Amazon has extended an offer to President Joe Biden to assist with the national distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, a move that could expedite the federal effort to combat the pandemic. From a report: Dave Clark, the CEO of Amazon’s consumer business, and one of the company’s highest-ranking executives, sent a letter to the president shortly after he was sworn in Wednesday….
Tag: party
Biden Rejoins Paris Climate Accord, Works To Overturn Trump’s Climate Policies
During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump’s environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden’s executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of…
What You Should Known Before Leaking a Zoom Meeting
The Intercept’s Nikita Mazurov warns that Zoom has digital watermarks that could expose sources working with journalists or government officials. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Many users may not realize it, but Zoom has the capability to insert both video and audio watermarks into a meeting. The video watermarks are readily perceptible to meeting participants. When enabled,…
Amazon Begins Removing QAnon Goods For Sale
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology. Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its…
Robert Cringley Predicted ‘The Death of IT’ in 2020. Was He Right?
Yesterday long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley reviewed the predictions he’d made at the beginning of last year. “Having done this for over 20 years, historically I’m correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I’m pretty sure I didn’t predict 370,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall. “We’ll just have to see whether…
Facial Recognition Reveals Political Party In Troubling New Research
Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University’s Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person’s sexual preference could be…
Poland Plans To Make Censoring of Social Media Accounts Illegal
Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump’s social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: “Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki,…
House Votes To Impeach President Trump a Historic Second Time
A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president’s party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes…
Ubiquiti Tells Customers To Change Passwords After Security Breach
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Networking equipment and IoT device vendor Ubiquiti Networks has sent out today notification emails to its customers informing them of a recent security breach. “We recently became aware of unauthorized access to certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third party cloud provider,” Ubiquiti said in emails today. The servers stored…
New Zealand’s Central Bank Says Its Data System Was Breached
The Associated Press reports:
New Zealand’s central bank said Sunday that one of its data systems has been breached by an unidentified hacker who potentially accessed commercially and personally sensitive information. A third party file sharing service used by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to share and store sensitive information had been illegally accessed, the Wellington-based bank said in a statement….