German Facebook users would want the social media platform to pay them about $8 per month for sharing their contact information, while U.S. users would only seek $3.50, according to a study of how people in various countries value their private information. From a report: The study by U.S. based think tank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina. It addresses growing concern about how companies from technology platforms to retailers have been collecting and monetizing personal data. U.S. regulators have imposed hefty fines on Facebook Inc and Alphabet-owned Google's YouTube unit for privacy violations. "Differences in how much people value privacy of different data types across countries suggests that people in some places may prefer weaker rules while people in other places might prefer stronger rules," Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at TPI told Reuters. "Quantifying the value of privacy is necessary for conducting any analysis of proposed privacy policies," he said.

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A jury on Tuesday convicted a former Microsoft worker of wire fraud and other charges in what prosecutors described as a scheme to steal $10 million in digital currency. From a report: The U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle said 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Kvashuk helped test Microsoft's online retail sales platform. He was accused of stealing digital currency such as gift cards that could be redeemed for Microsoft products, then reselling them on the internet and using the proceeds to buy a $160,000 Tesla vehicle and a $1.7 million lakefront home. He was fired in June 2018 after the scheme came to light. Prosecutors said that during the seven months of his activity, $2.8 million in bitcoin was transferred into his bank accounts.

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A shepherding spacecraft grabs an ageing telecoms satellite to help extend its mission life.

Karl Bode, reporting for Vice: Back in 2012, the US Supreme Court declared it was illegal for law enforcement to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car without first getting a warrant. But in 2018, cops in Indiana charged a suspected drug dealer with theft after he removed such a tracking device from his SUV, triggering a legal debate over whether you can legally remove such devices. As it turns out, you most assuredly can. A new unanimous ruling from the Indiana Supreme Court has declared that the suspect in question did not "steal" the government-owned device, and that law enforcement should have known better before bringing the charges. The case started back in July of 2018, when the Warrick County, Indiana Sheriff's Office obtained a warrant to attach a GPS tracking device to an SUV belonging to Derek Heuring, after receiving a tip from a confidential information who claimed he used the vehicle to sell meth. While the attached device delivered Heuring's location data to police for around a week, it stopped transmitting shortly thereafter -- leading police to suspect it had been removed. Police waited another 10 days to see if the device would start transmitting again, then applied for a new search warrant to search both Heuring and his parents' homes. Under US law, law enforcement has to show probable cause that a crime has been committed before performing a property search. In Heuring's case, police declared that the probable cause was the suspicion that Heuring had committed a crime by removing the device, something the court was skeptical of from the start.

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An anonymous reader shares a article: Anna Wiener, author of memoir "Uncanny Valley", writes especially well -- with both fluency and astonishment -- about the verbal habits of her peers: "People used a sort of nonlanguage, which was neither beautiful nor especially efficient: a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors, inflated with self-importance. Calls to action; front lines and trenches; blitzscaling. Companies didn't fail, they died." She describes a man who wheels around her office on a scooter barking into a wireless headset about growth hacking, proactive technology, parallelization, and the first-mover advantage. "It was garbage language," Wiener writes, "but customers loved him." I know that man, except he didn't ride a scooter and was actually a woman named Megan at yet another of my former jobs. What did Megan do? Mostly she set meetings, or "syncs," as she called them. They were the worst kind of meeting -- the kind where attendees circle the concept of work without wading into the substance of it. Megan's syncs were filled with discussions of cadences and connectivity and upleveling as well as the necessity to refine and iterate moving forward. The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor. I don't think anyone knew what anyone was saying, but I also think we were all convinced that we were the only ones who didn't know while everyone else was on the same page. In Megan's syncs, I found myself becoming almost psychedelically disembodied, floating above the conference room and gazing at the dozen or so people within as we slumped, bit and chewed extremities, furtively manipulated phones, cracked knuckles, examined split ends, scratched elbows, jiggled feet, palpated stomach rolls, disemboweled pens, and gnawed on shirt collars. The sheer volume of apathy formed an energy of its own, like a mudslide. At the half-hour mark of each hour-long meeting, our bodies began to list perceptibly toward the door. It was like the whole room had to pee. When I tried to translate Megan's monologues in real time, I could feel my brain aching in a physical manner, the way it does when I attempt to understand blockchain technology or do my taxes.

