Civil rights lawyers and Democratic senators are pushing for legislation that would limit U.S. law enforcement agencies’ ability to buy cellphone tracking tools to follow people’s whereabouts, including back years in time, and sometimes without a search warrant. From a report: Concerns about police use of the tool known as “Fog Reveal” raised in an investigation by The Associated Press published earlier this month also surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission hearing three weeks ago. Police agencies have been using the platform to search hundreds of billions of records gathered from 250 million mobile devices, and hoover up people’s geolocation data to assemble so-called “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used. Panelists and members of the public who took part in the FTC hearing also raised concerns about how data generated by popular apps is used for surveillance purposes, or “in some cases, being used to infer identity and cause direct harm to people in the real world, in the physical world and being repurposed for, as was mentioned earlier, law enforcement and national security purposes,” said Stacey Gray, a senior director for U.S. programs for the Future of Privacy Forum.

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Source: Slashdot – Senators Push To Reform Police’s Cellphone Tracking Tools

Holiday bargain shopping is starting extra early this year. And that could be good news for shoppers, even if it signals slightly worrisome things for the economy. From a report: E-commerce giant Amazon announced plans Monday for “a new two-day global shopping event” exclusive to members of its Prime loyalty program. Dubbed Prime Early Access Sale, the promotion is similar to Prime Day, the annual sale held in July to generate a bonanza of orders and new subscribers. Rival retail giants Walmart and Target have already signaled plans to kick off holiday sales earlier than ever, setting the stage for a long holiday shopping season with significant discounts. With warehouses and store shelves suddenly full of inventory after two years of supply chain disruptions, deals will be easier to come by than since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, say retail experts.

Amazon’s bonus sales event may be a sign that retailers are concerned that Americans will keep a tight grip on their wallets this holiday season because of fears over inflation, rising interest rates and predictions of an oncoming recession. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company — with annual sales of more than $470 billion last year — added the second online sale to help overcome such worries. “In light of inflation and economic head winds, we want to help members save throughout the season,” said Amazon spokesperson Deanna Zawilinski. […] Helping fuel the sales competition is an oversupply of merchandise — including clothes, toys, electronics, furniture and other popular consumer goods — that retailers ordered to meet expected consumer demand but that were delayed for months because of supply chain problems. The items are now taking up valuable space in warehouses and store shelves. With a recent surge in inflation and rising gasoline prices, Americans haven’t been spending on such items as much as retailers anticipated. Store owners and retail operators now need to move those items off the shelves to make way for new holiday merchandise.

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Source: Slashdot – A Second Prime Sale Shows Amazon is Nervous About the Economy Too

The PC beta for Modern Warfare 2 was only online for just over a weekend, but cheat developers quickly managed to create wallhacks anyway, according to videos created by multiple cheat developers. From a report: The news highlights the constant cat and mouse game between cheat developers and the companies that make competitive video games, and shows that Modern Warfare 2 will be no different. Warzone, the massively popular free-to-play battle royale game built on top of Call of Duty’s mainline games, was notoriously overrun by cheaters before publisher Activision and the development studios working on the game introduced a new anti-cheat mechanism called Ricochet. “I started developing a MW2 beta cheat right away. I was done the same day, the first day of the beta. My users got access once the cheat was complete & tested,” Zebleer, the pseudonymous administrator of Phantom Overlay, a cheat provider that has a long history of selling cheats for Warzone, told Motherboard in an email.

[…] EngineOwning, another cheat developer, published a video to their Twitter account over the weekend appearing to show their own product in action, although it didn’t seem to be ready for the beta. “Our MW2 cheat is now done and we’re currently in close testing,” the tweet read. “This means our cheat will be ready when the game launches, with all the features you’d expect.” The Anti-Cheat Police Department, a researcher who has tracked the cheating ecosystem and who reports offending players, claimed in their own tweet that “Ricochet has this shitty cheat detected they are just a scam operation at this point.”

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Source: Slashdot – Cheat Devs Are Ready for Modern Warfare 2