FCC accused of violating congressional resolution that nullified privacy rules.
Enlarge/ Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, November 30, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Clark )
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other Republican senators are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to impose new data-breach notification requirements on telecom providers. In a letter sent to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today, the senators claim the pending FCC action would violate a congressional order.
The letter was sent by Cruz, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). They say the proposed data-breach notification rules are preempted by an action Congress took in 2017 to kill an assortment of privacy and security rules issued by the FCC.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) was used in 2017 by Congress and then-President Donald Trump to throw out rules that would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information.
Eating, tipping, LGBTQ+ advice, and Mandarin for “Self-Flashing” and “RGB.”
Enlarge/ The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen is made to be pointed at, rapidly, in a crowded environment. (credit: Machinery Enchantress / Crowd Supply)
"Hong Kong has better food, Shanghai has better nightlife. But when it comes to making things—no one can beat Shenzen."
Many things about the Hua Qiang market in Shenzen, China, are different than they were in 2016, when Andrew "bunnie" Huang's Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen was first published. But the importance of the world's premiere electronics market, and the need for help navigating it, are a constant. That's why the book is getting an authorized, crowdfunded revision, the New Essential Guide, written by noted maker and Shenzen native Naomi Wu and due to ship in April 2024.
Naomi Wu's narrated introduction to the New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen.
Huang notes on the crowdfunding page that Wu's "strengths round out my weaknesses." Wu speaks Mandarin, lives in Shenzen, and is more familiar with Shenzen, and China, as it is today. Shenzen has grown by more than 2 million people, the central Huaqiangbei Road has been replaced by a car-free boulevard, and the city's metro system has more than 100 new kilometers with dozens of new stations. As happens anywhere, market vendors have also changed locations, payment and communications systems have modernized, and customs have shifted.
The Epic Games Store will be giving away a different PC game for free every day for 15 days starting December 13, 2023. The GOG Winter sale begins the same day. And Humble Bundle is already bringing back some of the year’s most popular bundles o…
The Epic Games Store will be giving away a different PC game for free every day for 15 days starting December 13, 2023. The GOG Winter sale begins the same day. And Humble Bundle is already bringing back some of the year’s most popular bundles on PC games and other content. If you’re looking for […]
All of the big pharmacy chains in the US hand over sensitive medical records to law enforcement without a warrant—and some will do so without even running the requests by a legal professional, according to a congressional investigation.
The revelation raises grave medical privacy concerns, particularly in a post-Dobbs era in which many states are working to criminalize reproductive health care. Even if people in states with restrictive laws cross state lines for care, pharmacists in massive chains, such as CVS, can access records across borders.
Lawmakers noted the pharmacies' policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter—signed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.)—said their investigation pulled information from briefings with eight big prescription drug suppliers.
“Mixture of experts” Mixtral 8x7B helps open-weights AI punch above its weight class.
Enlarge/ An illustration of a robot holding a French flag, figuratively reflecting the rise of AI in France due to Mistral. It's hard to draw a picture of an LLM, so a robot will have to do. (credit: Getty Images)
On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a "mixture of experts" (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we're closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.
Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral's models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context "weights" are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)
Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta's much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.
The Onyx BOOX Note Air3 is an ePaper tablet with a 10.3 inch, 1404 x 1872 pixel E Ink Carta 1200 glass display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of RAM, and a pressure-sensitive pen that lets you write or draw on the screen. Announced this week, the Note Air3 is avai…
The Onyx BOOX Note Air3 is an ePaper tablet with a 10.3 inch, 1404 x 1872 pixel E Ink Carta 1200 glass display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of RAM, and a pressure-sensitive pen that lets you write or draw on the screen. Announced this week, the Note Air3 is available for purchase for $400 and should […]
The BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign run by Sky, Premier League, FACT, ITV, CrimeStoppers, and the UK Intellectual Property Office, aims to deter piracy by linking illegal streaming services with criminality and malware. In an ironic twist, multiple security vendors are flagging the campaign’s website for suspected suspicious activity. On closer inspection, this unusual and unlikely situation may pre-date the campaign’s official launch.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The launch of the BeStreamWise online anti-piracy campaign early October was preceded by action in the ‘real’ world.
After being offered free lifetime subscriptions to a new streaming service from a pop-up stand in London’s Paddington Station, commuters were encouraged to sign up to ‘MalStreams’ using their real personal details.
Shortly after, a ‘scam’ was revealed; MalStreams didn’t exist but participants had been given a valuable lesson in security. Handing over personal and credit card details to strangers can be more dangerous than people think. Handing over financial details for a lifetime of free service suggests that some people don’t even think at all.
Run by Sky, Premier League, FACT, ITV, CrimeStoppers, and the UK Intellectual Property Office, among others, the campaign aims to raise awareness of the potential risks of using illegal streaming services.
