White House App-A Security Mess; Meta Launching Ray-Ban Smart Glasses With Corrective Lenses; Bluesky Bows Attie AI App to Build Custom Feeds; Amazon Tries Phone-Again

The White House app from the Trump administration is apparently a privacy nightmare. Mashable.com reports that The White House app requests user permission to access precise locations, network connections, fingerprint and biometric data, the ability to prevent the device from sleeping, and even modify or delete contents of shared storage. In other words, it is pretty much spyware! It shares location data every 4.5 minutes, and sends that to a third party called OneSignal. OneSignal puts out push notifications to users for location based campaigns. That’s enough, but the app also is apparently loading YouTube video embeds via a random GitHub user’s personal page. According to the report, if this GitHub user’s account is ever compromised, an attacker could “serve arbitrary HTML and JavaScript to every user of this app.” Just do yourself a favor and never download this app!

Meta is releasing a new version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses that are specially designed for users who already wear prescription glasses. According to 9to5google.com, there will be two versions…one rectangular and another with rounded style rims, both specifically designed for people that need prescription lenses. Now, to be fair, you can already add prescription lenses to existing Meta Ray-Bans, but there’s new models are specifically designed for them They are reportedly to be sold through ‘traditional prescription eyewear channels.’

Bluesky has created an AI assistant to help you design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and they say soon…vibe’ code your own app. TechCrunch.com says the AI app is named Attie. The app is now going to be beta tested by folks who attended the Atmosphere conference. They explained that it is a new product and not part of the actual Bluesky app. If you are excited about building your own custom feed by typing commands in natural language, this may be just the ticket. Stay tuned for it to be released to general users soon. 

Facebook tried, and failed. Amazon tried and failed. Now, Amazon is giving it another go. Mashable.com reports that after the Fire phone tanked a few years ago, Amazon is working on a new one code-named ‘Transformer.’ Amazon is calling this handset a ‘mobile personalization device’ that syncs with Alexa. The idea is for the phone to make interacting with various Amazon services easier. This includes buying from Amazon, watching Prime Video, or listening to Prime Music. Of course, AI would be in the middle of it all, though Alexa may not be the “primary operating system” of the phone. Amazon may rely on another company’s AI to run things on the device. It’s possible that this may not see the light of day, so no release dates, etc. If at first you don’t succeed…try, try again. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.