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Security

Routers and Modems Running Arcadyan Firmware Are Under Attack (therecord.media) 24

Routers and modems running a version of the Arcadyan firmware, including devices from ASUS, Orange, Vodafone, and Verizon, are currently under attack from a threat actor attempting to ensnare the devices into their DDoS botnet. From a report: First spotted by security firm Bad Packets earlier this week and confirmed by Juniper Labs on Friday, the attacks are exploiting a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-20090.

Discovered by Tenable security researcher Evan Grant earlier this year, the vulnerability resides in the firmware code produced by Taiwanese tech firm Arcadyan. Grant says the vulnerability has existed in the code for at least ten years and has made its way into the firmware of at least 20 router and modem models sold by 17 different vendors, which based their products on a white-label version of old Arcadyan devices. The list of affected devices includes some of today's biggest router vendors and internet service providers, such as ASUS, Orange, Vodafone, Telstra, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, and many others.

Verizon

Verizon Enlists AI in 5G Network Build-out (wsj.com) 14

Verizon Communications is enlisting artificial intelligence models to help place thousands of 5G wireless transmitters for optimal performance. From a report: Later this year, the company will begin a multibillion-dollar rollout of midband spectrum, which expands coverage of its existing ultra wideband 5G wireless service. Maximizing coverage with the least number of transmitters is a priority, said Shankar Arumugavelu, senior vice president and global chief information officer of Verizon. "When we build out these networks, these are very capital-intensive," he said. "We have to make sure that we are being very judicious in terms of how we are investing our capital."

The models, designed by in-house data scientists and other employees, factor in a number of variables that can alter the strength of 5G signals, like buildings, bridges, terrain, the position of the transmitter, as well as other transmitters nearby. Verizon, along with rivals AT&T and T-Mobile, is racing to build out nationwide 5G service, a yearslong effort slowed by the lack of available airwaves for fast transmission and long signal ranges, and by the deployment of new network equipment, analysts have said.

Government

White House May Work With Carriers To Screen Anti-Vax Messages (tmonews.com) 267

According to Politico, "Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are [...] planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages." The White House is also planning to work with social media platforms and traditional media outlets to combat misinformation and ultimately improve vaccination rates. TmoNews reports: The White House could ask carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T to step in and stop the spread of these text messages. This is one way they hope they will be able to get their vaccination message across better and eliminate misinterpretation. There is no word yet on whether or not the White House has reached out to these carriers to help them screen anti-vax messages. But if it does, it will be interesting to see how this will be acted upon and which tools would be used. Then again, it could open a can of worms with potential issues that would violate customer privacy and an individual's right to free speech. "We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover," White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. "When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out."
Yahoo!

The Yahoo! Brand Is Still Worth $1.6 Billion To Masayoshi Son (bloomberg.com) 16

The Yahoo brand, once an Internet name as iconic as Google, might be worth little to Gen Z-ers more familiar with TikTok and Instagram. But it still has value in Japan, where the once-illustrious marquee just sold for $1.6 billion. From a report: Z Holdings, a unit of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp, agreed to buy the rights to the Yahoo name in Japan for 178.5 billion yen to replace an existing licensing agreement. The deal follows the sale of Verizon's media division, the bulk of which is the original U.S. version of the Yahoo web portal, to private equity firm Apollo Global for $5 billion. Yahoo! was one of Son's early big investments, who built a $100 million stake in one of the original web startups in the mid-90s. He subsequently formed the joint venture Yahoo! Japan, which over the years morphed into tech and e-commerce platform Z Holdings as Yahoo sold off its core assets.
Privacy

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails (consumerreports.org) 98

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you receive emails flagged as spam or see a warning that a message might be a phishing attempt, it's a sign that your email provider is scanning your emails. The company may do that just to protect you from danger, but in some situations it can delve into your communications for other purposes, as well. Google announced that it would stop scanning Gmail users' email messages for ad targeting in 2017 -- but that doesn't mean it stopped scanning them altogether. Verizon didn't respond to requests for comments about Yahoo and AOL's current practices, but in 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that both email providers were scanning emails for advertising. And Microsoft scans its Outlook users' emails for malicious content. Here's what major email providers say about why they currently scan users' messages.

