Internet & Web
Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the accidental death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a "blackout challenge" on the video-sharing network TikTok.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said on Friday it had not managed to identify any content on its site that could have encouraged the girl to participate in any such challenge, but was helping the authorities in the probe over possible "incitement to suicide".
Medical experts have warned about the danger of the challenge being taken up by some young people, who refer to it as "scarfing" or "the choking game" in which restricted oxygen to the brain results in a high.
In order to digitally recreate a deceased person based on their "images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages," and other data, Microsoft has been granted a patent for an underlying technology trying to achieve that. In addition to creating a chatbot, it is suggested that 2D or 3D models could potentially be created.
Alphabet has announced it will shut down its internet balloon company Loon as "the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped," according to a post on the blog of Alphabet’s X moonshot division.
"Sadly, despite the team’s groundbreaking technical achievements over the last 9 years — doing many things previously thought impossible, like precisely navigating balloons in the stratosphere, creating a mesh network in the sky, or developing balloons that can withstand the harsh conditions of the stratosphere for more than a year — the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped. So we’ve made the difficult decision to close down Loon. In the coming months, we’ll begin winding down operations and it will no longer be an Other Bet within Alphabet."
The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, increased its average number of daily searches by 62% in 2020 as users seek alternatives to impede data tracking.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo vice president of communications said: "People are coming to us because they want more privacy, and it's generally spreading through word of mouth."
After Amazon, Google, and Apple forced Parler offline, the social network managed to make an online comeback on Sunday, even if not fully operational.
Parler's CEO John Matze wrote a post on the platform saying: "Our return is inevitable due to hard work, and persistence against all odds."
The social networking site went dark when Amazon stopped providing it cloud hosting services after it was revealed the platform was used to help organize the Capitol Hill attack on Jan. 6, which left five people dead.
Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack has stated in a series of tweets that Twitter is working on a future of social media and doing their "part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media." The technology called Bluesky will be blockchain-based and Twitter intends to "ultimately be a client of this standard."
Twitter has on Sunday temporarily blocked the account of Republican Congresswoman and "QAnon" supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Greene had violated company rules on multiple occasions, the online platform said. The congresswoman had written on Twitter that voter fraud had occurred in the Senate elections in Georgia. According to U.S. broadcaster CNN, Greene had spread several conspiracy myths and false reports at once in a lengthy thread.
The congresswoman's Twitter messages were then flagged with a notice that their content was controversial. A few hours later, the online network decided to suspend Greene's account for twelve hours.
WhatsApp announced Friday a three-month delay of a new privacy policy originally slated to go into effect on February 8th following widespread confusion over whether the new policy would mandate data sharing with Facebook. WhatsApp stated it wouldn’t enforce the planned update to its data-sharing policy until May 15.
"We’re now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8. We’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp. We’ll then go to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15," the firm said in a blog post.
"There's been a lot of misinformation causing concern and we want to help everyone understand our principles and the facts," said the company, which earlier this week ran full-page ads on several newspapers in India, where it has amassed over 450 million monthly active users.
Messaging applications Telegram and Signal see impressive user growth in the wake of confusion over updated terms of service notification from Facebook-owned encrypted messaging service WhatsApp.
Telegram said on Wednesday it had surpassed 500 million active users globally, while Signal took the number 1 spot on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store's top free apps lists this week.
Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook and then co-founding the Signal Foundation, told Reuters that "We’ve seen unprecedented growth this past week." He also said Signal was working to improve its video and group chat functions, allowing it to compete better with WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, and other conferencing apps that have become vital to day-to-day life over the past year. Privacy advocates have jumped on the WhatsApp changes, pointing to what they say is Facebook's poor track record of supporting consumers' interests when handling their data, with many suggesting users migrate to other platforms.
Parler, a social network used to plan the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, has been hit by a massive data scrape. Security researchers collected user data before the network went dark Monday morning after Amazon, Google, and Apple booted the platform.
Lead by Twitter user @donk_enby, a team of security researchers began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 per cent of its content.
The scraped data includes user profile data and information, raw media files -- including geolocation metadata -- and posts, including deleted ones.
YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared on an episode and blamed the Capitol siege on Democrats.
Twitter took action against a pair of President Trump's close associates Friday, banning them from the platform as part of a broader effort to contain the QAnon conspiracy movement. In recent months, each figure has promoted QAnon, an elaborate constellation of conspiracy theories purporting that President Trump is waging a secret battle against a cabal of political enemies who engage in child sex trafficking, among other baseless claims. As part of Trump's post-election legal team, Powell became a heroic figure to the QAnon crowd, which believes that a master plan being orchestrated behind the scenes will give the president a second term.
Following the violent storming of the US Capitol by radical supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump, Google has removed the online service Parler from its app store.
