systems. The law also bans app store owners from unreasonably delaying the approval of apps or deleting them from the marketplace, which the country fears is used as a method of retaliation. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the law has passed South Korea's National Assembly (the country's Congress equivalent), and President Moon Jae-in is expected to sign the bill into law.In OTHER NEWS the US is perfectly complacent with the Monopolies run by Google and Apple with regards to their respective App Stores.
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Microsoft sinks standalone Hyper-V Server, wants you using Azure Stack HCI for VM-wrangling
Microsoft won't ship a new version of Hyper-V Server – the free tool it offers alongside Windows Server to build hybrid clouds and manage fleets of virtual machines – with Windows Server 2022.
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@danp said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Microsoft sinks standalone Hyper-V Server, wants you using Azure Stack HCI for VM-wrangling
Microsoft won't ship a new version of Hyper-V Server – the free tool it offers alongside Windows Server to build hybrid clouds and manage fleets of virtual machines – with Windows Server 2022.
Just one less competitor in the market space, which will only drive up VMWare sales for the small businesses that don't see the value in using hosted services.
Edit: And who don't have/know there are alternatives to hosted/VMware because of marketing.
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Children's Code: What is it and how will it work?
A ground-breaking code to create "a better internet for children" comes into force in the UK on Thursday - but critics say it is too broad and leaves many digital businesses unsure how to comply.
The UK's independent data authority, the Information Commissioner's Office, introduced the Age Appropriate Design Code in September 2020, allowing companies a year to comply. Without regulation the way in which social-media and gaming platforms and video- and music-streaming sites use and share children's personal data could cause physical, emotional and financial harm, it said. -
Backblaze Introduces Developer Friendly EC2 Alternative Via Vultr Partnership
SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backblaze, Inc., a leading storage cloud company serving nearly 500,000 customers across 175+ countries, announced a new partnership with Vultr, the largest privately-owned global hyperscale cloud, to provide developers with a simple, enterprise-grade alternative for cloud computing resources outside the monolithic Amazon, Google, or Microsoft ecosystems.
This bit is interesting to sere.
All with free egress between the Backblaze and Vultr platforms.
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Old news but Microsoft abandons semi-annual releases for Windows Server
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/28/windows_server_2022_sac/ -
Apple employees make US labour watchdog complaints
Two employee complaints against Apple are being considered by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
One alleges retaliation for raising safety concerns, while the other focuses on alleged suppression of questions about pay equity. Apple has declined to comment on individual cases, but says it investigates when a concern is raised. The complaints come as an online campaign says it's received more than 600 stories of workplace problems. The NLRB is an independent US agency which protects the rights of private sector employees to join together to improve their wages and working conditions, and to prevent unfair labour practices. -
NextCloud Sync 2.0 Performance Boost
https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-sync-2-0-brings-10x-faster-syncing/
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
NextCloud Sync 2.0 Performance Boost
https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-sync-2-0-brings-10x-faster-syncing/
This will be a huge benefit to one of my clients. They have 50gb of tiny files (manufacturer service manuals), about 60k or so I think.
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ProtonMail removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy
Swiss courts compelled it to log and disclose a user's IP and browser fingerprint.
This weekend, news broke that security/privacy-focused anonymous email service ProtonMail turned over a French climate activist's IP address and browser fingerprint to Swiss authorities. This move seemingly ran counter to the well-known service's policies, which as recently as last week stated that "by default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account." After providing the activist's metadata to Swiss authorities, ProtonMail removed the section that had promised no IP logs, replacing it with one saying, "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first." -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
ProtonMail removed “we do not keep any IP logs” from its privacy policy
Swiss courts compelled it to log and disclose a user's IP and browser fingerprint.
This weekend, news broke that security/privacy-focused anonymous email service ProtonMail turned over a French climate activist's IP address and browser fingerprint to Swiss authorities. This move seemingly ran counter to the well-known service's policies, which as recently as last week stated that "by default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account." After providing the activist's metadata to Swiss authorities, ProtonMail removed the section that had promised no IP logs, replacing it with one saying, "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first."I guess I can't really blame them as I'm sure they have to keep something for some duration, even a microsecond.... Which is likely how the lawyers forced this..
Just kind of disappointing
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https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
Update as of September 3, 2021: Previously we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and to help limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.
so they are delaying it - but likely not stopping it.
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@dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
so they are delaying it - but likely not stopping it.
And changing the process. For better or worse, we shall see.
Nothing wrong with the purpose. Everything wrong with how they were doing it. -
@jaredbusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
so they are delaying it - but likely not stopping it.
And changing the process. For better or worse, we shall see.
Nothing wrong with the purpose. Everything wrong with how they were doing it.I believe that they only committed to maybe changing the process after evaluating it some more.
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@dashrender said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
Update as of September 3, 2021: Previously we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and to help limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.
so they are delaying it - but likely not stopping it.
Right. As of right now, nothing is officially changing except for the implementation date.
Which means for me, nothing is changing in my plans to not buy any more of that hardware because until they provide assurances that they won't start spying on me and my kids, I'm done with them. I appreciate the need to bow to unrelenting government pressures and threats, but that's why open source matters. Going closed source put them at risk of this and they have to live with the consequences of that decision, good or bad.
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WhatsApp “end-to-end encrypted” messages aren’t that private after all
Millions of WhatsApp messages are reviewed by both AI and human moderators.
Yesterday, independent newsroom ProPublica published a detailed piece examining the popular WhatsApp messaging platform's privacy claims. The service famously offers "end-to-end encryption," which most users interpret as meaning that Facebook, WhatsApp's owner since 2014, can neither read messages itself nor forward them to law enforcement. This claim is contradicted by the simple fact that Facebook employs about 1,000 WhatsApp moderators whose entire job is—you guessed it—reviewing WhatsApp messages that have been flagged as "improper."
