Newsletter Archives

• Bankrupt technology: How FTX crushed $40 billion to bits

  Posted on December 5, 2022 at 02:44 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, was valued by investors at $40 billion in early 2022 but wound up in bankruptcy last month and is now almost worthless.

  FTX, short for “Futures Exchange,” launched its service in 2019 and minted its own digital token with the ticker symbol FTT. With almost 250 million FTT units available to the public, FTX’s CEO and majority owner, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF, as he’s known) had a net worth of $26 billion in early 2022.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.49.0, 2022-12-05).

  Public Defender Bankruptcy, Cryptocurrency, FTT, FTX, Newsletters, Public Defender, Sam Bankman-Fried

• Why is Bing worse than Google for finding Windows info?

  Posted on November 7, 2022 at 02:44 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a small but growing market share — chipping away at Google’s 90% dominance worldwide — but the Redmond software giant’s Web crawler can be surprisingly weak in showing you helpful Windows information from technology websites other than Microsoft.com.

  There are thousands of blogs and newsletters that post every possible factoid about Windows, from the fluffiest corporate press releases to obscure technical features you’ve never dreamed of.

  So what might explain the inadequacy of Redmond’s favorite search engine to deliver the Windows info users need to know?

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.45.0, 2022-11-07).

  Public Defender Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Newsletters, Public Defender, search engines

• The state of Windows 11: A bit slow on the uptake

  Posted on October 10, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.41 • 2022-10-10

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  One year after the release of Windows 11, the new operating system is being installed by computer users at a much slower adoption rate than was achieved by Windows 10 and other major versions of Microsoft’s core OS.

  Counting all versions of Windows running on desktop computers worldwide, Windows 11, with a penetration of 13.6%, has only in the past two months overtaken the users of Windows 7 (10.6%), according to a September 2022 report by Statcounter. Just to state the obvious, the ancient Win7 OS was released by Microsoft way back in 2009.

  Meanwhile, good ol’ Windows 10 is still going strong, running on 71.9% of all Windows desktops globally, Statcounter says.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.41.0, 2022-10-10).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Public Defender Newsletters, Public Defender, Windows 11

• Should you get a free credit report for any data breach?

  Posted on September 26, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Samsung Electronics — the giant multinational that sells 28% of all the smartphones in the world, as well as many other consumer devices — has sent notices to some of its users that their personal information in Samsung’s database has been hacked.

  In a statement, the company says the hackers didn’t obtain users’ credit-card or debit-card numbers. But the intrusion did reveal some customers’ names, addresses, birthdates, and the Samsung products they’d registered. As a result, the corporation’s notices recommend that affected users obtain a copy of their credit report from major reporting agencies.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.39.0, 2022-09-26).

  Public Defender Credit Reports, data breach, Newsletters, Privacy, Public Defender, Samsung, Security

• Twitter accounts are 80% bots, expert says

  Posted on September 12, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  More than 80% of the accounts on Twitter are likely to be nothing more than automated bots, according to a study by the head of intelligence at F5, an international network-security firm with offices in 43 countries.

  Even worse, bots represent as much as 99% of the login traffic at some highly visible websites — perhaps even one of your favorites.

  These are the conclusions of a study by Dan Woods, who was a cyberoperations officer with the CIA prior to taking his current role at F5 six years ago.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.37.0, 2022-09-12).

  Public Defender Bots, Newsletters, Public Defender, Security, Twitter

• Google explains why videos sent from iPhones look so terrible

  Posted on August 29, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Visuals sent from iPhones and iPads via iMessage are seriously degraded, sometimes unrecognizably so, when received on Android phones — and even sometimes on other iPhones. This is because Apple refuses to support a common tech standard, according to a new public effort by Google.

  You may be surprised to learn that some very solid Mac users are the first to complain about Apple’s garbling of their multimedia files.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.35.0, 2022-08-29).

  Public Defender iMessage, Messages, MMS, Newsletters, Public Defender, RCS, SMS, Texting

• Kim Kardashian wants out of lawsuit for promoting EthereumMax

  Posted on August 15, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Attorneys for Kim Kardashian, the famous reality-TV star, have filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges investors lost millions of dollars after the celebrity promoted a new cryptocurrency named EthereumMax to more than 200 million followers on Instagram.

  EthereumMax is a digital product that went live in trading markets on May 17, 2021, under the symbol EMAX. Its promoters can’t be accused of thinking small: they issued an initial quantity of 2 quadrillion coins. (That’s 2 followed by 15 zeros or 2 million billion tokens.)

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.33.0, 2022-08-15).

  Public Defender Cryptocurrency, Newsletters, Public Defender

• Amazon releases Ring videos without consent. Should you care?

  Posted on August 1, 2022 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Giant retailer Amazon.com, the parent company of Ring video and audio doorbells and other devices, admits in a letter to a United States senator that it sometimes releases recorded files to law-enforcement agencies without a court-ordered warrant or the consent of the recording’s owner.

  In response to a request for information from Sen. Edward Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts), Amazon vice president for public policy Brian Huseman revealed: “Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times” in the first half of 2022.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.31.0, 2022-08-01).

  Public Defender Amazon Ring, Newsletters, Privacy, Public Defender, Security, Surveillance
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