Email providers can scan for spam and malicious links and attachments, often looking for patterns. [...] You may see lots of ads in your email inbox, but that doesn't necessarily mean your email provider is using the content of your messages to target you with marketing messages. For instance, like Google, Microsoft says that it refrains from using your email content for ad targeting. But it does target ads to consumers in Outlook, along with MSN, and other websites and apps. The data to do that come from partnering with third-party providers, plus your browsing activity and search history on Bing and Microsoft Edge, as well as information you've given the company, such as your gender, country, and date of birth.

[...] If you're using an email account provided by your employer, an administrator with qualifying credentials can typically access all your incoming and outgoing emails on that account, as well as any documents you create using your work account or that you receive in your work account. This allows companies to review emails as part of internal investigations and access their materials after an employee leaves the company. [...] Law enforcement can request access to emails, though warrants, court orders, or subpoenas may be required. Email providers may reject requests that don't satisfy applicable laws, and may narrow requests that ask for too much information. They may also object to producing information altogether.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

'Golden Age of Surveillance', as Police Make 112,000 Data Requests in 6 Months (newportri.com) 98

"When U.S. law enforcement officials need to cast a wide net for information, they're increasingly turning to the vast digital ponds of personal data created by Big Tech companies via the devices and online services that have hooked billions of people around the world," reports the Associated Press: Data compiled by four of the biggest tech companies shows that law enforcement requests for user information — phone calls, emails, texts, photos, shopping histories, driving routes and more — have more than tripled in the U.S. since 2015. Police are also increasingly savvy about covering their tracks so as not to alert suspects of their interest... In just the first half of 2020 — the most recent data available — Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft together fielded more than 112,000 data requests from local, state and federal officials. The companies agreed to hand over some data in 85% of those cases. Facebook, including its Instagram service, accounted for the largest number of disclosures.

Consider Newport, a coastal city of 24,000 residents that attracts a flood of summer tourists. Fewer than 100 officers patrol the city — but they make multiple requests a week for online data from tech companies. That's because most crimes — from larceny and financial scams to a recent fatal house party stabbing at a vacation rental booked online — can be at least partly traced on the internet. Tech providers, especially social media platforms, offer a "treasure trove of information" that can help solve them, said Lt. Robert Salter, a supervising police detective in Newport.

"Everything happens on Facebook," Salter said. "The amount of information you can get from people's conversations online — it's insane."

As ordinary people have become increasingly dependent on Big Tech services to help manage their lives, American law enforcement officials have grown far more savvy about technology than they were five or six years ago, said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. That's created what Cohn calls "the golden age of government surveillance." Not only has it become far easier for police to trace the online trails left by suspects, they can also frequently hide their requests by obtaining gag orders from judges and magistrates. Those orders block Big Tech companies from notifying the target of a subpoena or warrant of law enforcement's interest in their information — contrary to the companies' stated policies...

Nearly all big tech companies — from Amazon to rental sites like Airbnb, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and service providers like Verizon — now have teams to respond...

Cohn says American law is still premised on the outdated idea that valuable data is stored at home — and can thus be protected by precluding home searches without a warrant. At the very least, Cohn suggests more tech companies should be using encryption technology to protect data access without the user's key.

But Newport supervising police detective Lt. Robert Salter supplied his own answer for people worried about how police officers are requesting more and more data. "Don't commit crimes and don't use your computer and phones to do it."
Open Source

Rocky Linux 8.4 Achieves First General Availability Release, Proves Popular (rockylinux.org) 40

"When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Gregory Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor," Ars Technica reported in February.

