Fewer than one in four people in India have a smartphone, but in a country of more than 1.3 billion, that's about 300 million. And as of February 2017, 200 million of them are on WhatsApp - texting, voice messaging and video-calling each other - making India the messaging service's biggest market.

But India's WhatsApp habit has a dark side too. Misinformation, disinformation, rumours and false messages can go viral. In at least two cases, fake messages spread on WhatsApp have led to mobs lynching innocent people.

Google moved to strip from its news search results publications that mask their country of origin or intentionally mislead readers, a further step to curb the spread of fake news that has plagued internet companies this year.

The bright Muggles at Botnik Studios trained predictive keyboards (one for narration, one for dialogue) on all seven Harry Potter books and produced a brand-new chapter about the young wizard. And great sizzling dragon bogies, is it awful.

In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze

Zhu Long, co-founder of pioneering Yitu Technologies, whose facial-recognition algorithms have logged 1.8 billion faces and caught criminals across China, says AI will change the world more than the industrial revolution

one eye-popping statistic from the report stands out. According to Facebook, the company restricted video of a school shooting in Mexico 20,506 times after receiving a request from Mexican law enforcement. In context, that number is massive: the company only restricted content for violating local law a total of about 28,000 times, meaning the video accounted for 72 percent of restrictions in the first half of 2017. In the second half of 2016, by contrast, the company only restricted content about 7,000 times — meaning takedown requests quadrupled in the category. In Mexico, during that same 2016 period, Facebook agreed to restrict content only 25 times.

A couple and their 10-year-old boy taking a cruise from Mobile, Alabama to Mexico on Carnival Cruise Line says they found a hidden camera in their stateroom. The small camera was tucked inside the cables behind their TV.

Uber set up a covert unit tasked with stealing competitors' secrets and engaging in undercover surveillance, a letter published by a US court on Friday has alleged.

Twitter says it will now begin enforcing the new rules it announced last month to combat abuse and hateful conduct, including threats of violence and physical harm. The new rules expand policies to abusive or threatening content in usernames and profiles, and to accounts affiliated with hate groups both on and off platform.

Starting this week, Facebook will begin demoting spammy or “engagement bait” posts that goad users into taking actions like sharing, tagging, liking, or commenting. Posts which prompt users to “Tag a friend who likes to nap!” seem popular because they game Facebook’s algorithms, which causes Facebook to prioritize those posts in more News Feeds. The company says posts that ask people for help, advice, or recommendations like raising money for charity or asking for travel advice won’t be affected by the update.

British Airways, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Porsche are among five large companies that have been identified as having paid corporate intelligence firms to monitor political groups that challenged their businesses, leaked documents reveal.

Microsofts biometrisches Anmeldeverfahren Windows Hello ist unsicher. Der Ansatz kommt bei Windows 10 zum Einsatz und Nutzer können sich per Gesichtserkennung an Geräten anmelden. Sicherheitsforscher von SySS zeigen, wie sie das Verfahren mit einem auf Papier ausgedruckten Gesicht einer berechtigten Person erfolgreich umgehen – das klappt aber nicht immer.

Billions of miles have been driven on Britain’s roads this decade in cars fitted with “telematics” boxes recording every detail of a driver’s behaviour – whether they are speeding on a 30mph urban road, how they are cornering on a country road, and how they are braking or accelerating on a motorway.

Installed in about 1m cars by insurance companies, they offer drivers – usually 17 to 25-year-olds – less costly insurance if they drive more carefully. But the telematics black boxes also reveal a wealth of data about how Britain drives - debunking a lot of modern myths, but confirming many others.

Das Analytics-Team hat heute eine Reihe von Updates angekündigt, die sich rund um die Besucher einer Webseite drehen. Dabei steht nun nicht mehr die Technologie und der eigentliche Klick im Vordergrund, sondern der Besucher selbst. In den Diagrammen können nun direkt die Daten zu der Anzahl von Besuchern statt Pageviews und Aufrufe angezeigt werden. Natürlich liegt die Zahl der Views immer höher als die der Nutzer, so dass man nun besser vergleichbare Daten über echte Nutzer hat.

Aber das ist nicht alles, denn viel wichtiger ist die nun eingeführte Personalisierung dieser Daten. Für jeden einzelnen Besucher werden nun Profile angelegt, die mit Hilfe von Cookies immer wieder erkannt werden. So kann man jeden einzelnen Besucher jetzt separat aufrufen und sieht ein doch recht komplexes Profil. Man kann sehen wie oft der Nutzer die Seite besucht, wie lange er dort aktiv ist, wie viel Umsatz er generiert hat und noch sehr viel mehr.

Täglich chatten Millionen Nutzer mit dem angeblich besonders abhörsicheren Telegram. Unsere Recherchen zeigen, dass das BKA die App mit einer einfachen Software austricksen kann—und das auch schon dutzendfach getan hat

Ride-sharing company reveals 380,000 in Singapore were affected by the massive data breach that compromised 57 million accounts globally, but says no fraud or misuse has been tied to these users.

Das Buch von Michel Foucault, das diese These über die Funktionsweise moderner Überwachung enthält, erschien 1975. 2015 fand in Wien eine Tagung mit dem Titel Die Machtanalyse nach Foucault: 40 Jahre Überwachen und Strafen statt, deren Beiträge gerade in einem Sammelband erschienen sind. Das Theorie-Kollektiv diffrakt lud die darin vertretene Philosophin Petra Gehring sowie die beiden Herausgeber Roberto Nigro und Marc Rölli zu einer Diskussion in die ehemaligen Räume des Merve-Verlags in Berlin ein.

Angriffe durch Cyberkriminelle schaden nicht nicht nur dem Image des attackierten Unternehmens, sondern stellen in vielen Fällen auch eine finanzielle Belastung dar. Inzwischen erreicht die Schadenssumme mehrere Milliarden Dollar.

Over the years ever since the first Apple Watch was released, we’ve been hearing stories about how the device has saved the lives of quite a few of its users, such as alerting them to impending heart attacks. In fact just a new report from 9to5Mac will see the Apple Watch chalk up another life saved.

Microsoft should not be able to “shield evidence” held on Irish servers from US prosecutors, a group of 35 US state attorneys general has argued.…