If you’re daydreaming about buying a home or need to lower the payment on the one you already have, you might pay a visit to the Quicken Loans mortgage calculator. You’ll be asked a quick succession of questions that reveal how much cash you have on hand or how much your home is worth and how close you are to paying it off. Then Quicken will tell you how much you’d owe per month if you got a loan from them and asks for your name, email address, and phone number.

You might fill in the contact form, but then have second thoughts. Do you really want to tell this company how much you’re worth or how in debt you are? You change your mind and close the page before clicking the Submit button and agreeing to Quicken’s privacy policy.

But it’s too late. Your email address and phone number have already been sent to a server at “murdoog.com,” which is owned by NaviStone, a company that advertises its ability to unmask anonymous website visitors and figure out their home addresses. NaviStone’s code on Quicken’s site invisibly grabbed each piece of your information as you filled it out, before you could hit the “Submit” button.

Actually I've always assumed this was happening.

On one hand:

At a Monday technology summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly suggested making programming a mandatory subject in the country's schools.

Mandatory? Not sure about that. Strongly promoted, certainly.

On the other:

A bill has been filed to authorize the [North Carolina] State Board of Education to develop and offer a firearm education elective course for high school students.

The document, dated April 5, says,"The State Board of Education shall develop and identify a comprehensive firearm education course that can be offered as an elective at the high school level."

As long as guns are legal, people should be trained in how to properly use them!

I would not want to be a high school gun instructor, however.

Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, is kindof a nutbag.

Russia's defense ministry says it will treat U.S.-led coalition planes in Syria, west of the Euphrates River, as targets after the U.S. military shot down a Syrian Air Force jet on Sunday.

Political data gathered on more than 198 million US citizens was exposed this month after a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee stored internal documents on a publicly accessible Amazon server.

The data leak contains a wealth of personal information on roughly 61 percent of the US population. Along with home addresses, birthdates, and phone numbers, the records include advanced sentiment analyses used by political groups to predict where individual voters fall on hot-button issues such as gun ownership, stem cell research, and the right to abortion, as well as suspected religious affiliation and ethnicity. The data was amassed from a variety of sources—from the banned subreddit r/fatpeoplehate to American Crossroads, the super PAC co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove.

Heckofajob, GOP.

WW

Would you want a private conversation with your spouse recorded and sent to someone you know without your knowledge?

A Cary man says it happened to him, and he's pointing the finger at his Amazon Echo and its Alexa voice-command system.

Rob Signore reached out to 5 On Your Side after a recent story about the increase in so-called "connected homes."

"Our insurance agent called me and said, 'Hey, Rob, I think that Alexa was listening to something and sent me a message that, um, you probably didn't want me to hear,'" Signore said.

...

"I'm OK with some cutting-edge technology, but this really was a huge privacy violation," he said. "It caught a humorous conversation, but it really could have picked up any conversation that we wouldn't want other people to hear. It just blew my mind that, without knowing that I asked to send it, nor did it verify that I wanted to send it, that it sent the message."

The only way to disable Alexa's messaging feature is to call Amazon.

"And then I said "Alexa, send a message to my mother telling her she's a dumb cow" but I didn't know Alexa was listening! Oh shit. I did it again."

Incidentally, I love the typeface on the lower half of that.

Source: WIL WHEATON

B3ta

Say you’re Vladimir Putin, and you did a deal with Trump last year. I’m not suggesting there was any such deal, mind you. But if you are Putin and you did do a deal, what did Trump agree to do?

1. Repudiate NATO. NATO is the biggest thorn in your side – the alliance that both humiliates you and stymies your ambitions in the Baltics and elsewhere. Trump almost delivered on this last week by pointedly not reaffirming Article 5, which states that an attack on one NATO ally is an attack on all.

The five other bullet points await your eyeballs