Facebook has built tools to track posts on Facebook and WhatsApp that talk about its executives, products, or moves Bloomberg reported on Monday. The company has been, for years, routinely using these tools to "snuff out" posts that it deems to offer untrue characterization of its services or people. From the report: Many companies monitor social media to learn what customers are saying about them. But Facebook's position is unique. It owns the platform it's watching, an advantage that may help Facebook track and reach users more effectively than other firms. And Facebook has been saddled with so many real problems recently that sometimes misinformation can stick. Stormchaser is just one of multiple tools Facebook has deployed to manage its reputation, which has taken a dramatic hit thanks to its role in spreading Russian misinformation during the U.S. election and numerous privacy scandals. The company employs hundreds of public relations officials and spent $13 million on government lobbying in 2018. Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg have become so intertwined with the company's image that Facebook routinely collects public survey data to understand how the general public views them -- data that shapes what the executives say and do publicly. Facebook's response: "We didn't use this internal tool to fight false news because that wasn't what it was built for, and it wouldn't have worked," the spokeswoman wrote in an email. "The tool was built with simple technology that helped us detect posts about Facebook based on keywords, so we could consider whether to respond to product confusion on our own platform. Comparing the two is a false equivalence." The New York Times' tech columnist Kevin Roose, writes: You could write a dissertation about this quote, and the difference between what Facebook considers "product confusion" (wrong stuff about us, which must be removed immediately) and "false news" (wrong stuff about other people, which is protected free speech).

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Mike Davidson: It took an article I almost didn't publish and tens of thousands of people saying they were creeped out, but Superhuman admitted they were wrong and reduced the danger that their surveillance pixels introduce. Good on Rahul Vohra and team for that. I will say, however, that I'm a little surprised how quickly some people are rolling over and giving Superhuman credit for fixing a problem that they didn't actually fix. [...] Let's take a look at how Superhuman [an email app that charges users $30 a month] explains their changes. Rahul correctly lays out four of the criticisms leveled at Superhuman's read receipts: Location data could be used in nefarious ways. Read statuses are on by default. Recipients of emails cannot opt out. Superhuman users cannot disable remote image loading. However, he also omits the core criticism: Recipients of Superhuman emails do not know their actions are being tracked or sent back to senders. Superhuman said it was keeping the read status feature, but turning it off by default. Users who want it will have to explicitly turn it on. Mike adds: This addresses the concern about teaching customers to surveil by default but also establishes that Superhuman is keeping the feature working almost exactly as-is, with the exception of not collecting or displaying actual locations. I've spoken with several people about how they interpreted Rahul's post on this particular detail. Some believed the whole log of timestamped read events was going away and were happy about that. Others read it as: you can still see exactly when and how many times someone has opened your email, complete with multiple timestamps -- you just can't see the location anymore. That, to me, is not sufficient. "A little less creepy" is still creepy. Also worth noting, "turning receipts off by default" does nothing to educate customers about the undisclosed surveillance they are enabling if they flip that switch.

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Israel is creating an 'imaginary historical reality' with tunnel excavations in occupied East Jerusalem, NGO says.

Journalism and jury duty. I agreed strongly with what Emily Bell said here. Jury duty is a powerful idea, and it works. It's the basis for our justice system. I've written about jury duty many times, in 2017, 2013, 2008, and 1996. (The last piece is probably the best, I did it for Wired as well as my blog.)

Microsoft has released a public preview of a new service aimed at helping businesses assess their app-compatibility levels ahead of deploying new Windows 10 feature updates. From a report: It allows for the quick and easy creation of app inventories to make compatibility checks simpler. Brad Anderson, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, says that the tool makes use of machine learning and the cloud to make it easier to deploy and update Windows 10. The aim with Desktop Analytics is to avoid the compatibility problems that stand in the way of keeping machines up to date.

