A new study of over 700 full-time US employees reveals that that 48 percent of employees have access to more company data than they need to perform their jobs, while 12 percent of employees say they have access to all company data. From a report: The survey by business app marketplace GetApp also asked employees what classifications of data protection are in place at their company. No more than a third of businesses were found to use any one individual data classification. The lowest in use are Proprietary (15 percent) and Highly Confidential (18 percent). The most commonly used are Confidential -- 33 percent of businesses use this classification, Internal -- 30 percent, Public -- 29 percent and Restricted/Sensitive -- 25 percent.

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According to The Wall Street Journal, Verizon has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013, and was later included in Verizon's $4.5 billion purchase of Yahoo's web assets in 2017. Bloomberg reports: Automattic Inc. will buy Tumblr for an undisclosed sum and take on about 200 staffers, the companies said. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art, but it has been dwarfed by Facebook, Reddit and other services. The Tumblr acquisition is the largest ever in terms of price and head count for Automattic, the company's Chief Executive Matt Mullenweg said in an interview. The San Francisco company has a stable of brands focused on online publishing, including longform site Longreads, comment-filtering service Akismet, and avatar-managing service Gravatar. Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. "It's just fun," he said of Tumblr. "We're not going to change any of that." Tumblr has a strong mobile interface and dashboard where users follow other blogs, he said. Executives will look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.

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Mourning fans gather at Abidjan hospital after news spreads of 33-year-old singer's death.

The DRC is suffering its worst ever outbreak, but a new vaccine might prove effective against the virus.

Two experimental drugs developed in DR Congo trial using antibodies harvested from survivors of Ebola infection.

The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation's bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction. From a report: The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations. The rules also make it easier to remove a species from the endangered species list and weaken protections for threatened species, a designation that means they are at risk of becoming endangered. Overall, the new rules would very likely clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the changes would modernize the Endangered Species Act and increase transparency in its application. "The act's effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation," he said in a statement Monday. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement the revisions "fit squarely within the president's mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species' protection and recovery goals." The new rules are expected to appear in the Federal Register this week and will go into effect 30 days after that.

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Ibrahim el-Zakzaky and wife were granted bail by a court in Kaduna state to seek medical treatment abroad.

A look at the different groups clashing and the effect the recent developments will have on Yemen's peace prospects.

Epic Games is being sued over security breaches that allowed hackers to access the personal information of Epic Games accounts. From a report: The class-action lawsuit, filed by Franklin D. Azar & Associates in U.S. District Court in North Carolina, alleges Epic's "failure to maintain adequate security measures and notify users of the security breach in a timely manner." The lawsuit states that "there are more than 100 class members." In January, Epic acknowledged that a bug in Fortnite may have exposed personal information for millions of user accounts.

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Already facing a severe economic crisis, Venezuela is struggling to deal with higher than global average teen pregnancy rates.

Party chiefs fail to agree on a date to hold confidence vote in government after Matteo Salvini sparked fresh crisis.

Choosing NULL as your license plate might seem like a funny idea. But as an infosec researcher discovered recently, the cool-looking NULL vanity plate comes with its own consequences. Researcher Droogie, that's his handle, who presented at this year's DEF CON in Las Vegas, said he has been on the receiving end of thousands of dollars worth of tickets that aren't his. From a report: Droogie registered a vanity California license plate consisting solely of the word "NULL" -- which in programming is a term for no specific value -- for fun. And, he admitted to laughs, on the off chance it would confuse automatic license plate readers and the DMV's ticketing system. "I was like, 'I'm the shit,'" he joked to the crowd. "'I'm gonna be invisible.' Instead, I got all the tickets." Things didn't go south immediately. As Droogie explained, he's a cautious driver and didn't get any tickets for the first year he owned the vanity plate. Then he went to reregister his tags online, and, when prompted to input his license plate, broke the DMV webpage. It seemed the DMV site didn't recognize the plate "NULL" as an actual input. That was the first sign that something was amiss. The next sign was, well, a little more serious: After receiving a legitimate parking ticket, thousands of dollars in random tickets starting arriving in the mail at his house, addressed to him. It seemed that a privately operated citation processing center had a database of outstanding tickets, and, for some reason -- possibly due to incomplete data on their end -- many of those tickets were assigned to the license plate "NULL." In other words, the processing center was likely trying to tell its systems it didn't know the plates of the offending cars. Instead, with Droogie's vanity plate now in play, it pegged all those outstanding tickets on him. Specifically, over $12,000 worth of outstanding tickets. Long story short, Droogie went on the painstaking process to explain the situation to the DMV and the LAPD, both of whom advised him to change his plate. At any rate, the DMV reached out to the private vendor and sorted the issue.

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Russia's revitalised pro-democracy movement is increasingly gaining ground in the Russian capital.

New hardline policy targets documented immigrants who apply for government benefits such as food and housing.

Unroll.me, a firm that helps people manage their email list subscriptions but also sells users' data for profit, has settled with the FTC after allegations of deceiving consumers, the agency said. In a press release, the agency wrote: In a complaint, the FTC alleges that Unrollme , falsely told consumers that it would not "touch" their personal emails, when in fact it was sharing the users' email receipts (e-receipts) with its parent company, Slice Technologies. E-receipts are emails sent to consumers following a completed transaction and can include, among other things, the user's name, billing and shipping addresses, and information about products or services purchased by the consumer. Slice uses anonymous purchase information from Unrollme users' e-receipts in the market research analytics products it sells. Unrollme helps users unsubscribe from unwanted subscription emails and consolidates wanted email subscriptions into one daily email called the Rollup. The service requires users to provide Unrollme with access to their email accounts.

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