An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Disney is said to have pulled its advertising spending from YouTube, joining other companies including Nestle, after a blogger detailed how comments on Google's video site were being used to facilitate a "soft-core pedophilia ring." Some of the videos involved ran next to ads placed by Disney and Nestle. All Nestle companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, a spokeswoman for the company said Wednesday in an email. Video game maker Epic Games and German packaged food giant Dr. August Oetker KG also said they had postponed YouTube spending after their ads were shown to play before the videos. Disney has also withheld its spending. On Sunday, Matt Watson, a video blogger, posted a 20-minute clip detailing how comments on YouTube were used to identify certain videos in which young girls were in activities that could be construed as sexually suggestive, such as posing in front of a mirror and doing gymnastics. Watson's video demonstrated how, if users clicked on one of the videos, YouTube's algorithms recommended similar ones. By Wednesday, Watson's video had been viewed more than 1.7 million times. Total ad spending on the videos mentioned was less than $8,000 within the last 60 days, and YouTube plans refunds, the spokeswoman said. Two years ago, Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies pulled their ads from YouTube after learning that some of their ads surfaced next to extremist and violent content. Yesterday, YouTube released an updated policy about how it will handle content that "crosses the line" of appropriateness. "Any content -- including comments -- that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We took immediate action by deleting accounts and channels, reporting illegal activity to authorities and disabling violative comments," a spokeswoman for YouTube said in an email.

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Facebook has rolled out an update to Android users that gives them a greater degree of control over the sharing of location data with the social network. From a report: Specifically, the update makes it possible to stop Facebook from using tracking your location in the background when you are not using the app. The change brings parity to the iOS and Android Facebook apps. In introducing the new finer-grained controls, Facebook insists that it is "not making any changes to the choices you've previously made nor are we collecting any new information."

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NATO nations view Turkey's purchase of the Russian defence system with suspicion but Ankara is pressing ahead.

In a shock move at a crucial time, Conservative and Labour rebels are trying to form a new brand of British politics.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Employees and contractors are exposing confidential and sensitive information online and in the cloud in some 98 percent of organizations. This is found primarily in Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft SharePoint. This is among the findings of a new report from insider threat specialist Dtex Systems which has analyzed information from work-issued endpoints and more than 300,000 employee and contractor accounts. All of the assessments detected employees and contractors transferring confidential and sensitive data via unencrypted USB drives, personal email accounts, and cloud applications, an increase of 10 percent over 2018. In addition 97 percent of assessments detected employees and contractors who were flight risks, a class of insider threat that often steals data and IP. This is an increase of 59 percent over 2018. 95 percent detected employees and contractors attempting to bypass or circumvent security controls via anonymous browsing, VPN and TOR usage, up 35 percent over 2018.

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Amnesty said dozens were killed during five days of protests in January, and 900 people were arrested.

On the sidelines of the Galaxy Fold announcement, Samsung today also unveiled the Galaxy S10, Galaxy S10 Plus, and Galaxy S10E -- the latest iteration of its flagship Android offering. The Samsung Galaxy S10 sports a 6.1-inch Dynamic AMOLED display with Quad HD+ resolution in a 19:9 aspect ratio, whereas the Galaxy S10 Plus has a 6.4-inch display. Both the handsets are powered by Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 855, coupled with 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and 128GB to 512GB (1TB on S10 Plus), expandable via microSD of storage. On the photography front, both the handsets have a wide angle 12-megapixel (77-degree), telephoto 12-megapixel (45-degree), and ultra wide 16-megapixel (123-degree) on the back; and 10 megapixels, 8-megapixel RGB depth camera (S10 Plus) upfront. The Galaxy S10 has 3,400mAh battery, whereas the Plus sibling houses a 4,100mAh battery. Both the handsets run Android 9 Pie with Samsung One UI, and support Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5, LTE Cat.20, wireless charging. They both have USB-C ports, and a headphone jack. Samsung Galaxy S10E is a lower-cost, smaller variant of the other two phones. It has a 5.8-inch "Dynamic AMOLED" display, Full HD+ resolution in a 19:9 aspect ratio. You can read more about it here. All three phones will be available for preorder starting tomorrow, February 21, and they will start shipping on March 8th. In addition to all four major US carriers, the S10 family will also be available unlocked from Samsung and other retailers, starting at $899.99 for the S10 and $999.99 for the S10 Plus. The S10E starts at $750.

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At an event today, Samsung unveiled its foldable smartphone. It's called the Galaxy Fold, and it sports dual screens: one that folds in half like a notebook, and another that works just like any other. From a report: The roughly 200-gram Galaxy Fold flips open in portrait orientation, and the inside is coated with a film that gives it a photopaper-like appearance. It's got a protective polymer consisting of a cover window, a shock-absorbent film, and a polarizer that's 45 percent slimmer than the company's previous thinnest, along with a flexible layer and backplane. Samsung says the tech -- dubbed Infinity Flex Display -- took seven years to develop. Thanks to a highly durable adhesive, the Fold's 7.3-inch primary screen and "sophisticated" hinge system with interlocking gears can undergo "hundreds of thousands" of flexes without sustaining damage, Samsung says. The 4.6-inch secondary screen doesn't bend, and that's by design -- it puts apps at your fingertips when the Fold's folded in half. [...] It's available in both an LTE and 5G version, starting at an eye-popping $1,980. April 26 is the launch date.

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Thousands of women rally in front of Argentina's Congress to relaunch campaign for legal abortion.

Senator launches bid to be Democratic candidate for 2020 US presidential race.

Thousands of school teachers demonstrate in Rabat against fixed-term contracts on Arab Spring uprising anniversary.

Judge agrees to the delay to give Michael Cohen time to recover from surgery and prepare for congressional testimony.

In the latest episode of The Omni Show, I am the guest. How does this even work? Do I interview myself? What’s going on here?

PS I like being on podcasts, and I’d be happy to be on yours, to talk about Omni stuff or my own stuff or both. I could probably even convince Ken Case to be a guest on your show if you want to talk about Omni apps and developing for Mac and iOS in 2019.

(My email address is no secret, and every spammer everywhere already has it, so I’ll just post it here: it’s brent@ranchero.com.)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's Edge browser contains a secret whitelist that lets Facebook run Adobe Flash code behind users' backs. The whitelist allows Facebook's Flash content to bypass Edge security features such as the click-to-play policy that normally prevents websites from running Flash code without user approval beforehand. The whitelist isn't new. It existed in Edge before, and prior to February 2018, it included 58 entries, including domains and subdomains for Microsoft's main site, the MSN portal, music streaming service Deezer, Yahoo, and Chinese social network QQ. The list was narrowed down to only two Facebook domains (facebook.com and apps.facebook.com) after a Google security researcher found that the whitelist mechanism had some security issues. The bug report also contains the original version of the whitelist, with all the 58 domains.

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Protesters and Italy's Five Star Movement may derail a massive project between France and Italy.