Tuesday Newsday: Apple's Double Whammy

It has not been a great few days for the folks over at Apple HQ as they're hit with a double dose of bad news.

A group of university researchers have discovered a chip-level exploit in Macs with Apple Silicon chips. The researchers stated that they used the design flaw to bypass the computer's encryption and access private security keys. After that, it's game over for your private data.

On top of that, the Department of Justice in the US filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, stating that the company has been making its software and hardware ecosystem inaccessible to competitors (which is ENTIRELY true by the way).

It's probably not that big of a surprise in the hyper-connected, Internet of Things era that devices are (literally) always spying on you. What comes as a surprise to many is that companies often use fancy legalese to dupe you into also granting them the ability to sell this collected data to third parties. Drivers of GM manufactured cars were absolutely not thrilled to learn that their driving data had passed hands not only once, but twice. First to a data analytics firm, which happens to have some sort of deal with car insurers. Hard to see how this could go wrong for the drivers. </s>

We've had choice words about Mozilla before, so forgive me if it sounds like I told you so but I freaking told you so. Onerep, an "identity protection service" that was recently bundled into Firefox as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus has been dropped. This is largely because Onerep CEO Dimitri Shelest has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years.

Recently unsealed court records show that the US government demanded the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of all Google account users who accessed specific YouTube videos (which were uploaded as a honeypot btw) between January 1 and January 8, 2023, from Google HQ. Oh, and they also said Google couldn't tell anybody about it. It's unclear whether or not Google complied but it's probably safe to assume they did.

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