You've all heard of Protonmail, the email provider that makes big claims about privacy, including one that promises not to keep logs of your IP address when accessing their service. That claim is now relatively useless as they handed over the IP address of a French climate activist to Swiss authorities after a request from French police. Protonmail was forced by the Swiss court to begin logging IP addresses for a specific email address French police were interested in, so they did. This lead to identification and arrest of the Protonmail user. The contents of their Protonmail account are still encrypted. Protonmail defended themselves in a blog post, basically saying they had no choice.
The German government is floating the idea of 7 years of security updates and spare parts for smartphones to the European Union. The EU is already discussing 5 years of updates as part of a new law, along with spare parts at a reasonable price, faster delivery of spare parts, adding an energy label and the creation of a repairability index. Unsurprisingly, a lobby group "representing manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, and Huawei, believe the Commission's proposals go too far, and have suggested that makers provide security updates for three years and OS updates for two years". 7 years sounds excellent to me. If Apple can keep an iPhone 5 going for that long with iOS 15, all phones should at least get security patches for that long too.
Data monitoring/mining app App Annie reckons Android "users in the UK and US are spending more time on TikTok than on YouTube", which they say indicates higher levels of engagement - the holy grail for advertisers. They don't have data on iOS users, presumably because Apple doesn't let App Annie monitor users at the same level as Google allows on Android. YouTube is still much more popular (2b worldwide users versus 700m for TikTok), but TikTok's stats don't include China, where TikTok is called Douyin. Either way, people love TikTok now, it's absolutely a thing, you can't deny it. Cut me some slack here, it's a slow news day.
Chia Coin broke the computer storage market lately when its value went nuts, but even in its demise the cryptocurrency is fucking things up for the rest of us. Chia miners are clearing out their inventory now that the price has shit the bed, but instead of selling the SSDs and HDDs they've been grinding on as used items, they're trying to fob them off as new, or are not disclosing how badly they've been abused. SSDs are the worst for this, as they have a limited read/write lifespan before dying. HDDs can last longer, but you still don't want to pay top dollar for a drive on its last legs!
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