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Amazon is warning third-party sellers on its Marketplace platform not to gouge customers on protective face masks as the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak that originated in mainland China continues to spread internationally and becomes increasingly likely to hit the U.S. From a report: The effectiveness of the masks as a preventative measure against infection by the coronavirus, a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2 which causes a disease called COVID-19, is unclear. Proper handwashing and avoiding contact with infected individuals is probably more important, and the Centers for Disease Control isn't currently advising the general public wear masks. But prices for masks have tripled and in some cases quadrupled on Amazon, with Amazon telling some sellers that their listings are "not in compliance" with policies that ban price-gouging. Typically this policy is enforced during the holiday season when there are shortages of popular gifts, though price-gouging on Amazon during previous crises has been an issue (such as elevated prices for water before the impact of Hurricane Irma). Many states also have laws against raising prices of basic goods during emergencies, which the outbreak is after the feds declared a public health emergency last month.

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Normal life has ground to a halt in the disputed Himalayan region as businesses lay off workers, hospitals struggle to care for patients, and ordinary people despair. Pranav Dixit, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Since August 5, Indian authorities have kept the people of Kashmir in a digital blackout, restricting most internet access. At 205 days and counting, it's the longest-running internet shutdown in any democracy so far, seven months in March. That means no email. No WhatsApp. No maps. And no weather.

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Insurers are supposed to price based on risk, but Allstate's algorithm put a thumb on the scale. From a report: Seven years ago, Allstate Corporation told Maryland regulators it was time to update its auto insurance rates. The insurer said its new, sophisticated risk analysis showed it was charging nearly all of its 93,000 Maryland customers outdated premiums. Some of the old rates were off by miles. One 36-year-old man from Prince George's County, Md., who Allstate said in public records should have been paying $3,750 every six months, was instead being charged twice that, more than $7,500. Other customers were paying hundreds or thousands of dollars less than they should have been, based on Allstate's new calculation of the risk that they would file a claim. Rather than apply the new rates all at once, Allstate asked the Maryland Insurance Administration for permission to run each policy through an advanced algorithm containing dozens of variables that would adjust it in the general direction of the new risk model. Allstate said the goal of this new customer "retention model," which it was rolling out across the country, was to limit policy cancellations from sticker shock. After questions from regulators, the insurer submitted thousands of pages of documentation on the price changes -- including data showing how they would affect each individual customer, a rare public window into details of its auto insurance pricing that have otherwise been kept behind a wall of privacy, labeled a trade secret. When The Markup and Consumer Reports conducted a statistical analysis of the Maryland documents, we found that, despite the purported complexity of Allstate's price-adjustment algorithm, it was actually simple: It resulted in a suckers list of Maryland customers who were big spenders and would squeeze more money out of them than others. Customers who were already paying the highest premiums, of about $1,900 or more every six months, and were due an increase would have borne price hikes of up to 20 percent. But drivers with cheaper policies, who deserved price jumps that were just as big, would be charged a maximum increase of only 5 percent. Customers in the 20 percent group were more likely to be middle-aged.

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Facial recognition company Clearview AI notified customers that an intruder had gained "unauthorized access" to its entire list of customers, The Daily Beast reports. From a report: Clearview gained widespread attention in recent weeks after a wave of media coverage, starting with The New York Times in January. The company stands out from others due to its use of a database of over 3 billion photos the firm constructed by scraping images from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks and websites. Clearview sells its product to law enforcement clients particularly in the U.S. The company's app allows a customer to point their phone's camera at a subject, or upload a photo into the system. Then, the system provides links to other photos and related social media profiles of the suspected person online.

