Tag: ‘urges’
Symbolic Wyoming Proposal Urges Voluntary Phase-out of EV Purchases by 2035
In the proposed resolution, a group of lawmakers led by Senator Jim Anderson says Wyoming’s “proud and valued” oil and gas industry has created “countless” jobs and contributed revenue to the state’s coffers. They add that a lack of charging infrastructure within Wyoming would make the widespread use of EVs “impracticable” and that the state would need to build “massive amounts of new power generation” to “sustain the misadventure of electric vehicles.” SJ4 calls for residents and businesses to limit the sale and purchase of EVs voluntarily, with the goal of phasing them out entirely by 2035.
If passed, the resolution would be entirely symbolic. In fact, it’s more about sending a message to EV advocates than banning the vehicles altogether. To that point, the final section of SJ4 calls for Wyoming’s Secretary of State to send President Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom copies of the resolution. “One might even say tongue-in-cheek, but obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion,” Senator Boner, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Cowboy State Daily. “I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life. I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Urges Apple Not to ‘Drop the Ball’ on Fixing Messaging in New Billboard Pushing RCS
The digital billboard urges Apple not to “drop the ball” on fixing its “pixelated photos and videos.”
Hey Apple, it’s Android
the ball may have dropped on 2022, but you don’t have to drop the ball on fixing your pixelated photos and videos. Here’s some code to get the ball rolling…
After the short message, the billboard scrolls through RCS code, ending with a plea to customers to “Help Apple #GetTheMessage,” the hashtag that Google has been using for the campaign.
Google launched the “Get the Message” push back in August with a full website highlighting the benefits of RCS, which include support for higher resolution photos and videos, audio messages, and bigger file sizes, along with improved encryption, cross-platform emoji reactions, and more reliable group chats across different devices.
Google continues into 2023 with more RCS ads targeted at Applehttps://t.co/fB6Mst1xXh
— Aaron (@aaronp613) January 5, 2023
Google has been pestering Apple to adopt RCS for well over a year through the website, pleas on Twitter, billboards, and more, but Apple has made no acknowledgement of Google’s efforts. In fact, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that RCS is not a priority. “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point,” said Cook.
All major mobile carriers and manufacturers have implemented RCS support, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Motorola, Nokia, OnePlus, Samsung, Sony, and others, with Apple remaining the lone holdout.
This article, “Google Urges Apple Not to ‘Drop the Ball’ on Fixing Messaging in New Billboard Pushing RCS” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Archbishop of Canterbury urges govt to fix UK’s ‘broken’ social care system
Watchdog Says 53 VPN Apps Unavailable in Hong Kong Since Security Law Passed, Urges Apple To State Its Policy
In a report released on Thursday entitled “Apps at Risk: Apple’s censorship and compromises in Hong Kong,” AppleCensorship found that more apps were unavailable in Hong Kong’s than in most of the 173 App Stores it monitored. According to AppleCensorship’s latest statistics from last month, 2,370 or 16 per cent of the 14,782 apps it tested were unavailable in Hong Kong’s App Store. The watchdog said only stores in Russia and China had more unavailable apps than their Hong Kong counterpart — Russia had 2,754 and China had 10,837.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EU Ombudsman urges close monitoring of Ireland’s Big Tech GDPR cases
The decision concludes a year-long inquiry into claims that the European Commission had failed to adequately monitor how data protection rules are applied in Ireland.
Read more: EU Ombudsman urges close monitoring of Ireland’s Big Tech GDPR cases
Teen-Turn urges women to avail of ATU engineering scholarship in 2023
Trane Technologies is funding two engineering scholarships for women doing degrees at ATU. Each is worth €24,000 over four years.
Read more: Teen-Turn urges women to avail of ATU engineering scholarship in 2023
Senator Wyden Urges FTC Probe of Neustar Over Possible Selling of User Data to Government
But now U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has asked America’s Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Neustar violated the privacy rights of millions, reports the Washington Post, “when it sold records of where they went online to the federal government.”
America’s Department of Defense funded a research team at Georgia Tech who purchased Neustar’s data starting in 2016, notes a letter from Senator Wyden. Wyden has obtained emails between those researchers and “both the FBI and the Department of Justice, indicating that government officials asked the researchers to run specific queries and that the researchers wrote affidavits and reports for the government describing their findings.”
But in addition, Wyden now cites a Department of Justice statement (entered an unrelated court case) which he says makes a concerning assertion: that Neustar executive Rodney Joffe, “who led the company’s efforts to sell data to Georgia Tech, was also involved in the sale of DNS data directly to the U.S. government. The court documents say:
Rodney Joffe and certain companies with which he was affiliated, including officers and employees of those companies, have provided assistance to and received payment from multiple agencies of the United States government. This has included assistance to the United States intelligence community and law enforcement agencies on cyber security matters. Certain of those companies have maintained contracts with the United States government resulting in payment by the United States of tens of millions of dollars for the provision of, among other things, Domain Name System (‘DNS’) data. These contracts included classified contracts that required company personnel to maintain security clearances.
From The Washington Post:
The stipulation naming entrepreneur Rodney Joffe was the clearest confirmation to date of web histories being sold directly to federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, instead of through information brokers exempt from restrictions on what telephone companies and websites can share with the government.
Wyden adds:
The data that Neustar sold to Georgia Tech may have also included data collected from consumers who were explicitly promised that their data would not be sold to third parties. Between 2018 and 2020, Neustar acquired a competing recursive DNS service, which had previously been operated by Verisign. That service had been advertised to the public by Verisign with unqualified promises that “your public DNS data will not be sold to third parties.”
When the product changed hands, users of Verisign’s service were seamlessly transitioned to DNS servers that Neustar controlled. This meant that Neustar now received information about the websites accessed by these former Verisign-users, even though neither Verisign nor Neustar provided those users with meaningful, effective notice that the change of ownership had taken place, or that Neustar did not intend to honor the privacy promises that Verisign had previously made to those users. It is unclear if the data Neustar sold to Georgia Tech included data from users who had been promised by Verisign that their data would not be sold.
This is because both Neustar and Verisign have refused to answer questions from my office necessary to determine this important detail.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.