Posts

There’s a multibillion-dollar market for your phone’s location data

Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated$12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they’ve amassed. Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1....

There’s a new wave of text fraud going around, here’s how you can avoid getting scammed

A new “fraud wave” has been reported in the UK, targeting mobile phone users with texts that, at first glance, appear to be from delivery companies or government institutions. You may even have been targeted by the text scams yourself, which often ask you to pay missed delivery charges or tax fees and are sent from numbers that claim to belong toRoyal Mail,Hermes, orHMRC. While these scams are actually nothing new, there does appear to have been asudden and dramatic increasein their volume in recent weeks, coming after the recent spike incoronavirus vaccine scamsand scams targeting those seeking tobuy a pet onlineduring the pandemic....

There’s a new Web curation tool on the block – meet Bundlr

Over the past year or so, a number of curation tools have emerged that make it easy to group diverse collections of online content around themes. Journalists in particular have taken to tools likeStorify,Curated.byandPearltreesas a way of making sense of information around the Web as they put news stories together – sometimes event incorporating their curated bundles into their actual reporting. With a number of tools already available, is there room for another?...

There’s an app for that — The demise of software suites.

Most of the software I review these days fits at least one of the following categories: Security, Performance and Creative (a broad category, I admit, that varies from burning software to office suites). The content of these categories has hardly changed over the past ten years. The fact that software releases are mostly limited to these categories is fine. The fact that the released software lacks innovation and often uses features that are standard in your OS already....

There’s an asteroid heading for Earth — but scientists tell us not to worry

There’s an asteroid heading for Earth — but scientists tell us not to worry So, what’s the story? Our story begins a couple of years ago, on November 3, 2018. That night, theZwicky Transient FacilityatPalomar Observatoryin Southern California discovered a faint new “near-Earth asteroid” – an object whose orbit can approach, or cross, that of our planet. At the time of its discovery, 2018 VP₁ was roughly 450,000 kilometers from Earth – a little farther than the average distance between Earth and the Moon (around 384,000km)....