Month: April 2022

Enlarge / A sign advises people to wear a mask and stand six feet apart as travelers make their way through Miami International Airport on December 28, 2021. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

A federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down the Biden administration's mask mandate for public transit and travel hubs.

The abrupt ruling throws passenger requirements into tumult when Americans are resuming pre-pandemic travel levels and while cases of the omicron subvariant BA.2 have begun ticking upward.

It's unclear if or when the Department of Justice will appeal the judge's order and seek a stay to reinstate the mandate until the matter is litigated further. According to the latest reports, administration officials confirmed that the mandate is no longer in place, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the use of masks on public transit. The administration is said to be reviewing the next steps.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last year, Apple enacted App Tracking Transparency, a mandatory policy that forbids app makers from tracking user activity across other apps without first receiving those users’ explicit permission. Privacy advocates praised the initiative, and Facebook warned it would spell certain doom for companies that rely on targeted advertising. However, research published last week suggests that ATT, as it’s usually abbreviated, doesn’t always curb the surreptitious collection of personal data or the fingerprinting of users.

At the heart of ATT is the requirement that users must click an “allow” button that appears when an app is installed. It asks: “Allow [app] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” Without that consent, the app can’t access the so-called IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers), a unique identifier iOS or iPadOS assigns so they can track users across other installed apps. At the same time, Apple also started requiring app makers to provide “privacy nutrition labels” that declared the types of user and device data they collect and how that data is used.

Loopholes, bypasses, and outright violations

Last week’s research paper said that while ATT in many ways works as intended, loopholes in the framework also provided the opportunity for companies, particularly large ones like Google and Facebook, to work around the protections and stockpile even more data. The paper also warned that despite Apple’s promise for more transparency, ATT might give many users a false sense of security.

Enlarge / A Russian airbase as seen from space.

4:29 pm ET update: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the company hasn't changed anything with regard to blurring out sensitive sites in Russia, so perhaps none of us were looking closely until now.

Original story: On Monday, the Internet got a much better look at military facilities across Russia. Google Maps stopped obscuring the sensitive locations due to Russia's ongoing invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces announced the end of Google's censorship of Russia's bases on Twitter.

Thanks to former US President Donald Trump, we know that the 0.5 m per pixel resolution available on Google Maps' satellite view is a far cry from the images available to the US government. But it will be invaluable to the growing mass of open source intelligence analysts. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in late February, the OSINT community on Twitter has been cataloging Russian losses by geolocating images of destroyed tanks, fighting vehicles, aircraft, and cruise missile attacks.

Enlarge / The lighting puns write themselves. (credit: Insteon)

The smart home company Insteon has vanished.

The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

As IoT reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

The shareholder who sued Elon Musk and Tesla over Musk's infamous "Funding secured" tweet is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent Musk from continuing to claim publicly that the 2018 tweet was accurate. The lead plaintiff representing a class of Tesla shareholders says a federal judge has already ruled that Musk's tweet was false—although that ruling has not yet been unsealed.

"As this Court has determined in its recent order granting Plaintiff's motion for partial summary judgment, these statements by Musk were false and misleading and that Musk made these false statements recklessly and with full awareness of the facts that he misrepresented in his tweets," said the filing on Friday in the class action lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The order was issued under seal, according to another court filing.