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Billions of devices -- many of them already patched -- are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference. From a report: The vulnerability exists in Wi-Fi chips made by Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom, the latter a chipmaker Cypress acquired in 2016. The affected devices include iPhones, iPads, Macs, Amazon Echos and Kindles, Android devices, Raspberry Pi 3's, and Wi-Fi routers from Asus and Huawei. Eset, the security company that discovered the vulnerability, said the flaw primarily affects Cyperess' and Broadcom's FullMAC WLAN chips, which are used in billions of devices. Eset has named the vulnerability Kr00k, and it is tracked as CVE-2019-15126. Manufacturers have made patches available for most or all of the affected devices, but it's not clear how many devices have installed the patches. Of greatest concern are vulnerable wireless routers, which often go unpatched indefinitely. "This results in scenarios where client devices that are unaffected (either patched or using different Wi-Fi chips not vulnerable to Kr00k) can be connected to an access point (often times beyond an individual's control) that is vulnerable," Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."

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Apple is trying really, really hard to always come off as the good guys. From a report: According to Rian Johnson, director of Knives Out, Apple won't let villains use iPhones on-screen. Apple is so obsessed with how the public conceptualizes its products that the company has taken steps to ensure none of the bad guys ever use its phones in movies. Johnson told Vanity Fair in an interview, "Also another funny thing, I don't know if I should say this or not... Not cause it's like lascivious or something, but because it's going to screw me on the next mystery movie that I write, but forget it, I'll say it. It's very interesting. Apple... they let you use iPhones in movies but -- and this is very pivotal if you're ever watching a mystery movie - bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera."

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I thought the best point made in the debate last night was from Buttigieg where he said what torture it would be to have to endure a campaign of Trump versus Sanders. Up to that point I hadn’t thought of it that way but it’s true, can’t imagine how exhausting that will be.

Today's podcast is entitled We Are Deep In Fascist Shit. This is what no one wants to talk about. Even MSNBC is switching away from it. Our last chance imho is to create a new Democratic Party where the only thing we all have in common is we believe in the rule of law. Until we can reboot our democracy, create Marshall Plan for ourselves, and do it quickly, with every hand on deck, we're going to where India is now. We are probably the last hope. So no it doesn't matter what anyone said 10 years ago, it doesn't even matter what they said yesterday. What matters is that we create a big enough a movement now to be noticed when the government shuts it down. As I said earlier, things are so bad now that Trump might not even have to cheat to win. And then we are lost. Far more lost than we are now. We don't want to look at this, I get it, but we have to. We have to support each other, not fear each other. We might not have another chance, but if we're going to survive we can't keep going the way we're going.

Google is continuing to expand beyond its home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said Wednesday the company will invest more than $10 billion in offices and data centers across the US in 2020. From a report: "These investments will create thousands of jobs -- including roles within Google, construction jobs in data centers and renewable energy facilities, and opportunities in local businesses in surrounding towns and communities," Pichai said in a blog post. The search giant, which already has a presence in 26 states, said its new investments will be focused in 11 states: Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and California. This includes opening Google's new Hudson Square campus in New York City, which the company says gives it the ability to double its local workforce by 2028. Google also said its opening a new Google Operations Center in Mississippi to improve customer support for its users and partners.

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The ocean's most mammoth, docile beasts manage to find their way around the oceans with relative ease. And that's especially true for the gray whale, a creature that makes the biggest migration of any mammal, traveling over 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) across the planet to feed and breed. New research suggests gray whales may navigate with a kind of seventh sense that allows them to detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field -- and this sense can be adversely affected by the sun. From a report: Gray whales are about as long as a school bus and six times heavier than an African elephant. They communicate using low-frequency sounds and navigate the oceans without the help of GPS. In a study published in the journal Current Biology on Monday, researchers examined 186 strandings of gray whales reported between 1985 and 2018. To try to tighten up the data set and remove some variables, the team looked at strandings of whales that were stranded alive with "no signs of injury, illness, emaciation or human interaction." The strandings were then correlated with various measures of solar activity: how many sunspots were present, changes in the Earth's magnetic field and solar radio flux, which is determined by radio frequency noise and has shown to correlate well with sunspot numbers and be affected by solar storms.

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