An anonymous reader shares a report: Steven Adair hunts hackers for a living. Back in January, in a corner-of-his-eye, peripheral kind of way, he thought he saw one in his customer's networks -- a shadowy presence downloading emails. Adair is the founder of a cybersecurity company called Volexity, and he runs traps to corner intruders all the time. So he took a quick look at a server his client was using to run Microsoft Exchange and was stunned to "see requests that we're not expecting," he said. There were requests for access to specific email accounts, requests for confidential files. He followed all this requested information to a virtual server off-site. "The hair is almost rising on my arms right now when I think about it," Adair told NPR later. "This feeling of like, oh, crap this is not what should be going on." What Adair discovered was a massive hack into Microsoft Exchange -- one of the most popular email software programs in the world. For nearly three months, intruders helped themselves to everything from emails to calendars to contacts. Then they went wild and launched a second wave of attacks to sweep Exchange data from tens of thousands of unsuspecting victims. They hit mom-and-pop shops, dentist offices, school districts, local governments -- all in a brazen attempt to vacuum up information. Both the White House and Microsoft have said unequivocally that Chinese government-backed hackers are to blame. NPR's months-long examination of the attack -- based on interviews with dozens of players from company officials to cyber forensics experts to U.S. intelligence officials -- found that stealing emails and intellectual property may only have been the beginning. Officials believe that the breach was in the service of something bigger: China's artificial intelligence ambitions. The Beijing leadership aims to lead the world in a technology that allows computers to perform tasks that traditionally required human intelligence -- such as finding patterns and recognizing speech or faces. "There is a long-term project underway," said Kiersten Todt, who was the executive director of the Obama administration's bipartisan commission on cybersecurity and now runs the Cyber Readiness Institute. "We don't know what the Chinese are building, but what we do know is that diversity of data, quality of data aggregation, accumulation of data is going to be critical to its success."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Law enforcement agencies and government organizations from 24 countries outside the United States used a controversial facial recognition technology called Clearview AI, according to internal company data reviewed by BuzzFeed News. That data, which runs up until February 2020, shows that police departments, prosecutors' offices, universities, and interior ministries from around the world ran nearly 14,000 searches with Clearview AI's software. At many law enforcement agencies from Canada to Finland, officers used the software without their higher-ups' knowledge or permission. After receiving questions from BuzzFeed News, some organizations admitted that the technology had been used without leadership oversight. In March, a BuzzFeed News investigation based on Clearview AI's own internal data showed how the New York -- based startup distributed its facial recognition tool, by marketing free trials for its mobile app or desktop software, to thousands of officers and employees at more than 1,800 US taxpayer-funded entities. Clearview claims its software is more accurate than other facial recognition technologies because it is trained on a database of more than 3 billion images scraped from websites and social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Law enforcement officers using Clearview can take a photo of a suspect or person of interest, run it through the software, and receive possible matches for that individual within seconds. Clearview has claimed that its app is 100% accurate in documents provided to law enforcement officials, but BuzzFeed News has seen the software misidentify people, highlighting a larger concern with facial recognition technologies. Based on new reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Clearview AI took its controversial US marketing playbook around the world, offering free trials to employees at law enforcement agencies in countries including Australia, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. To accompany this story, BuzzFeed News has created a searchable table of 88 international government-affiliated and taxpayer-funded agencies and organizations listed in Clearview's data as having employees who used or tested the company's facial recognition service before February 2020, according to Clearview's data. Some of those entities were in countries where the use of Clearview has since been deemed "unlawful." Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That insists the company's key market is the U.S., saying: "While there has been tremendous demand for our service from around the world, Clearview AI is primarily focused on providing our service to law enforcement and government agencies in the United States. Other countries have expressed a dire need for our technology because they know it can help investigate crimes, such as, money laundering, financial fraud, romance scams, human trafficking, and crimes against children, which know no borders." Ton-That alleged there are "inaccuracies contained in BuzzFeed's assertions," but declined to explain what those might be and didn't answer any follow-up questions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung smartphone owners are facing a looming deadline to rescue their photos from Samsung Cloud or risk losing backed up images. From a report: Samsung is removing the option to back up your photo gallery to Samsung Cloud, presumably in a bid to cut storage costs. Samsung Cloud will still continue to back up data such as contacts, calendar entries and notes, but photos and videos are no longer part of the package. Samsung has instead been encouraging customers to back up their photos using Microsoft's OneDrive service, but the deadline is looming for the Samsung Cloud service to be cut off, with customers warned they could lose photos if they don't have copies of them stored locally. Confusingly, Samsung has split customers into two groups, each with different cut-off deadlines. It's not easy to work out which group you're in, so it's probably safest to assume you're in Group 1, which has the earliest set of cut-off