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NSA Spy Program Cost Taxpayers $100 Million and Was Overall Useless

Andrew Orr ·

Form 2015 to 2019 the National Security Agency (NSA) collected Americans’ domestic phone calls and texts. The program cost US$100 million but only one investigation was able to make use of that data.

Moreover, only twice during that four-year period did the program generate unique information that the F.B.I. did not already possess, said the study, which was produced by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and briefed to Congress on Tuesday.

“Based on one report, F.B.I. vetted an individual, but, after vetting, determined that no further action was warranted,” the report said. “The second report provided unique information about a telephone number, previously known to U.S. authorities, which led to the opening of a foreign intelligence investigation.”

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Amazon's Eero Mesh Routers Now Support Apple HomeKit

Charlotte Henry ·

Amazon’s eero mesh routers now support Apple’s HomeKit, AppleInsider reported. They are the first mesh routers to Apple’s smart home platform.

After appearing recently appearing imminent, Eero has finally made the update available to users of its eero, eero Pro, and eero Beacon models which add additional security for smart home devices. With HomeKit support, users are able to restrict communication for smart home devices to only communicate in the home, to the default connections recommended by the manufacturer, or no restriction whatsoever. With smart home devices controlling everything from our lights to our locks, knowing that they are prevented from sending data outside your abode can offer a great deal of peace of mind. The update is installed by heading to the “Discover” tab within the eero app.

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Someone Stole Clearview AI’s List of Clients

Andrew Orr ·

Clearview AI gained notoriety for partnering with law enforcement on facial recognition, using its database of billions of scraped images from the web. But someone just stole its list of clients.

…Clearview AI disclosed to its customers that an intruder “gained unauthorized access” to its list of customers, to the number of user accounts those customers had set up, and to the number of searches its customers have conducted. The notification said the company’s servers were not breached and that there was “no compromise of Clearview’s systems or network.”

Meanwhile, law enforcement on end-to-end encryption: “Who needs that kind of encryption, other than maybe the military? We don’t even — in law enforcement — use encryption like that.”

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It’s ok to Complain About Intrusive iOS Ads

Charlotte Henry ·

Macworld’s The Macalope is not known for pulling punches. This week the anonymous columnist joined the debate on iOS ads in typically robust fashion.

While The Macalope is not a fan of exaggeration, he’s even less a fan of junking up the iOS user experience. And that’s what ads do, even when they’re ads for Apple stuff. The Macalope has railed against Microsoft doing this on Windows so he can’t very well not rail against Apple doing the same. And there’s a problem with not complaining about it. Often if you don’t complain about bad behaviors, they never get fixed. It took five years of complaining to get Netflix to stop auto-playing previews of shows that we weren’t going to watch, but the complaining system worked eventually.

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Could iPhone 12’s Fast 802.11ay Wi-Fi Be For AR Glasses?

Andrew Orr ·

The iPhone 12 is rumored to get support for 802.11ay, a high speed and low latency Wi-Fi standard. Jason Cross posits that it could be used for Apple’s AR glasses.

The alternative is to make the headset a relatively dumb set of displays and cameras, with all the processing happening on some sort of base station—like your new iPhone 12. An ultra-high speed, super low-latency connection like that provided by 802.11ay is a necessity to make that work.

A popular thought is that Apple Glasses will be an iPhone accessory like Apple Watch is (or, started out) with most or all of the processing happening on the iPhone.