August 2022 – Page 62 – news.buyenne.com

FTC sued by firm allegedly selling sensitive data on abortion clinic visits

The firm hopes stopping all health data collection will block the FTC’s lawsuit.

Among the first location data brokers to publicly come under fire by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly selling sensitive reproductive health data is Kochava, Inc. In a lawsuit filed by the adtech company this week, Kochava asked a federal court to intervene and stop the FTC from an alleged overreach.

Kochava’s complaint revealed for the first time how the FTC might act to protect consumer data from being used to support abortion prosecutions in post-Roe America. In it, Kochava described a proposed FTC complaint against Kochava that alleges that the company's data collection practices make it possible for third parties and bad actors to track users' sensitive location data. The FTC suggests that mobile phone users weren't reasonably informed that they were sharing this data with Kochava, making the practice unfair or deceptive and allegedly in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

In a statement to Ars, Kochava defended its data collection practices: “Kochava operates consistently and proactively in compliance with all rules and laws, including those specific to privacy. Nonetheless, Kochava has been threatened by the FTC with a lawsuit and a proposed settlement, the merits upon which are not accurate. This is a manipulative attempt by the FTC to give the appearance that it is protecting consumer privacy despite being based on completely false pretenses.” Suing the FTC to block its lawsuit, Kochava in its complaint noted that the FTC has up to 60 days—by mid-October—to answer a court summons.

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Daily Deals (8-18-2022)

HBO Max is offering 40% off the price of annual subscriptions for new or returning subscribers. That brings the cost down to $5.83 per month for the company’s ad-supported tier or $8.75 per month for the ad-free version of the service… alt…

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Motorola takes on the Pixel 6a with a 144 Hz mid-range phone

The Moto Edge has a super-fast display, but can the MediaTek SoC keep up?

Motorola, somehow the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the US after Apple and Samsung, is taking on the Pixel 6a. The company announced the Moto Edge 2022 (not to be confused with the $1,000 Edge+), and at $500, the mid-ranger is going right up against Google's latest phone. The two companies are definitely taking different approaches to the ~$500 price tag.

Motorola is throwing most of its budget at an eye-popping 144 Hz, 6.6-inch, 2400×1080 display, which is a powerful spec-sheet line item versus the lowly 60 Hz display in the Pixel 6a. The SoC is the brand-new MediaTek Demensity 1050, and the phone has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, an in-screen fingerprint reader, a 5000 mAh battery, and 30 W charging.

That MediaTek SoC is an interesting choice. It's a 6 nm chip with two ARM Cortex A78 CPUs and six Cortex A55 CPUs, so it's not going to set the world on fire. It's not out yet, but pre-release Geekbench tests turned in a score of 2142, which makes it quite a bit slower than the Pixel 6a's flagship-class Google Tensor SoC (around ~2850 points). Putting aside the issue of whether you even want a 144 Hz display in a budget phone, is this Mediatek SoC able to render Android at a stable 144 FPS? Motorola is no stranger to negating its fast displays with underpowered SoCs, so this should be a major concern if you view 144 Hz as a selling point.

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The Motorola Edge 2022 has a 144 Hz display and MediaTek Dimensity 1050

The Motorola Edge (2022) is a smartphone with a 6.6 inch, 2400 x 1080 pixel OLED display featuring a 144 Hz refresh rate, a MediaTek Dimensity 1050 processor, and up to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s Motorola’s third smartphone to l…

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Kilimandscharo: Tanzania Telecommunications bringt Glasfaser auf 3.720 Meter

Der Campingplatz Horombo Hut bietet Glasfaser-Internet auf 3.720 Meter Höhe. Bald soll auch der höchste Berggifel des Kilimandscharo versorgt werden.. (Glasfaser, Telekommunikation)

Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music

Problem has been assigned an official CVE ID, despite lack of specifics.

It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit "Rhythm Nation."

But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility.

According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by "a major computer manufacturer," and it can affect not just the laptop playing the song but adjacent laptops from other PC companies as well. The specific hard drive model at issue—again from an unnamed manufacturer—would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation.

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Manga Piracy: New Shueisha U.S. Court Action Indicates Complex Investigation

Japanese manga publisher Shueisha has launched new legal action in the United States as a prelude to filing lawsuits against pirate site operators located elsewhere. While it is likely to prevail in the U.S., a closer look at Shueisha’s targets reveals a mass of moving parts and connected entities that may keep its investigators busy for some time.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In recent years, publishers of Japanese manga comics have been sending a sustained and clear message that content piracy will not be tolerated, wherever it takes place in the world.

The problems faced by companies including Shueisha, Kadowaka, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, are easy to describe but much more difficult to counter.

Japan-based pirate site operators serving a domestic audience face experienced local investigators, law enforcement agencies, and a relatively high prospect of criminal sanctions. Those based overseas still have the ability to reach Japanese users but identifying them presents new legal challenges for the publishers. That’s also the case when sites are administered from Japan but utilize international infrastructure.

As a result, cross-border investigations and accompanying jurisdiction issues are now common in piracy cases. Thousands of pirate sites use the services of American companies, so whether they have connections to Cloudflare or process payments in the U.S., the risk of the publishers seeking assistance from local courts is now high, as the successful prosecution of MangaBank’s operator showed.

Shueisha Seeks Assistance from U.S. Court

Following the playbook deployed in the MangaBank case, Shueisha has just filed another ex parte application at the same California district court seeking discovery of information for use in a foreign proceeding (28 U.S. Code § 1782).