deadlines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the most popular subreddits are protesting the proliferation of COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories on the platform. Moderators from several high profile subreddits, including r/awww, r/showerthoughts, and r/pics, are now calling on the site to do a better job of curbing the spread of disinformation. "It is clear that even after promising to tackle the problem of misinformation on this site, nothing of substance has been done aside from quarantining a medium sized subreddit, which barely reduces traffic and does little to stop misinformation," user N8theGr8 posted said in a post announcing the protests, which lists dozens of subreddits who had signed on in solidarity. Reddit pushed back 8 hours later with a post from CEO Steve Huffman in r/announcements. It didn't mention the thread specifically, but there's little doubt it was a response to calls to ban subreddits that spread disinformation. Huffman began by saying the CDC was the best source of up to date information about the pandemic and urged people to get vaccinated. "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations," Huffman said. "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate. This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus. This includes conversations that criticize those that disagree with the majority opinion. This includes protests that criticize or object to our decisions on which communities to ban from the platform."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Journalism tries to understand Facebook as if it were a news org about the size of one of them. It's a poor fit. So much more goes on there. Think about how much is going on in a city like New York right now. Facebook is 338 times the size of NYC.

Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing told has told that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company's steepest single increase. From a report: The price increases and the time frames for the hikes differ depending on the client, according to reports by Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper and other media outlets. For some companies that received TSMC's notice, the hikes took effect immediately. TSMC and other Taiwanese semiconductor companies raised chip prices by more than 10% between last fall and this spring. But with strong demand continuing to outstrip supply, TSMC decided to sharply increase prices again. The increased costs tied to ramping up production are being passed downstream, with the company enjoying better bargaining power amid the global chip crunch as well. This move likely will impact the sticker prices of end products. A TSMC spokesperson declined to comment to Nikkei about the higher chip prices. Concerns over lower profitability are another reason behind the price hikes. The company has said it will make $100 billion in capital investments over three years through 2023. That commitment has fueled qualms about a potential decline in profits as TSMC prepares to boost its overseas expansion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's the thing about the Taliban and ISIS -- they're competing for the same soldiers, and as long as ISIS is attacking and hurting the US, they're going to recruit more soldiers, primarily from the Taliban. So the Taliban "controls" Afghanistan in a temporary way. They're going to be fighting other radicals for a long time to come.

Netflix is testing out its first stab at mobile gaming within its own app at no extra cost, bringing two pre-existing Stranger Things games to its Android app -- but only in Poland. From a report: The two games available in Poland -- Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3 -- have been available for years off Netflix's app, having been released through a licensing partnership in 2017 and 2019 to coincide with the second and third seasons of the hit retro-supernatural show. Last month, Netflix confirmed it plans to expand into video games, starting with ad-free games for mobile devices like phones and tablets available on its existing service at no added cost to subscribers. With broad ambitions to ultimately widen even to console games for Xbox and PlayStation, it represents its biggest expansion into a new kind of entertainment since Netflix started streaming in 2007 and released its first original show in 2012.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of Google killing a product, ArsTechnica has a rundown on the company's 16 years long effort to dominate the messaging space to no success. From the report: Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old) -- Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing. Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases -- or user goodwill -- forward into the present day. Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. [...]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is infamous for spinning up products and killing them off, often in very short order. It's an annoying enough habit when it's stuff like messaging apps and games. But the tech giant's ambitions stretch into many domains that touch human lives these days. Including, most directly, healthcare. And -- it turns out -- so does Google's tendency to kill off products that its PR has previously touted as "life saving." To wit: Following a recent reconfiguration of Google's health efforts -- reported earlier by Business Insider -- the tech giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it is decommissioning its clinician support app, Streams. The app, which Google Health PR bills as a "mobile medical device," was developed back in 2015 by DeepMind, an AI division of Google -- and has been used by the U.K.'s National Health Service in the years since, with a number of NHS Trusts inking deals with DeepMind Health to roll out Streams to their clinicians. At the time of writing, one NHS Trust -- London's Royal Free -- is still using the app in its hospitals. But, presumably, not for too much longer, since Google is in the process of taking Streams out back to be shot and tossed into its deadpool -- alongside the likes of its ill-fated social network, Google+, and Internet balloon company Loon, to name just two of a frankly endless list of now defunct Alphabet/Google products. Other NHS Trusts we contacted which had previously rolled out Streams told us they have already stopped using the app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes your “liberty” isn’t the most important thing.

