A court in Washington, D.C., has moved to limit the scope of search warrants obtained by federal investigators for Facebook data in connection with an ongoing investigation into criminal rioting on Inauguration Day. As a result of the order, the Department of Justice will be blocked from viewing identifying information on innocent third-party Facebook users who interacted with a page used to organize protests against President Trump on Jan. 20.
The Anti-Defamation League is making another move to enlist the tech industry in its efforts to curb hate online. The civil rights organization said it's opened the Center for Technology and Society, complete with an advisory board stacked with notable names like Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Facebook Vice President of Product Guy Rosen, and Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe.
Under growing pressure from governments and counterterrorism advocates, YouTube has drastically reduced its video archive of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American cleric who remains the leading English-language jihadist recruiter on the Internet six years after he was killed by a United States drone strike. Using video fingerprinting technology, YouTube now flags his videos automatically and human reviewers block most of them before anyone sees them, company officials say.
Missouri’s attorney general has launched a broad investigation into whether Google is violating the state’s consumer-protection and antitrust laws, a new front in the Internet giant’s regulatory battles. Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley said he issued an investigative subpoena to probe Google’s collection of user data, its use of other sites’ content, and its alleged manipulation of search results to favor its own services.
Google said that it would support the Federal Election Commission (FEC) implementing new disclosure rules for online political ads. In a filing submitted to the FEC, the Internet giant argued that advertisers and online platforms could use clearer regulations for what information needs to be disclosed on political ads and what types of ads qualify for the disclosures.
Numerous tech companies have voiced their support for a bill currently working its way through Congress, the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (or SESTA), which is designed to make it easier for prosecutors to target websites that enable sex work. Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia, is concerned that the new bill will overreach, and make it difficult for sites built on user-generated content to continue to operate.
Fifteen months into a wide-ranging investigation by the agency’s counterintelligence arm, known as Q Group, and the FBI, officials still do not know whether the NSA is the victim of a brilliantly executed hack, with Russia as the most likely perpetrator, an insider’s leak, or both. Three employees have been arrested since 2015 for taking classified files, but there is fear that one or more leakers may still be in place. And there is broad agreement that the damage from the Shadow Brokers already far exceeds the harm to American intelligence done by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor who fled with four laptops of classified material in 2013.
Twitter has suspended its verification program following outrage over handing a blue checkmark to the organizer of the deadly Charlottesville rally in August. Twitter verified the account of Jason Kessler who, after the death of Heather Heyer, tweeted that Heyer was a "fat, disgusting Communist" whose death "was payback time."
Up to 180 million smartphone owners are at risk of having some of their text messages and calls intercepted by hackers because of a simple coding error in at least 685 mobile apps, cyber-security firm Appthority warned. Developers mistakenly coded credentials for accessing services provided by Twilio Inc., said Appthority’s director of security research, Seth Hardy.
People should worry about online data collection by technology companies because it gives them unparalleled insight into users lives, said the creator of one of the biggest web browsers, Opera. Jon von Tetzchner said the situation was already comparable to George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, since “everyone is being followed and everyone’s information is being collected.”
The “remorseless” growth of cyber crime is leading to 4,000 ransom attacks a day and gangs’ technological capability now threatens critical parts of the financial sector, the head of Europol said. Online criminals have become so sophisticated that gangs have created “conglomerations” with company structures that specialize in different criminal activities to carry out the attacks, Rob Wainwright, who leads the EU law enforcement agency, said.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) slammed big tech firms, saying that they should be held to the same style of net neutrality rules as major telecommunications companies. “Not only do they guide what we see, read and buy on a regular basis, but there dominance specifically in the market of information now requires that we consider their role in the integrity of our democracy,” Franken said, criticizing firms like Twitter, Facebook and Google for their inability to stop foreign actors from manipulating their platforms to meddle in elections.
European authorities have asked Apple to share details of its recent tax arrangements as the company faces an order to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes while leaked documents have revealed new details of its alleged tax planning. Just a day earlier, Apple's tax strategies were revealed in reports by the Guardian and the New York Times, including the company's alleged moves to shift key foreign subsidiaries to an island tax haven.
Former Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer apologized for two massive data breaches at the internet company, blaming Russian agents for at least one of them, at a hearing on the growing number of cyber attacks on major U.S. companies. “Unfortunately, while all our measures helped Yahoo successfully defend against the barrage of attacks by both private and state-sponsored hackers, Russian agents intruded on our systems and stole our users’ data,” she said.
Israeli company Corephotonics filed a lawsuit against Apple, just as Apple was awarded $120 million by the Supreme Court after a prolonged battle with Samsung. Corephotonics, a maker of dual lens camera technology, claims that the cameras featured in the iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus infringe on four of its patents.
The FBI hasn’t been able to access the data inside the mobile phone of the gunman in the Texas church massacre, renewing tension between tech companies that protect devices with encryption and law enforcement agencies investigating crimes. Officials sent the phone belonging to Devin P. Kelley to a Federal Bureau of Investigation facility in Quantico, Virginia, where experts were examining it, said Christopher Combs, special agent in charge in San Antonio, Texas.
A bank in Nepal has recovered most of the money stolen after its SWIFT server was hacked last month, two officials, involved in the investigation of the Himalayan nation’s first reported cyber heist, said. Cyber attackers made about $4.4 million in illegal transfers from NIC Asia Bank, based in the Nepali capital, by hacking the SWIFT server at the private bank, to other countries, including the United States, Britain, China, Japan and Singapore last month when the bank was closed for annual festival holidays, Nepali media said.
Despite some onlookers calling him — or her — a hero, the anonymous Twitter employee who pulled the plug on President Trump's Twitter account before leaving the company may want to lawyer up, according to experts on computer law. Whether or not Twitter pursues legal action against its former worker, federal officials could be motivated to prosecute — if only to deter future cases, analysts say.
After years of sparring in the courts, Apple has once and for all claimed victory over Samsung to the count of $120 million. The Supreme Court said today that it wouldn’t hear an appeal of the patent infringement case, first decided in 2014, which has been bouncing through appeals courts in the years since.
Indonesia vowed to block Facebook Inc’.s WhatsApp Messenger within 48 hours if the service did not ensure that obscene Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images were removed. WhatsApp, which is widely used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, said message encryption prevented it from monitoring the third-party providers Indonesians use to search for GIFs.
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