Security researcher Ibrahim Balic said he has matched 17 million phone numbers to Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in Twitter's Android app. TechCrunch reports: Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter's contacts upload feature. "If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return," he told TechCrunch. He said Twitter's contact upload feature doesn't accept lists of phone numbers in sequential format -- likely as a way to prevent this kind of matching. Instead, he generated more than two billion phone numbers, one after the other, then randomized the numbers, and uploaded them to Twitter through the Android app. (Balic said the bug did not exist in the web-based upload feature.) Over a two-month period, Balic said he matched records from users in Israel, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Armenia, France and Germany, he said, but stopped after Twitter blocked the effort on December 20. Balic provided TechCrunch with a sample of the phone numbers he matched. Using the site's password reset feature, we verified his findings by comparing a random selection of usernames with the phone numbers that were provided. While he did not alert Twitter to the vulnerability, he took many of the phone numbers of high-profile Twitter users -- including politicians and officials -- to a WhatsApp group in an effort to warn users directly. A Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch the company was working to "ensure this bug cannot be exploited again." "Upon learning of this bug, we suspended the accounts used to inappropriately access people's personal information. Protecting the privacy and safety of the people who use Twitter is our number one priority and we remain focused on rapidly stopping spam and abuse originating from use of Twitter's APIs," the spokesperson said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick will step down from the board, effective Dec. 31, and a spokesperson said Tuesday he has sold all of his stock in the ride-hailing company he co-founded 10 years ago. It's unclear how much Kalanick's total stake is worth, but the latest public filings show it's about $2.5 billion. In a statement Tuesday, Uber said Kalanick, 43, is leaving to "focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors." Kalanick is launching latest venture, CloudKitchens, which rents out space to restaurateurs for delivery-based businesses. Uber did not say who will fill Kalanick's board seat. An Uber spokesperson said the ride-hailing company has "strong director candidates to put forward at the appropriate time." "Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years," Kalanick said in the release. "At the close of the decade, and with the company now public, it seems like the right moment for me to focus on my current business and philanthropic pursuits. I'm proud of all that Uber has achieved, and I will continue to cheer for its future from the sidelines. I want to thank the board, Dara and the entire Uber team for everything they have done to further the Uber mission."

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A new method for preserving genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials is reported. From a report: The future of digital memory may be inside a small plastic bunny that contains 3-D printing instructions for replicating itself stored in artificial DNA, said scientists Monday, who announced a method for mixing genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials. The scientists sealed the DNA data inside thousands of microscopic glass beads that protected the information as the plastic for the toy was heated and processed. By sequencing a snippet of the toy's DNA-infused plastic, they could extract the instructions and make flawless copies of the figure, they said. They reported the experiment in the journal Nature Biotechnology. While cumbersome compared with conventional computer hard drives or tapes, the new DNA data-storage technique one day could be used to store digital information in items molded into virtually any shape, the scientists said. It could, for example, be used to make devices that contain their own blueprints or to embed electronic health records in medical implants and prescription drugs, they said. "We wanted to show that you can use this technology to hide information in common objects," said computational genomics researcher Yaniv Erlich, a co-author of the study who is chief science officer at a consumer genetics genealogy company called MyHeritage. The company wasn't involved in the project.

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Turkey says it will increase its military support to the internationally recognised government of Libya if necessary.

The rebel-held Idlib region has seen an uptick in violence as gov't forces supported by Russian airstrikes hit the area.

Those rescued in the Mediterranean were given permission to land in Taranto, Italy.

Chinese criminals have been exploiting the country's African swine fever crisis by intentionally spreading the disease to force farmers to sell their pigs for a low price before smuggling the meat and selling it on as healthy stock, state media has reported. From a report: Sometimes the gangs spread rumours about the virus, which is fatal to pigs, but in more extreme cases they are using drones to drop infected items into farms, according to an investigation by the magazine China Comment, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua. The disease has reduced the country's pig herds by over 40 per cent because of mass culls designed to stop it spreading further. The resulting shortages have seen pork prices more than double, providing opportunities for the criminals to exploit. The magazine's report said that the gangs tried to spread panic among farmers to force them to sell their livestock at a discount rate. Sometimes they spread rumours about the disease spreading in the locality and may even leave dead pigs on the side of a road to make farmers believe the infection is spreading.

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Many Lebanese are relying on the generosity of others this Christmas amid worsening economic and political crises.

dryriver writes: We've all seen the DeepFake videos on Youtube, where a different actor's face from the original is digitally inserted into a film scene. Some of these DeepFakes are actually quite convincing. DeepFakes are currently computationally intensive, but may one day happen in realtime on hardware custom made to accelerate the process. Now to the question: Will this "digital face swapping" be a realtime feature in future TVs some day? Will people be able to say to their TV "I don't like this actor/actress. Replace him/her with _actorname_ please"? Or watch a 100 Million Dollar movie with their own face on an actor's body, essentially making the TV owner the star of the movie playing? Will this perhaps become so normal some day that people in the future look back at our era and say "In those days, you couldn't choose which actors to watch any given piece of content with. Technology wasn't as advanced as it is today back then."?

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In November 2019, Tim Berners-Lee and the Web Foundation launched the Contract for the Web, a set of rules designed to address the challenges facing digital communication and participation -- from threats to online privacy and security to connectivity and digital inclusion. The multi-stakeholder effort outlines nine principles for governments, companies and citizens designed to safeguard the future of the Web. The Wikimedia Foundation has not yet signed on to the Contract and it has offered an explanation. From a blog post: The Wikimedia Foundation participated in the Core Group and the Working Group on Principle 6, "Developing technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst," which aims to support positive technology that puts people first. The Contract aligns with our goal to foster a web where everyone can find and access knowledge freely. We deeply support the principles of the Contract for the Web. At Wikimedia, we are committed to fostering a digital information sphere that is accessible for everyone, that offers strong privacy protections, that supports free expression and open collaboration, and safeguards the web from bad actors that seek to monopolize and use it for harm. All of these principles align closely with the commitments underlined in the Contract for the Web. We chose not to sign the Contract at this time because we still have open questions about how the Contract will be implemented to maximize its impact. In particular, we are exploring how each signatory will be held accountable to these commitments. We are especially interested in seeing concrete steps towards enforcement mechanisms that ensure big technology companies that endorse the Contract will change their attitudes and current practices that violate the principles in the Contract. The world's biggest challenges, from the global climate crisis to disinformation online, can only be solved if we work together and ensure that everyone is doing their part. Active reporting, transparency, and clear indicators for progress are critical to ensuring the implementation of the Contract for the Web. However, it will take clear, direct, and enforceable systems to ensure we're all contributing to a better internet for everyone.

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Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Friday he now supports a pilot program to fly three private surveillance planes over the city, reviving a controversial effort that had been shelved since it was revealed to have been used secretly three years ago. From a report: Harrison, who as recently as two months ago said he was skeptical of the planes, said the trial run will commence in May, funded by philanthropic dollars. Baltimore will become the first city in the country to use the technology, Harrison said. "I'm obviously well aware of the plane's controversial history," Harrison said. "I'm looking forward to hearing from our community and to educate them on what this is and what this is not." Harrison previously said the plane system's proponents had oversold its benefits and it was unproven to work. His apparent reversal followed a lobbying campaign that included members of the Greater Baltimore Committee endorsing the program and a prominent pastor presenting a poll that claimed to show community support. It also has become an issue in the mayor's race, with at least one candidate receiving support from the system backers and city officials arguing over whether the technology should be adopted.

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Law allows voters to elect individual legislators instead of choosing from party lists and sets out new constituencies.

Answering this question requires that we rethink our views of exercise. From a report: People often consider walking and running to be activities that the body is able to perform on autopilot. But research carried out over the past decade by us and others would indicate that this folk wisdom is wrong. Instead exercise seems to be as much a cognitive activity as a physical one. In fact, this link between physical activity and brain health may trace back millions of years to the origin of hallmark traits of humankind. If we can better understand why and how exercise engages the brain, perhaps we can leverage the relevant physiological pathways to design novel exercise routines that will boost people's cognition as they age -- work that we have begun to undertake. To explore why exercise benefits the brain, we need to first consider which aspects of brain structure and cognition seem most responsive to it. When researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., led by Fred Gage and Henriette Van Praag, showed in the 1990s that running increased the birth of new hippocampal neurons in mice, they noted that this process appeared to be tied to the production of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is produced throughout the body and in the brain, and it promotes both the growth and the survival of nascent neurons. The Salk group and others went on to demonstrate that exercise-induced neurogenesis is associated with improved performance on memory-related tasks in rodents. The results of these studies were striking because atrophy of the hippocampus is widely linked to memory difficulties during healthy human aging and occurs to a greater extent in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The findings in rodents provided an initial glimpse of how exercise could counter this decline.

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Ethiopians call for justice after four mosques burned in attacks in the Amhara region.

Abandoned by a broken health system, many people in Zimbabwe are left to cope however they can or left to suffer alone.