"This week, the company released a new form of facial recognition called periocular recognition, which can supposedly identify individuals by just their eyes and eyebrows. Rank One says the new system uses an entirely different algorithm from its standard facial recognition system and is specifically meant for masked individuals. Rank One says it will ship the technology to all of its active customers for free."

"Those who design this stuff are plainly doing so for people close in age to themselves. But surely no harm would come from them considering whether their parents or grandparents would have any chance of fathoming out whatever new consumer electronics they are working on."

"Facebook will ban any groups, pages or Instagram accounts that "represent" QAnon, the company announced Tuesday, in a sharp escalation of its attempt to crack down on the antisemitic conspiracy movement that has thrived on its platform."

"TL;DR: all recent macOS devices are no longer safe to use if left alone, even if you have them powered down. The root of trust on macOS is inherently broken They can bruteforce your FileVault2 volume password They can alter your macOS installation They can load arbitrary kernel extensions"

"But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long - or, in older versions which PHE may have still been using, a mere 65,536. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That means that, once the lab had performed more than a million tests, it was only a matter of time before its reports failed to be read by PHE."

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

"As Americans continue to grapple with media distrust, conspiracy theories, bots, trolls, and general panic amid multiple unprecedented crises, Twitter is once again trying a new method of identifying misinformation. A new feature in development at the social media platform, called "Birdwatch," was first reported by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong (h/t Tech Crunch) in early August. "

"Twitter has said that tweets wishing for Donald Trump's death in the wake of the president's diagnosis with Covid-19 violate its policies and could result in suspension."

"If someone sees the police approaching, they can press a button on their phone to start recording. Footage is uploaded in real time to the cloud using military-grade encryption, so that if the phone is damaged or confiscated during an interaction with police, the footage is preserved."

"Dubbed SilentFade (short for "Silently running Facebook Ads with Exploits"), the malware compromised Facebook accounts and used them to promote malicious ads, steal browser cookies and more. The social-media giant said that the Chinese malware campaign started in 2016, but it was first discovered in December 2018, due to a suspicious traffic spike across a number of Facebook endpoints. After an extensive investigation, Facebook shut down the campaign and pursued legal action against the cybercriminals behind the attack in December 2019. "

"As explained above, filling in the forms in the fake HTML pages above will send off your password to websites controlled by the criminals. Of course, email passwords are amongst the most valuable credentials for crooks to acquire, simply because many people use their email account for password resets on a multitude of other accounts."

"But Leuthardt, for one, expects he will live to see it. "At the pace at which technology changes, it's not inconceivable to think that in a 20-year time frame everything in a cell phone could be put into a grain of rice," he says. "That could be put into your head in a minimally invasive way, and would be able to perform the computations necessary to be a really effective brain-computer interface.""

"Let's say you have an IoT device that is well protected with functions that can be accessed through a well-defined API; even if you can control the device through the API, you probably can't do too much harm. Firmware, the programming inside the device has logical constraints that don't allow you, for example, to close garage doors while someone is in the way of them or overheat a device so that it combusts.  We used to trust that hardware, such as a common kitchen appliance, could be trusted and could not be easily altered without physically dismounting the device. But with today's "smart" appliances, this is no longer the case."

"The combination of software and IP in every device is a sea-change for the organization of our society. As firms have become increasingly concentrated - as monopolies have emerged in every sector - they have also figured out how to infuse their products with just enough software that they can invoke IP to control their competitors, critics, and customers. These are market power monopolies backstopped by creators' monopolies, which create IP rights that supercharge their market power."

""Critical, user-facing vulnerabilities" were found in the Chinese supplier's fixed-broadband products caused by poor code quality and an old operating system, the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board said in a report. "U.K. operators needed to take extraordinary action to mitigate the risk.""

"The Joker malware circumvents the Google Play app vetting process through a combination of code tweaks, execution method variation, and changes to how it downloads the payload allowing it to function, steal information, and trigger the WAP service sign-ups. Google has removed the 16 infected apps from the Play Store and disabled them on devices where they are installed, thought to be in the region of 120,000 devices. "

"Facebook on September 22 dismantled a network of fake accounts that originated in China and the Philippines, including some that criticised the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing Platforms such as Facebook have become political battlegrounds and have helped strengthen Duterte's support, having been instrumental in his 2016 election"

""Facebook, listen to me," Duterte said in a late-night televised address. "We allow you to operate here hoping that you could help us. Now, if government cannot espouse or advocate something which is for the good of the people, then what is your purpose here in my country?""

"This time the model could look at both the surrounding words and the content of the image to fill in the blank. Through millions of repetitions, it could then discover not just the patterns among the words but also the relationships between the words and the elements in each image."