Electric Wallet

08/09/2021

I began Googling data recovery services and rang up three based in London.

One engineer advised me to immediately stop trying to access the hard drive that Windows said wasn't working properly.

He said the drive had a logic failure, quoting me a price of £250 to repair it. If I kept trying to access the drive, I could lose the data entirely, he warned.

The drive with the clicking noise was worse. This was a mechanical failure where the read-and-write head - akin to a needle on a record player - needed to be replaced. A repair would cost at least £500.

None of other quotes offered were any cheaper, except Currys PC World's Team Knowhow service, which quoted me £90 for a logic failure repair and £350 for a mechanical or component failure.

If data recovery is unsuccessful there is no charge, the retailer says. But you have to be patient about when it will be done, especially with the pandemic.

I asked Western Digital for advice and was told: "If a drive has stopped working, we encourage customers to reach out to our customer service team to help identify the issue and discuss options.

"If it turns out the drive has failed, our customer service team can assist with replacement products, based on warranty, and can refer the customer to one of our data recovery partners if needed."

But since my drives are six and four years old respectively, the only option was to pay for data recovery.How to back up your data and keep it safe?

I'd always thought I was pretty good at keeping my personal data safe, but I was wrong.

My personal files were backed up onto two HDD external hard drives, and in the space of 24 hours in July, both drives failed.

Windows 10 told me that one drive wasn't working properly and kept offering to repair it, to no avail, while the other made a suspicious clicking noise and couldn't be detected by the computer at all.

All of this got me thinking - as a consumer, what is the right way to back up your data, and what do you do if it goes wrong?

External hard drives are portable storage devices that plug into PCs. There are two types - hard disk drives (HDD) that use spinning magnetic discs to store data, and newer, solid state drives (SSD) that use a chip-based flash storage technology.

I started using 1TB Western Digital HDD drives in 2015. Prior to that, I had backed up my data on my laptop and on writeable DVDs.

If my computer died, I would buy a new one, get the data recovered from the old laptop and transferred straight onto the new PC.

Yet once I started using an external hard drive, it was so easy to use that I began to depend on the technology entirely, and when I got a second drive I thought my solution was infallible.

When I got a new laptop a couple years ago with a much smaller but exponentially faster SSD hard drive in it, I wasn't fazed - all I had to do was keep most files on the hard drives, leaving just a few frequently used files on the laptop.

So when the drives failed I was shocked. I turned to the internet but the how-to software tutorials online were of no help.

07/09/2021

Apple has delayed plans to roll out detection technology which would have scanned US users' iPhones in search of child sexual abuse material.

It follows widespread criticism from privacy groups and others, worried that the on-device tracking set a dangerous precedent.

Apple said that it had listened to the negative feedback and was reconsidering.

There were concerns the system could be abused by authoritarian states.

The so-called NeuralHash technology would have scanned images just before they are uploaded to iCloud Photos. Then it would have matched them against known child sexual abuse material on a database maintained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

If a match was found then it would have been manually reviewed by a human and, if required, steps taken to disable a user's account and report it to law enforcement.

It was due to launch later in the year.

In a statement, Apple said: "Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of child sexual abuse material.

"Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."

Privacy campaigners expressed concern that the technology could be expanded and used by authoritarian governments to spy on citizens.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation has been one of the most vocal critics of the system, gathering a petition signed by 25,000 customers opposing the move.

Its executive director Cindy Cohn told the BBC: "The company must go further than just listening and drop its plans to put a backdoor into its encryption entirely."

"The enormous coalition that has spoken out will continue to demand that user phones - both their messages and their photos - be protected, and that the company maintains its promise to provide real privacy to its users."

Apple has been an exponent of privacy and end-to-end encryption in the past.

06/09/2021

WhatsApp has been fined €225m (£193m) by Ireland's data watchdog for breaching privacy regulations.

It is the largest fine ever from the Irish Data Protection Commission, and the second-highest under EU GDPR rules.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has its EU headquarters is in Ireland, and the Irish regulator is the lead authority for the tech giant in Europe.

WhatsApp said it disagrees with the decision, and the severity of the fine, and plans to appeal.

The fine relates to an investigation which began in 2018, about whether WhatsApp had been transparent enough about how it handles information.

The issues involved were highly technical, including whether WhatsApp supplied enough information to users about how their data was processed and if its privacy policies were clear enough.

Those policies have since been updated several times.

"WhatsApp is committed to providing a secure and private service," a company spokesperson said.

"We have worked to ensure the information we provide is transparent and comprehensive and will continue to do so. We disagree with the decision today regarding the transparency we provided to people in 2018 and the penalties are entirely disproportionate."

