Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Bottles of Purdue Pharma L.P. OxyContin medication sit on a pharmacy shelf in Provo, Utah, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Sackler family—the ultra-wealthy family that made billions from illegally marketed opioids and the group largely blamed for sparking and fueling the devastating, $504 billion-per-year epidemic of opioid addiction—has been making even more money off the country’s drug crisis than previously thought, according to a series of reports by the Financial Times.

The Sacklers own the infamous drug company Purdue Pharma, which in 2007 pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors, regulators, and patients about the addictiveness of its branded oxycodone opioid drug, OxyContin. Yet the guilty plea seemed to do little to reform the company’s ethics or curb sales, according to a new report in the FT. Purdue continued to recklessly push the drugs on doctors, insiders told the outlet, and in 2010, it was raking in more than $3 billion in OxyContin sales.

In 2016, Forbes estimated the Sackler family’s collective wealth at $13 billion.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

A court ruling that limits state regulation of cable company offerings was praised by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who says the ruling supports his contention that the FCC can preempt state-level net neutrality rules.

The new court ruling found that Minnesota's state government cannot regulate VoIP phone services offered by Charter and other cable companies because VoIP is an "information service" under federal law. Pai argues that the case is consistent with the FCC's attempt to preempt state-level net neutrality rules, in which the commission reclassified broadband as a Title I information service instead of a Title II telecommunications service.

The ruling was issued Friday by the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, following a lawsuit filed by Charter Communications against the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (MPUC). A three-judge panel ruled against Minnesota in a 2-1 vote—the FCC had filed a brief supporting Charter's position in the case.

(credit: Reyner Media / Flickr)

On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill mandating that the state's utilities move to 100-percent zero-emission electricity generation by 2045. Brown also issued an executive order today requiring the state to become carbon neutral by 2045, that is, mandating that the state remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it puts into the atmosphere.

California is the most populous state to agree to such aggressive decarbonization and only the second state to formalize such a pledge in legislation, after Hawaii. Although California has phased coal plants out of its state-wide energy mix, it still relies predominantly on natural gas for the bulk of its electricity.

The bill was passed by California's Assembly and Senate in August. The votes weren't a sure thing: some Republicans and Democrats worried that such an ambitious goal would lead to increased energy cost for their constituents.

Enlarge (credit: Mongkol Chuewong, GettyImages)

During preparation for a workshop at DEF CON in August on locating privacy leaks in network traffic, we discovered a number of applications on both iOS and Android that were broadcasting precise location data back to the applications' developers—in some cases in unencrypted formats. Research released late Friday by Sudo Security's Guardian mobile firewall team provided some confirmation to our findings—and demonstrated that many apps are sharing location data with firms that market location data information without the users' knowledge.

In a blog post entitled "Location Monetization in iOS Apps," the Guardian team detailed 24 applications from the Apple iOS App Store that pushed data to 12 different "location-data monetization firms"—companies that collect precise location data from application users for profit. The 24 identified applications were found in a random sampling of the App Store's top free applications, so there are likely many more apps for iOS surreptitiously selling user location data. Additionally, the Guardian team confirmed that one data-mining service was connected with apps from over 100 local broadcasters owned by companies such as Sinclair, Tribune Broadcasting, Fox, and Nexstar Media.

While some of these applications use location data from various sources as part of their service—several were weather applications, and one was a fitness tracker—others use location mostly "for providing you more relevant ads." None explicitly stated that data was being shared with a third party.