And this week, "The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.4," reports ZDNet. "It's an important milestone because it's the first Rocky Linux general availability release ever." Huge companies, including Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon, relied on CentOS, and they were reportedly not happy about RedHat's decision... It turns out that Kurtzer's decision has been a popular one. Besides quickly building up an army of hundreds of contributors for the project, Rocky Linux 8.4 - which follows the May 18 release of Red Hat's RHEL 8.4 - was downloaded at least 10,000 times within half a day of its release... "If we extrapolate the count to include our other mirrors we are probably at least 3-4x that (if not even way more)!" boasts Kurtzer in a LinkedIn post. "Lots of reports coming in of people and organizations already replacing their CentOS systems (and even other Linux distributions) with Rocky. The media is flying off the hook and business analysts also validating to me personally that Rocky Linux might soon be the most utilized Linux operating system used in enterprise and cloud!"

Rocky Linux 8.4 took seven months for the newly formed community to release, and is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architecture hardware in various ISOs.

"Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems," explains a blog post at RockyLinux.org, adding that free community support is available through the forums as well as live chat avaiable through IRC and Rocky Linux Mattermost. "Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ..."

"Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that's who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you." Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It's a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles — embedded even within our repositories and ISOs — are immutable...

This is just the beginning, and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is more than just Rocky Linux — it's a home for those that believe that open source isn't just a switch that can be toggled at will, and that projects that many rely on not be subject to the whims of a few. To this point, you can easily find all of our sources, our build infrastructure, Git repositories, and everything else anyone would need to fork our work and ensure that it continues if need be...

When we announced our release candidate, we asked you to come build the next free, open, community enterprise operating system with us. Now we're asking you for more: join us as we build our community.

They also thanked 11 sponsors and partners for contributing "resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure."
Communications

New York State Low-Cost Broadband Law Blocked by US Judge (bloomberg.com) 99

A federal judge granted a preliminary order blocking New York state from enforcing a law that requires internet service providers to offer high-speed broadband service to low-income customers at a discount. From a report: U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley in Central Islip, New York, sided with telecom industry groups representing AT&T and Verizon, which sued to block the law. The legislation was enacted in April as part of the state's 2022 budget.
Cellphones

Carriers Agree To Start Sharing Vertical Location Data For 911 Calls (xda-developers.com) 23

The three major carriers in the U.S. have now agreed to start providing vertical location data for 911 calls, which will help first responders quickly locate 911 callers in multi-story buildings. XDA Developers reports: The FCC wrote in its announcement, "FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today announced breakthrough agreements with America's three largest mobile phone providers to start delivering vertical location information in connection with 911 calls nationwide in the coming days. This information will help first responders quickly locate 911 callers in multi-story buildings, which will reduce response times and ultimately save lives."

The FCC first announced in 2015 that carriers would be required to start sharing vertical location data. The original deadline was June 2nd, 2021, but AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon wanted an 18-month extension (allegedly due to issues testing the functionality during the COVID-19 pandemic). With the deadline rapidly approaching, the FCC began an investigation in April to find out what was taking carriers so long. All three major carriers have now agreed to start providing vertical location data to 911 call centers within the next seven days, and each company will pay a $100,000 settlement. The agreement also increases the scope of the vertical location data; instead of the data only being provided in select areas, vertical location information will be provided by carriers across the entire United States. However, it will likely take longer than a week for the vertical data to be used in most 9-1-1 call centers, as the change will require updated software and (possibly) additional training for emergency dispatchers.

The Internet

Guess Who Opposes Federal Funding for Broadband Internet Services Run by City Governments? (msn.com) 116

U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed federal funding for local internet services run by nonprofits and city governments, according to Bloomberg. "That's not sitting well with Comcast, AT&T, Verizon Communications, and other dominant carriers, which don't like the prospect of facing subsidized competitors." Pleasant Grove, Utah shows why established carriers might be vulnerable. With 38,000 residents, it's nestled between the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake Basin, just south of Salt Lake City. When it asked residents about their broadband, almost two-thirds of respondents said they wouldn't recommend their cable service. Almost 90% wanted the city to pursue broadband alternatives... [The city-owned ISP Utopia Fiber] will also reach areas not served by current providers... When the city council voted unanimously to approve Utopia's $18 million build-out in April, the mood was a mix of giddy and vengeful. "I'll be your first customer that signs up and says goodbye to Comcast," said one council member moments before the body voted. "I'm right behind ya," another added.

