US Cities Are Helping People Buy Amazon Surveillance Cameras Using Taxpayer Money

The Ring doorbell surveillance camera sits squarely in the center of a Tiffany-blue online flyer, which provides details about a “Security Product Subsidy Event” in Arcadia, California. This isn’t an ad from Best Buy or an electronics store. It’s an ad from the Arcadia city government.

The local city government is selling discounted surveillance cameras directly to its residents, and the ‘discount’ is subsidized by the city. In other words, taxpayer money is being paid to Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance company, in exchange for hundreds of surveillance cameras. Cities and towns around the country are paying Ring up to $100,000 to subsidize the purchase of the company’s surveillance cameras for private residents.

Woman says Amazon recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact

A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon’s Alexa — the voice-controlled smart speaker — and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list. A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon’s Alexa — the voice-controlled smart speaker — and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list.

Suspicious event hijacks Amazon traffic for 2 hours, steals cryptocurrency

Amazon lost control of a small number of its cloud services IP addresses for two hours on Tuesday morning when hackers exploited a known Internet-protocol weakness that let them to redirect traffic to rogue destinations. By subverting Amazon’s domain-resolution service, the attackers masqueraded as cryptocurrency website MyEtherWallet.com and stole about $150,000 in digital coins from unwitting end users. They may have targeted other Amazon customers as well.

Yet again, Google tricked into serving scam Amazon ads

It’s at least the second time in two years that Google has served up a malicious ad under Amazon’s name. Over the past year, we’ve heard of several cases of bad ads that have redirected users to malicious pages, but to our knowledge have never directly served malware.

Source: zdnet.com

Amazon’s policies promote counterfeiting

When someone goes to the lengths of making counterfeits of your products, it’s at least a sign you’re doing something right. And it deserves a minute of flatter

Source: elevationlab.com