xecutives of Facebook, Twitter and Google pledged to Congress this week to do more to prevent the fakery that has polluted their sites. “We understand that the people you represent expect authentic experiences when they come to our platform,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said the company was doubling its review staff to 20,000 and using artificial intelligence to find more “bad actors.”

According to Google, which is actively working to remove Intel’s Management Engine (MINIX) from their internal servers (for obvious security reasons), the following features exist within Ring -3:

Full networking stack
File systems
Many drivers (including USB, networking, etc.)
A web server 

That’s right. A web server. Your CPU has a secret web server that you are not allowed to access, and, apparently, Intel does not want you to know about.

Überwachung für Daheim nun auch auf Pump finanzieren:

Möchte man nun einen Echo in den Einkaufswagen legen, wird dem potentiellen Käufer nicht nur die übliche Zahlungsart angeboten. Neu ist die Aufteilung des Betrages in fünf monatliche Raten.

A US federal judge has stopped a ruling from the Canadian Supreme Court from going into effect in the US. The Canadian order would have ordered Google to de-index all pages belonging to a company called Datalink, which was allegedly selling products that violated the IP of Vancouver-based Equustek.

A crippling flaw affecting millions—and possibly hundreds of millions—of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly suspended 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents.

Aus der Abteilung "Privatsphäre muss man sich leisten können":
Was das Ganze nun schwer zuordnen lässt, ist schlichtweg der Preis. In den USA werden für den Stick 49,99 Dollar fällig, in Frankreich sind es 59,99 Euro. In beiden Fällen ist dies mehr als die aktuelle Version mit Sprachfernbedienung kostet.

Employers are using a range of technologies to monitor their staff’s web-browsing patterns, keystrokes, social media posts and even private messaging apps

Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users.

"While it is okay to use the Google logo for your personal Doodle, it is not okay [emphasis Google's] to use it anyplace else or outside this activity."

Project Oberon is an open source top-to-bottom computer design, from GUI to FPGA. It builds on the Oberon System, the latest iteration from Niklaus Wirth of his teaching systems which start with ALGOL-W.

Privacy experts have wondered what putting such a camera in the home could mean for law enforcement, particularly given last year's episode when Amazon refused to help law enforcement in a murder case in Arkansas. There, investigators attempted to get the company to hand over data collected by a nearby Alexa. If that instance is any indication, Amazon may resist a legal demand to open up an Amazon Key lock.

Beyond concerns about the police, many on Twitter are fundamentally uncomfortable with Amazon Key.

"We have an ongoing dialogue with a lot of tech companies in a variety of different areas," he told Politico Pro. "There's some areas where they are cooperative with us. But on this particular issue of encryption, the tech companies are moving in the opposite direction. They're moving in favor of more and more warrant-proof encryption."

Because the ancient Egyptians were a farming culture that lived and died by the harvest, the annual Nile flood was key to survival. Floods meant nutrient-rich waters fed the fields and everyone could eat. Nile levels were so important to the Egyptian economy that the government based tax amounts on readings from "Nilometers," stone wells fed by the river where they could measure its height in cubits. If the levels were trending too high (destructive flooding) or too low (drought), taxes were scaled back to account for people's diminished fortunes.

Years with low rainfall inevitably meant people wanted for more and had less to lose. Gripes with the government became full-scale rebellions, like the 20-year "Theban revolt" that started in 207 BCE and the "Egyptian revolt" against Ptolemy III between 245-238 BCE. Both came after periods of increased volcanic activity. Though many other factors were in play, there is an undeniable correlation between eruptions and rebellion against the Ptolemaic regime.

Today we are releasing a new browser extension for Chrome and Firefox named Privacy Pass. Privacy Pass uses privacy-preserving cryptography to allow users to authenticate to services without compromising their anonymity. This is joint work with George Tankersley, Ian Goldberg, Nick Sullivan and Filippo Valsorda.

I have some news: the Internet of Things is a mess. A hacked refrigerator sounds slightly scary, but a vibrator-controlling app that records all your sex sounds and stores them on your phone without your knowledge? That's way worse.

For years, Barbara Simons was the loneliest of Cassandras—a technologist who feared what technology had wrought. Her cause was voting: Specifically, she believed that the electronic systems that had gained favor in the United States after the 2000 presidential election were shoddy, and eminently hackable.

The S8 data line locator is a GSM listening and location device hidden inside the plug of a standard USB data/charging cable. It supports the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz GSM frequencies.

Its core idea is very similar to the COTTONMOUTH product line by the NSA/CSS [1] in which an RF device is hidden inside a USB plug. Those hidden devices are referred to as implants.

The device itself is marketed as a location tracker usable in cars, where a thief would not be able to identify the USB cable as a location tracking device. Its malicious use-cases can, however, not be denied. Especially since it features no GPS making its location reporting very coarse (1.57 km deviation in my tests). It can, e.g., be called to listen to a live audio feed from a small microphone within the device, as well as programmed to call back if the sound level surpasses a 45 dB threshold.

Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill continues her excellent investigative work on Facebook's mysterious "People You May Know" system, which has caused consternation among users by making seemingly impossible (and often disturbing) connections, such as "A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later."

Es ist nur zu unserem Besten!

Amazon is going to show the industry how to monitor more moments: by making corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Silicon Valley already earns vast sums of money from watching what we do online. Soon it’ll earn even more money from watching what we do offline.