Apple offers $95M settlement in Siri privacy lawsuit • The Register - Something as simple as a zipper or an individual raising their arms would cause Siri to start recording. Lopez, et al v. Apple Inc will be settled for $95 million if the N. California District Court approves. Apple CEO Tim Cook had previously told Congress that Siri’s recording features required a “clear, unambiguous trigger”, i.e.; “Hey Siri”
Siri-enabled Apple users from 2011-to an unknown date will likely be eligible diluting individual payouts.
95m dollars(USD) is roughly less than .001 of Apple’s Profits in 2024.
Critical Apache Struts bug under active exploit • The Register - Guess who’s back, back again. Apache Struts, in-famous for being the source of the Equifax breach in 2017, is back with CVE-2024-53677 a rehash of a vulnerability discovered in Dec 2023. Struts File Upload component features the 9.5 out of 10 CVSS CVE
N Korea may receive tech in exchange for military support • The Register - DPRK has provided around 10,000 troops to Putin’s war in Ukraine. After DPRK successfully conducted a 90 minute missile flight the US and its allies are starting to wonder exactly what Pyongyang got in exchange for those troops.
No one likes the sappy I’m such a good manager look at me manage with my great insights post. But every now and then I learn something and I think other people who are moving from a technical resource to a leader may gain insight or value from it. So I share here.
‘Satanic’ data thief hits 350M Hot Topic shoppers • The Register - HotTopic, Torrid, and Lunchbox shoppers (around 350m) of them have had a few bits of info stolen; names, emails, physical addresses, dates of birth, last four digits of customers’ credit cards, card types, hashed expiration dates, and account holder names. Likely just watch out for My Neighbor Totoro-themed phishes and you’ll be ok.
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a protocol left over from the early days of the second internet. Adopted widely in the early 2000s, RSS became a privacy conscious way for users to get updated information from disparate news sources, blogs, content creators, and the like without having to visit individual sites. An interested reader could simply drop an RSS link into an aggregator and curate an “OPML” file of interesting blogs, video content creators, news channels, and other interesting content. Simply subscribe, with no login, no sign-ups, and wait for the content to role in. The OPML file would be managed by the aggregator and with a single click (or pop-up notification), users could find all the new content they were interested in.
This post began as a diatribe by myself to an invisible audience in my travel journal. My infant daughter (Nibble,1f) is on vacation with us and has been eating copious amounts of Greek Yogurt to help combat the diarrhea caused by an antibiotic, cefdinir. In my musings, I wandered what it would have been like to travel with an infant suffering an ear infection with little to soothe her than the ineffective and near-witchcraft style medicine available prior to the age of antibiotics. I then began to write about what medicine may be like in the future and realized that along our current trajectory the Star-Trek-esque future we hope for likely isn’t a possibility.
Google Adds New Pixel Security Features to Block 2G Exploits and Baseband Attacks (thehackernews.com) - Google will now allow their Pixel phones to be configured to ignore 2G downgrade attacks caused by Stingrays (cell-site simulators) and other devices that emulate a cellular baseband (tower) controlled by their service provider. This will prevent attacks like those performed by Intellexa and Predator using the Triton malware. This will also prevent SMS Blasting which bypass carrier spam protections.
Data watchdog fines Clearview AI $33M • The Register - Clearview scrapes photos from all over the internet, adds them to its database, then sells the data to advertisers and governments, some who use it without appropriate legal permissions (think 4th amendment/warrantless surveillance issues)
Election News
Spamouflage trolls pretend to be American patriots on X • The Register - #China - People’s Republic of China propaganda crew ramps up X and TikTok work claiming to be American citizens and “frustrated Conservatives”. The threat actor group is using AI generated content of Pres. Biden, VP Harris, and fmr Pres. Trump. Overall, users are able to identify that something isn’t “right” about the accounts, though the propagandist are getting better.