Shueisha is investigating several manga piracy sites, listed in the application as follows:

mangagohan.com, mangapro.top, gokumanga.com, doki1001.com, manga1001.in, comick.top

The publisher’s legal team says that the sites published infringing copies of Shueisha’s copyrighted works soon after commercial release, adding that this constitutes infringement under both Japanese and Vietnamese laws.

The reference to Vietnam is based on information provided by Cloudflare. Shueisha previously obtained a DMCA subpoena requiring the CDN company to hand over the personal details of those being the sites. The disclosed information doesn’t identify individuals but does link them to IP addresses belonging to a pair of telecoms companies – ‘Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group’ and ‘Vietname Telecom National’.

Vietnam doesn’t allow third-party companies to obtain internet users’ identifying information based on copyright infringement allegations so Shueisha’s plan is to act on other information provided by Cloudflare. PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Google, Braintree and/or Stripe accounts are linked to the site operators and since the companies are based in the United States, Shueisha wants them to hand over whatever they hold.

The endgame is to file lawsuits against the site operators in Japan or Vietnam, presumably on copyright infringement grounds, and Shueisha says that courts in both countries would appreciate assistance from the United States. There’s no explanation of why these sites are of particular interest to the publisher out of the hundreds online, but potential clues in the application open up interesting avenues of research.

Does Investigation Encompass Many More Sites?

Studying the domains reveals that they all target consumers of pirated manga in Japan, with no less than 88% and as many as 94% of their visitors coming from the country. Another interesting aspect is that traffic to the sites is either trending downwards (in some cases off the edge of a cliff) or behaving in unnatural ways.

For example, mangagohan.com enjoyed around 1.9m visits in May, the same in June, but less than half that in July. From 1.6m visits in May, visits to mangapro.top suddenly jumped to 3.6m in June before dropping to 2.4m in July. Visits to gokumanga.com in May topped out at around 2m but traffic was less than a quarter of that in July.

The other sites show similarly strange patterns, but doki1001.com stands out as a particularly big mover. In May it had around 13.1m visits according to SimilarWeb stats, versus just 1.7m in July, so what lies behind these wild fluctuations?

Redirections and Connections

According to Shueisha, both mangagohan.com and gokumanga.com redirected themselves to mangagohan.me at some point, but that site’s traffic has gone down instead of up in recent months.

However, scratch just below the surface looking for other redirects and a whole new world of potential links appears between the domains in the application and many others, some of which Shueisha is already investigating.

– Mangagohan.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me (down)
– Gokumanga.com (down): Outbound redirect: mangagohan.me (down)

– Mangapro.top (down): Inbound redirects: comick.to, mymangaraw.com, mixmanga.com, 3xmanga.com, upmanga.com, picmanga.com, overmanga.com, padmanga.com, loadmanga.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangamenu.com, mangano1.com, mangarip.com. Oubound redirect: comick.top

– Doki1001.com (down): Inbound redirect: manga-1001.com (existing Shueisha target)
– Manga1001.in (up) – Outbound redirect: manga9.co (zero traffic in May, 6.4m July)

– Comick.top – (up) – Inbound redirects: padmanga.com, mangano1.com, mangapro.top, mangamenu.com, mangarank.com, mangaair.com, mangatweet.com, mangarip.com, manga1001.top, loadmanga.com. Outbound redirect: mangapro.top

The limited domain information above suggests that if the U.S. companies provide useful, actionable material to Shueisha, a gateway to even bigger things may lie ahead. Most obviously, there may be an opportunity to eliminate many pirate sites, for beyond the handful listed in the application.

Shueisha’s application for discovery can be found here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Zoom patches critical vulnerability again after prior fix was bypassed

MacOS security researcher was able to bypass the fix issued just last weekend.

A critical vulnerability in Zoom for MacOS, patched once last weekend, could still be bypassed as of Wednesday. Users should update again.

It's time for Zoom users on Mac to update—again.

After Zoom patched a vulnerability in its Mac auto-update utility that could give malicious actors root access earlier this week, the video conferencing software company issued another patch Wednesday, noting that the prior fix could be bypassed.

Zoom users on macOS should download and run version 5.11.6 (9890), released August 17. You can also check Zoom's menu bar for updates. Waiting for an automatic update could leave you waiting days while this exploit is publicly known.

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Sprachanschlüsse: Telekom erhöht die Preise

Wer nur telefonieren will, muss bei der Telekom etwas mehr zahlen. Das betrifft die Call-Start-Tarife. (All-IP, Telekom)

Netflix’s ad-supported plan likely to have another drawback: No video downloads

Text found in iOS app code says plan won’t allow downloads for offline viewing.

A man holding an iPad that displays a list of shows available on Netflix.

The presence of advertisements apparently won't be the only major difference between Netflix's ad-supported and ad-free plans. Text reportedly found in the code of Netflix's iPhone app suggests the ad-supported plan won't let users download movies and shows for offline viewing.

The text says, "Downloads available on all plans except Netflix with ads," according to a Bloomberg report yesterday. The text was discovered by iOS developer Steve Moser, who wrote about it on his blog. Unsurprisingly, the Netflix app "code also suggests that users won't be able to skip ads—a common move in the streaming world—and playback controls won't be available during ad breaks," Bloomberg wrote.

Netflix has been offering video downloads in its apps since late 2016. A Netflix spokesperson told Ars, "We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower-priced, ad-supported tier and no decisions have been made. So this is all just speculation at this point."

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