Group items tagged

"a small city in China's central Anhui province, purporting to show vice-mayor Wang Hun pay a friendly visit to an elderly woman. There's only one problem: The image, which appears to show Wang floating above a particularly tiny woman, has clearly been modified."

"The Register reports that security firm Zscaler was first to spot the app, which presents itself as a normal video playing app, albeit for playing videos of an adult nature. Apparently once it has silently snapped photos of its victim it will display a message on screen demanding that they pay $500 . Otherwise, well... do you want people knowing you've used the app?"

A porn studio "harrassed" someone it claims illegally downloaded their films by threatening to subpoena their neighbours and spouse if they didn't pay up, a judge has said.

Crime never pays...

Family feels that they shouldn't have to pay for a security system that doesn't work!

"Wired recently started an anti-ad-blocking campaign that attempts to prevent ad-blocked users from reading articles unless they pay a monthly subscription fee. On the heels of this decision comes a roundup of the major ad-blockers, some of which are pretty dodgy indeed. Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size and placement. Ghostery blocks trackers, but by default gathers "anonymized" data about your browsing habits (it's very hard to conclusively describe any deep data set as anonymized). "

"TeslaCrypt ransomware with new features that are impossible to crack, according to Cisco's Talos security arm. That means user infected with the latest version (3.01) of the malware can no longer use white hat-engineered software to get their files back. Until someone finds a new solution -- and that seems unlikely -- victims will have to pay."

"Petya ransomware victims can now unlock infected computers without paying. An unidentified programmer has produced a tool that exploits shortfalls in the way the malware encrypts a file that allows Windows to start up. In notes put on code-sharing site Github, he said he had produced the key generator to help his father-in-law unlock his Petya-encrypted computer."

"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"Affectiva is running a program that pays drivers to help train its emotion-recognition system. The company sends drivers a kit including cameras and other sensors to place within their vehicles. These record a person's facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice on the road. That data is then labeled by trained specialists for a range of emotions, and fed into deep neural networks."

"Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in "vaccine controversies", the Guardian has found. Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in "Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines", which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and "informed consent", which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws."

"After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all the way back to 2008; including SSNs, home addresses and phone numbers, disciplinary files, health information, emergency contact details, health benefits and payroll info, pay information, financial data for direct deposits."

"In a survey of more than 4,200 people conducted by CAA, travelers most frequently cited being split from their party while traveling on Ryanair, but the airline insists that it doesn't employ a family-splitting algorithm. Ryanair says if a person doesn't pay for their seat assignment, they are "randomly" assigned, which may result in them not sitting with their party."

""I don't really care about data privacy because I think it's all an illusion anyway." It's interesting to see how this encounter also reflects the general behavior of a majority of people when it comes to privacy. Although user data has long been a gold mine for companies, would it be more acceptable if they started paying their users in exchange for it?"

"Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan calls Zoom a "privacy disaster," filled with "creepy" features that send tracking data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and tell meeting hosts if attendees aren't paying attention. Zoom's privacy policy allows it to use what it calls "customer content" for advertising purposes."

"Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a model for traffic without ownership. You pay a monthly fee for it, like with Spotify, tell the app where you are going and get instant access to taxis, Ubers, buses, and so on. Everything is available on-demand and ownership is no longer needed."

"SoundCloud announced on Tuesday it would become the first major streaming service to start directing subscribers' fees only to the artists they listen to, a move welcomed by musicians campaigning for fairer pay. Current practice for streaming services including Spotify, Deezer and Apple is to pool royalty payments and dish them out based on which artists have the most global plays. Many artists and unions have criticised this system, saying it disproportionately favours megastars and leaves y little for musicians further down the pecking order."

"JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber-attack shut down operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia and Canada. While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian-headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft."