The General Data Protection Regulation will be enforced as of May, and once it does, internet companies will no longer be able to collect or share your data unless they give you a clear, simple explanation of how it will be used, and get your consent, along with contact details for named individuals who report directly to the business's senior management. (more…)

Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We love our nifty phones and just-a-click-away services, but these behemoths enjoy unfettered economic domination and hoard riches on a scale not seen since the monopolies of the gilded age. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.

A open-source (GPL-3) R package to facilitate writing books and long-form articles/reports with R Markdown. Features include:

Generate printer-ready books and ebooks from R Markdown documents
A markup language easier to learn than LaTeX, and to write elements such as section headers, lists, quotes, figures, tables, and citations
Multiple choices of output formats: PDF, LaTeX, HTML, EPUB, and Word.
Possibility of including dynamic graphics and interactive applications (HTML widgets and Shiny apps)
Support for languages other than R, including C/C++, Python, and SQL, etc.
LaTeX equations, theorems, and proofs work for all output formats
Can be published to GitHub, bookdown.org, and any web servers
Integrated with the RStudio IDE
One-click publishing to https://bookdown.org

The UK may be forced to scale back its digital mass surveillance schemes after a court ruled today that its current powers are unlawful.

The UK’s Court of Appeal said that the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) did not adequately restrict police officers access to personal information, including citizens’ phone records and web browsing history. According to a report from The Guardian, three appeal court judges ruled said that DRIPA lacked safeguards like an independent overseer, and so was “inconsistent with EU law.”

The Secret Service has been warning US financial institutions that domestic ATMs are being targeted in jackpotting attacks, according to a new report from well-known security journalist Brian Krebs.

Jackpotting, in which thieves use a variety of tools to hack into ATMs and cause them to dispense large amounts of cash on demand, has been a legitimate threat for several years now. The late computer hacker Barnaby Jack famously showed off an ATM exploit at the Black Hat conference back in 2010. But until now, jackpotting was mostly a threat in Europe, Asia, and Mexico.

Facebook will introduce a new privacy center this year that features all core privacy settings in one place, ahead of the introduction of a strict new EU data protection law that takes effect on May 25th. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will restrict how tech companies collect, store, and use personal data. Facebook also says that it’s publishing its privacy principles for the first time, detailing how the company handles user details.



Last year, a Reddit user known as “deepfakes” used machine learning to digitally edit the faces of celebrities into pornographic videos, and a new app has made the process much easier to create and spread the videos online. on Friday, chat service Discord shut down a user-created group that was spreading the videos, citing their policy against revenge porn.

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkish government took reprisals against hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have been involved in the failed coup of 2016, one of the criteria they used for whom to round up for indefinite detention as well as myriad human rights abuses (including torture) was whether people had a cookie on their computers set by a 1x1 tracking pixel served by Bylock, which the Erdogan regime says is evidence of support of exiled opposition leader Fethullah Gülen

One of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges has revealed that it’s lost nearly $400 million in a security breach. Coincheck says that it has restricted deposits and withdrawals for a cryptocurrency called NEM, and Bloomberg reports that 500 million NEM tokens have been sent from the company “illicitly,” and that it’s not sure how.

Blockchain transactions are recorded forever and indelibly, and that means that all the Bitcoin transactions on early Tor hidden service marketplaces like Silk Road are on permanent, public display; because many people who made these transactions later went on to link those Bitcoin wallets with their real identities, those early deals are now permanently associated with their public, identifiable selves

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

As Uber goes, so does Lyft, apparently. The ride-hailing company says it’s investigating whether some of its employees abused access clearances and looked into customers’ information, with one saying it went on for “too long.”

Apple gifted us with new Animoji, more insight into battery health, and an update for ARKit yesterday with its release of iOS 11.3. Buried in its update notes, the company also says it now supports Advanced Mobile Location, which automatically sends a user's location to emergency services when someone calls.

AML isn't currently supported in the US, but iOS users in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, Sweden, Lithuania, and some parts of Lower Austria can take advantage

Last year, Korean rules regulating abusive practices by online services went into effect, under terms set out in the "Amended Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act Now Effective, Specifically Classifying and Regulating Certain Prohibited Acts of Telecom Service Providers." (more