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Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

4 hours 52 minutes ago
Or, how public information and a €5 tracker exposed an avoidable opsec lapse

Militaries around the world spend countless hours training, developing policies, and implementing best operational security practices, so imagine the size of the egg on the face of the Dutch navy when journalists managed to track one of its warships for less than the cost of some hagelslag and a coffee.…

Brandon Vigliarolo

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

5 hours 18 minutes ago
Your cybersecurity is only as good as the physical security of the servers

PWNED  Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we immortalize the worst vulns that organizations opened up for themselves. If you’re the kind of person who leaves your car doors unlocked with a pile of cash in the center console, this week’s story is for you.…

Avram Piltch

Newly Unsealed Records Reveal Amazon's Price-Fixing Tactics

5 hours 23 minutes ago
Newly unsealed records in California's antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. The Guardian reports: [...] In one previously redacted deposition, marked "highly confidential," Mayer Handler, owner of a clothing company called Leveret, testified that he received an email in October 2022 from Amazon notifying him that one of his products was "no longer eligible to be a featured offer" through Amazon's Buy Box. The tech giant, he testified, had suppressed the item, a tiger-themed, toddler's pajama set, because his company was selling it for $19.99 on Amazon, a single cent higher than what his company was offering it for on Walmart. Afterwards, Handler testified, his company "changed pricing on Walmart to match or exceed Amazon's price" or changed the item's product code to try to throw off Amazon's price tracking system. In response to a question from the Guardian, Handler criticized Amazon for tracking prices across the internet and "shadow" blocking his company's products -- tactics which he said were depriving consumers of "lower prices." "Maybe that's capitalism," he wrote. "Or that's a monopoly causing price hikes on the consumer." In another unsealed deposition, Terry Esbenshade, a Pennsylvania garden store supplier, testified in October 2024 that whenever his products lost Amazon's Buy Box because of lower prices elsewhere on the internet, his sales on Amazon would plummet by about 80%. This financial reality forced him to try to raise his products' prices with other retailers elsewhere, he said. In one instance, Esbenshade testified, he discovered that one of his company's better-selling patio tables had "become suppressed" on Amazon. Esbenshade wasn't sure why, he recalled, until someone at Amazon suggested he look at Wayfair, another online retailer that happened to be selling his patio table below Amazon's price. The businessman went online and set up a new minimum advertised price for the table on Wayfair to ensure it was higher than Amazon's. "So that raised the price up, and, voila, my product came back" on Amazon, he said, thanks to the reinstatement of the Buy Box.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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