In addition Apple threatened a removal and demanded that Parler must take measures to prevent users from planning illegal, violent activities together.
Twitter has stated that "After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence."
WhatsApp has been informing its approximately two billion users via a pop-up message in the app that there have been changes to the terms of use.
Following an update to the terms of use and privacy policy, WhatsApp users must now agree that all information in the app may be used by the entire company. This includes user-stored data such as phone numbers, address book, profile names, profile pictures, status messages, and more.
Twitter has stated that three tweets of the United States President Donald Trump have been removed because they were in "severe" violation of Twitters "Civic Integrity policy".
This means that Trump needs to remove the tweets and his account will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of the tweets.
Adobe officially discontinued support for its Flash Player on December 31, 2020, and will start blocking Flash content starting January 12, 2021. Adobe already announced its plan to end support for Flash in 2017.
The Adobe Flash Player was released in 1996 and was used for streaming videos and playing games, but showed security problems and failed to transition to smartphones.
Facebook published full-page newspaper ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post on Wednesday criticizing Apple’s upcoming iOS privacy changes.
"We’re standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere," the headline read. "At Facebook, small business is at the core of our business," the ad continues and claims that Apple's changes will be "devastating to small businesses," and ends by writing that"small businesses deserve to be heard. We hear your concerns, and we stand with you."
Apple responded by saying it was "standing up" for people who use its devices and that user "should know when their data is being collected and shared across other apps and websites — and they should have the choice to allow that or not."
In an effort to avoid the EU's privacy laws, Facebook will move all of its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California. Google has done a similar move in February.
"Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook Inc. There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK," so Facebook's UK arm.
Twitter has been fined €450,000 by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) for breaching Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
"The DPC’s investigation commenced in January, 2019 following receipt of a breach notification from Twitter and the DPC has found that Twitter infringed Article 33(1) and 33(5) of the GDPR in terms of a failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach," so the DPC in a statement on its website.
Reddit said in a statement on Sunday that it has acquired TikTok rival Dubsmash. It did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Dubsmash allows users to create and share video content, and it's especially popular with young, diverse audiences.
Dubsmash's three co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel, and Tim Specht, will be joining Reddit with immediate effect.
Users from around the world are reporting problems with multiple Google-owned services. Among others YouTube, Gmail and the Google Calendar are unreachable to users.
According to first reports YouTube remains reachable if used in incognito mode or the user hasn't been logged in before.
Hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday.
Google has released its "Year in Search 2020" Wednesday, featuring this year's top searches in various categories.
The top five search queries were Coronavirus, Election results, Kobe Bryant, Zoom and IPL. The list also highlights this year's losses, with people searching for Kobe Bryant, George Floyd, Chadwick Boseman, Sean Connery, Eddie van Halen and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a coalition of attorneys general from 48 states and territories filed two separate antitrust lawsuits against Facebook on Wednesday. The lawsuits target two of the companies major acquisitions: Instagram and WhatsApp.
The antitrust lawsuits were announced by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
"It’s really critically important that we block this predatory acquisition of companies and that we restore confidence to the market," James said during a press conference announcing the lawsuit.
Airbnb has launched Airbnb.org, a nonprofit platform designed to proved housing and shelter for people in emergency situations. After Airbnb hosts have opened up their homes for people in need for years, Airbnb.org will now formally "hosts on Airbnb to provide stays for people in times of need. "
"The program has evolved to focus on emergency response and to help provide stays to evacuees, relief workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and most recently, frontline workers fighting the spread of COVID-19," so Airbnb in a statement.
Federal Judge Carl Nichols has decided that the U.S. Department of Commerce has no sufficient legal basis for prohibiting ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, from holding infrastructure and data for the operation of the social media application in the United States.
The Trump administration used as a basis for its action a 1977 law granting the U.S. president broad emergency powers in the event of extraordinary dangers from abroad. However, this provision expressly prohibits the president from restricting the import and export of information or information material or personal communications. TikTok clearly falls into this category, Judge Nichols now stressed.
Brazilian company Embraer, considered today's third-largest airplane maker after Boeing and Airbus, was the victim of a ransomware attack last month.
Tutanota is one of the few email providers that encrypt all incoming emails by default. However, a ruling by the Cologne Regional Court is now forcing the Hanover-based company to install a function with which investigators can monitor individual mailboxes and read emails in plain text.
The now 70 year old Apple co-founder Wozniak has set up a new technology company called Efforce, a decentralized, block chain-based platform designed to enable energy savings to be traded. On the trading platform, contributors can make financial contributions to projects of other companies that aim to improve their energy efficiency. Participants will benefit by receiving crypto tokens that represent the value of the energy savings made possible by such projects.