Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is throwing his weight behind California’s November data privacy ballot measure — not just endorsing the initiative but chairing its advisory board, the Proposition 24 campaign announced Monday. Politico reports: Yang’s involvement could bring more visibility and cachet to the effort, given the tech entrepreneur’s national profile and popularity among younger voters. It could also help counter the negative messaging from some consumer and civil rights groups that are opposing it. Yang lives in New York, thousands of miles from where voters will cast their ballots in November. But the initiative, like the law it would rewrite, could be the nation’s de facto privacy law in the absence of federal action.

Prop. 24 would rewrite parts of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gave Californians new rights over their personal data when it took effect in January. The new measure would create a regulatory agency to manage California’s privacy regime, add protections for “sensitive data,” and eliminate the 30-day window that companies now have to correct problems before the attorney general can take them to court. It also would make it harder for the Legislature to roll back its protections in the future; any changes would need to further the law’s aims. Alastair Mactaggart, a Bay Area real estate developer whose 2018 initiative compelled the Legislature to pass the CCPA that year, is behind the effort to amend it. “The California Consumer Privacy Act was a major win for the state of California and the country, but we have to do more,” says Yang. “Technology is changing more rapidly than ever before, and tech corporations are already lining up to undermine the CCPA. It’s up to us to protect consumers and strengthen our privacy rights to global standards. Our data should be ours no matter what platforms and apps we use. That’s why I hope California voters will join me in supporting Prop 24 by voting YES in November.”

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Source: Slashdot – Andrew Yang Takes Lead Role In California Data Privacy Campaign

Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world. Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday as shares of Tesla continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split. Musk is now worth $115.4 billion compared with $110.8 billion for Zuckerberg. Yahoo Finance reports: Also Monday, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world’s richest woman, passing L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth $66.4 billion. Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by $87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500%. Also helpful: an audacious pay package — the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive officer and a board of directors — that could yield him more than $50 billion if all goals are met. Tesla’s $464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart Inc., the largest company in the U.S. by revenue. Last week, Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club as tech stocks rose.

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Source: Slashdot – Elon Musk Passes Mark Zuckerberg To Become Third-Richest Person In the World

Apple is steadily removing references to the old @mac.com and slightly less old @me.com addresses from its support documents. AppleInsider reports: It used to be that if your email addressed ended in @mac.com, you were telling the world that you are an Apple user. Now while it’s only that part of the world which is extremely geeky, you’re actually telling them that you were an Apple user on or before July 9, 2008. This email address was once championed by Apple as part of its iTools service back in 2000, and if you still have one, you have some bruises from the days of iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe before you got to today’s iCloud. If your email ends in @mac.com then you got it somewhere between 2000 and 2008. If it ends in @me.com, you got it during the briefer opportunity between then and 2012. To be exact, you have still got an @mac.com address because you had it and were actively using it on July 8, 2008, plus you kept your MobileMe account and – there’s more – you moved to iCloud before August 1, 2012.
[…]
Your Apple ID is tied to an email address and Apple gives you some flexibility about this, because it recognizes that we sometimes lose access to a previous address. You can change the address associated with your Apple ID and there’s a current support document about how and why you might do that. For some years, though, that page has said you’re out of luck if you want to change to an @mac.com or @me.com address. You can’t do it unless you somehow already have that address associated with your account. And then in late August 2020, even that helpful information is gone. That same support page still lists what you can do with third-party email addresses. But gone are any references to @mac.com and @me.com.

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Source: Slashdot – Twelve Years Later, Apple Is Still Trying To Erase Mac.com Email Addresses

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Facebook and Google are hollowing out local communities by serving as vectors for misinformation while hobbling local journalism and collecting taxpayer subsidies, a new paper from progressive think tank the American Economic Liberties Project charges. Both companies cite benefits their platforms offer small businesses as a key defense against critiques of their size and power. The paper, dated Aug. 30, is sure to presage further scrutiny of the impact they’ve had on local communities.

The brief, by Pat Garofalo, the group’s director of state and local policy, argues that: Google doesn’t do enough to protect against fraud, allowing scammers to get their own numbers and websites listed on Google to the detriment of legitimate businesses. Facebook, by design, boosts shoddy and sensationalist content, crowding out legitimate local news and information, all as it and Google have come to dominate the local advertising market that was long the lifeblood of community journalism. Both have sucked up potentially billions in local taxpayer dollars via tax breaks as well as subsidies and discounts on utilities they’ve gotten in exchange for building data centers. Garofalo recommends remedies including more antitrust enforcement at the federal and state levels and an end to preferential treatment by states and localities, either voluntarily or under force of law.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook and Google Serve As Vectors For Misinformation While Hobbling Local Journalism and Collecting Taxpayer Subsidies, Group Says

As 5G networks have continued to spread across the world, the biggest issue with ultra-fast millimeter wave (mmWave) towers has been their short transmission distance, which is generally measured in city blocks rather than miles. Today, Qualcomm announced a breakthrough in mmWave transmission range, successfully achieving a 5G data connection over a 3.8-kilometer (2.36-mile) distance — over twice the range originally promised by its long-range QTM527 antenna system last year. VentureBeat reports: It’s important to put today’s news into perspective, as the record is specific to broadband modems rather than smartphones. Qualcomm is touting the achievement as evidence of mmWave’s viability as a fixed wireless access solution, enabling carriers to offer fiber-speed 5G coverage in rural, suburban, and urban communities that might have had poor wired home broadband options in the past. The successful test was conducted in Regional Victoria, Australia, presumably with minimal physical interference between the sending and receiving devices. The test relied on two existing Qualcomm hardware solutions — the Snapdragon X55 modem and QTM527 antenna — inside a consumer premises equipment broadband modem, communicating with Ericsson’s Air5121 and Baseband 6630 tower hardware, enhanced by extended-range software. No details were provided on speeds or other details of the connection, but Qualcomm characterized the successful range test as “the first step in utilizing mmWave for an extended-range 5G data transfer,” hinting that there may have been compromises in speed or other areas. The company previously noted that carriers would be able to deliver up to 7Gbps download speeds if the QTM527 could access a full 800MHz of mmWave spectrum. Existing tower hardware has hit 4.3Gbps for a single device or 8.5Gbps for two devices.

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Source: Slashdot – Qualcomm Doubles 5G mmWave Range To 2.36 Miles For Broadband Modems