Insurers use drones to watch your home

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Invasion of privacy? CJ Sveen says his home insurance was dropped after aerial pics were used to spy on his property. Plus, Russian troops smuggle Starlink, Android’s new “Find My Device” feature, and the crazy lengths one hacker took to avoid paying $100,000 in child support. 

Tags: Android, insurance


Your data is worth big money — and you can take it back

“Call me for a good time.” That simple message prompted more creepy calls and texts than you can believe. A woman contacted me after someone posted that message — alongside her cellphone number — on a porn site.

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Talk dirt to me: Dyson’s dropping a new AR tool for its vacuums in June — the Dyson CleanTrace. It maps your cleaning path, marking cleaned zones in a majestic purple and spotlighting dirt you’ve missed. The catch? It only works with the great-but-pricey Dyson Gen5detect ($698 on sale now — 27% off!).

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15% annual increases in cybercrime 

That will lead to $13.8 trillion in losses by 2028. The U.S. GDP — the largest economy in the world — is $25.5 trillion. (It’s followed by China at $17.9 trillion and Japan at $4.2 trillion.) Cybercrime is now a world economic leader. That’s just a bad phish-cal policy.

📍 Google’s Find My Device network is finally here! Android users can track their phones and tablets, even when offline. While it’s not yet for your everyday items, Chipolo and Pebble Bluetooth tags will join the party in May. Heads-up: Your device must run Android 9 or newer.

Wok this way: Sansan Chicken in NYC is ditching the traditional cashier for a woman in the Philippines who works via Zoom. Customers tap orders on a digital kiosk and chat through a speaker system. The system has been dubbed “cost-effective” by the manager.

🚋 Blast from the past: San Francisco’s trains chug along using floppy disks from 1998, raising alarms over a possible “catastrophic failure.” Yep, each morning starts with a manual software load from these digital dinosaurs. Sure, an upgrade is on track, but it could take another decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

🛰️ Putin on a show: Russian troops in Ukraine are using Starlink terminals from black market networks for comms and drone ops. Despite SpaceX’s no-sale policy to Russia and efforts to block access, these devices were smuggled in and the geofencing controls were bypassed. Ahem, why can’t SpaceX just shut the internet terminal down?

He chose the road death traveled: What would you do to avoid paying $100,000 for child maintenance in a divorce? A hacker from Somerset, Kentucky, used a stolen doctor’s identity and declared himself gone in Hawaii’s death registry. Caught in this grave mistake, he faces up to seven years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

🛑 D-Link exploited: Over 92,000 older D-Link network-attached storage devices that stopped getting updates have been hacked with a backdoor account. Got one? Stop using it and buy a new one.

33% of rideshare drivers have had a crash on the job

Phone use, unruly passengers and long hours are all crash culprits. Definitely buckle up.