Technology

A judge in Australia found Google misled users about personal location data the company collected via Android devices, a violation of Australian law, the Associated Press reported. According to Federal Court Judge Thomas Thawley, the violations occurred between January 2017 and December 2018. Users creating a new Google account while setting up a new Android device were led to believe that the “Location History” setting was the only Google account setting that would determine if the company collected identifiable data about the user’s location. In fact, another Google account setting that was turned on by default — the “Web & App Activity” setting— allowed Google to collect and store personally identifiable location information when it was active. The Australian Competition and Consume...

During a mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis on Thursday, a company policy barring some employees from having their cell phones on them while working prevented family members from being able to contact workers inside the facility, The New York Times reported. Authorities said the gunman, a former employee, fired into the warehouse killing eight people and wounding at least seven others, then fatally shot himself before police arrived. The incident began around 11PM Thursday and was over in a matter of minutes. Tami Campbell, whose husband works at the facility, said she didn’t know what had happened to him until he called her after his shift ended at 10AM Friday. “I called his phone a thousand times even though I knew he wouldn’t have it,” she told the Times. And according to...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission on Saturday issued a warning about Peloton Tread Plus treadmills, saying the machines pose “serious risks to children for abrasions, fractures, and death.” In a March blog post by CEO John Foley, the company said it was aware that a child had died in an accident on the treadmill. The agency says it is aware of 39 incidents with the Tread Plus, including one death. “In light of multiple reports of children becoming entrapped, pinned, and pulled under the rear roller of the product, CPSC urges consumers with children at home to stop using the product immediately,” the CPSC bulletin states. The CPSC posted a video showing what could happen in a Tread Plus accident involving a child. It shows an unattended child being pulled under the treadmill and nearly...

It looks like problems on Twitter that began Friday night are persisting Saturday morning. People on the east coast of the US were reporting that while the page would load, they were unable to send tweets and DMs. Twitter Support posted a brief message Friday night that it was looking into the matter Tweets may not be loading for some of you. We’re working on fixing a problem and you’ll be back on the timeline soon. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 17, 2021 Donwndetector, which monitors site outages, showed a massive spike in problems around 8:25PM ET on Friday. Things seemed to be returning to normal within an hour, but Saturday morning around 8AM ET, it was showing a small uptick in reported problems again. Often these outages are the result of a problem with an intermediary ser...

Washington state lawmakers have passed a measure that would phase out the sale of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2030. The Clean Cars 2030 initiative passed Thursday as an amendment to a bill that requires state utilities prepare for an electric-vehicle future. The bill now awaits Gov. Jay Inslee’s signature. That’s five years earlier than planned gas vehicle bans in California and Massachusetts, and the first ban on gas cars passed by legislators, rather than by an executive order. The bill passed Washington’s Senate by a vote of 25-23 and a vote of 54-43 in the House. The bill bans the sale, purchase, or registration of non-EVs from model year 2030 and later, and would include vehicles bought in another state and brought into Washington state. The Clean Cars 2030 measure depends on the...

Google’s Project Zero, a team of dedicated security engineers tasked with reducing the number of “zero day” vulnerabilities around the entire internet, says it will give developers an extra 30 days before disclosing vulnerability issues, in order to give end-users time to patch their software. Developers will still have 90 days to fix bugs, but Project Zero will wait another 30 days before it discloses the details of the bug publicly. If a flaw is being actively exploited in the wild, a company will have seven days to issue a patch, and a three-day grace period if requested. But Google Project Zero will wait 30 days before it discloses technical details. In 2020, Google announced a trial to allow developers 90 days to work on patch development and adoption, with the idea that if a dev want...

There’s an Apple event next week, and it’s looking fairly likely that we’ll see updated models of the iPad Pro and perhaps the iPad Mini. Which is great, because it made me think about the Eee PC, which was either one of the greatest short-lived success stories in tech history or a collective delusion shared by a handful of late 2000s tech bloggers that never actually happened. The Eee PC 701SDX. It had an SD card slot, and an X. There were two products that arrived in 2007 that fundamentally changed computing: one, of course, was the iPhone. The second, obviously more important product was the $399 Eee PC 701. It originally ran a custom Linux operating system that reviewers loved (Laptop Mag’s Mark Spoonauer said it was “ten times simpler to use than any Windows notebook”) and was general...

Yesterday and today, the enthusiasm for joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin overwhelmed Robinhood, leading to “sporadic crypto order failures and delayed notifications for some customers,” Robinhood wrote in a blog post. “These interruptions aren’t acceptable to us,” Robinhood wrote in its post. “We believe we’re the most intuitive crypto platform for Dogecoin traders and we’re proud to be a top choice for this community.” Robinhood has a history of exactly this kind of whoopsie. In March 2020, there were three huge outages which Robinhood has said were due to “stress on our infrastructure.” And infamously, in January, Robinhood limited trades on GameStop, pissing off the entire internet and getting itself hauled in front of Congress in the process because it hadn’t planned for anything approachi...

Peak Design has announced it is delaying shipment of products in its Kickstarter campaign for Mobile, a broad range of phone accessories designed to make it easy to mount your phone on everything from a motorcycle handlebar to a simple dock on your desk. It is meant to be compatible with iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones. Originally targeted for May, the company now expects to be able to begin shipping in August, though some products will also come later. To make up for it, Peak is offering either full refunds for cancellations or discounts on other Peak Design products. Peak Design has used Kickstarter to launch everything from camera-focused backpacks to tripods and its original product, an innovative camera mounting clip. But this new project is on a different scale of ambition: it’s mu...

Today, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NFT sold for about $5.4 million, or 2,224 ETH. The NFT is of an artwork that shows an image of Snowden’s face made from pages of a US appeals court decision that ruled the mass surveillance program Snowden exposed had violated US law. The image is called “Stay Free.” The profits won’t go to America’s most famous exiled whistleblower, however. Instead, the sale is meant to benefit the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where Snowden is the president. Its board includes actor John Cusack, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and the writer Glenn Greenwald. We have a winner, internet friends. I want to extend a very special thanks to everyone who followed this over the last 24 hours, and the deepest gratitude from EVERYONE at our @FreedomofPress to those who ...

Have you ever wanted to watch a wolf hunt freshwater fish? Thanks to the Voyageurs Wolf Project from the University of Minnesota, you can see it on YouTube any time you like. The researchers with the project trapped V089, a lone wolf, sedated him, and then strapped on the Vectronic-Aerospace camera collar. The collar recorded video in 30 second bursts during daylight hours, for a total of 7 minutes a day. The wolf is a regular neckbeard, it turns out The footage is very cool, though some of it is obscured by V089’s fur. (“The wolf’s beard needed a little trim… lesson learned,” one video caption says.) They found that V089 was clever enough to hunt near a beaver dam, going after fish that were trapped by the obstacle. “Up until recently, wolves hunting and killing freshwater fish is s...

Peloton is resisting a request from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to recall its Tread Plus treadmill, which was involved with the death of a child last month, the Washington Post is reporting tonight. At the time of the incident, the CPSC issued a statement that it was investigating. The agency is reportedly planning on issuing a consumer alert about the Tread Plus and may do so as early as Saturday, according to officials who spoke to the Post. One official added that “this doesn’t happen with other treadmills.” The Post’s sources tell the paper that the CPSC is aware of “‘dozens’ of incidents involving Peloton’s treadmills, some involving pets or exercise balls and many of them resulting in serious injuries.” Bloomberg notes this this past February the CPSC received a rep...