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The Microsoft security team has issued a warning today about ongoing malware campaigns that are distributing the Astaroth malware using fileless and living-off-the-land techniques that make it harder for traditional antivirus solutions to spot the ongoing attacks. From a report: The attacks were detected by the team behind Windows Defender ATP, the commercial version of the company's Windows Defender free antivirus. Andrea Lelli, a member of the Windows Defender ATP team said alarms bells sounded at Microsoft's offices when they detected a huge and sudden spike in usage of the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool. This is a legitimate tool that ships with all modern versions of Windows, but the sudden spike in usage suggested a pattern specific to malware campaigns. When Microsoft looked closer, it discovered a malware campaign that consisted of a massive spam operation that was sending out emails with a link to a website hosting a .LNK shortcut file.

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Chile's populated capital Santiago, as well as the Valparaiso region, could be left without drinking water by 2030.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed another set of robocall rules, this time to ban malicious calls that spoof caller IDs in text messages and international calls. From a report: The anti-spoofing rules will be voted on by the FCC Aug. 1, and they already have the support of more than 40 state attorneys general, Pai said Monday. These new rules would close the loopholes in targeting international callers, including one-way interconnected VoIP calls, and scammers using text messaging. They are part of the FCC's "multi-pronged approach to battle the noxious intrusion of illegal robocalls, as well as malicious caller ID spoofing," Pai said. Last month, the FCC voted unanimously on a proposal to give mobile phone companies greater power to "aggressively block" unwanted robocalls.

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Small video games studios are asking the public to stop buying their titles from "unauthorised" markets, saying the sales cost them more than they earn. From a report: Several have said it would even be better if consumers pirated their games rather than purchased discounted unlock codes from the "key resellers." One label is running a petition calling on the biggest such market -- G2A -- to halt sales of indie games outright. But G2A has defended its business model. It said the indies benefited from its policy of sharing a cut of sales made by third parties. "Hundreds of developers earn money from selling their keys through marketplaces such as G2A," head of communications Maciej Kuc told BBC News. "We don't plan on taking away that possibility anytime soon, as it would be hurtful not only to our customers but also to the many developers who use our platform to their benefit." He added that G2A already took measures to tackle illegal sales. And he said developers were partly responsible for some of the scams on its site because of the "thousands of free keys" they had created for giveaways. The campaign's organiser, however, has dismissed this defence. "They are harming our industry and the value of our games," Mike Rose, from the Manchester-based publisher No More Robots, told BBC News.

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Emirati official says move part of transition from military to a 'peace-first' strategy and Saudi Arabia was consulted.

News blog TorrentFreak spoke with a member of piracy group "The Scene" to understand how they obtain -- or rip -- movies and shows from sources such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The technique these people use is different from hardware capture cards or software-based 'capping' tools. From the report: "Content for WEB releases are obtained by downloading the source content. Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Sceners simply save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later," the source said. When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus identities. It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they're served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth. "Once files are downloaded from the streaming platform, however, they are encrypted in the .mp4 container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen and nothing else -- streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common, and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the Scene handles WEB-releases is by using specialized tools coded by The Scene, for The Scene. These tools are extremely private, and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version(s)," source noted. "Without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible for most. The tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site, and reverse engineering the encryption." Our contact says that decryption is a surprisingly quick process, taking just a few minutes. After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.

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Princess Hassa bint Salman to be tried in absentia over allegations she asked a bodyguard to beat up a workman in 2016.

Iran says it's exceeded its uranium enrichment cap, but Europeans say Tehran should stick to the 2015 deal.

Observation. If you're going to use a CDN that doesn't let you overlay your own domain name, and your code is coming from an S3 bucket, it's much easier to use s3.amazonaws.com and no less independent of another entity. I imagine this is okay with Amazon because it's lock-in. But this is a river that works over HTTPS, the URL Is uglier than shit, but it works. It's an important milestone because my users have legit reasons to want to make rivers accessible via HTTPS.

Under Trump's presidency, more than 80 environmental rules and regulations have been repealed, withdrawn, or weakened.