Newsletter Archives

• Twitter accounts are 80% bots, expert says

  Posted on September 12, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  More than 80% of the accounts on Twitter are likely to be nothing more than automated bots, according to a study by the head of intelligence at F5, an international network-security firm with offices in 43 countries.

  Even worse, bots represent as much as 99% of the login traffic at some highly visible websites — perhaps even one of your favorites.

  These are the conclusions of a study by Dan Woods, who was a cyberoperations officer with the CIA prior to taking his current role at F5 six years ago.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.37.0, 2022-09-12).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Bots, Public Defender, security, Twitter

• Google explains why videos sent from iPhones look so terrible

  Posted on August 29, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Visuals sent from iPhones and iPads via iMessage are seriously degraded, sometimes unrecognizably so, when received on Android phones — and even sometimes on other iPhones. This is because Apple refuses to support a common tech standard, according to a new public effort by Google.

  You may be surprised to learn that some very solid Mac users are the first to complain about Apple’s garbling of their multimedia files.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.35.0, 2022-08-29).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, iMessage, Messages, MMS, Public Defender, RCS, SMS, Texting

• Kim Kardashian wants out of lawsuit for promoting EthereumMax

  Posted on August 15, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Attorneys for Kim Kardashian, the famous reality-TV star, have filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges investors lost millions of dollars after the celebrity promoted a new cryptocurrency named EthereumMax to more than 200 million followers on Instagram.

  EthereumMax is a digital product that went live in trading markets on May 17, 2021, under the symbol EMAX. Its promoters can’t be accused of thinking small: they issued an initial quantity of 2 quadrillion coins. (That’s 2 followed by 15 zeros or 2 million billion tokens.)

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.33.0, 2022-08-15).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Cryptocurrency, Public Defender

• Amazon releases Ring videos without consent. Should you care?

  Posted on August 1, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Giant retailer Amazon.com, the parent company of Ring video and audio doorbells and other devices, admits in a letter to a United States senator that it sometimes releases recorded files to law-enforcement agencies without a court-ordered warrant or the consent of the recording’s owner.

  In response to a request for information from Sen. Edward Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts), Amazon vice president for public policy Brian Huseman revealed: “Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times” in the first half of 2022.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.31.0, 2022-08-01).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Amazon Ring, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, privacy, Public Defender, security, Surveillance

• Make semiconductor chips without wasting water? Intel says it can.

  Posted on July 25, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Semiconductor manufacturing requires water, and a lot of it. But the Intel Corporation, one of the world’s largest operators of fabrication facilities, announced recently that it’s on track by the year 2030 to deliver to local communities 100% as much clean water as its plants use — and that the company is already generating more than 100% in some countries.

  How is that possible? If fabs require water to run their manufacturing processes, how could a chip maker end up with more water than it uses?

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.30.0, 2022-07-25).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Environment, Public Defender, Silicon

• TikTok steals your files, passwords, and more: FCC official

  Posted on July 11, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.28 • 2022-07-11

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  TikTok, the wildly popular short-video app owned by China’s ByteDance corporation, may be kicked out of Apple’s and Google’s download stores.

  A US official boldly asserts that TikTok is “accessing users’ most sensitive data, including passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and personal messages.”

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.28.0, 2022-07-11).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Federal Communications Commission, privacy, Public Defender, security, TikTok

• Want more power and control? Turn on developer mode.

  Posted on June 20, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Most digital devices and software applications have a little-known side of themselves called “developer mode.” Once you turn this baby on, you can have previously undreamed-of power literally at your fingertips.

  Tech companies normally remain quiet about these features — except with regard to actual app developers — because boneheaded users can fall into hidden bear traps and not know how to get themselves out. But if you read up on the capabilities you want, you can enable features that you’ll wish you’d had from Day One.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.25.0, 2022-06-20).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Android, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender

• Should you try USDTea technology or leaf it alone?

  Posted on June 6, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  A new cryptocurrency that trades on the Ethereum blockchain — USDTea — promises to maintain a stable value equivalent to $1.00 essentially forever. But is it a scam, a joke, or a new kind of technology that you could actually put to use in your own life?

  At first glance, it would be easy to assume that any new crypto coin is a con game. After all, 81% of initial coin offerings were found to be outright scams — that is, the promoters disappeared with all the money that eager investors poured in, according to a 2018 study by Satis Group LLC.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.23.0, 2022-06-06).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Cryptocurrency, Fintech, Public Defender, safety

• Want laptop graphics power specs? They might not be easy to find.

  Posted on May 23, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.21 • 2022-05-23

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Some well-known manufacturers of laptops make it a little hard to discover the power ratings that determine their machines’ LCD display performance, even though graphics-chip suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD order the laptop makers to do so.

  One of the suppliers — the graphics-processor giant Nvidia — says about this situation, “We’re requiring OEMs to update their product pages” to reveal a crucial laptop feature known variously as Total Graphics Power (TGP) by Nvidia and Typical Board Power (TBP) by AMD, as I explain.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.21.0, 2022-05-23).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  AskWoody FREE Newsletter, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Graphics Cards, Graphics Performance, Public Defender

• Are Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) good or evil?

  Posted on May 9, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  A programming technique that Google says will speed up websites is actually slowing them down, according to major Web publishers and browser makers who are actively blocking it or working around it.

  The technology is called Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. The search giant has been working on the technique since at least 2015. But AMP has become a hot potato only recently.

  Last year, publishers and Web developers began realizing that Google was favoring its own AMP systems and silently diverting to itself a large cut of websites’ advertising revenue, according to a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of 16 US states.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.19.0, 2022-05-09).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Google searches, Online advertising, Public Defender

• Protect yourself from iPhone and Android spying

  Posted on April 18, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  As technology marches forward, there are more and more things for us to watch out for. One thing you might not be aware of is how easy it is for someone to listen to everything you say through a smartphone, such as an iPhone — even if the device is turned off.

  That’s right. That innocent-looking glass slab on the next table could be picking up everything you say and transmitting it 100 meters or so to an Apple AirPod earpiece, in the case of an iPhone, or to any wireless headphones, by using an app for Android phones.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.16.0, 2022-04-18).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Android, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, iPhone, Spying

• Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames

  Posted on April 4, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  An undocumented feature of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and related programs makes the applications open but fail to load an image — and the apps then close abruptly — if you launch the apps using a filename with specific characters, according to numerous licensed users.

  This weird behavior, which is either an inadvertent bug or a deliberate Easter egg programmed in by some Adobe developer, can be seen on releases of the software all the way back to Photoshop version 5 (1998) and through Photoshop 23.2.2.325, which is the current version in Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2022.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.14.0, 2022-04-04).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Adobe, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender
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