If you live in Venezuela and rely on Adobe products to do your job — whether that’s publishing a newspaper, running an NGO, or doing design work, Adobe has a very special message for you: GO FUCK YOURSELF.
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Tag: cloud computing
Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015
It’s been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they’ve admitted that all those files are lost: “As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch at [email protected].”
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Analyst: Apple’s poor earnings will recover now they’ve switched from innovating to rent-seeking
Apple just had a really poor Q3 earnings report, with hardware sales falling off as people figure out that they just don’t need to get a new phone every year or so; writing in Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky tries to soothe investors by pointing out that Apple is still seeing growth in “services” and that there’s plenty more growth to be realized there.
A year later, giant Chinese security camera company’s products are still a security dumpster-fire
A year ago, Chinese white-label CCTV/DVR vendor Xiongmai announced a recall and security update for its devices, whose weak security meant that they had been conscripted into a massive, unstoppable botnet.
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Standard Notes: free, open, cross-platform, encrypted, eternal note-taking app
With Evernote’s business on the rocks, a lot of people are waking up to the fact that commercial, proprietary cloud systems work great (easy, well-supported) but fail badly (lock-in, sudden bankruptcy, loss of years’ worth of important data).
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Amazon’s cloud business leads American companies in shifting its electric cost to taxpayers
Whether it’s paying for burying dedicated power-lines for data-centers, winning below-cost sweetheart deals on electricity rates, or securing tax-breaks and incentives to set up shop, Amazon Web Services has proven time and again that it is the nation’s best cost-shifter, enjoying billions in tax-funded gifts for operating data centers that employ almost no one and whose profits go straight to distant shareholders.
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You can unscramble the hashes of humanity’s 5 billion email addresses in ten milliseconds for $0.0069
Marketing companies frequently “anonymize” their dossiers on internet users using hashes of their email addresses — rather than the email addresses themselves — as identifiers in databases that are stored indefinitely, traded, sold, and leaked.
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The latest generation of chatbot toys listen to your kids 24/7 and send their speech to a military contractor
Last year’s Hello Barbie chatbot toy sent all your kid’s speech to cloud servers operated by Mattel and its tech partner, but only when your kid held down Barbie’s listen button — new chatbot toys like My Friend Cayla and the i-Que Intelligent Robot are in constant listening mode — as is your “OK Google” enabled phone, your Alexa-enabled home mic, and your Siri-enabled Ios device — and everything that is uttered in mic range is transmitted to Nuance, a company that makes text-to-speech tech (you probably know them through their Dragon-branded tools), and contracts to the US military.
Eye-Fi orphans 14 products, which will therefore cease to function
Eye-Fi makes clever wifi hotspots in the shape of SD cards; your camera sees them as SD cards but you can mount them on your network and automatically feed the images captured by your camera to a nearby laptop. But to make all this work with some models, you need an account on “Eye-Fi Center,” a cloud service run by the company that sends configuration data to your card.
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Microsoft has always reserved the right to read and disclose your Hotmail messages
Microsoft’s “Scroogled” campaign (no relation) boastfully compared Hotmail’s privacy framework to Gmail’s, condemning Google for “reading your mail.” Now, Microsoft has admitted that it scoured the Hotmail messages belonging the contacts of a suspected leaker in order to secure his arrest, and points out that Hotmail’s terms of service have always given Microsoft the right to read your personal mail for any of a number nebulously defined, general reasons.
The company says that is had an undisclosed “rigorous process” to determine when it is allowed to read and publish your private email. In a statement, it sets out what the process will be from now on (though it doesn’t say what the process has been until now) and vows to include the instances in which it reads its users’ mail in its transparency reports, except when it is secretly reading the Hotmail accounts of people who also work for Microsoft.
Here’s a PGP tool that claims to work with Hotmail, and would theoretically leave your Hotmail messages unreadable to Microsoft, though the company could still mine your metadata (subject lines, social graph, etc).
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