Tag: advertising

Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has been bottling water since 1843 and has grown into the largest seller of bottled water. But a detailed report on Bloomberg uncovers the company’s operation in Michigan, revealing that Nestle has come to dominate in the industry in part by going into economically depressed areas with lax water laws. It makes billions selling a product for which it pays close to nothing. Find the Bloomberg Businessweek article here (it might be paywalled, here’s an alternative source). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

iOS 11 Released

Today, Apple released the final version of iOS 11, its latest mobile operating system. If you have an iPhone or iPad that was released within the last few years, you should be able to download the new update if you navigate to the Settings panel and check for a software update under the General tab. The Verge reports: OS 11, first unveiled in detail back at Apple’s WWDC in June, is the same incremental annual refresh we’ve come to expect from the company, but it hides some impressive complexity under the surface. Not only does it add some neat features to iOS for the first time, like ARKit capabilities for augmented reality and a new Files app, but it also comes with much-needed improvements to Siri; screenshot capture and editing; and the Control Center, which is now more fully featured and customizable. For iPads, iOS 11 is more of an overhaul. The software now better supports multitasking so you can more easily bring two apps into split-screen mode, or even add a third now. The new drag-and-drop features are also much more powerful on iPad, letting you manage stuff in the Files app more intuitively and even letting you drag and drop photos and text from one app to another. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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iOS 11 Released

Ransomware Hack Targeting 2 Million an Hour

New submitter Zorro writes: A ransomware attack sweeping the globe right now is launching about 8, 000 different versions of the virus script at Barracuda’s customers, Eugene Weiss, lead platform architect at Barracuda, told Axios, and it’s hitting at a steady rate of about 2 million attacks per hour. What to watch out for: An incoming email spoofing the destination host, with a subject about “Herbalife” or a “copier” file delivery. Two of the latest variants Barracuda has detected include a paragraph about legalese to make it seem official, or a line about how a “payment is attached, ” which tricks you to click since, as Weiss puts it, “everyone wants a payment.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ransomware Hack Targeting 2 Million an Hour

Equifax Has Been Sending Consumers To a Fake Phishing Site for Almost Two Weeks

An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report (condensed for space): For nearly two weeks, the company’s official Twitter account has been directing users to a fake lookalike website. After announcing the breach, Equifax directed its customers to equifaxsecurity2017.com, a website where they can enroll in identity theft protection services and find updates about how Equifax is handing the “cybersecurity incident.” But the decision to create “equifaxsecurity2017” in the first place was monumentally stupid. The URL is long and it doesn’t look very official — that means it’s going to be very easy to emulate. To illustrate how idiotic Equifax’s decision was, developer Nick Sweeting created a fake website of his own: securityequifax2017.com. (He simply switched the words “security” and “equifax” around.) As if to demonstrate Sweeting’s point, Equifax appears to have been itself duped by the fake URL. The company has directed users to Sweeting’s fake site sporadically over the past two weeks. Gizmodo found eight tweets containing the fake URL dating back to September 9th. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Equifax Has Been Sending Consumers To a Fake Phishing Site for Almost Two Weeks

8,500 Verizon Customers Disconnected Because of ‘Substantial’ Data Use

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Verizon is disconnecting another 8, 500 rural customers from its wireless network, saying that roaming charges have made certain customer accounts unprofitable for the carrier. The 8, 500 customers have 19, 000 lines and live in 13 states (Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin), a Verizon Wireless spokesperson told Ars today. They received notices of disconnection this month and will lose access to Verizon service on October 17. Verizon said in June that it was only disconnecting “a small group of customers” who were “using vast amounts of data — some as much as a terabyte or more a month — outside of our network footprint.” But one customer, who contacted Ars this week about being disconnected, said her family never used more than 50GB of data across four lines despite having an “unlimited” data plan. We asked Verizon whether 50GB a month is a normal cut-off point in its disconnections of rural customers, but the company did not provide a specific answer. “These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network, ” Verizon said. “Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month. We sent these notices in advance so customers have plenty of time to choose another wireless provider.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8,500 Verizon Customers Disconnected Because of ‘Substantial’ Data Use

Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them “health attacks.” New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don’t add up. Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August — nine months after symptoms were first reported. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens

Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser

The biggest advertising organizations say Apple will “sabotage” the current economic model of the internet with plans to integrate cookie-blocking technology into the new version of Safari. Marty Swant, reporting for AdWeek: Six trade groups — the Interactive Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers, the 4A’s and two others — say they’re “deeply concerned” with Apple’s plans to release a version of the internet browser that overrides and replaces user cookie preferences with a set of Apple-controlled standards. The feature, which is called “Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ” limits how advertisers and websites can track users across the internet by putting in place a 24-hour limit on ad retargeting. In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary, ” warning that the changes could affect the “infrastructure of the modern internet, ” which largely relies on consistent standards across websites. The groups say the feature also hurts user experience by making advertising more “generic and less timely and useful.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in the Safari Browser

