“According to his bio on Harvard.edu, Mikao John was an erudite scholar: a medical student at the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology who’d studied statistics and biochemistry at Yale and published research in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine,” reports Futurism:

John was also a prolific author of blog posts on Harvard’s site… But despite that veneer of academic authenticity, his posts didn’t sound much like medical research. nstead, John’s recent works carried titles like “KeefX.co: The Cannabis Fintech Company that Provides $1M in Funding a Month,” which took the form of an extremely flattering article about a startup that provides financial services to weed businesses, and “Idahome Solar Makes Switching to Solar Power in Idaho a No-Brainer,” which praised the “client-first mentality” and “incredible financing program” of a seemingly random solar panel company in Idaho.

As it turns out, there is no Harvard student by the name of Mikao John. Instead, a scammer invented that persona — and, alarmingly, managed to obtain the credentials to insert him into Harvard’s web system — in order to sell SEO-friendly backlinks, and the prestige of being hyped up by someone at one of the world’s most distinguished universities, to marketing firms with publicity-hungry clients.

The practice of scammers cooking up fake Harvard students to shill brands on the university’s site appears to be widespread. In response to questions from Futurism, Harvard removed the Mikao John profile as well as about two dozen similar accounts being used for the same purpose… Swathes of Harvard.edu have become a spammer free-for-all where fake students and other accounts hawk an endless parade of dubious stuff: online casinos, synthetic urine, real estate in Florida, CBD, [42 more examples deleted] and many more incongruous yet trashy brands and services…

Overall, it felt as though if a reporter hadn’t been sending numerous emails, the fake students probably would have been allowed to continue posting indefinitely.

Harvard eventually told the reporter that the scammers were signing up for their online classes, then using the email address they received to infiltrate the university’s blogging platforms (writing fake posts about everything from bitcoin to concealed carry holsters and even bouncy castles.)

Ironically, Harvard’s official motto (first adopted in 1643) is “Veritas” — the Latin word for truth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scammers Are Creating Fake Students on Harvard.edu and Using Them to Shill Brands

“The third time my 1999 Honda Civic was stolen, I had a plan,” writes Washington Post technology reporter Heather Kelly. Specifically, it was a tile tracker hidden in the car, “quietly transmitting its approximate location over Bluetooth.”

Later that day, I was across town hiding down the block from my own car as police detained the surprised driver. When the Tile app pinged me with a last known location, I showed up expecting the car to be abandoned. I quickly realized it was still in use, with one person looking through the trunk and another napping in the passenger seat, so I called the police…

In April of this year, one month after my car was stolen, Apple released the $29 AirTag, bringing an even more effective Bluetooth tracking technology to a much wider audience. Similar products from Samsung and smaller brands such as Chipolo are testing the limits of how far people will go to get back their stolen property and what they consider justice. “The technology has unintended consequences. It basically gives the owner the ability to become a mini surveillance operation,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law…

Apple has been careful to never say AirTags can be used to recover stolen property. The marketing for the device is light and wholesome, focusing on situations like lost keys between sofa cushions. The official tagline is “Lose your knack for losing things” and there’s no mention of crime, theft or stealing in any of the ads, webpages or support documents. But in reality, the company has built a network that is ideal for that exact use case. Every compatible iPhone, iPad and Mac is being silently put to work as a location device without their owners knowing when it happens. An AirTag uses Bluetooth to send out a ping with its encrypted location to the closest Apple devices, which pass that information on to the Apple cloud. That spot is visible on a map in the Find My app. The AirTag owner can also turn on Lost Mode to get a notification the next time it’s detected, as well as leave contact information in case it’s found. Apple calls this the Find My network, and it also works for lost or stolen Apple devices and a handful of third-party products. The proliferation of compatible Apple devices — there are nearly a billion in the network around the world — makes Find My incredibly effective, especially in cities. (Apple device owners are part of the Find My network by default, but can opt out in settings, and the location information is all encrypted…)
All the tracker companies recommend contacting law enforcement first, which may sound logical until you find yourself waiting hours in a parking lot for officers to address a relatively low-priority crime, or having to explain to them what Bluetooth trackers are.

The Times shares stories of two people who tried using AirTags to track down their stolen property. One Seattle man tracked down his stolen electric bike — and ended up pedalling away furiously on the (now out of power) bicycle as the suspected thief chased after him.

And an Ohio man waited for hours in an unfamiliar drugstore parking lot for a response from the police, eventually travelling with them to the suspect’s house — where his stolen laptop was returned to the police officer by a man holding two babies in his arms.

Some parents have even hidden them in their childrens’ backpacks, and pet owners have hidden them in their pet’s collars, the Times reports — adding that the EFF’s director of cybersecurity sees another possibility. “The problem is it’s impossible to build a tool that is designed to track down stolen items without also building the perfect tool for stalking.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – What Happens When You Use Bluetooth Tags to Track Your Stolen Items?

More than 63,000 pounds of trash — including a refrigerator — have now been removed from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, reports USA Today:

A half-mile long trash-trapping system named “Jenny” was sent out in late July to collect waste, pulling out many items that came from humans like toothbrushes, VHS tapes, golf balls, shoes and fishing gear. Jenny made nine trash extractions over the 12-week cleanup phase, with one extraction netting nearly 20,000 pounds of debris by itself.

The mountain of recovered waste arrived in British Columbia, Canada, this month, with much of it set to be recycled. But this was not a one-off initiative. In fact, it was simply a testing phase. And the cleanup team is hoping it’s only the start of more to come: more equipment, more extractions and cleaner oceans.

The catalyst behind the cleaning is The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit trying to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. Boyan Slat, who founded the organization in 2013 at the age of 18, called the most recent testing phase a success, but said there’s still much to be done. The 27-year-old from the Netherlands said the group can enter a new phase of cleanup after testing eased some scalability concerns and proved that the system could accomplish what it was designed to do: collect debris… It hopes to deploy enough cleaning systems to reduce the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% every five years and to initiate a 90% reduction in floating ocean plastic by 2040… While Jenny tackles the garbage patch, The Ocean Cleanup will work on a larger, full-scale cleaning system set to be released in summer 2022 that expects to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of systems.

Slat projects they will need 10 full-scale systems to clean the patch at a rate of just under 20,000 tons per year, which would put the group on par to reach its goal of reducing the mass by 50% in five years.
The garbage patch now has its own page on Wikipedia, which points out that some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old. “The patch is believed to have increased ’10-fold each decade’ since 1945. Estimated to be double the size of Texas, the area contains more than 3 million tons of plastic.” So it’s even more amazing that “It’s within the realm of possibility for the first time since the invention of plastic that we can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” Slat tells USA Today.

The group also says that 95% of the plastic it collects can be recycled. And they’ve already begun turning that plastic into products like sunglasses to be sold on its website.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Ocean Cleanup’ Successfully Removes 63,000 Pounds from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch