Article neglects to mention that the corporate gutting of software qa departments is largely to blame. At least for non life-threatening products like consumer electronics.
Something I am all too familiar with.
Hell, who DOESN'T buy gold at 30% of spot???
I know I sure as hell do. Got a 1 oz. gold coin? Sure, I'll give you $300 for it. I will probably want to drill it first; the Chinese are pretty good at forging them, though my Fisch is supposed to be able to tell the difference.
Clickbait, but picked up some mainstream press. I looked at a backhoe bucket this morning. Yup. That's it. The stupid article claims it's aluminum-- and separately steel and something else. They can't even decide what this miraculous backhoe tooth is made out of. Obviously, no real...
Amazing to see that... I'm not surprised by it, but I guess this is the "awareness" step-- let the public know that SA owns a bunch of debt they can sell. To lessen the surprise when they do, I guess.
If you're worried about your privacy, keep your phone off (battery out), or in a shielded box if you can't pull the battery. Otherwise you're carrying a tracking beacon.
An RFID tag sort-of antenna (which is super short range) would be the least of my concerns.
It has been done by hackers before-- a couple of years ago in Montana. It seems that a lot of radio and TV stations had their EAS gear on the internet-- with the default password. Doh.
But I doubt it's a hacker in this case, since it was nationwide. I think somebody fumble-fingered...
AT&T goofed. The good news is they are likely to be fined heavily by the FCC for throwing an EAN by mistake. (What you are describing sounds like an Emergency Action Notification type of alert... the seriously bad one.)
In a real emergency, there would have been an audio and or video feed...