Posted in Commentary with tags Twitter on February 14, 2023 by itnerd
In what seems to be another attempt to walk back an attempt by Elon Musk to make money from Twitter any way he can, it appears that Elon’s attempt to charge for API access, which he has sort of done a U-turn on, is now being delayed. I’m basing that on this Tweet:
There has been an immense amount of enthusiasm for the upcoming changes with Twitter API. As part of our efforts to create an optimal experience for the developer community, we will be delaying the launch of our new API platform by a few more days.
Fun fact: There has been ZERO enthusiasm when it comes to the changes to Twitter’s API.
The bottom line is this. Elon is trying to make a buck on anything he can. But his “ready, fire, aim” mentality keeps catching him out when his attempts to make money by any means keeps blowing up in his face. You’d think that he’d stop doing this as the humiliation of having to constantly walk stuff he does back would get old after a while. But clearly that’s not the case with Elon. In any case, it will be interesting to see what Twitter does in “a few more days” when it comes to API access. And whether it will quiet all those who are really mad about this.
Here’s a heads up for those of you who still run Internet Explorer on your PC despite the risks of doing so. Microsoft as part of “Patch Tuesday” which is today, will be disabling it from your Windows 10 PC. According to Microsoft’s support documentation, a Microsoft Edge browser update will fully disable Internet Explorer in most versions of Windows 10, redirecting users to Edge:
The out-of-support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) desktop application was permanently disabled on certain versions of Windows 10 on February 14, 2023 through a Microsoft Edge update. Note, this update will be rolled out over the span of a few days up to a week, as is standard for Microsoft Edge updates.
All remaining consumer and commercial devices that were not already redirected from IE11 to Microsoft Edge were redirected with the Microsoft Edge update. Users will be unable to reverse the change. Additionally, redirection from IE11 to Microsoft Edge will be included as part of all future Microsoft Edge updates.
IE11 visual references, such as the IE11 icons on the Start Menu and taskbar, will be removed by the June 2023 Windows security update (“B” release) scheduled for June 13, 2023. The optional, non-security preview “C” release on certain Windows 10 versions scheduled for May 23, 2023, will also remove IE11 visual references.
Realistically, Microsoft Windows 10 users should have made the switch to Microsoft Edge by now. After all, security updates stopped last summer. Which means that anyone running it was and is at risk for any number of threats that are floating around. Thus if you’re one of those people, now would be a good time to move to Microsoft Edge, or Firefox, or Chrome. You’ll be a lot safer and you’ll thank me for suggesting that you do so.
Posted in Commentary with tags Google on February 14, 2023 by itnerd
Via a blog post today, Google announced that their Privacy Sandbox Beta is coming to Android. Specifically, Android 13 devices at first and expanding over time. If you’re one of the users selected for the beta, you’ll receive an Android notification letting you know that you’ve been selected.
Here’s what this means for you via the blog post:
The Privacy Sandbox Beta provides new APIs that are designed with privacy at the core, and don’t use identifiers that can track your activity across apps and websites. Apps that choose to participate in the Beta can use these APIs to show you relevant ads and measure their effectiveness.
You’ll be able to control your Beta participation by going to the Privacy Sandbox section of Settings. From this screen you’ll be able to see and manage the interests that apps can use to show you relevant ads. For example, you could see that Android has estimated that you’re interested in topics like Movies or Outdoors, and you can block any topics if they don’t fit your interests. And if you change your mind about participating in the Beta, you can turn it off or back on in Settings.
If you’re an Android user, I’d keep an eye out for that notification as from my perspective, Google appears to be starting to take privacy seriously.
Posted in Commentary with tags Twitter on February 14, 2023 by itnerd
Remember last week when Elon Musk lost his mind because his engagement on Twitter was down, and as a result fired someone over it? Well I guess that his engagement on Twitter really matters to him as Twitter users are reporting seeing way more of Elon than they are used to:
Several of us here at The Verge are seeing more Musk replies than usual, and I personally counted five at the very top of my feed, with many more sprinkled in between tweets from other users. The same is true for some accounts that don’t even follow Elon Musk.
And:
Over the weekend, Musk said Twitter rolled out some sort of change to fix this “visibility” issue, with the billionaire CEO stating that 95 percent of his tweets weren’t “getting delivered.” I’m not sure if this is at all related to this Elon-filled feed, but I’m hoping Twitter fixes this issue soon — unless the new mandate is to get the boss more views by any means necessary.
I don’t see a fix coming for this soon as this is how Twitter is going to be under Elon. It’s basically become his own echo chamber where only the gratification of his ego matters. If you needed another reason to flee Twitter, this is a great one because his head is becoming so big, the rest of us won’t fit onto Twitter because of that.
