It was a week of lost and found fortunes in the tech world. The Feds charged My Big Coin Pay over its $6 million cryptocurrency scam, Netflix is poised to take home as many a four golden statues for Mudbound, Bungie’s in hot water again over tweaking…
As influencer marketing has exploded over the past few years celebrities have taken to promoting products through their social media channels. It’s pretty common to see celebrities, particularly B and C-listers, hawking products like slimming teas, teeth whiteners, protein supplements, etc on Instagram and Facebook. This trend has given birth to countless companies that claim to add hundreds of followers to accounts overnight in exchange for money. Devumi is one such company, it sold more than 3.5 million fake social media followers to celebrities and politicians, and now it’s being investigated by the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Selling fake social media followers isn’t exactly illegal. Even if you’ve never paid for such a service, chances are you have several bots following you on Twitter and Instagram. That’s how prevalent they are.
Devumi isn’t being investigated just because it sold 3.5 million fake social media followers. It’s being investigated because apparently at least 55,000 of the fake accounts were made using personal details of real people. Some of those people live in New York. These bot accounts reportedly used pictures, names, hometowns, and other details from real people on Twitter.
Schneiderman says that this amounts to “impersonation and deception.” It gets worse, though, because some of the people whose information was used for these bots were not even legal adults.
Devumi claims to be based in New York City on its website but the New York Times reports that the company is actually based in Florida.
Company Selling Fake Social Media Followers To Celebrities Being Investigated , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Elon Musk runs several companies that will happily sell you anything from an all-electric car to new roof tiles that double as solar panels. What about a potential weapon, though? Elon Musk founded The Boring Company not too long ago. The company aims to fix traffic woes by building tunnels underground and establishing a high-speed transport system. He sold a ton of Boring Company hats and teased that when the hats were sold out, they’d sell a flamethrower. Lo and behold, you can now pre-order a flamethrower from The Boring Company.
Musk’s Boring Company is now selling the “world’s safest” flamethrower that you can pre-order for $500. The company hasn’t confirmed when it’s going to ship, though. If you don’t feel comfortable buying a $500 flamethrower, perhaps you will be more interested in a branded fire extinguisher for $30.
There are 20,000 of these flamethrowers available for purchase and Musk tweeted yesterday that over 2,000 have been sold already. Don’t worry about getting in trouble because they’re legal, Musk says that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms permits flamethrowers that shoot fire at less than 10 feet. That appears to be the case with this one.
There’s no real reason why The Boring Company is selling a flamethrower other than it being a novelty item. That’s what got them into hats anyway but then again, that’s comparing apples to oranges. Musk does say that the flamethrower is “great for roasting nuts.”
Elon Musk Is Selling Flamethrowers , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
It has been a rough couple of weeks for OnePlus. The company recently discovered a credit card hack on its website that potentially affected 40,000 customers. Then a story started making the rounds that OnePlus identifies and then uploads clipboard data like bank account numbers to a Chinese server. OnePlus has denied this outright and explained why some might be thinking that it could be doing this.
This misunderstanding apparently stems from a file in the OxygenOS beta called badwords.txt. It includes words like Chairman, Vice President, Private Messaging, etc. The allegation was that OnePlus uses this file to identify what data is to be uploaded from the Clipboard app to the server in China.
This would be very wrong had it turned out to be true. OnePlus was quick to issue a denial. It explains that badwords.txt is actually a blacklist file, it informs the operating system to not monitor matching data for its smart clipboard service.
OnePlus users outside China will not be familiar with this feature because it only exists in HydrogenOS, the operating system that the company only uses in China.
“There’s been a false claim that the Clipboard app has been sending user data to a server. The code is entirely inactive in the open beta for OxygenOS, our global operating system. No user data is being sent to any server without consent in OxygenOS,” the company said in its official statement.
The only mistake OnePlus seems to have made here is including files from HydrogenOS into the OxygenOS beta. The code remains inactive so it doesn’t do anything, but it’s confusing and leads to misunderstandings like these.
OnePlus Denies Sending Clipboard Data To China , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
The cryptocurrency market has just been hit with one of its biggest losses in its short lifespan. The Tokyo-based Coincheck, one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, has confirmed that it recently lost 500 million tokens of the NEM currency to attackers, and is still investigating how they got away with it. The theft is said to be worth at least … Continue reading
If you keep your phone plugged in overnight to charge, make sure the cable doesn’t become a tripping hazard. You don’t have to worry about stumbling over any wires if you have the TAMO Charge-N-Glow cable. This MFi-Certified Lightning cable glows in the dark thanks to the LED lights along the cord that light up
Depending on whether your cable is plugged in or not, the lights will blink faster or slower. The lights also display the energy flowing into your phone, so you can get a nice visual of your phone juicing up. The cable even doubles as a night light.
Grab the TAMO Charge-N-Glow MFi-Certified Lightning Cable for only $18.99 in the Technabob Shop.
The spokeswoman rips “salacious” speculation after the first lady skipped a planned trip to Davos with her husband.
Piers Morgan tweeted his big breaking news to promote his presidential interview.
We need to ask: when is the industry going to acknowledge it’s legacy of sexual assault, shame and silence?
It appears that Elon Musk wasn’t kidding when he teased that The Boring Company would start selling a real flamethrower. The tunnel-digging company is now taking pre-orders for the tool/weapon, priced at a mere $500. It’s not clear exactly when the flamethrower will ship, but to help keep things extra safe buyers have the option of throwing in a Boring … Continue reading
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