Apple says Chinese iCloud accounts are safe, Reporters Without Borders says otherwise.

One journalist went all-in on connecting her apartment to the internet, but her experiences might make you think twice about doing the same.

*What stark revisionism this is.
https://mashable.com/2018/01/30/strava-fitness-tracking-apps-data-privacy/#0Pmq2llaliOO
Your fitness tracker knows too much about you.
Where you jog, where you work,...

Half a billion dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency was stolen—that’s gotten people’s attention.

In a textbook example of the use of big data to create a digital poorhouse, as described in Virginia Eubanks's excellent new book Automating Inequality, the Australian government created an algorithmic, semi-privatised system to mine the financial records of people receiving means-tested benefits and accuse them of fraud on the basis of its findings, bringing in private contractors to build and maintain the system and collect the penalties it ascribed, paying them a commission on the basis of how much money they extracted from poor Australians

Over the course of the last several years, every major social platform has been plagued by fake news. Now Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a fake news problem of its own.

Because of how the search engine’s autofill feature works, people who visit Bing looking for news videos may be redirected to a flood of fake news videos, all generated by a single source. You can see how it works for yourself: click on the “News” tab from Bing’s homepage. The page autofills the search bar with “Top stories.” Now travel to any other search tab, including “Maps” or “Images” and you’ll see that the search bar retains the “Top stories” query. Autofilling “Top stories” into the search bar appears to be an innocuous design decision — until you hit the...

Over the course of the last several years, every major social platform has been plagued by fake news. Now Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has a fake news problem of its own.

Because of how the search engine’s autofill feature works, people who visit Bing looking for news videos may be redirected to a flood of fake news videos, all generated by a single source. You can see how it works for yourself: click on the “News” tab from Bing’s homepage. The page autofills the search bar with “Top stories.” Now travel to any other search tab, including “Maps” or “Images” and you’ll see that the search bar retains the “Top stories” query. Autofilling “Top stories” into the search bar appears to be an innocuous design decision — until you hit the...

Amazon has been granted a pair of patents for a wristband that can pinpoint the location of warehouse employees and track their hand movements in real time. The patents, first spotted by GeekWire, describe an inventory management system comprised of trackers and receivers used to monitor workers’ performance. The original patents were both filed back in 2016 but were granted on January 30th.

Australian national broadcaster ABC has gotten hold of a massive trove of state secrets that were inadvertently sold off in a pair of cheap, locked filing cabinets purchased from a Canberra junk-shop that specialises in government surplus furniture

Satori is built to turn routers, thermostats, and other household devices into zombies.

For victims of revenge porn and other explicit material shared without consent, legal remedies have arrived only within the last decade. But thanks to AI-assisted technology, anyone with an online presence could now end up starring in pornography against their will — and there’s little that the law can do about it.

After it launched with mixed reviews, more than 100 child development experts, health advocacy groups, educators, and parents have called on Facebook to shut down Messenger Kids, a spinoff of the company’s messenger app that’s specifically designed for children ages six to 12. The collective, led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, addressed its open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, warning that the app is “harmful to children and teens,” and that it could “undermine children’s healthy development.”

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.

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.