Handing over personal and financial information to strangers can have unexpected consequences, as the ‘customers’ of MalStreams quickly discovered. The same applies when people install streaming apps offering premium content for free. Football matches and movies for nothing may sound attractive, the campaign explains, but exposing devices to the risk of malware infection is something few people want.
Further details on malware risks are available on the BeStreamWise website, at least for those able to access it right now.
BeStreamWise.com Blocked For Security Reasons
After being informed that BeStreamWise.com was ‘down’ last evening for no obvious reason, some quick tests revealed a curious situation. The site could be accessed as normal using a VPN but without one it simply wouldn’t load.
Hoping to find out who, if anyone, was blocking the site, a few network tests revealed that requests were being blocked before even escaping the LAN. The culprit was found in one of the routers where for the first time in over a year, a site had triggered blocking measures on non-VPN outbound traffic.
According to the AI protection service supplied by Trend Micro, the domain had been blocked for phishing. A subsequent test on the Trend Micro global portal returned the same result, with the following detail: Fraudulent sites that mimic legitimate sites to gather sensitive information, such as user names and passwords.
Since so-called ‘false positives’ are not unusual, checking with other security vendors can help to shine a light on situations like these. Unfortunately, that failed to clear things up as expected, at least not initially.
Subsequent tests revealed that Avira had also flagged BeStreamWise.com for phishing, CDRF and CyRadar had settled on malicious, while AlphaMountain simply reported suspicious activity.
Thanks to its bold layout, however, URLScan.io quickly provided information that may explain why BeStreamWise was flagged for suspected phishing, which entity it was believed to be masquerading as, and who vendors may have been trying to protect.
Whatever the specific reasons behind the alerts, the above indicates that the BeStreamWise domain faces allegations of impersonating Sky. The broadcaster actually runs the campaign site on its own infrastructure, making foul play unlikely, but whether this largely unadvertised direct connection played a part in these alerts is unknown.
For its part, the BeStreamWise campaign believes there’s little to be concerned about.
“BeStreamWise.com raises awareness of the risks involved in illegal streaming. Given the nature of the topic, we are extremely vigilant over the security of the site. It is functioning normally and we have not detected any issues, but we will continue to investigate,” a spokesperson informs TorrentFreak.
While the campaign doesn’t believe there’s much to worry about, these warnings aren’t new and may even precede the campaign’s official launch.
Domain Flagged Since Before Official Launch
The results of at least five full scans are available on URLScan and potentially more if any scans were designated as private. The oldest scan was carried out on September 28, followed by others on October 7, October 17, and October 19.
All of these scans signaled ‘malicious behavior’ which raises the question of how many people tried to visit BeStreamWise over the past couple of months to learn about malware, only to be blocked from accessing it due to a possible risk of malware.
Bad Labeling, Bad Outcomes
Another potential issue lies with Comodo’s Xcitium Verdict Cloud, which has categorized BeStreamWise.com as a ‘media sharing’ site. This type of mislabeling can have serious knock-on effects, as we’re only too aware.
TorrentFreak has been wrongfully categorized as a media-sharing platform on more than one occasion, which led to readers being prevented from accessing the site via public WiFi serviceson more than one occasion.
In 2018, Comcast erroneously blocked TorrentFreak for being ‘suspicious’ and in 2013, customers of Sky were unable to access the site after an exploit placed us on the UK’s pirate site blocking list.
So to summarize, watch out for malware but remember that not all reports of malware are accurate. Also be aware that when pirate apps receive a clean bill of health following a malware scan, in a worrying number of more recent cases that can mean absolutely nothing. Not exactly a comfort, but reality nonetheless.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Taking some science and some postcards for a ride.
Enlarge/ Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system consists of a booster and a capsule. (credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin is finally returning to flight.
On Tuesday the company announced, via the social media site X, that its New Shepard spacecraft would launch no earlier than next Monday.
"We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission," the company stated. "#NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads as well as 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space."
Tesla fights DMV complaint that Autopilot is falsely advertised as autonomous.
Enlarge/ Cars parked at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)
Tesla is trying to use a free speech argument to defeat a complaint that it falsely advertised "Autopilot" as an autonomous vehicle system. In response to the California Department of Motor Vehicles allegation about Autopilot, Tesla claims the state laws cited by the DMV violate the US Constitution's First Amendment.
The DMV's July 2022 complaint alleges that Tesla falsely advertises its Autopilot-enabled cars as operating autonomously and seeks a suspension or revocation of Tesla's manufacturer license.
Tesla's response, which was filed last week and published yesterday in a story by The Register, says that several California statutes and regulations cited by the DMV "are unconstitutional under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 2, of the California Constitution, as they impermissibly restrict Tesla's truthful and nonmisleading speech about its vehicles and their features."
Bei Amazon kann man zwei LED-Taschenlampen mit Akku für einen Preis kaufen, den man normalerweise für eine einzelne Taschenlampe zahlt. (
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