Ring is paywalling existing features
Ring, a company owned by Amazon, is paywalling the Ring Alarm in-app features behind a subscription. Apparently, Amazon is still not making enough money even after taking 50% of all sales on Amazon, as seen a few weeks ago. Anyway, some of the main features, that you probably bought a Ring for in the first place, that are now being paywalled are: Arming and Disarming from the app, changing cameras and doorbells Home and Away modes from the app, and receiving notifications about alarms. There are more changes, so I would link to their official page here. The paywalled features could only be accessed by having a Ring Protect plan, which begins at $4 a month. But you should not pay for it because Amazon sucks. For example, Ring would gladly give your information to police without your consent or a warrant. Including videos of inside your home and they will still give your information out even if the police are not investigating you.
EV Manufacturers are issuing recalls
The EV manufacturers that are issuing these recalls are Tesla, Rivian, Lordstown, and start-up company Electra Meccanica. Rivian is recalling nearly 13,000 cars in order to make sure the passenger airbag deploys. This happened because a sensor within the seatbelt is too small and can not detect a passenger. This is the second big recall from Rivian in recent months, with the last one happening in October of last year. Tesla is recalling 3,470 Model Y’s for having loose bolts that secure the rear seats and seatbelts, that would be hazardous if the vehicle would get into a crash. This problem would be fixed at Tesla service stations free of charge. This comes shortly after Tesla’s 362,000 car recall about the “Full Self Driving” service operating unsafely in specific types of intersections. It wasn’t a physical recall because the issue was resolved via an over the air software update. Lordstown and Electra Meccanica have hardly sold any cars, so their recalls affect next to noone. Lordstown had a high-voltage cable that may cause a shutdown of the vehicle and Electra had sudden loss of drive power. Make sure to stay informed in case your vehicle of choice has a recall.
You can now get scammed by your family
Scammers are now using AI to sound like family members in distress. One elderly couple got a call from what they thought was their grandson asking for money. They immediately went to the bank and withdrew $3000 CAD. They then went to another bank to withdraw more money, but luckily the bank manager informed them that this was most likely a dirty scam. Advancements in machine learning allow people to replicate voices with just a few sentences of audio samples.
You can swear again on Youtube
Toward the end of last year, Youtube made a change to their monetization rules that limited swearing, which included already published videos. This demonetization of videos brought forth massive backlash from the community. These new relaxed rules don’t completely revert to the previous policy. You can now use moderate profanity throughout the whole video and receive monetization. You can now say strong profanity in the first 7 seconds of the video and still receive limited ads. This was a change from the previous where you would have received no monetization. These changes have been in effect since March 7th.
Unkillable malware has been discovered
This malware, dubbed BlackLotus, was discovered by researchers on Wednesday. This malware targets the UEFI, which is the first thing to run on a modern computer. It runs before the OS startup and other security monitors, which makes it the perfect place to put malware. This malware would still persist even after a full system restart. It is’t all bad because this malware is very hard to put on computers. First, the hacker would need to have Admin privileges in order to install the bootkit for BlackLotus. UEFI Secure Boot was the biggest hurdle to jump over for this malware, because all of the data is encrypted and the computer would not start if a single string of unknown code is in the UEFI. But sadly, there has been an exploit found that allows this to happen on modern versions of Windows. For a more in depth explanation, here is an Ars Technica article about the subject and how it works.
Ring is back and still giving away your data.
Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Oho, got a request from the local police. They asked for his Ring camera footage, which he had 21 of them around his home and business, for a specific time frame. They were investigating his neighbor for drugs and Michael complied and sent clips to the police. Later that week, the police wanted a whole day’s worth of footage from his business. This time he said no. A week later, Ring sent a notice to Michael to inform him that they gave the police all of his camera footage, including the ones from his house, which was not even part of the investigation. As said in the previous article about Ring this week, Amazon sucks. Even though the police had a warrant, Ring should not give its users data without consent.
Sony resorts to theories about the Activision deal
Sony’s latest attempt to stop Microsoft’s Activision-Blizzard deal is to ask the question: What if Microsoft sabotages COD for Playstation? Sony imagined this scenario, “Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates.” Because “Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release,” Sony says it wouldn’t even matter if “such degradations could be swiftly detected” and fixed: Fickle players would already have “lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty,” and maybe, unthinkably, switched over to Xbox. Sony believes that Microsoft would make COD worse on Playstation in order to force people over to Xbox. Sony also says that Microsoft promising to bring COD to Nintendo and Nvidia platforms is not a sign of good faith because “any behavioral commitment from Microsoft to grant rivals access to Call of Duty could pose a greater, not lesser, risk for consumers”. It is only a matter of time before the deal goes through.
The Sonic of SSD’s
Sabrent is working on a PCI-e Gen 5 SSD that has been reported to have over 12,000 MB per second sequential read and write speeds. Sabrent also claims that they are working to make the drive transfer over 14,000 MB per second. These kinds of speeds sound expensive and I doubt that it would be needed for most people.
The greatest iPhone has just been announced
Clickbaited. It’s just yellow. I do like this color of yellow and I wish more companies would be bolder with their phones color choice. We need more vibrant colors like orange, bright red, and sky blue. It still won’t make me buy an iPhone. Android is superior.