Atlas VPN announced yesterday that has upgraded its service with 10Gbps servers. The newly introduced servers come with custom kernel optimization to deliver even greater speed and stability while browsing, streaming, downloading, or gaming.
Servers are at the core of any VPN service. When a user connects to a VPN, all of their data travels via its selected server, which encrypts and decrypts it before the data reaches the internet. However, if servers get congested with traffic, browsing speed can suffer as a result.
While the company has been using reliable 1Gbps servers since its start, with the onset of high-speed 5G technology and a rapidly growing user base, it has started the shift toward new, more powerful servers.
Currently, the 10Gbps servers are available for the Amsterdam, Netherlands, location. However, the company plans to expand the 10Gbps network to cover more locations in the near future.
The newly introduced 10Gbps servers are the latest addition to Atlas VPN’s premium offering. The premium bundle also includes privacy-optimized servers Privacy Pro, as well as advanced security tools, such as data breach tracker Data Breach Monitor, and malware and third-party tracker blocker SafeBrowse, among other benefits.
Posted in Commentary with tags Hacked on February 14, 2023 by itnerd
This is rather unsettling.
Four California medical groups filed a joint disclosure with the US department of Health and Human Services of data breach affecting the PII of over 3.3 million patients. The groups included Regal Medical Group, Lakeside Medical Organization, ADOC Medical Group and the Greater Covina Medical Group. In a notice of breach on their website, regal Medical Group describes this as a ransomware attack, yet no details of the attack vector or the perpetrators is mentioned.
The attack occurred on December 1st of 2022 and investigators have determined that the personal information compromised in the attack included names, SS#s, DOB, addresses, medical diagnosis and treatment, lab results, prescriptions, radiology reports, health plan numbers and phone numbers. That’s the sort of information that in the wrong hands can cause real damage to somebody’s life.
I have two comments on this data breach. The first is from Ted Miracco, CEO of Approov:
“The healthcare industry remains one of the most vulnerable and most targeted sectors of the economy when it comes to cyber attacks. While the specifics of the attack have not been disclosed, it would not be surprising if the attack involved either the use of mobile devices and/or the exploitation of APIs. This is a common vector, as the security of mobile applications and the APIs they rely on remain the weakest link in protecting this most sensitive and most personal data. A more comprehensive approach to cybersecurity in the healthcare space is required, and that approach must take into account more than protection, and also address the detection and effective countermeasure to be effective.”
“The addition of healthcare records may make this recent attack on these California medical groups one of the most significant data events in years. Social Security numbers go for around a dollar. Trust me, the bad guys already have your social. Log-in credentials go for around $25 and maybe up to $75 if this also gives the cyber criminal access to your banking log-ins. If they have the credentials of an email admin you could see those go for as high as $1,500 (email admins should never put their job title on their LinkedIn for just this reason. However healthcare records, pins and log-ins can go for more than any of these.
“First, threat actors can see a person’s prescription history and will attempt to fill those prescriptions and sell the drugs on the Silk Road like websites, easily available on the Tor network. Second, if the records are detailed enough, they will attempt to extort those with embarrassing medical information. Imagine you are a married executive and a criminal approaches you letting you know they have all the information about your psychiatric history and medications, abortions or even venereal diseases. The amount they can extort in these instances can be tremendous and these often go unreported.
“When healthcare records are stolen the thieves will often gain $10’s of thousands of dollars of drugs and services from those records and the average victim will spend nearly 200 hours repairing the situation. It’s hard to know precisely what was stolen in this event but if the Healthcare records are detailed this may be one of the more costly breaches in the last 5 years.”
The scary thing about this data breach is that the effects could be felt for years as there’s no telling what the threat actors might do with the data that they obtained. That’s going to keep a lot of people awake at night.
Posted in Commentary with tags Apple on February 13, 2023 by itnerd
I like Apple products. But a very negative experience that has been ongoing since November of last year has seriously made me reconsider being part of the ecosystem. Let’s start from the beginning.
Back in November of last year, I had an issue with the keyboard on my MacBook Pro. Specifically the “C” key would not work. No problem I figured. I took a visit to my local Apple Store after making a Genius Bar appointment. The Genius was able to diagnose it instantly and tried to repair it by replacing the specific key. That didn’t work so he ordered a new top case which includes a keyboard, battery, and trackpad and sent me home with my MacBook Pro. It came in a few days later and I took my MacBook Pro and it was promised to me five days later.
That’s where my problems began.
