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FairBnB is an ethical alternative to Airbnb, coming in 2019

Dec06
by on December 6, 2018 at 1:11 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


In terms of entrepreneurship and innovation, Airbnb is an absolutely brilliant company. Based on the simple idea of helping people rent out their homes to tourists, the company’s yearly revenue has passed the $2 billion mark in its first 10 years and its services are available in almost every country on the planet. But Airbnb’s immense popularity and benefits have also come with a heap of problems. Many cities cite Airbnb as one of the major factors for increased rent, housing shortages, gentrification, and other disruptive effects of tourism. That’s why Sito Veracruz and his partners went on the ambitious…

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Mozilla and ThingsCon launch certification mark for secure IoT devices

Dec06
by on December 6, 2018 at 1:00 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


Mozilla and ThinksCon today announced the launch of the Trustable Technology Mark, which will help consumers determine if their latest “smart” home gizmo is designed with privacy and security in mind. The Trustable Technology Mark is a bit like the EEA’s CE Mark. The main difference is that while the CE mark concerns itself with the overall safety of the product, the Trustable Technology Mark focuses on privacy and the security lifecycle. For a device to achieve Trustable Technology Mark certification, it must first be evaluated by netural experts from ThingsCon, who look at five criteria. Privacy & Data Practices:…

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Internal docs show Facebook absolutely loves your data

Dec06
by on December 6, 2018 at 12:35 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider


Unless you’re waking up from a decade-long deep slumber, you know that Facebook doesn’t give two hoots about your privacy, and about how it gets your data. If that wasn’t clear, you should have a look at the 250-page document that contains the company’s internal emails, just released by the UK parliament. The document highlights on the first page that the social network knew that it could be dangerous to read call logs and text messages from a user’s Android device without permission. But it went ahead and pushed an update for that anyway: Facebook knew that the changes to…

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Switzerland says its national blockchain will be more secure than Bitcoin – it won’t be

Dec06
by on December 6, 2018 at 11:11 am
Posted In: Around the Web, cryptocurrency, Hard Fork


Switzerland‘s state-run postal and telecoms services are hellbent on building a national blockchain in a bid to recruit local businesses to convert to distributed ledger technology (DLT). Swiss Post and Swisscom have shared details of joint-venture to build a completely private Swiss blockchain for launching locally operated “decentralized” applications. The proposed blockchain is to be a touch more centralized than usual. All data it handles is said to be kept within Switzerland’s digital borders. What’s more curious is the press release includes a rather alarmist sales pitch. Apparently, having Swiss utilities act as blockchain gatekeepers means the infrastructure uses less…

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Millions of Brits can’t access mobile internet as O2’s data services go down

Dec06
by on December 6, 2018 at 10:48 am
Posted In: Around the Web, UK


One of the largest UK phone networks, O2, is investigating a network outage that has rendered mobile data inaccessible to the company’s 25 million customers. The issue is also impacting customers of MVNOs that piggyback on O2’s infrastructure, like GiffGaff, Tesco Mobile, and Lyca Mobile. This means that the number of impacted customers is, in reality, likely to be much higher than 25 million. In a tweet, the network said that the issue lay with one of its third-party suppliers, and recommended that users switch to Wi-Fi wherever possible. Outage Update: One of our 3rd party suppliers has identified a…

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