Chatbot Lets You Sue Equifax For Up To $25,000 Without a Lawyer

Shannon Liao reports via The Verge: If you’re one of the millions affected by the Equifax breach, a chatbot can now help you sue Equifax in small claims court, potentially letting you avoid hiring a lawyer for advice. Even if you want to be part of the class action lawsuit against Equifax, you can still sue Equifax for negligence in small claims court using the DoNotPay bot and demand maximum damages. Maximum damages range between $2, 500 in states like Rhode Island and Kentucky to $25, 000 in Tennessee. The bot, which launched in all 50 states in July, is mainly known for helping with parking tickets. But with this new update, its creator, Joshua Browder, who was one of the 143 million affected by the breach, is tackling a much bigger target, with larger aspirations to match. He says, “I hope that my product will replace lawyers, and, with enough success, bankrupt Equifax.” Not that the bot helps you do anything you can’t already do yourself, which is filling out a bunch of forms — you still have to serve them yourself. Unfortunately, the chatbot can’t show up in court a few weeks later to argue your case for you either. To add to the headache, small claims court rules differ from state to state. For instance, in California, a person needs to demand payment from Equifax or explain why they haven’t demanded payment before filing the form. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chatbot Lets You Sue Equifax For Up To $25,000 Without a Lawyer

Equifax Blames Open-Source Software For Its Record-Breaking Security Breach

The blame for the record-breaking cybersecurity breach that affects at least 143 million people falls on the open-source server framework, Apache Struts, according to an unsubstantiated report by equity research firm Baird. The firm’s source, per one report, is believed to be Equifax. ZDNet reports: Apache Struts is a popular open-source software programming Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for Java. It is not, as some headlines have had it, a vendor software program. It’s also not proven that Struts was the source of the hole the hackers drove through. In fact, several headlines — some of which have since been retracted — all source a single quote by a non-technical analyst from an Equifax source. Not only is that troubling journalistically, it’s problematic from a technical point of view. In case you haven’t noticed, Equifax appears to be utterly and completely clueless about their own technology. Equifax’s own data breach detector isn’t just useless: it’s untrustworthy. Adding insult to injury, the credit agency’s advice and support site looks, at first glance, to be a bogus, phishing-type site: “equifaxsecurity2017.com.” That domain name screams fake. And what does it ask for if you go there? The last six figures of your social security number and last name. In other words, exactly the kind of information a hacker might ask for. Equifax’s technical expertise, it has been shown, is less than acceptable. Could the root cause of the hack be a Struts security hole? Two days before the Equifax breach was reported, ZDNet reported a new and significant Struts security problem. While many jumped on this as the security hole, Equifax admitted hackers had broken in between mid-May through July, long before the most recent Struts flaw was revealed. “It’s possible that the hackers found the hole on their own, but zero-day exploits aren’t that common, ” reports ZDNet. “It’s far more likely that — if the problem was indeed with Struts — it was with a separate but equally serious security problem in Struts, first patched in March.” The question then becomes: is it the fault of Struts developers or Equifax’s developers, system admins, and their management? “The people who ran the code with a known ‘total compromise of system integrity’ should get the blame, ” reports ZDNet. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Equifax Blames Open-Source Software For Its Record-Breaking Security Breach

TechCrunch: Equifax Hack-Checking Web Site Is Returning Random Results

An anonymous reader quotes security researcher Brian Krebs: The web site that Equifax advertised as the place where concerned Americans could go to find out whether they were impacted by this breach — equifaxsecurity2017.com — is completely broken at best, and little more than a stalling tactic or sham at worst. In the early hours after the breach announcement, the site was being flagged by various browsers as a phishing threat. In some cases, people visiting the site were told they were not affected, only to find they received a different answer when they checked the site with the same information on their mobile phones. TechCrunch has concluded that “the checker site, hosted by Equifax product TrustID, seems to be telling people at random they may have been affected by the data breach.” One user reports that entering the same information twice produced two different answers. And ZDNet’s security editor reports that even if you just enter Test or 123456, “it says your data has been breached.” TechCrunch writes: The assignment seems random. But, nevertheless, they were still asked to continue enrolling in TrustID. What this means is not only are none of the last names tied to your Social Security number, but there’s no way to tell if you were really impacted. It’s clear Equifax’s goal isn’t to protect the consumer or bring them vital information. It’s to get you to sign up for its revenue-generating product TrustID. Meanwhile, one web engineer claims the secret 10-digit “security freeze” PIN being issued by Equifax “is just a timestamp of when you made the freeze.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TechCrunch: Equifax Hack-Checking Web Site Is Returning Random Results