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What to Do if You Were Affected by the Equifax Breach

Jason Tate

If you were affected by the Equifax breach, I’ve found these resources to be helpful in sharing with friends and family.

The New York Times:

In the meantime, here’s hoping that this breach is the nudge you need to finally sign up for permanent freezes on your credit files. I’ve used them for years, and here’s how they work. You sign up (and pay some fees, because you knew it wasn’t going to be free to protect data that you didn’t ask these companies to store, right?) at Equifax’s, Experian’s and TransUnion’s websites.

Lifehacker:

This breach actually happened three months ago, so there’s a chance that your information is already being used. Check your credit report and make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary happening.

Reddit:

If you do nothing else, place an initial 90 day fraud alert on your file. This is free and will require lenders to contact you if someone (including yourself) tries to apply for credit.

Brian Krebs:

I’m here to tell you that if you’re an American, your basic personal data is already for sale. What follows is a primer on what you can do to avoid becoming a victim of identity theft as a result of all this data (s)pillage.

Equifax: The Dumpster Fire Edition

Jason Tate

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

The breach Equifax reported Thursday, however, very possibly is the most severe of all for a simple reason: the breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals. By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be. The theft, by criminals who exploited a security flaw on the Equifax website, opens the troubling prospect the data is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both and will remain so indefinitely.

Brian Krebs:

I cannot recall a previous data breach in which the breached company’s public outreach and response has been so haphazard and ill-conceived as the one coming right now from big-three credit bureau Equifax, which rather clumsily announced Thursday that an intrusion jeopardized Social security numbers and other information on 143 million Americans.

Spotify and Hulu Partner on a Discounted Bundle For Students

Jason Tate

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:

Hulu and Spotify announced a partnership today that will see the two companies working together to market entertainment bundles offering both services which will be jointly sold through a single subscription plan. Initially, this bundle will be targeted towards U.S. college students and will cost just $4.99 per month – the same as Spotify’s existing student plan. The bundle includes access to Spotify Premium, the company’s on-demand music service, and Hulu’s “Limited Commercials” plan.

Apple, Amazon Join Race for James Bond Film Rights

James Bond
Jason Tate

The Hollywood Reporter:

The James Bond sweepstakes has taken an unexpected turn. While Warner Bros. remains in the lead to land film distribution rights to the megafranchise — whose deal with Sony expired after 2015’s Spectre — a couple of unlikely suitors have emerged that also are in hot pursuit: Apple and Amazon.

The tech giants are willing to spend in the same ballpark as Warners, if not much more, for the rights, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. MGM has been looking for a deal for more than two years, and Sony, Universal and Fox also had been pursuing the property, with Warners and Sony the most aggressive.

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Facebook Offers Millions of Dollars for Music Rights

Facebook
Jason Tate

Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. is offering major record labels and music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars so the users of its social network can legally include songs in videos they upload, according to people familiar with the matter.

The posting and viewing of video on Facebook has exploded in recent years, and many of the videos feature music to which Facebook doesn’t have the rights. Under current law, rights holders must ask Facebook to take down videos with infringing material.

Pixelmator Pro Coming This Fall

Apps
Jason Tate

Pixelmator, my image editor of choice, has announced their new “Pro” app coming later this year:

Pixelmator Pro is an image editor packed full of innovations. From a reimagined editing workflow and simplified editing tools to machine learning powering all-new, intelligent image editing features. So the tools at your fingertips are smarter and more powerful, yet more intuitive and easier to use than ever before.

It looks good.

A Serf on Google’s Farm

Google
Jason Tate

Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo:

Now Google can say – and they are absolutely right – that every month they send checks for thousands and millions of dollars to countless publishers that make their journalism possible. And in general Google tends to be a relatively benign overlord. But as someone who a) knows the industry inside and out – down to the most nuts and bolts mechanics – b) someone who understands at least the rudiments of anti-trust law and monopoly economics and c) can write for a sizable audience, I can tell you this: Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices.

Tesla Working on Own Streaming Service?

Tesla
Jason Tate

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:

A friend of the site and Tesla tinkerer known as Green, who brought us Tesla’s new maps and navigation engine and the Autopilot debugging mode, has found a new client in Tesla’s most recent updates for the new streaming service.

It’s called ‘TTunes’, which could likely only be a placeholder name for the actual service.

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Google Search Uses a Medical Quiz to Help Diagnose Depression

Google
Jason Tate

Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget:

Only half of Americans who face depression get help for it, and Google is determined to increase that percentage. As of today, it’s offering a medically validated, anonymous screening questionnaire for clinical depression if you search for information on the condition. This won’t definitively indicate that you’re clinically depressed, to be clear, but it will give you useful information you can take to a doctor. And importantly, the very presence of the questionnaire promises to raise awareness and promote treatment beyond what a basic information card would offer.

Cloudflare’s Lava Lamps

Technology
Jason Tate

Katharine Schwab:

When you walk into the San Francisco office of the cloud network and security firm Cloudflare, you’re greeted by a receptionist–and a giant wall of 100 lava lamps. It isn’t just a throwback to the 1960s. The lava lamps act as a random number generator, helping to encrypt the requests that go through Cloudflare, which make up 10% of all internet requests.[…]

Cloudflare turns the “Wall of Entropy” into encryption using a camera that photographs the wall every millisecond of every day of the year. Any one of the company’s systems can turn the display of pixels–which changes based on a multitude of factors, like the movement of the lava, the inclusion of anyone who’s walking by, and the shifting daylight–into random numbers.[…]

In London, they use dual pendulums. While a single pendulum swinging back and forth is very predictable, mathematicians have shown that if you take a pendulum and hang another pendulum from it, you’ll create a system that no one has figured out how to model.

GoDaddy and Google Boot White Supremacist Site

Jason Tate

TechCrunch:

White supremacist site the Daily Stormer needs to find another domain provider after getting the boot from GoDaddy. In a tweet, the company said “We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.”

They tried to move to Google, and Google rejected them as well:

Google has canceled the domain registration for The Daily Stormer, a company spokesperson confirmed Monday.

“We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” the spokesperson told Business Insider.

Good.

Jeff Bezos Becomes World’s Richest Person

Jeff Bezos
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

A 1 percent pop in the shares of Amazon.com — the internet company Mr. Bezos founded, which accounts for the vast majority of his wealth — was enough to bump him over the wealth of Mr. Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, according to a real-time list of billionaires by Forbes.com, which has tallied the fortunes of the uber-rich for decades.

Forbes now estimates the wealth of Mr. Bezos, currently Amazon’s chief executive, at about $90.6 billion, compared with $90 billion for Mr. Gates.

Adobe to Discontinue Flash in 2020

Jason Tate

Frederic Lardinois, writing for TechCrunch:

Adobe today announced that Flash, the once-ubiquitous plugin that allowed you to play your first Justin Bieber video on YouTube and Dolphin Olympics 2 on Kongregate, will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Until then, Adobe will still partner with the likes of Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google to offer security updates for Flash in their browsers and support new versions of them, but beyond that, Adobe will not offer any new Flash features.

Good riddance.

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