The flood of lobbying dollars spent by tech companies has increased with market concentration, according to a new study that cites similar patterns in the pharmaceutical and oil industries. Bloomberg: The report suggests that entrenched firms face less competition and don't have to invest as much in innovation, giving them more resources to spend influencing the democratic process. Reed Showalter, an attorney with the anti-monopolist group American Economic Liberties Project who wrote the study, said policy makers and antitrust enforcers should look beyond the impact that mergers have on consumers and consider how market concentration affects the democratic process. "We need to more closely scrutinize various elements of competition policy that have allowed industries to become more concentrated over the last 30 to 40 years," Showalter said in a phone interview Tuesday. "Allowing unchecked concentration is the cause for a lot of the democratic harms that we're also seeing people complain about as big money enters politics. There's no coincidence there."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The state security ministry is recruiting from a vast pool of private-sector hackers who often have their own agendas and sometimes use their access for commercial cybercrime, experts say. From a report: China's buzzy high-tech companies don't usually recruit Cambodian speakers, so the job ads for three well-paid positions with those language skills stood out. The ad, seeking writers of research reports, was placed by an internet security start-up in China's tropical island-province of Hainan. That start-up was more than it seemed, according to American law enforcement. Hainan Xiandun Technology was part of a web of front companies controlled by China's secretive state security ministry, according to a federal indictment from May. They hacked computers from the United States to Cambodia to Saudi Arabia, seeking sensitive government data as well as less-obvious spy stuff, like details of a New Jersey company's fire-suppression system, according to prosecutors. The accusations appear to reflect an increasingly aggressive campaign by Chinese government hackers and a pronounced shift in their tactics: China's premier spy agency is increasingly reaching beyond its own ranks to recruit from a vast pool of private-sector talent. This new group of hackers has made China's state cyberspying machine stronger, more sophisticated and -- for its growing array of government and private-sector targets -- more dangerously unpredictable. Sponsored but not necessarily micromanaged by Beijing, this new breed of hacker attacks government targets and private companies alike, mixing traditional espionage with outright fraud and other crimes for profit. China's new approach borrows from the tactics of Russia and Iran, which have tormented public and commercial targets for years. Chinese hackers with links to state security demanded ransom in return for not releasing a company's computer source code, according to an indictment released by the U.S. Department of Justice last year. Another group of hackers in southwest China mixed cyber raids on Hong Kong democracy activists with fraud on gaming websites, another indictment asserted. One member of the group boasted about having official protection, provided that they avoid targets in China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The non-fungible token industry is continuing to grow, though there are also signs of some less-than-desirable activity, according to a study from blockchain analytics platform Nansen. From a report: The industry "remains spotted by certain profit-seeking practices," Nansen cautioned, citing patterns in transactions that suggest token founders might be buying up the floor for certain projects. That could be an indication of "wash trading," a practice where a trader or group of traders buy and sell the same asset to create the illusion of heightened demand. "While something appears amiss, it definitely isn't incriminating evidence of wash trading, because they aren't being sold directly to each other," Nansen analyst Ling Young Loon said in an email. "The wallets that they eventually sell to may be related, but that would require a much more rigorous study."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain will attempt to move away from European data protection regulations as it overhauls its privacy rules after Brexit, the government has announced. From a report: The freedom to chart its own course could lead to an end to irritating cookie popups and consent requests online, said the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, as he called for rules based on "common sense, not box-ticking." But any changes will be constrained by the need to offer a new regime that the EU deems adequate, otherwise data transfers between the UK and EU could be frozen. A new information commissioner will be put in charge of overseeing the transformation. John Edwards, currently the privacy commissioner of New Zealand, has been named as the government's preferred candidate to replace Elizabeth Denham, whose term in office will end on 31 October after a three-month extension. Dowden said: "Now that we have left the EU I'm determined to seize the opportunity by developing a world-leading data policy that will deliver a Brexit dividend for individuals and businesses across the UK. It means reforming our own data laws so that they're based on common sense, not box-ticking. And it means having the leadership in place at the Information Commissioner's Office to pursue a new era of data-driven growth and innovation. John Edwards' vast experience makes him the ideal candidate to ensure data is used responsibly to achieve those goals." The GDPR data protection rules introduced by the EU in May 2018 are part of UK law even after Brexit, under the Data Protection Act.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.