Norwegian patient data has been hacked, 2,8 million people might have been completely leaked. Everything from SSN to health records. Issue was first noticed at 8. January. They don’t know who did it or the reason behind it.

VW, Scout, der Automobilclub von Deutschland und weitere Unternehmen wollen Schulwege sicherer machen. Aber nicht für alle Kinder, sondern nur für die, die sich mit einem Tracking-System namens „Schutzranzen“ digital überwachen lassen. Das soll an Grundschulen in Ludwigsburg und Wolfsburg getestet werden.

18 • 5:44PM

A15-year-old gained access to plans for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran by pretending to be the head of the CIA to gain access to his computers, a court has heard

: Instagram rüstet Stalking-Feature nach Facebooks Vorbild nach. Heißt "Activity Status" und lässt einen sehen, wann die Gegenseite zuletzt die App offen hatte.

Amazon is considering granting third-party app developers access to transcripts of audio recordings saved by Alexa-powered devices, according to a report from The Information today. The change would be aimed at enticing developers to continue investing in Alexa as a voice assistant platform, by giving those app makers more data that could help improve their software over time. Amazon’s goal, according to The Information, is to stay competitive with more recent entrants in the smart speaker market, like Apple and Google.

Stanford researchers trained a convolutional neural network on a data set of 40,895 images from 14,982 studies. The paper documents how the algorithm detected abnormalities (like fractures, or bone degeneration) better than radiologists in finger and wrist radiographs. However, radiologists were still better at spotting issues in elbows, forearms, hands, upper arms, and shoulders.

Last week, cowards from both sides of the aisle caved into America's lawless spy agencies, and today bipartisan senators reprised that cowardice to ensure that the Senate would not get a chance to vote on amendments to the renewal of Section 702, the rule that has allowed the NSA to conduct mass, warrantless surveillance on Americans in secret, without meaningful oversight or limit

Amazon was the last major tech company to issue a "transparency report" detailing what kinds of law-enforcement requests they'd serviced, and where; when they finally did start issuing them, they buried them on obscure webpages deep in their corporate info site and released them late on Friday afternoons

When an alert went out warning Hawaiians they were about to get nuked, they immediately stopped fapping. Upon realizing it was a false alarm, masturbation recommenced, and then some! And within 45 minutes, life at Pornhub had returned to normal

Former Facebook insiders and a design ethicist spoke with NBC News about how they say “Facebook has failed its users — and what, if anything, can be done to rein in its power.” The short version: design has real-world consequences, and when the only purpose of design is to help a platform earn more money, watch out.

The chat platform Discord has struggled with abuse, racism, and intolerance on its service, but its problems are far from over — and now include revenge porn. In a report published today, The Daily Beast details how it discovered “hundreds of [explicit] images, almost all of women,” pulled from social media or of sexual imagery being shared without consent across the platform maliciously.

YouTube is tightening the rules around its partner program and raising the requirements that a channel/creator must meet in order to monetize videos. Effective immediately, to apply for monetization (and have ads attached to videos), creators must have tallied 4,000 hours of overall watch time on their channel within the past 12 months and have at least 1,000 subscribers. YouTube will enforce the new eligibility policy for all existing channels as of February 20th, meaning that channels that fail to meet the threshold will no longer be able to make income from ads.

Today, with an app called Kohler Konnect and a collection of new and updated products, Kohler is announcing the largest suite of smart bathroom and plumbing fixtures on the market.

XML pioneer and early blogger Tim Bray went looking through Google for some posts he knew about from 2006 and 2008 and found that Google couldn't retrieve either of them, not even if he searched for lengthy strings that were exact matches for text from the articles; he concluded that "from a busi­ness point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google in­dex­ing ev­ery­thing, no mat­ter how old and how obscure," and so we could not longer rely on "Google’s glob­al in­fras­truc­ture as my own per­son­al search in­dex for my own per­son­al pub­li­ca­tion­s."

The New York Times reports that Kinsa makes smartphone-paired digital thermometers claimed to be in 500,000 American homes and producing 25,000 data points  each day. From its data, Kinsa says, it can tell Missouri and Iowa are being hit hard by flu this winter, while New York and New England are getting off lighter than usual

Facebook’s ongoing experimentation with the content of the News Feed is boosting posts that promote fake news, reports The New York Times. The social networking site is currently testing a feature that separates users’ posts from content from professional news sites. News stories are instead placed in a separate feed called Explore, which is being tested in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Serbia.

OnePlus is investigating reports of customers’ credit card details being stolen after they bought goods from the smartphone maker online. The investigation began after a poll posted by users on OnePlus’ forums found that many customers had experienced the same problem. In the poll, 174 respondents said they had discovered fraudulent transactions on their cards after making a purchase from OnePlus. One customer who bought a OnePlus 5T wrote that he was alerted by the bank as someone tried to make an unauthorized purchase at Walmart worth $790.

One in six US adults (or around 39 million people) now own a voice-activated smart speaker, according to research from NPR and Edison Research. The Smart Audio Report claims that uptake of these devices over the last three years is “outpacing the adoption rates of smartphones and tablets.” Users spent time using speakers to find restaurants and businesses, playing games, setting timers and alarms, controlling smart home devices, sending messages, ordering food, and listening to music and books. Over half of respondents keep their smart speaker in the living room, followed by the kitchen (21 percent), and master bedroom (19 percent).

In December, a dispute following an online wageredCall of Duty match resulted in the death of a 28-year-old Kansas man after a faked call led a SWAT team to his house. Los Angeles police quickly arrested Tyler Barriss, the man responsible for making the call, and this week, he was charged with felony involuntary manslaughter and two additional counts.

Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist, has posted slides and notes from his talk at last December's Strata Data Conference in Singapore, "We need to build machine learning tools to augment machine learning engineers." (more…)