Amazon Admits Employees Have Secretly Watched Ring Camera Customers

In a letter to U.S. senators, tech behemoth Amazon admits that it has fired employees discovered to have been spying on customers using the company’s Ring cameras.

Although the Ring cameras were originally marketed as a way to see who’s standing outside the door before opening it, many users have installed the surveillance equipment inside the house.

Ring's eight-page letter was a response to inquiries made by five U.S. senators regarding the company’s security policies and findings of the company’s internal audits. In November 2019 Senators Ron Wyden, Chris Van Hollen, Edward J. Markey, Christopher A. Coons, and Gary C. Peters co-signed the letter looking for answers to questions about stories of privacy breaches being reported in the media.

The letter to legislators, signed by Amazon Vice President of Public Policy Brian Huseman, explains that Ring received four complaints of its employees viewing of Ring data “that exceeded what was necessary for their job functions.” Huseman reports in the letter that “after determining that the individual violated company policy, the individual was terminated.”

It is unclear whether Huseman means that one individual in each of the four complaints was fired, or whether the abuse of access to data reported to Ring resulted in the termination of only one of the employees investigated by Ring.

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/75976/amazon-admits-employees-have-secretly-watched-ring-camera.html

Iran's only female Olympic medalist defects to Europe

Iran's only female Olympic medalist says she has permanently left the country, posting a lengthy Instagram post that begins with "Should I start with hello, goodbye, or condolences?"

Kimia Alizadeh, 21, cited the country's treatment of women, including her, as the main force driving her defection to Europe. Alizadeh earned a bronze medal in the taekwondo 57-kilogram weight class at the 2016 Summer Olympics and won a silver medal at the 2017 World Taekwondo Championships.

On Thursday, Iran's state-run news media reported that Alizadeh had defected to the Netherlands, according to RadioFreeEurope, which added that she was expected to still try for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo with a different country's team.

Alizadeh didn't specify in her Instagram post where she was or what her future athletic plans were, though she did say her only concerns at the moment were taekwondo, her security, and a healthy and happy life.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/news/iran-olympic-medalist-defects-europe

>>7801288

And no security to prevent them from doing it …Wonder Why

Albanian President Vetoes Laws Censoring Online Media

President Ilir Meta returned to Parliament the two laws of the so-called “anti-defamation package” which media organization have considered a government tool for online media censorship. The two laws are that “On Audiovisual Media” and “On Electronic Communication”.

The President argued that both laws violate:

The fundamental constitutional principles of a democracy;

The right to freedom of expression, press and the right to information;

The previous decisions of the Constitutional Court;

The European Convention on Human Rights.

Meta argued in his decision that the implementation of these laws would lead to censorship due to government agencies’ power to impose fines that need to be paid before a final court verdict.

https://tsarizm.com/news/balkans/2020/01/12/albanian-president-vetoes-laws-censoring-online-media/

Wi-Fi 6 is slowly gathering steam

There’s a lot to look forward to about 802.11ax, aka Wi-Fi 6, just don’t expect it to be a top-to-bottom revolution in 2020.

The next big wave of Wi-Fi technology, 802.11ax, is going to become more commonplace in enterprise installations over the course of the coming year, just as the marketing teams for the makers of Wi-Fi equivalent will have you believe. Yet the rosiest predictions of revolutionary change in what enterprise Wi-Fi is capable of are still a bit farther off than 2020, according to industry experts.

The crux of the matter is that, while access points with 802.11ax’s Wi-Fi 6 branding will steadily move into enterprise deployments in, the broader Wi-Fi ecosystem will not be dominated by the new standard for several years, according to Farpoint Group principal Craig Mathias.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3512153/wi-fi-6-will-slowly-gather-steam-in-2020.html#tk.rss_all

DARPA Names Qualifiers for the Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit

Seventeen teams have qualified to participate in the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Urban Circuit. Eleven teams will compete in the Systems competition at Satsop Business Park in Elma, Washington, Feb. 18-27, 2020. Eight teams qualified to participate in the Virtual competition, which will run Jan. 23-30. Two teams will compete in both Virtual and Systems events.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge seeks to better equip warfighters and first responders to explore human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks, while decreasing risk to human lives. The SubT Challenge Systems and Virtual competitions aim to create a community of multidisciplinary teams from wide-ranging fields to foster breakthrough technologies in autonomy, perception, networking, and mobility for underground environments. The Tunnel Circuit took place in August 2019. The Cave Circuit is planned for August 2020, and the Final Event incorporating all three underground environments is targeted for August 2021.

To compete in the Systems competition, each team had to demonstrate baseline performance capabilities and appropriate safety measures. Teams in the Systems competition will deploy autonomous ground and aerial systems to attempt to accurately identify and map as many artifacts as possible along two competition courses. Each course will include 20 artifacts representing items a first responder or service member may encounter in an urban underground environment.

Qualified Virtual competitors will submit their solutions through the SubT Virtual Portal during the submission window. Selecting from a repository of robot models and a variety of sensors, each team can assemble an esports style solution to map, navigate, and search dark, dangerous, and unpredictable underground scenarios.

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-01-10