The events in Pleasant Grove jibe with the rhetoric coming out of the White House. Biden says he wants to reduce prices and ensure that every household in the U.S. gets broadband, including the 35% of rural dwellers the administration says don't have access to fast service. To connect them as well as others languishing with slow service in more built-up places, the president wants to give funding priority to networks from local governments, nonprofits, and cooperatives. Established carriers are pushing back against the proposal; they have long criticized municipal broadband as a potential waste of taxpayer funds, while backing state-level limits on it.

Almost 20 states have laws that restrict community broadband, according to a tally by the BroadbandNow research group.

The carriers say the administration and its Democratic allies are calling for blazing upload speeds that have little practical use for consumers, who already get fast downloads for videos and other common web uses... Republicans want to bar spending on municipal networks and have criticized Biden's broadband plan as too expensive. In response the administration scaled back its plan to $65 billion, from $100 billion.

The article notes that local governments in the U.S. are already offering about 600 networks that serve about 3 million people, according to Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Yet it also cites statistics showing that in 14 of America's 50 states, less than 85% of the population has access to broadband.
Verizon

Verizon Forces Users Onto Pricier Plans To Get $50-Per-Month Government Subsidy (arstechnica.com) 31

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon and other Internet service providers are preventing some low-income customers from getting new $50-per-month government subsidies unless they switch to different plans that are sometimes more expensive. Over 825 ISPs nationwide are selling plans eligible for the new subsidies that the US government made available to people who have low incomes or who lost income during the pandemic. Verizon stands out among big ISPs in its use of the subsidy to "upsell" customers to pricier plans, according to a story yesterday by Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler.

"Soon after the EBB [Emergency broadband Benefit program] launched, I started hearing from Washington Post readers about their frustrations signing up with certain ISPs," he wrote. "Verizon elicited the most ire from readers." Instead of letting people enroll online, Verizon requires them to call a phone number to sign up and then "tells some customers the EBB can't be used on 'old' data plans, so they'll have to switch," the Post article said. Verizon is limiting the plans available on both mobile and home Internet service. The EBB is temporary, lasting until the $3.2 billion in program funding runs out or six months after the Department of Health and Human Services declares an end to the pandemic. Verizon customers who have to switch to a more expensive plan in order to get the $50 monthly discount would have to pay the higher rate after the subsidy expires.

"At the end of the program, you will either continue on your plan at the price without the EBB discount or you will end your Internet-related services with Verizon," a company FAQ says. "We will give you an opportunity to decide this at the beginning of your enrollment into the EBB program and again before the end of the program. If you do not affirmatively choose to keep your Internet-related services, the FCC requires that we disconnect those services at the end of the EBB program." Verizon defended its implementation of the subsidy program yesterday, saying it has enrolled nearly 1,000 customers in less than a week. But that's just an average, and yesterday's Washington Post story makes clear that some customers would have to switch to more expensive plans to get the subsidy.
Earlier today, the FCC said that more than one million U.S. households have signed up to take part in the broadband subsidy program, which is being accepted at over 900 broadband providers. Some providers estimate the program could run out of money in four to six months.
United States

Tech Giants Join Call for Funding Chip Production (reuters.com) 241

Some of the world's biggest chip buyers, including Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, are joining top chip-makers such as Intel to create a new lobbying group to press for government chip manufacturing subsidies. From a report: The newly formed Semiconductors in America Coalition, which also includes Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday it has asked U.S. lawmakers to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, for which President Joe Biden has asked Congress to provide $50 billion. "Robust funding of the CHIPS Act would help America build the additional capacity necessary to have more resilient supply chains to ensure critical technologies will be there when we need them," the group said in a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses of the U.S. Congress.

A global chip shortage has hit automakers hard, with Ford Motor saying it could halve second-quarter production. Automotive industry groups have pressed the Biden administration to secure chip supply for car factories. But Reuters last week reported administration officials were reluctant to use a national security law to redirect computer chips to automakers because doing so could hurt other industries. The new coalition includes some of those other chip-consuming industries, with members such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, General Electric, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Verizon Communications. It cautioned against government actions to favor a single industry such as automakers.

