How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web

Found on Wired on Monday, 11 December 2017
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The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device.

According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends. And you probably never noticed.

Every email client should block the loading of remote content by default; it has been abused by spammers for well over a decade now. Displaying email as plain text rather than ugly html also serves its purpose.

Amazon drivers forced to deliver 200 parcels a day while earning less than minimum wage

Found on Sunday Mirror on Sunday, 10 December 2017
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Drivers are being asked to deliver up to 200 parcels a day for Amazon while earning less than the minimum wage, a Sunday Mirror investigation reveals today.

Yet they have so little time for food or toilet stops they snatch hurried meals on the run and urinate into plastic bottles they keep in their vans.

The delivery giant, which makes £7.3billion a year, does not employ them directly but uses an army of agencies instead. These agencies recruit drivers who work via an Amazon app and follow a delivery route set by the company.

The end of the story is that people won't care. They will still complain that their parcel arrived 5 minutes after it should, and that everything takes too long anyway. The majority of shoppers at Amazon are part of the problem too.

Top-selling handgun safe can be remotely opened in seconds—no PIN needed

Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 09 December 2017
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The Vaultek VT20i handgun safe, ranked fourth in Amazon's gun safes and cabinets category, allows owners to electronically open the door using a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone app.

The feat required no knowledge of the unlock PIN or any advanced scanning of the vulnerable safe. The hack works reliably even when the PIN is changed. All that's required to make it work is that the safe have Bluetooth connectivity turned on.

Why would anybody with a single braincell build a bluetoothed safe? Is this all the world as come to: "App! App! App!"?

Nvidia’s new graphics card is $3,000, painted gold, and not meant for graphics

Found on Ars Technica on Friday, 08 December 2017
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Although Nvidia launched its 21 billion transistor Volta GPU architecture back in May, until now the chip has been used exclusively in compute cards—specifically, the Tesla V100 cards, which cost about $10,000 for the PCIe version.

It's inevitable that some deep-pocketed gamers will pick up a Titan V and use it as nothing more than a graphics card, but that's certainly not the core market.

If someone really thinks he can show off by buying one of these cards, so be it. You cannot even have pity with such people.

Keylogger Found on Nearly 5,500 Infected WordPress Sites

Found on Bleeping Computer on Thursday, 07 December 2017
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The malicious script is being loaded from the "cloudflare.solutions" domain, which is not affiliated with Cloudflare in any way, and logs anything that users type inside form fields as soon as the user switches away from an input field.

The script is also dangerous when left to run on the frontend. While on most WordPress sites the only place it could steal user data is from comment fields, some WordPress sites are configured to run as online stores. In these instances, attackers can log credit card data and personal user details.

It does not appear to be much different than those other plugins which send all your interaction to remote servers, so some marketing companies can replay your browser session,

ISPs and Movie Industry Prepare Canadian Pirate Site Blocking Deal

Found on Torrentfreak on Wednesday, 06 December 2017
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In most countries, these blockades are ordered by local courts, which compel Internet providers to restrict access to certain websites. In Canada, however, there’s a plan in the works to allow for website blockades without judicial oversight.

“Recent history suggests that the list will quickly grow to cover tougher judgment calls. For example, Bell has targeted TVAddons, a site that contains considerable non-infringing content,” Geist notes.

He stresses that the ISPs involved in these plans should seriously consider if they want to continue down this path, which isn’t necessarily in the best interest of their customers.

In other words, the entertainment industry is not happy with the current laws and courts, so they come up with a way to bypass them. Not too surprising, knowing their history.

German government wants ‘backdoor’ access to every digital device: report

Found on The Local on Tuesday, 05 December 2017
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Germany’s Interior Minister wants to force tech and car companies to provide the German security services with hidden digital access to cars, computers, phones and more, according to a media report from Friday.

De Maizière also wants the security services to have the ability to spy on any device connected to the internet. Tech companies would have to give the state "back door" access to private tablets and computers, and even to smart TVs and digital kitchen systems.

Good luck with that after the experiences with the Stasi.

Judge Hands Back $92,000 Taken From Musician By Cops For Failing To Buckle His Seatbelt

Found on Techdirt on Monday, 04 December 2017
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Musician Phil Parhamovich made the mistake of driving in Wyoming without his seatbelt buckled. A click-it ticket in Wyoming usually runs about $25. In Parhamovich's case, it cost him nearly $92,000.

Most Americans aren't aware law enforcement officers regularly engage in pretextual traffic stops for the sole purpose of warrantless searches and seizures. According to the musician, the cops made

Good to see not all cases of highway robbery are successful.

WebAssembly Will Finally Let You Run High-Performance Applications in Your Browser

Found on IEEE on Sunday, 03 December 2017
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Imagine that all your programs and data were stored in the cloud and that even computationally intensive applications like multimedia editing ran just as well in your browser as they would if they had been installed locally.

Looking back to the original dream of allowing the Web to run all manner of programs just as well as if they had been installed locally, my colleagues and I can see there is still a lot of work left to do. But with WebAssembly, we’re happy to be one giant step closer to that goal.

Javascript is already bad enough because naturally, it is abused to shovel all sorts of malware and advertisments onto the user's browser. Many websites load noteably faster with Javascript disabled (and are even better to navigate). Now imagine unsigned, random binaries running inside your browser. At least for now there are solutions like javascript.options.wasm and javascript.enabled.

Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

Found on NASA on Saturday, 02 December 2017
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If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.

The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1's, however.

40 years after the launch of Voyager 1, 40 years of innovation and scientific advancements later, the technology won't even last a decade anymore because it either simply breaks (sometimes by design) or because that trendy cool "cloud app(tm)" required to operate it gets shut down.