WTF

Amazon Sidewalk – Let’s Timewarp To 1984

by

Amazon begins sharing your Internet connection with neighbors. Here’s how to turn it off.

Washington Post–You have no control over what sort of data flows over Amazon’s new Sidewalk wireless network, which has been lying dormant in Echo smart speakers and Ring cameras … until now

But here’s the rub: Sidewalk authorizes your Echo to share a portion of your home’s Internet bandwidth. It’s up to 500 megabytes per month — the rough equivalent of more than 150 cellphone photos. Amazon caps it at a rate of 80 Kbps, which the company says is a fraction of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high-definition video. Still, this traffic could count toward your Internet service provider’s data cap, if you’ve got one. The bill will be paid by you, not Amazon.

Turning Sidewalk off isn’t hard, but involves digging through some settings. You’ll only see the option if you’ve already got an Sidewalk-eligible device installed and associated with your account. That includes the third-generation and newer Echo and Echo Dot, the second-generation and newer Echo Show and the Ring Floodlight Cam and Spotlight Cam. (For a full list of compatible Sidewalk Bridge devices see here.)

How to turn off Sidewalk

Read more

Government Report – No Evidence Of Alien Spacecraft?

by

Report does not confirm, or rule out, UFOs in unexplained aerial events

Washington Post–A soon-to-be-released government report on unexplained aerial phenomena finds no proof of extraterrestrial activity, but cannot provide a definitive explanation for scores of incidents in which strange objects have been spotted in the sky, officials said on Thursday.

That the report, whose conclusions were first described by the New York Times, does not rule out extraterrestrial activity is likely to further stoke what has become a highly unusual national discussion about the possibility that unknown life-forms are visiting Earth, as senators, former CIA directors and former president Barack Obama express new openness to UFOs.