Recent Posts and Articles

Data collection is still ramping up with a Chinese company selling an emo robot to keeps tabs on you (think smart speak in a cute shell).  Of course an open source project can now let you provide white noise so your personal spy spies on you less, but of well…  This and more including an […]

This week we see that I have been right ALL ALONG!  The Ring Smart doorbells collect video that is stored on AWS S3 buckets which were given encrypted to employees and contractors to view all your comings and goings!  Also, a new smart app to detect if you have an Opioid Overdose!  Wow… not to […]

Yep, we all feel Apple’s pain.  They lost sales this year because it came out that they were actually slowing down phones causing people to upgrade their devices, but once the world found out, they were forced to offer cheaper battery replacements…and many people found that a better plan than dropping another thousand on a […]

This weekly news roundup looks at some rather murderous talk coming from prolific smart speakers, all while that Roomba device that maps your home can create a level on the old video game Doom.  Wow, we are in strange times! Privacy https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/26/18156304/roomba-doom-levels-doomba http://www.richwhitehouse.com/index.php?postid=72 https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/apple-music-subscribers-can-now-get-their-own-year-in-review-too-thanks-to-this-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/28/smart-speakers-hit-critical-mass-in-2018/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/21/alexa-amazon-echo-kill-your-foster-parents https://blog.any.do/2018/10/shared-grocery-list/ Business https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/27/18151918/any-do-app-smart-grocery-list-purchase-suggestions-siri-alexa-google-assistant https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/a-tour-of-elementary-os-perhaps-the-linux-worlds-best-hope-for-the-mainstream/ Huh?!? https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/26/18156183/snapchat-dog-lenses-filter-christmas

Facial recognition has become a huge topic of late and two places it showed up this week were a Taylor Swift concert and Hertz Car Rentals!  What?!?!  Yep.  This, and google and Facebook had some leaks, Mozilla wants FireFox to start giving us recommendations, and more taxes may be coming down the pipeline!  These and […]

This week in the news, Verizon was hit with the largest ever fine for COPPA violations…it was less than 0.495% of their sales.  I think something needs to change in this day of mega corporations. We will also look at how AI is starting to get a grasp into our modern world with Skype starting […]

This week on the news we will look at the beginning of the end as President Trump proposes a world-wide state run media company to show how great America is as a country. This raises concerns with those of us who follow dystopian stories. 1984 the state controls the media, as is the cases in […]

Apple makes most of their income on selling hardware, but some interesting changes were reported in the last few weeks.  One is they will stop sharing numbers of units sold.  But they also recently reported a focus on services with that being a push toward more recurring revenue.  As with any service-based model, there is […]

Today we will look at a few news articles about Google collecting more data via a VPN, also their acquisition of a medical company.  Of course, VPNs are a good thing, and I recommend both Private Internet Access and Nord VPN.  These do not collect data and are not owned by data collection companies, but […]

The groundbreaking book 1984 was not just about privacy invasion, but more about thought policing.  We have found some articles this week about that very trend!  In addition to our regular articles on privacy and business, we will also look at a new project analyzing twitter accounts for instances of hate…by none other than the […]