Daily Tech News 7 October 2024

• Insecure "Deebot" vacuum cleaners made by Chinese company Ecovacs are recording you and taking pictures and measuring every corner of your house and sending the data back to the manufacturer. (ABC) (no, the other one)
  
  But you agreed to this when you were silly enough to buy one of their products.

  The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program.

  When users opt into this program through the Ecovacs smartphone app, they are not told what data will be collected, only that it will "help us strengthen the improvement of product functions and attached quality".

  But I can use the app to delete my data, right?

  It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.

  But at least the data doesn't go any further, right?

  Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.

  "If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?

  "Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."

  But... Lerian Jihad time.

   

• Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K desktop CPU - expected to arrive this week - sets a new single-threaded performance record. (WCCFTech)
  
  It scores 5268 on Passmark (my preferred benchmark for mainstream CPUs), about 10% ahead of competing chips from AMD and Apple.
  
  On the multi-threaded version of the test, though, things are not so rosy.
  
  There the 24 core (8P, 16E) 285K comes in behind AMD's Ryzen 7 7900, which has 12 cores, is two years old, and uses between half and one third the power of the Intel chip.
  
  That might be a hiccup, but the 285K has only 8 full-size cores, without hyper-threading. (Intel has removed hyper-threading in this generation.) The Ryzen chip has 12 full-size cores with hyper-threading.
  
  
  
• React on the server is not PHP all over again. (Christoffer Artmann)
  
  No, it's not.
  
  
  
• It's worse. (Infrequently Noted)
  
  And here's why.
  
  
  
• After shutting down its cashierless stores - where you can walk in, pick out what you want, and just leave - Amazon is looking to sell the technology to other companies. (CNBC)
  
  I hear this is already big in California.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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