America Online

About 1.5 Million People Still Pay for AOL (cnbc.com) 81

Amid the hodgepodge of Verizon Media assets that Apollo Global Management is buying from Verizon -- Yahoo Finance, TechCrunch, advertising technology, Yahoo Fantasy -- there's one cash flow stream that will not die: AOL. From a report: The famed internet company that once bought Time Warner for $182 billion and used to make billions of dollars annually selling dial-up modem access, still has a monthly subscription service called AOL Advantage. In 2015, 2.1 million people were still using AOL's dial-up service. That revenue stream has dried up. The number of dial-up users is now "in the low thousands," according to a person familiar with the matter.

But AOL still has a fairly lucrative base of customers who pay for technical support and identity theft services each month. There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private. If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue.

Yahoo!

Verizon Sells Internet Trailblazers Yahoo and AOL for $5 Billion (apnews.com) 64

AOL and Yahoo are being sold again, this time to a private equity firm. From a report: Wireless company Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the once-pioneering tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal. Verizon said Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo. Yahoo at the end of the last century was the face of the internet, preceding the behemoth tech platforms to follow, such as Google and Facebook. And AOL was the portal, bringing almost everyone who logged on during the internet's earliest days. Verizon spent about $9 billion buying AOL and Yahoo over two years starting in 2015, hoping to jump-start a digital media business that would compete with Google and Facebook.
AT&T

Telecom Goes To War With New York Over Low-Income Broadband Law 95

Trade groups representing AT&T, Verizon and other telecom companies are opening fire on a new law requiring them to provide discounted internet service to low-income households in New York. From a report: New York's first-in-the-nation law could be adopted by other states at a time when the White House has signaled it wants to reduce broadband prices for all Americans. Driving the news: Trade associations USTelecom, CTIA, the New York State Telecommunications Association and others representing smaller companies filed a lawsuit Friday against New York's new law requiring providers in the state to offer broadband service for $15 a month to low-income households. New York estimates that 7 million people in 2.7 million households will qualify for the discounted service. "This program -- the first of its kind in the nation -- will ensure that no New Yorker will have to forego having reliable home internet service and no child's education will have to suffer due to their economic situation," Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement when he signed the legislation in April.
Verizon

Verizon Is Weighing a Sale of Yahoo, AOL (bloomberg.com) 88

According to Bloomberg, Verizon is considering selling AOL and Yahoo -- two once high-flying dot-com brands it purchased in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Bloomberg reports: Verizon Media could fetch as much as $5 billion [...]. The company is talking to Apollo Global Management about a deal, they said. It couldn't immediately be learned how a deal would be structured or if other suitors may emerge. No final decision has been made and Verizon could opt to keep the unit. The move comes as Verizon divests tertiary media assets while ramping up its focus on its wireless business and the the rollout of its 5G service. Last year, it agreed to sell the HuffPost online news service to BuzzFeed Inc. and it unloaded the blogging platform Tumblr in 2019. This divestiture would mark Verizon's final retreat from an expensive foray into online advertising, a strategy that never really took off.
Google

Daily Mail Owner Sues Google Over Search Results (bbc.com) 73

The owner of the Daily Mail newspaper and MailOnline website is suing Google over allegations the search engine manipulates search results. The BBC reports: Associated Newspapers accuses Google of having too much control over online advertising and of downgrading links to its stories, favoring other outlets. It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace. Google called the claims "meritless."

Associated Newspapers' concerns stem from its assessment that its coverage of the Royal Family in 2021 has been downplayed in search results. For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets. That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist.
In response, a Google spokesperson said: "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search. More generally, we compete in a crowded and competitive ad tech space where publishers have and exercise multiple options. The Daily Mail itself authorizes dozens of ad tech companies to sell and manage their ad space, including Amazon, Verizon and more. We will defend ourselves against these meritless claims."
Android

T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T Have Reportedly Killed Their RCS Joint Venture (androidpolice.com) 55

