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Data breaches are a dime a dozen these days so unless they're absolutely massive I tend not to bother mentioning them here - but Twitter suffered one recently, exposing the "private phone numbers and email addresses that are not meant to be public" of over 5.4m users. The data was collected via an API vulnerability in December 2021. It's now appeared on some hacking forum, free to download. Meanwhile, Elon tweeted that Twitter's check mark program "could" return later this week. "Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates. Painful, but necessary".
The USA's FCC "voted unanimously to adopt new rules that will block the importation or sale of certain technology products that pose security risks to U.S. critical infrastructure". At the top of the list of are products from Chinese brands Huawei and ZTE, along with Hikvision and Dahua video surveillance cameras. Huawei and ZTE's issues with the US government are not new and I honestly thought they were already banned from the US market - but banning Dahua and Hikvision gear is pretty big. They arguably make the best value for money cameras going around and now they're effectively not allowed in the US. There's long been speculation that Hikvision and Dahua's gear is full of deliberate security vulnerabilities. Either the USA knows something we don't or it's just another act in their economic cold war against China.
Tumblr is going to add ActivityPub support, made popular of late by people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon and also used by YouTube alternative PeerTube. As TechCrunch explains, "this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to becoming a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts" - "it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users' posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app. It could also provide Tumblr users with an entry point into the so-called fediverse without having to face some of the complexities that are involved with signing up for Mastodon for the first time". There's no date for Tumblr supporting ActivityPub, but Matt Mullenweg said it is coming ASAP.
1996 Telstra Business Card phone card (Colnect)
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