A facial recognition tool that Amazon.com Inc. sells to web developers wrongly identified 28 members of Congress as police suspects, in a test conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the organization said. Amazon, in a response, said it took issue with the settings of its face ID tool during the test.
Toerisme Vlaanderen, a Belgian tourist board based in Flanders, wrote an open letter to Facebook complaining that its posts featuring paintings by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens had been taken down. Rubens was one of the most influential painters of the 17th century, known for his paintings of nude adults and cherubs.
Facebook Inc. reported slower user growth, revenue that fell short of analysts’ expectations and increased spending to safeguard data, which cut into its profit margin in the second quarter and sent shares down 7 percent after hours. The company had cautioned investors to expect a big jump in costs because of efforts to address concerns about poor handling of users’ privacy and to better monitor what users post.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ YouTube channel received a strike for violating the site’s community guidelines, The Verge has learned. YouTube removed four videos from Jones’ channel, which has 2.4 million subscribers, that contained instances of hate speech and child endangerment, sources familiar with the matter said.
Facebook will be legally required to end its practice of allowing businesses to block certain groups like blacks, gays and immigrants from viewing ads under an agreement reached with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. The Attorney General’s Office said it had launched an investigation into the social media giant and successfully bought 20 fake Facebook ads that excluded various ethnic minorities in late 2016.
A retired Georgia Institute of Technology engineering professor described as a “pioneer” in developing the idea of ride sharing sued Lyft Inc, claiming it infringed his patent for technology underlying the core of its business model. According to a complaint filed on Monday evening, Lyft has failed to pay Stephen Dickerson for using his system integrating cellphones, global positioning system (GPS) technology and automated billing, despite earning as much as $1 billion of annual revenue.
Asustek Computer Inc. and Royal Philips NV were among four companies fined a total of 111 million euros ($130 million) by European Union antitrust regulators for preventing online retailers from setting prices that undercut traditional stores. Asus received the largest fine, about 63.5 million euros, while Philips owes nearly 30 million euros, the European Commission said in a press release.
Hackers working for Russia claimed “hundreds of victims” last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, federal officials said. The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure, “air-gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies, said officials at the Department of Homeland Security.
The operator of a shuttered bitcoin-denominated exchange pleaded guilty to federal charges that he defrauded investors and lied to U.S. securities regulators investigating the theft by hackers of virtual currency now worth about $46 million. Jon Montroll, 37, pleaded guilty to securities fraud and obstruction of justice before U.S. Magistrate Judge James Cott in Manhattan, federal prosecutors said in a statement.
Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity. A Google spokesperson said Security Keys now form the basis of all account access at Google.
Russia, which American intelligence agencies said spread its fair share of misinformation during the 2016 United States election, says it will crack down on “fake news” at home, with a proposed law that critics say could limit freedom of speech on the Internet. The bill, submitted by lawmakers from the governing party, United Russia, proposes holding social networks accountable for “inaccurate” comments users post.
Facebook said it suspended a longtime partner that had used data from Facebook and other social networks to assist governments — including Russia, Turkey, and the United States — in monitoring public sentiment, a more cautious approach in the aftermath of a data privacy scandal. Facebook said that Boston-based Crimson Hexagon did not do anything inappropriate but that it is curtailing the company’s access to its data while conducting an investigation.
Senate Republicans have dropped their attempt to reimpose U.S. sanctions on the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE, lawmakers said, a victory for President Trump as congressional Republicans abandoned a rare effort to thwart his agenda. The retreat means ZTE, a company found guilty of selling U.S. goods to Iran in violation of sanctions, will duck Commerce Department penalties that bar U.S. companies from doing business with it.
Singapore has been hit by what local media is calling the country’s “worst” cyber attack. Hackers targeting Singapore’s largest health care institution, SingHealth, stole the personal profiles of some 1.5 million patients along with the details of prescriptions for 160,000 others. Included in the latter group was Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who the Ministry of Health said was targeted “specifically and repeatedly.”
Three of the top cybersecurity officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation are retiring from government service, according to people familiar with the matter -- departures that come as cyberattacks are a major concern for the country’s security agencies. Senior U.S. intelligence officials warn that the country is at a “critical point” facing unprecedented cyberthreats, including Russia’s ongoing attacks on the American political system.
The Justice Department plans to alert the public to foreign operations targeting U.S. democracy under a new policy designed to counter hacking and disinformation campaigns such as the one Russia undertook in 2016 to disrupt the presidential election. The government will inform American companies, private organizations and individuals that they are being covertly attacked by foreign actors attempting to affect elections or the political process.
Amazon.com Inc. has made it easy for small brands to sell their products to large numbers of customers, but that has also enabled some counterfeiters to cut into their business. Amazon said it prohibits the sale of counterfeit products, but counterfeiters have been able to exploit Amazon’s drive to increase the site’s selection and offer lower prices.
U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the European Union over a record $5 billion fine EU antitrust regulators imposed on Google, saying the bloc was taking advantage of the United States. EU officials on Wednesday also ordered Google to stop using its popular Android mobile operating system to block its rivals, adding to trade tensions between Washington and Brussels.
EU antitrust regulators charged Qualcomm with a new violation in a case where the U.S. chipmaker has been accused of selling chipsets below cost to drive out Nvidia Corp. unit and British phone software maker Icera. “The supplementary statement of objections sent today focuses on certain elements of the 'price-cost' test applied by the Commission to assess the extent to which UMTS baseband chipsets were sold by Qualcomm at prices below cost,” the European Commission said.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell expressed doubts about the usefulness of cryptocurrency for anything other than obscuring illegal activity. Powell told a House panel that virtual currencies such as bitcoin are too volatile to hold consistent value, pose serious risks to consumer safety, and inhibit crackdowns on illicit finance.
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