Warmer, digging out and a NYTG article about hacking you ALL need to read, especially women

Good Morning Augusta

Don’t hurt your back digging out thoday.  We have anopther snow event coming this weekend.

This morning we have partly cloudy skies that will become overcast in the afternoon. A few flurries or snow showers possible. High near 30ºF. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph.

Tonight we’ll have  cloudy skies with a low of 17ºF. Winds will be from the West at 10 to 20 mph.

The readings from my weather instruments are:

Humidity is 90%, the dew point is 24ºF, outside it’s -3.9ºC and 23.6ºF.

The wind direction is South Southwest between 0.1 MPH and 0.3 MPH, generating a wind chill of 23.6ºF.

The Barometric pressure is 29.13 / HPA 986.5 and rising with a weather graphic indicating clouds.

The UV rating is 0 out of 16, Sunrise is at 6:50 a.m. Sunset is 6:45 P.M. Moon rise is at :58 p.m., Moon set is 8:30 p.m. and the moon phase is waning gibbous.   

The RAW METAR reading from the airport in Augusta, Maine is:

METAR KAUG 150953Z AUTO 23008G16KT 10SM BKN044 M04/M08 A2911 RMK AO2 SLP862 T10441078 $

Visibility is 10.0 miles / 16.1 Kilometers with mostly cloudy to 4,400 ft / 1,341 m.

We received slightly less than 24 inches of snow here during the past 24 hours, but you ought to see the drifts those 40 mph wind gusts built last night!

Space Weather for this morning is:

Today’s Solar flux is 72, the solar wind speed is 363  Kilometers per second and the chance of a solar storm is 1%.

I’m not posting a recipe today, instead I’m posting a New York Times article from yesterday that all women need to be aware of, well, maybe not ALL women, but… well you know what I mean.

From yesterday’s New York Times Technology:

By KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA

MARCH 14, 2017

 

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Customers complained that the bluetooth-enabled We-Vibe devices sent private data to the manufacturer through a companion app. The company, Standard Innovation, has settled a class-action suit.

Forget about prying microwaves. The real spies might be sex toys.

That, at least, was a claim made by two plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago against Standard Innovation, a Canadian manufacturer of “smart” vibrators that allow users to remotely “turn on your lover” via a Bluetooth connection.

The class action came after two hackers demonstrated in a hacking conference last year that it was possible to remotely take control of the vibrator and activate it.

The company agreed this week to pay $3.75 million to settle the suit, which alleged that the firm violated privacy by accessing personal information. Under the terms of the settlement, Standard Innovation will also stop recording users’ personal information and destroy any collected data.

To use the We-Vibe vibrator’s full range of features and customized vibrations, including text and chat features, users were required to download the We-Connect mobile app from the Apple Store or Google Play. Once the app was installed and linked to the vibrator, consumers could use their smartphone to remotely access and control it, according to the company.

“The usage information collected by Standard Innovation through We-Connect is extraordinarily intimate and private,” according to court documents from the plaintiffs. The two lead plaintiffs were anonymous, including an Illinois woman identified as N.P. who said she bought a $130 We-Vibe Rave and downloaded the app but was never warned about the data collection, The Chicago Tribune reported.

 

“Standard Innovation collected individual-level usage information – often tied to users’ personally identifiable addresses,” they said, adding that the firm “breached its customers’ trust, devalued their purchases” and “violated federal and state law in the process.”

About 300,000 people purchased We-Vibe devices covered by the class action, and about 100,000 downloaded and used the app, according to a memo filed with the settlement agreement.

 

The security and data collection issues came to light last year at the Def Con hackers’ conference in Las Vegas during a talk called “Hacking the Vibrating Internet of Things,” by two hackers, The Guardian reported in August.

“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” one of the hackers, who goes by @Followr on Twitter, told the conference. “But if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.” His co-presenter was @g0ldfisk. They estimated that Standard Innovation had about two million customers for its products.

In the settlement, the company denied any wrongdoing.

“At Standard Innovation we take customer privacy and data security seriously,” a spokesman, Denny Alexander, said in an email on Tuesday, calling the settlement “fair and reasonable.”

In September, he said, “we responded rapidly to concerns about app privacy and security. We enhanced our privacy notice, increased app security, provided customers more choice in the data they share, and we continue to work with leading privacy and security experts to improve the app.”

This latest class action reflects growing concerns over internet-connected “smart” products in the home that can get, well, too smart. A string of reports in recent years about hackers targeting and remotely controlling items like baby monitors have raised alarm. And numerous experiments by researchers have shown how easy it is to hack into cars, medical devices and even dolls.

Last month, German regulators announced that they were banning sales of Cayla, a doll made by U.S.-based Genesis Toys, because they said hackers could use it to steal personal data by recording private conversations over an insecure Bluetooth connection.

The doll is also under scrutiny in the United States, where advocacy groups filed a complaint with the toymaker in December, alleging that the company records and transmits the voice prints of children to a software company.

 

If you think this is a fake post, go to the NYjT yourself and re-read it there at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/technology/we-vibe-vibrator-lawsuit-spying.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfron