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"The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself."

"There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can't shut it down. You can't terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered."

The US National Security Agency (NSA) knew of the Heartbleed flaw in the widely used OpenSSL security tool and exploited it for year - instead of blowing the whistle so that the patch could be flawed."

"Branded as "Tox", the tool lets anyone, regardless of technical ability, automatically create ransomware: software which encrypts a victim's hard drive and demands payment before decrypting it."

"One of the most widely used tools for monitoring and restricting pupils' internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children's personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned."

Clear rules are needed to govern what social networks can do with the massive amount of personal data they collect and how they inform their users about their practices, said Sen. Charles Schumer, who has asked the FTC to articulate a set of guidelines. Facebook claims it offers users "powerful" privacy tools, but Paul Stephens of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse suggested consumers need a PhD to understand them.

"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"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."

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"In the fawning media coverage of the Obama campaign's technological prowess, it did not occur to observers at the time to call this a startling invasion of privacy. And it wasn't, or at a very minimum, the privacy risks were arguably outweighed by the benefits. A tool like this could be the future of politics: door-to-door canvassing for the digital age, and a welcome antidote to impersonal broadcast TV ads or a welcome upgrade from getting a phone call from a stranger telling you to vote."

"The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives."

"Rekognition indicated high confidence that 28 members of the current Congress were known arrestees. It was wrong in every case. The false positives disproportionately targeted racialized members of Congress. This, finally, has Congress's attention: members of Congress have sent some pointed questions to Amazon about its Rekognition tool and given them a deadline of Aug 20 to respond. They've also requested an immediate meeting with Jeff Bezos to discuss the topic in depth."

"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)."