25/08/2021

Microsoft and GitHub are facing a lawsuit for violating the GNU🤔 license.

Copilot is a new neural network assistant project designed to help programmers write code. This proprietary technology was created by OpenAI and is distributed as a plug-in for Visual Studio Code

Yesterday, GitHub admitted that the developers used all the public code available in the service's repositories when training the Copilot helper, without taking into account the license type.

In fact, the code produced by Copilot violates many free licenses, including the GPL,

Third-party developers and users were outraged by such actions from Microsoft and GitHub, and accused the corporation of disrespecting the code rights of individuals and small public projects.

Activists have already started rallying people around them, including lawyers from the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Together they intend to file a class action lawsuit against evil corporations✊🏻.

On the other hand, right now there is no law that prohibits AI from violating copyrights😖

GitHub's position on this: "training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use in the AI development community."
We'll stay tuned for further developments.
This trial is very important because it should determine the distribution of copyright on works created by machines.

25/08/2021

Kazakhstan government website has been spreading malicious documents for half a year🤦🏼♀️

Researchers from T&T Security and Zerde National Infocommunication Holding JSC found that documents infected with the Razy😳 malware have been posted on Kazakhstan's e-government website for over five months.

The Razy family samples studied by experts are a common downloader Trojan disguised as office documents.

Razy has been active since around 2015, but is still used for attacks today. Its main activity is centered around extracting financial gain for its operators. For example, the malware steals credentials from victims' browseфrs and seizes control of the exchange buffer to spoof cryptocurrency wallet addresses that fall into it.

☝🏻A fun fact: The company's experts believe that the documents discovered were not part of any targeted attack. In their opinion, some of the government employees simply got infected by Razy.

Razy, in turn, used the FakeDoc component, which is used for further distribution. It infected other documents stored on victims' machines, and then these files were uploaded to the official portal eGov.kz🤨

25/08/2021

Evil corporation lobbies for cloud computing😡

Microsoft is moving its worst operating system to the cloud.

The villains have introduced Windows 365, a new service that will allow you to access cloud PCs from anywhere by streaming a version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 in a web browser🤷🏼♀️

Although virtualization and remote PC access have been around for more than a decade, Microsoft is banking on Windows 365 to offer cloud-based PCs to businesses, just as they're moving toward a combination of office and remote work.

Microsoft is offering 12 different configurations for Windows 365 Business and Enterprise, and businesses will be able to scale computing power, so there will be plenty of options to choose from🤨
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☝🏻The dangers of such systems and cloud computing in general were warned us by Comrade Stallman

Back in 2010, Richard Matthew Stallman, founder of the fight for free software, said that the overreliance on cloud computing: "It's stupid. It's worse than stupidity, in fact, it's a marketing program based on deception."

Stallman pointed out that there is a risk of losing legal rights to data stored in the cloud: "To get access to your local data, the police have to show a search warrant; but if the data are stored on some company's server, the police will get it without showing any documents. They might not even have to show a warrant for the company."

He believes it should be in the interest of users to keep information on their computers rather than outsourcing it. Stallman believes that the cloud computing fashion is simply a trap that ties people to proprietary systems👏🏻

"It's just as bad as using proprietary software. Do your data processing on your own computer, with your own copy of free software. If you use a proprietary program or someone else's web server, however, you are vulnerable. You become nothing more than a piece of wax in the hands of whoever developed the software.

25/08/2021

Basic Income System Already in California🤔

California lawmakers have approved the first state-funded guaranteed income plan in the United States.

Thirty-five million dollars each month will be handed out to people for nothing, with no restrictions on how they spend it😉

The payments will be given primarily to young people. The guaranteed income pilot program calls for up to $1,800 every 3 months with no strings attached.

The idea is to reduce the stress of poverty that causes health problems and makes it difficult for people to find and keep a job, an issue that is particularly acute now with increasing digitalization and robotization

The idea of Basic Income is almost the only way to solve the problem of technological unemployment and reduce economic inequality

25/08/2021

23/08/2021

Electronics tax.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade plans to introduce mandatory marking of the electronic component base and components for manufacturers and importers of electronics from 2022.

According to the department it is necessary to increase tax collection. 🤦🏼♀️

In addition, the introduction of labeling will be used by the authorities from 2023 to introduce a recycling fee for foreign manufacturers and importers of electronic devices on certain types of their products, as well as to lobby Russian manufacturers in the market.

In Russia, the labeling operator is the Center for Development of Advanced Technologies LLC. The company charges a fee for marking each item and assigns a unique code to it. 💸

The introduction of mandatory labeling on electronic components will lead to an increase in the cost of many devices for users, as well as delays in the supply of electronics from China and Taiwan. 😡
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