Five days came and went and I heard nothing from Apple. I called in and got the run around. And only when I forced the issue did I get an answer. They replaced the top case and discovered that the ambient light sensor was faulty. I was then told that they would put a “rush” on my repair by trying a new screen to see if it would fix my issue. Another day went by and nothing. That’s when I phoned the Apple Store again and pressed the issue again. I got a senior repair tech who said that he would order a new logic board (aka, the main system board) as the screen didn’t fix the issue. He assured me that he would put a new “rush” on getting the logic board into the store and into my computer. Three days after that I got a call saying that my MacBook Pro was ready.
Let me stop here for a second before I go on. I get it that stuff happens when you’re in the business of repairing stuff. But to force the customer to call in to get information on their status of their repair rather than being proactive really leaves a bad taste in the customer’s mouth. And frankly, a company like Apple should know better.
Back to the story.
I got the MacBook home, did a Time Machine restore and I thought all was fine. Except that it wasn’t. When I tried to set up Apple Pay, I got this error message:
Now one thing that I should point out is that the Apple Store asked me to remove my MacBook Pro from my Apple ID account so that the could facilitate the repair. I am guessing that this had something to do with this issue for reasons that I will get to in a moment. As part of my troubleshooting, I noted that the MacBook Pro still had the credit cards that I was trying to add associated with it. I tried to delete them from the computer, as well as from iCloud with no success as they came back within seconds. This ties into my theory about something about my Apple ID being messed up. While I figured that this was Apple’s issue, to be safe I contacted both banks associated with the credit cards in question. After 45+ minutes with each bank, they determined that there should be no reason why I shouldn’t be able to add these cards, and this was clearly Apple’s issue. And to be extra safe, I did a clean install of the operating system as that is what Apple usually falls back on when someone has an issue with a Mac. No change to the behaviour. That’s when I called Apple. And that’s really where the nightmare began. Apple opened a case, then after going through circle of troubleshooting, failing to resolve the issue, pass me along to someone else four times, claimed that the cards would disappear on their own in five days and they would follow up with me to confirm that happened.
Except they never contacted me.
So when they didn’t follow up with me when they promised to, I phoned in again. then after again going through circle of troubleshooting, failing to resolve the issue, pass me along to someone else four more times, they said that they would escalate the issue and I would hear from them in a couple of days.
I never heard from them and attempts to follow up failed. Then I discovered that the case had been closed. At this point I figured that I wasted enough time on this. So I forgot about it as clearly Apple didn’t care enough to solve this issue.That changed today with macOS Ventura 13.2.1 hit the streets. I updated and happened to check my Apple ID and found that the cards had been deleted. Now I don’t know if this Ventura update or just time was the reason why the cards were no longer present. But I decided to try and add a card. Sure enough, it failed with the same error message. So I called Apple and quoted the original case number. And then went through five people. Yes five people. All of which were playing the game of “blame the victim” by saying things like it was my network, I should not have done a Time Machine restore, go talk to my bank as it’s their fault, etc. When I kept calling them on it, the fifth guy I spoke to blamed the fact that I had installed beta software. Which was a bold faced lie as I was running a production version of macOS Ventura 13.2.1. I even offered to show him via Apple’s screen sharing feature. But he stuck to his story. Either he was misinformed, or he was just trying to get me off the phone. Either way this really left a bad taste in my mouth. And since we were engaging in a circular argument, I just ended the call.
So, I’m resigned to the fact that Apple Pay isn’t going to work on my MacBook Pro. And I’ve discovered on Reddit at least one other person who has the same issue:
So seeing as I am not the only person that has this issue, Apple clearly has an issue that they don’t want to own. And as a result, their customers are on the short end of the stick. That’s really doesn’t reflect well on Apple. And as a result several things have happened or are going to happen:
When customer ask me if they should get a Mac, I will simply say that their hardware is fine. But their after service support leaves a lot to be desired. And the latter is more important than the former.
I was just about to pull the trigger to get an M2 Pro Mac mini for the purposes of running my Zwift setup. But that’s not going to happen as I am not going to give Apple any more of my money as I feel that the after sales support is simply not there. Instead, I will be investigating a small form factor PC build.
So, am I going to dump my Apple hardware? No. At least not yet. But as my hardware and accessories from Apple fall out of AppleCare, and I need to look for replacements, PC’s are on the table for the first time in over a decade. The fact is that I have been around long enough to remember when Apple’s after sales support was top notch. But those days are clearly over based on this experience. Which means that I will have to make my future purchasing decisions based on the fact that Apple is no longer the company that it once was. Now I am free to be proven wrong. But I don’t think I am as even if Apple reads this, I seriously doubt that I will get a response from them as they are not the sort of company to ever apologize for screwing up. Which means that they will have one less loyal customer as a result.
