Even the courts cannot agree on whether geofence warrants are legal, likely setting up an eventual challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court.
While Google is not the only company subject to geofence warrants, Google has been far the biggest collector of sensitive location data, and the first to be tapped for it.
Although the companies have said little about how many geofence warrants they receive, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo last year backed a New York state bill that would have banned the use of geofence warrants across the state.
The data showed Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, then 8,396 geofence warrants in 2019, and 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020 — or about one-quarter of all the legal demands that Google received.
But there is hope that Google shutting the door on geofence warrants — at least going forward — could significantly curtail this surveillance loophole.
Ubiquity, the networking and video surveillance camera maker, has fixed a bug that users say mistakenly allowed them access to the accounts and private live video streams of other customers.
Reports first emerged on Reddit that some customers received push notifications on their phones featuring Ubiquiti account-related information and private video streams belonging to other customers.
Another person said they logged into their Ubiquiti account but were presented with the account data of another customer.
“I logged in and I seem to be someone else,” said one person on the Ubiquiti subreddit.
Ubiquiti is a cloud and technology company that makes routers, network switches, security and video surveillance gear, which can be remotely controlled and operated through its centralized cloud offering.
“I think crypto has always been made by very technical people and for technical people,” Johann Kerbrat, the general manager of crypto at Robinhood, said on the Chain Reaction podcast.
“At the end of the day, I think customers, when they use crypto, they don’t really care what is the protocol under it?
Robinhood users can do more technical things like transfer to its crypto wallet and use “advanced charts and autotypes where you can put, for example, a stop loss,” Kerbrat said.
The platform might not be as highly technical as one that’s crypto-focused, Robinhood is doing research to understand what customers want and are missing.
With that said, the platform still has 14 cryptocurrencies and one stablecoin, USDC, available for users to buy and sell.
Instagram launched a new feature where you can create customized “Add Yours” templates with GIFs, images and text, allowing you to make your own meme-able Stories for followers to participate in.
To create an Add Yours template, start uploading a Story and add elements like a GIF, custom text or an image from the gallery.
Then tap on the “Add Yours Templates” sticker and select which elements you want to pin.
Now anyone can take an Add Yours prompt and add their own spin to it, allowing for more creative expression and collaboration.
Similarly, Instagram introduced a “template browser” for Reels in July, letting you discover and customize pre-made templates to add to your videos.
The location-based social network, which launched earlier this year in March, wants to help people focus on real-life connections and make friends.
Jagat is somewhat similar to Snap-owned Zenly, a social map app that shut down last year.
Your social map is what you see when you open Jagat, as it’s where you see your friends’ locations in real-time.
“We want to bring back social in social apps – focusing on social networking and not media,” Beagen said.
Around 85% of Jagat users are part of GenZ.
Firefox maker Mozilla announced today the launch of over 450 new extensions — aka browser add-ons — which are now available on Mozilla’s Firefox Browser Add-ons page.
While Firefox’s nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox’s mainstream users were also without.
It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today’s news that there are now 450+ extensions available.
Safari, Samsung’s browser, Opera, and others are also ahead of Firefox in the mobile browser race.
With extensions, you’re free to change the way Firefox for Android looks and behaves.
More importantly for Mastodon, Meta committed to integrating Threads with ActivityPub, meaning users would be able to find and follow both Mastodon and Threads users across both services.
While many expected that integration wouldn’t arrive until early 2024, Meta surprised everyone by announcing yesterday that it would begin testing ActivityPub integration.
I’m pretty optimistic about this,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Threads.
Threads users’ profiles on Mastodon weren’t backfilled with their older posts before the integration went live.
With Threads’ integration into Mastodon’s ecosystem, users will have more choice in how they want to engage with Threads users and content, including by accessing those accounts from an app of their choosing.
Beeper Cloud users were also impacted, the company’s post said, referring to its original messaging app aggregator, but said those users could contact Beeper Help for a fix as well.
Apple appears to be deliberately blocking iMessages from being delivered to ~5% of Beeper Mini users.
Uninstalling and reinstalling Beeper Mini fixes the issue.
But although Beeper believed Apple would not be able to shut its service down, as Beeper Mini users communicated directly with Apple’s servers, just as iPhones do, Apple quickly reacted on Friday to put an end to Beeper Mini’s operation.
As a result of Apple’s meddling, leading to Beeper Mini’s instability, the startup made its new app free for Android users for the time being.
Hackers compromised the code behind a crypto protocol used by multiple web3 applications and services, the software maker Ledger said on Thursday.
The company says it has sold six million units of its hardware wallet, and Ledger Live, its software equivalent, is used by 1.5 million users.
That would allow the hackers to drain the crypto inside users’ wallets — so long as the users accepted the push to connect their wallets to the malicious Ledger version.
ZachXBT, a well-known independent crypto researcher, wrote on X that one victim had more than $600,000 in crypto drained from their account.
Several blockchain security researchers, as well as people who work in the web3 industry, warned users on social media of the supply chain hack against Ledger.
Australia-based link-in-bio platform Linktree announced today that it has acquired competitor Koji from its parent company GoMeta for an undisclosed amount.
The company is offering Koji users three months of Linktree Pro plan as a trial.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Koji users to the Linktree community and are excited to continue to innovate on the category we created.
The company launched Koji as a link-in-bio platform in March 2021 and raised $16 million through its parent entity.
In a previous avatar, Koji let non-technical developers make “mini apps on the web,” which were later turned into templates on the link-in-bio platform.