According to a new report from Light Reading, the three major U.S. carriers (four at the time) have reportedly abandoned their joint venture to launch a new Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI), that promised interoperability for an RCS Universal Profile-based messaging standard. It was originally set to be launched in 2020. [For a detailed explanation of RCS Messaging, we recommend this article.] Android Police reports: Although the company handling the logistics behind the cross-carrier effort claims that it's still "continuing to move forward with preparations," a Verizon spokesperson told Light Reading that "the owners of the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative decided to end the joint venture effort." [...] This may seem like bad news, but things have changed since 2019. In the time since the CCMI was announced, Google leapfrogged the carrier's selfish dithering and rolled out its own RCS messaging solution via the Messages app, all connected to its Jibe network (though it will use your carrier network if it's Universal Profile-compatible). It's a move that means customers don't have to wait on their carriers to start the work they should have done five years ago. More recently, T-Mobile has essentially handed the reins for its whole network messaging solution to Google by adopting Messages as the default SMS app for all T-Mobile phones, connecting all its customers to Google's RCS network.

Given what has and hasn't succeeded when it comes to RCS messaging, what we'd like to see is for Verizon and AT&T to follow T-Mobile, give up on their own stupid standards, and simply adopt Google's RCS Messaging -- either by connecting their chat apps to Google's Jibe network somehow or by adopting the Messages app as sanctioned solutions, as T-Mobile did. But in the meantime, there's nothing to prevent customers on either network from just installing the Messages app themselves and bypassing the carrier mess altogether -- especially since it sounds like the carriers have given up on fixing it.

Verizon

Verizon Recalls 2.5 Million Hotspot Devices Due To Fire Hazard (cnbc.com) 12

Verizon is recalling 2.5 million hotspot devices after discovering that the lithium ion battery can overheat, creating a fire and burning hazard. CNBC reports: The recall impacts Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspots imported by Franklin Wireless Corp and sold between April 2017 and March 2021. The affected models are labeled: MHS900L, MHS900LS and MHS900LPP. Verizon disclosed the recall Thursday alongside a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). A Verizon spokesperson said just over 1 million of the recalled devices are currently in use, meaning currently or recently used by customers.

According to the recall notice posted by the CPSC, Verizon had received 15 reports of the hotspots overheating. Six of those reports included incidents of fire damage to bedding or flooring and two involved minor burn injuries. Some of the hotspots were supplied to students by their schools to continue remote learning, according to the recall notice. Parents who received hotspots from their children's schools are advised to contact the schools about receiving a replacement. Other customers can request a replacement by going to ellipsisjetpackrecall.expertinquiry.com or calling 855-205-2627.

Privacy

Congress Says Foreign Intel Services Could Abuse Ad Networks For Spying (vice.com) 30

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of bipartisan lawmakers, including the chairman of the intelligence committee, have asked ad networks such as Google and Twitter what foreign companies they provide user data to, over concerns that foreign intelligence agencies could be leveraging them to harvest sensitive information on U.S. users, including their location. "This information would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns," a letter signed by Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill Cassidy, reads. The lawmakers sent the letter last week to AT&T, Verizon, Google, Twitter, and a number of other companies that maintain advertisement platforms.

The concerns center around the process of so-called real-time bidding, and the flow of "bidstream" data. Before an advertisement is displayed inside of an app or a browsing session, different companies bid to get their ad into that slot. As part of that process, participating companies obtain sensitive data on the user, even if they don't win the ad placement. "Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing 'bidstream' data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them. In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments," the letter continued. [...] The letter asked the ad companies to name the foreign-headquartered or foreign-majority owned firms that they have provided bidstream data from users in the U.S. to in the past three years. The other companies the lawmakers sent the letter to were Index Exchange, Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic.
Mark Tallman, assistant professor at the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Motherboard in an email that "It's difficult to imagine any policy solution or technical sorcery that can fully 'secure' consumers' private data such that applications and platforms can collect it, and the publishing and advertising industries can access it, while guaranteeing that cybercriminals and foreign intelligence agencies will never get it. Our adversaries already know that they can buy (or steal) data from our marketplace that they could only dream of collecting on such a broad swath of Americans twenty years ago."

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