Hours after a federal judge forced a group in Texas to remove online blueprints for 3-D printed firearms, gun-rights groups in California said they were publishing the files on a separate website. The Firearms Policy Coalition and other groups pulled the plans off the website of pro-gun group Defense Distributed before the court order and are now sharing those same files on a new site, said Craig DeLuz, a spokesman for the group.
Reddit announced that a hacker broke into its computer systems in June, gaining access to the email addresses of some of its users and a database of user names from 2007. The company did not say how many users may have been affected.
China appointed a new director for its powerful Internet regulator, elevating an official seen as an associate of President Xi Jinping to a post with censorship responsibilities and huge sway over tech companies. Zhuang Rongwen was named to head the Cyberspace Administration of China, the regulator said in a brief statement; he had been a deputy director since 2015.
Chinese regulators are investigating Pinduoduo Inc. after media reports of third-party vendors selling counterfeit goods on its group-discounting marketplace, a move analysts said is likely to further batter the firm’s newly listed shares. The probe comes just days after the Shanghai-based startup raised $1.63 billion in the year’s second-biggest U.S. listing by a Chinese firm, which valued Pinduoduo at $23.8 billion.
Three Ukrainians have been arrested on criminal hacking charges including stealing payment card numbers, in attacks on more than 100 U.S. companies that cost businesses tens of millions of dollars, the U.S. Justice Department said. U.S. prosecutors alleged that the three Ukrainians, who were arrested in Europe between January and June, are members of FIN7, a notorious cybercrime gang.
Infowars founder Alex Jones is getting another slap on the wrist from a major tech company: Spotify, the music streaming service that also streams podcasts, has removed multiple episode of “The Alex Jones Show” for violating the company’s policies around hate speech. “We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community,” a Spotify spokesperson told Recode.
Google may launch a censored version of its search engine in China in a move that would largely reverse its 2010 decision to withdraw from the country, The Intercept reported. The news outlet says Google has been working on a project called Dragonfly since last year and has demonstrated a version of the censored search engine to Chinese officials.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence vowed to protect domestic elections from foreign interference, hours after Facebook said it had identified a new effort to use its site to influence November’s U.S. congressional elections. Facebook Inc disclosed it had taken down dozens of fake accounts after identifying a new coordinated political influence campaign to mislead users and organize rallies ahead of this year’s elections.
Facebook said it had deleted hundreds of offensive posts since a law banning online hate speech came into force in Germany at the start of the year that foresees fines of up to 50 million euros ($58 million) for failure to comply.The social network received 1,704 complaints under the law, known in Germany as NetzDG, and removed 362 posts between January and June, Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president for global policy solutions said in a blog.
President Trump intends to nominate Kelvin Droegemeier, an expert in extreme weather from the University of Oklahoma, as his top science and technology adviser at the White House, according to an administration official. Droegemeier’s selection, if approved by the Senate, could soon end a roughly 19-month vacancy at the top of the Office of Science and Technology Policy — a critical arm of the White House that guides the president on such issues as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, emerging medical research and climate change.
Facebook confirmed it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign believed to be working ahead of November's midterm elections. The social media company announced it had detected and removed 32 fake accounts and pages from both Facebook and Instagram after identifying "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Twitter is teaming up with academic researchers on ways to cut down on abusive content and harassment on its platform. The company said that it is partnering with two groups of academic researchers that will help measure the "health" of conversations on the platform.
In a policy paper obtained by Axios, Sen. Mark Warner's office laid out 20 different paths to address problems posed by Big Tech platforms -- ranging from putting a price on individual users' data to funding media literacy programs. The paper -- prepared by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner’s staff and circulated in tech policy circles in recent weeks -- is a window to the options available to U.S. policymakers concerned about disinformation and privacy.
A U.S. jury awarded International Business Machines Corp. $82.5 million after finding that Groupon Inc. infringed four of its e-commerce patents. The verdict is a boon to IBM’s intellectual-property licensing business, which last year brought in $1.19 billion for the company, holder of more than 45,000 patents.
Amid a plummeting share price, Facebook Inc. wants panicked investors to believe Europe’s strict General Data Protection Regulation is to blame for fewer people using the social network in the region. EU lawmakers disagree. The new law came into force on May 25 and forced companies that hold data on EU citizens to obtain “unambiguous” consent to collect personal information.
The Trump administration is crafting a proposal to protect Web users’ privacy, aiming to blunt global criticism that the absence of strict federal rules in the United States has enabled data mishaps at Facebook and others in Silicon Valley.Over the past month, the Commerce Department has been huddling with representatives of tech giants such as Facebook and Google, Internet providers including AT&T and Comcast, and consumer advocates, according to four people familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record.
State-sponsored Russian hackers appear far more interested this year in demonstrating that they can disrupt the American electric utility grid than the midterm elections, according to United States intelligence officials and technology company executives. Despite attempts to infiltrate the online accounts of two Senate Democrats up for re-election, intelligence officials said they have seen little activity by Russian military hackers aimed at either major American political figures or state voter registration systems.
Alex Jones, the American conspiracy theorist who runs the InfoWars website, has been suspended from Facebook for bullying and hate speech. The suspension will last for 30 days, and affects only Jones’s personal account on the social network, not the main InfoWars account.
Google is updating its financial services-related ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice, Google's director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer, told CNBC. That means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won't be allowed to serve ads through any of Google's ad products, which place advertising on its own sites as well as third-party websites.
President Donald Trump waded into the controversy over reports that Twitter Inc. is limiting the visibility of some Republicans on its platform -- a practice known as shadow banning -- sending shares down. "Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints," Trump, who prefers to use the site to communicate and is its most influential user, tweeted.
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