Posted in Commentary with tags Twitter on February 13, 2023 by itnerd
I am sure that Elon Musk is wishing that he never bought Twitter as the site went down for the second time in a week as noted by Down Detector. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time for him as this latest outage happened during the Super Bowl:
Nearly 1,000 users reported on Downdetector that they were having problems with Twitter, peaking as the Super Bowl halftime show started around 8:30 p.m. ET. Reports returned to normal about half an hour later, as the third quarter began.
Some Twitter users were faced with the error message “Tweets aren’t loading right now,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the outage.
“Did Rihanna’s perfect performance overwhelm Twitter?” tweeted Brian Stelter, formerly a media reporter at CNN and the New York Times. “All I’m seeing are ‘tweets are not loading now’ error messages,” he added.
And this latest outage comes as Elon directed his staff to maximize stability, even though the way he’s doing it creates other problems. It also illustrates what a dumpster fire Twitter has become under Elon Musk. I’m honestly expecting more outages like this in the days and weeks ahead as Twitter is clearly not in a good place.
A video on YouTube about Microsoft Windows 11 sending telemetry data to not only Microsoft, which to be frank isn’t a surprise, but to third parties, which to frank is a big surprise, got my attention. Here’s the video in question:
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s the TL:DR from Tom’s Hardware:
To analyze DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a brand-new notebook, the PC Security Channel used the Wireshark network protocol analyzer that reveals precisely what is happening on a network. The results were astounding enough for the YouTube channel to call Microsoft’s Windows 11 “spyware.”
As it turned out, an all-new Windows 11 PC that was never used to browse the Internet contacted not only Windows Update, MSN and Bing servers, but also Steam, McAfee, geo.prod.do, and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com. Apparently, the latest operating system from Microsoft collected and sent telemetry data to various market research companies, advertising services, and the like.
Now that really sounds at best sketchy. And not what you would expect from Microsoft. Except here’s what Microsoft said when they were contacted by Tom’s Hardware:
“As with any modern operating system, users can expect to see data flowing to help them remain secure, up to date, and keep the system working as anticipated,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware. “We are committed to transparency and regularly publish information about the data we collect to empower customers to be more informed about their privacy.”
Except that is not what the YouTube video shows. Microsoft has an answer for that too:
“By accepting this agreement and using the software you agree that Microsoft may collect, use, and disclose the information as described in the Microsoft Privacy Statement (aka.ms/privacy), and as may be described in the user interface associated with the software features,” the terms of service read. It also points out that some data-sharing settings can be turned off.
That kind of sounds like Microsoft is saying that you accepted the terms of service so you gave us permission to do this. But that would be the cynic in me talking.
Both of the quotes tell me that Microsoft’s spokesperson either does either not understand the subject matter or is just giving a standard, generic answer to this kind of question. Probably both. I say that because keeping the operating system up to date does not require contacting third parties. Ever. And on the subject of transparency, that would be better served if Microsoft would publish what exactly they transfer and to whom in detail.
So how about it Microsoft, will you do that? Of course not. You’re too busy collecting cash from the third parties that you hand over user data to. That’s not cool Microsoft.
So why is Elon doing this. My guess is that it has to do with this CNN report which states that about half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of this year:
Some 625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January, according to estimates from Pathmatics, based on data running through January 25.
Wells Fargo said it “paused our paid advertising on Twitter” but continues to use it as a social channel to engage with customers. The other brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As a result of the pullback, monthly revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers plummeted by more than 60% from October through January 25, from around $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data.
That has to alarm Elon and it’s clearly making him do some very unconventional things to get engagement up. Because if engagement goes up, he then has something to sell to advertisers. And it ensures that he has cash rolling into Twitter’s bank account. Which based on the CNN report isn’t happening at present. Thus I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re going to see more of this sort of behaviour from Elon as he gets more desperate.
Twitter Delays API Changes After Significant Outcry
Posted in Commentary with tags Twitter on February 14, 2023 by itnerdIn what seems to be another attempt to walk back an attempt by Elon Musk to make money from Twitter any way he can, it appears that Elon’s attempt to charge for API access, which he has sort of done a U-turn on, is now being delayed. I’m basing that on this Tweet:
Fun fact: There has been ZERO enthusiasm when it comes to the changes to Twitter’s API.
The bottom line is this. Elon is trying to make a buck on anything he can. But his “ready, fire, aim” mentality keeps catching him out when his attempts to make money by any means keeps blowing up in his face. You’d think that he’d stop doing this as the humiliation of having to constantly walk stuff he does back would get old after a while. But clearly that’s not the case with Elon. In any case, it will be interesting to see what Twitter does in “a few more days” when it comes to API access. And whether it will quiet all those who are really mad about this.
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