Article Trunk



Posts Tagged ‘gadgets’

“Glass” on Samsung’s foldable phone no more scratch-resistant than plastic

Samsung claims to have developed an "Ultra Thin Glass" for its new Galaxy Z Flip foldable smartphone, signalling scratch resistance and durability beyond that of similar products. But tests conducted by Zack Nelson using a Mohs Hardness Testkit [Amazon] -- a set of styluses made of different materials -- show that it is no ...

Trump’s immigration enforcement agents use cellphone location data to track individuals for detention – WSJ

A commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones is being used by immigration and border authorities to round up undesirable immigrants for detention and deportation.

The Wall Street Journal [paywall] published a special report on Friday about how federal agencies under impeached president Donald Trump are exploiting cellphone location data to track ...

A company that makes spy-tech for cops threatened to sue Vice for publishing its sales literature (because Iran!)

Special Services Group makes surveillance crapgadgets for cops and spies: cameras and mics hidden in tombstones, vacuum cleaners, children's car-seats, and other everyday items. Muckrock's Beryl Lipton used a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of "Black Book," SSG's massive sales brochure out of the Irvine police department, with minimal redactions.

When Motherboard ...

After random surveillance images started to show up on users’ devices, Google blocked Xiaomi from running Assistant or Google Home

Last week, a redditor posted that "When I load the Xiaomi camera in my Google home hub I get stills from other people's homes!!" The post included video of the user's tablet showing stills of strangers in their homes, including some of strangers asleep in their bedrooms.

A few days later, a googler commented ...

Rhasspy: a free/open voice assistant toolkit that’s fully offline

US Air Force research scientist Michael Hansen created Rhasspy as a privacy-oriented alternative to surveilling "voice assistant" products like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri; the free/open project supports dozens of languages from German, French and English to Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian, and is designed to run on Raspberry Pi-based devices.

It's licensed under the very permissive ...