Hasta La Gadget!

You may have heard of the Juul e-cigarettes that have been wildly popular over the past year. They don’t actually look like e-cigarettes as the design is very discrete which makes them look more like USB drives than e-cigarettes. That’s one of the reasons behind Juul’s popularity. However, in the wake of increased government scrutiny, Juul has said that it will no longer be selling some of its flavor pods through retail stores.

Juul Labs has confirmed that it will stop selling most of its flavored vaping pods at retail stores. It will end social media promotions and advertisements as well. It’s shutting down its Facebook and Instagram accounts while its YouTube and Twitter accounts will be limited to non-promotional communications.

The company has posted an “action plan” on its website in response to more scrutiny from the government about its potential targeting of kids. Juul will no longer be fulfilling orders from retailers for its cucumber, creme, fruit, and mango flavored pods. The menthol, mint, and tobacco pods will continue to be available.

The sweeter flavors will only be available from Juul’s website going forward. The website will have an age verification system so that sales can be limited to customers who are 21 years of age or older. Customers will need to provide information such as their date of birth, name, permanent address, and the last four digits of their social security number to get these pods.

The information will be verified by a third-party source and cross-referenced with public records to confirm the customer’s age. Retailers will only be allowed to sell these pods if they put a similarly strict age verification system in place.

Some Juul Pods Will No Longer Be Sold At Retail Stores , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

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If you’re planning on picking up some cool new smart device for a loved one this holiday season, it might be worth your while to check whether it’s one of the good ones or not. Not just in the quality of the camera or step tracking, but the security and privacy practices of the companies that will collect (and sell) the data it produces. Mozilla has produced a handy resource ranking 70 of the latest items, from Amazon Echos to smart teddy bears.

Each of the dozens of toys and devices is graded on a number of measures: what data does it collect? Is that data encrypted when it is transmitted? Who is it shared with? Are you required to change the default password? And what’s the worst case scenario if something went wrong?

Some of the security risks are inherent to the product — for example, security cameras can potentially see things you’d rather they didn’t — but others are oversights on the part of the company. Security practices like respecting account deletion, not sharing data with third parties, and so on.

At the top of the list are items getting most of it right — this Mycroft smart speaker, for instance, uses open source software and the company that makes it makes all the right choices. Their privacy policy is even easy to read! Lots of gadgets seem just fine, really. This list doesn’t just trash everything.

On the other hand, you have something like this Dobby drone. They don’t seem to even have a privacy policy — bad news when you’re installing an app that records your location, HD footage, and other stuff! Similarly, this Fredi baby monitor comes with a bad password you don’t have to change, and has no automatic security updates. Are you kidding me? Stay far, far away.

All together 33 of the products met Mozilla’s recently proposed “minimum security standards” for smart devices (and got a nice badge); 7 failed, and the rest fell somewhere in between. In addition to these official measures there’s a crowd-sourced (hopefully not to be gamed) “creep-o-meter” where prospective buyers can indicate how creepy they find a device. But why is BB-8 creepy? I’d take that particular metric with a grain of salt.

Intel has revealed its second-generation artificial intelligence USB stick, with the Neural Compute Stick 2 promising up to eight times the performance of its predecessor, despite the compact size. It’s part of Intel’s push to place its silicon the heart of AI, by making developing new machine learning and AI projects and applications far more straightforward. The original Neural Compute … Continue reading

Earlier this year, Withings announced that it is once again an independent company after being part of Nokia Health since 2016. The freshly-independent company is wasting little time in getting new products out the door, and today, it’s reviving its old Pulse brand for a new fitness tracker. The original Pulse launched way back in 2013, so unsurprisingly, this new … Continue reading