Halo is Amazon’s fitness band infused with artificial intelligence
Over 50,000 NSW drivers licences just left hanging in the open internet for anyone to steal
Russian bloke flew to Nevada and tried to bribe Tesla employee into deploying malware
The reMarkable 2.0 e-ink tablet looks very classy if you’re the note taking type
Cheap No Man's Sky for PC, Nokia 2720, Hasbro Game Night for Switch, TP-Link wi-fi powerboard, Baseus 120W USB-C charger, 75" EKO 4K TV, SanDisk 400GB microSD
Amazon's getting in on the fitness band game with "Halo". Amazon describes the Halo as combining "a suite of AI-powered health tools with an innovative and stylish wrist band". The band has a bunch of sensors like an accelerometer, temperature, heart rate and two mics, along with being water resistant with a battery that lasts for 7 days so you can wear it whilst you sleep. The app gets that sensor data and uses AI magic to "give customers a comprehensive understanding of their health and wellness". Probably the creepiest feature Halo employs is using the mics to analyse the tone of a user's voice to "better understand how they may sound to others, helping improve their communication and relationships". Is this bad? It sounds bad. I hope it’s not yet another inappropriate use of an algorithm.
Bob Diachenko of Security Discovery stumbled upon an open AWS S3 bucket with "108,535 images of the front and back of scanned driver's licences, and another contained scans of Roads and Maritime Services tolling notice statutory declarations, in PDF and JPG format". Oddly we don't know who put this data up there, the bucket doesn't belong to Transport for NSW or any government system. AWS was notified and the bucket closed up an hour or two after the report. Fresh drivers licences are quite valuable on the dark web, dodgy cunts use them for all kinds of stuff ranging from kinda harmless opening parcel lockers for receiving drug deliveries, to activating SIM cards in someone else's name, to full blown applying for credit cards/personal loans. Hope whoever left this bucket of ID open wide online gets severely punished for their carelessness.
Earlier this week the FBI said a Russian tourist named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov went to Nevada offering US$500,000 to an employee of "Company A" in exchange for installing malware he developed onto Company A's network. The employee said no, but after Egor continued to "wine, dine, and booze" the employee, upping the offer to US$1m, the employee said yes with an ulterior motive - dobbing Egor in to his superiors and the FBI. Egor got busted and no attack took place, but we never knew which company had such a brazen, out in the open attempt placed on them. I assume the FBI had good reason not to say but Elon Musk didn't give a shit, letting loose on Twitter that it was Tesla. Imagine if comrade was successful in bribing the Tesla employee and every Tesla on the road got crypto'd or every driver's location history got leaked, fuckkkk.
Reviews of the reMarkable 2.0 are out and about today, as the embargo the 10" e-ink screen designed to replace paper is lifted. For those unfamiliar with the reMarkable, it's basically a $680 Kindle, but with a larger screen and a stylus for drawing. This new unit has very low latency for stylus input and a superior texture to it that's supposed to feel like scribbling on paper. My Deep Guide has a very thorough video review of the reMarkable 2 and Good e-Reader has a detailed text review. I'm kinda tempted to get a reMarkable just as a PDF viewer for reading reports and taking basic notes on instead of printing them out (which I wastefully do now because staring at an LCD upsets my old man eyes) and using a highlighter.
No Man’s Sky for PC on Steam - $27.89 at CD Keys
Nokia 2720 4G flip phone with Google Assistant - $98 from Amazon
Hasbro Game Night for Nintendo Switch - $29 from Amazon
TP-Link Kasa KP303 3-plug wi-fi power strip - $49 at MSY & Umart
Baseus 120W GaN USB-C charger with EU/US power plug - $66 from Aliexpress
75” EKO 4K TV with Android & Google Assistant - $999 at Big W
SanDisk Extreme microSDXC 400GB - $89 at Amazon AU
🎶 Lord Only Knows - Big Black Delta
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