Linked List: March 30, 2022

Wednesday, 30 March 2022

A Spate of SMS Spam From People’s Own Phone Numbers 

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

This morning, I received a very blatant spam text offering me “a little gift” for supposedly paying my phone bill. Normally I’d groan, roll my eyes, and quickly delete such a thing, but there was something different about this particular message: it was spoofed as coming from my own phone number. As best my iPhone could tell, it was a legitimate message from me to myself. Tapping into the sender details took me to my own contact card. [...]

Turns out I wasn’t alone. Many customers on Verizon have reported getting similar spam from their respective numbers over the last few days — same for its MVNO Visible — and several Verge employees on other carriers have also encountered them. I posted an Instagram story about it and have gotten plenty of “same” responses. SMS phishing, or “smishing,” has been on the rise in recent years, but there’s something more disconcerting and invasive about it being linked to your own number. It’s all very “the call is coming from inside the house.”

I got the same exact spam over the weekend, but instead of coming from my personal phone number (which is indeed on Verizon), it came to my personal phone number from my Google Voice number. Spooky, to say the least.

My wife got the same spam over the weekend too, from her own number to her own number, and for a moment, it was really freaky, because she had previously only texted herself to send photos from one device to another. So the whole chain of messages above the spam message made it look like the spammer was somehow sending her photos from her own photo library.

Matthew Panzarino’s Interview With Apple Execs Regarding the Mac Studio and Studio Display 

Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch two weeks ago (I’m just now digging out of my hardware reviews catch-up):

“We look very much at Mac studio for what it is, a completely new Mac product line. Which is rare. We don’t add product lines to the Mac very often,” says Tom Boger, Vice President of Mac & iPad Product Marketing at Apple. “Our philosophy was not at all to take a Mac Mini and scale it up, it was ‘we know we’re working on this M1 Ultra chip and we want to bring it to those users who want performance and conductivity and a modular system. And let’s allow it to live right on people’s desks so it’s within easy reach. And that’s what we delivered.”

I spoke to Boger, along with Shelly Goldberg, Senior Director, Mac and iPad Product Design, and Xander Soren, Director of Product Marketing, Pro Apps at Apple about the design and development of Mac Studio.

Panzarino’s take, combined with the interview, really nails the ways that the Mac Studio and Studio Display fill important spots in the Mac hardware lineup that have long been vacant.

The Washington Post: ‘Facebook Paid Republican Strategy Firm to Malign TikTok’ 

Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, reporting for The Washington Post:

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users. [...]

Targeted Victory needs to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

We all know that the smart way to alter the opinions of today’s teenagers is to ... place op-eds in local newspapers around the country.

Recall too that Facebook was caught using a Republican smear-campaign firm back in 2018 — their target then was George Soros.