Reddit’s first earnings report as a public company showed leaps in users and advertising revenue, along with expenses related to its initial public offering.
Amazon has been focusing on shipping products quickly by putting more items closer to customers. The company’s cloud computing business is also growing.
Quarterly results on Wednesday underscored Meta’s repositioning of itself as a company poised to capitalize on the industrywide fervor for artificial intelligence.
The first-quarter results are likely to fuel worries that competitors will continue grabbing a bigger slice of a market dealing with slowing electric car sales.
The second quarter “will be a lot better,” Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said on a conference call to discuss the company’s first-quarter results.
General Motors has struggled with electric vehicles and in foreign markets but it is selling lots of combustion engine cars and trucks in North America.
When we told the true tale of a virtual kidnapping scam in Utah, though the teenaged victim at the center of the scam was eventually found, his family still lost nearly $80,000.
And when we asked Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included team about what types of information modern cars can collect about their owners, we were entirely blindsided by the policies from Nissan and Kia, which claimed the companies can collect data about their customers’ “sexual activity” and “sex life.”
In looking at these stories collectively, it can feel like the everyday consumer is hopelessly outmatched against modern companies. What good does it do to utilize personal cybersecurity best practices, when the companies we rely on can still leak our most sensitive information and suffer few consequences? What’s the point of using a privacy-forward browser to better obscure my online behavior from advertisers when the machinery that powers the internet finds new ways to surveil our every move?
These are entirely relatable, if fatalistic, feelings. But we are here to tell you that nihilism is not the answer.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports, about some of the most recent, major consumer wins in the tech world, what it took to achieve those wins, and what levers consumers can pull on today to have their voices heard.
Brookman also speaks candidly about the shifting priorities in today’s legislative landscape.
“One thing we did make the decision about is to focus less on Congress because, man, I’ll meet with those folks so we can work on bills, [and] there’ll be a big hearing, but they’ve just failed to do so much.”
The company’s revenue was 15 percent higher compared with last year, and it solidified its standing as the entertainment company’s dominant streaming service.
You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but.
Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but it’s general in nature.
From the executive summary:
We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the uncertainty introduced by use of electronic machinery and the ability of bad actors to exploit electronic vulnerabilities to remotely alter the results. However, some portion of voters mistakenly mark paper ballots in a manner that will not be counted in the way the voter intended, or which even voids the ballot. Hand-counts delay timely reporting of results, and introduce the possibility for human error, bias, or misinterpretation.
Technology introduces the means of efficient tabulation, but also introduces a manifold increase in complexity and sophistication of the process. This places the understanding of the process beyond the average person’s understanding, which can foster distrust. It also opens the door to human or machine error, as well as exploitation by sophisticated and malicious actors.
Rather than assert that each component of the process can be made perfectly secure on its own, we believe the goal of each component of the elections process is to validate every other component.
Consequently, we believe that the hallmarks of a reliable and optimal election process are hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned, separately and securely stored, and rigorously audited after the election but before certification. We recommend state legislators adopt policies consistent with these guiding principles, which are further developed below.
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