An Explosion in Geofence Warrants Threatens Privacy Across the US

An Explosion in Geofence Warrants Threatens Privacy Across the US

Police around the country have drastically increased their use of geofence warrants , a widely criticized investigative technique that collects data from any user's device that was in a specified area within a certain time range, according to new figures shared by Google.

Facebook’s Oversight Board Has Spoken. But It Hasn’t Solved Much

Facebook’s Oversight Board Has Spoken. But It Hasn’t Solved Much

In a statement Thursday, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for content policy, said the company would follow the board’s decisions to restore four items, including the Instagram post from Brazil.

Parler Finds a Reprieve in Russia—but Not a Solution

Parler Finds a Reprieve in Russia—but Not a Solution

Given the Russian government’s active efforts to isolate the country’s internet and gain access to all data, Parler could expose its users to Russian surveillance if the site someday does relaunch in full with DDoS-Guard.

Share Streaming Accounts? Set Up Separate User Profiles

Share Streaming Accounts? Set Up Separate User Profiles

Click Add Profile to do just that—you'll be prompted to provide a name for the profile first of all, and then you can set an avatar image and various user preferences (like episode autoplay).During the profile creation process, you'll be asked if you want to configure it as a child profile, which means you can put restrictions on it in terms of maturity ratings and which kinds of content can be viewed.

6 Apps to Help You Trim Down Subscriptions—and Save Money

6 Apps to Help You Trim Down Subscriptions—and Save Money

Photograph: DoNotPay via David NieldGet the app set up on iOS, and it'll need connections to your banking and email accounts to start working its magic.

Chatroulette Is On the Rise Again—With Help From AI

Chatroulette Is On the Rise Again—With Help From AI

User traffic has nearly tripled since the start of the year, to 4 million monthly unique visitors, the most since early 2016, according to Google Analytics.The new team tapped the surge in traffic to conduct user research and test ways to moderate content, including AI tools from Amazon and Microsoft .

Facebook Shut Down Malware That Hijacked Accounts to Run Ads

Facebook Shut Down Malware That Hijacked Accounts to Run Ads

Today at the digital Virus Bulletin security conference, Facebook researchers presented a detailed picture of how the malware, dubbed SilentFade, actually works and some of its novel methods, including proactively blocking a user's notifications so the victim wouldn't be aware that anything was amiss.

Reddit Bots Are Hunting Down Racists, One Post at a Time

Reddit Bots Are Hunting Down Racists, One Post at a Time

Improving the bot so that it could respond to comments almost instantly, keep a database of all the users it investigated and comments it replied to, and run on a server for months at a time without crashing took much more learning and effort,” says the creator.

How to Protect the Data on Your Laptop

How to Protect the Data on Your Laptop

Make sure you have your own user account set up on your laptop, even if you're the only one who uses it—not only will this keep the kids from messing up your browser bookmarks when they want to play games, it'll also stop anyone else from accessing it.

A Startup Is Testing the Subscription Model for Search Engines

A Startup Is Testing the Subscription Model for Search Engines

Ramaswamy's startup company, Neeva, is that "something different"—and though it, too, is a search engine, it seeks to sidestep some of Google's problems by avoiding the ads altogether.

Clever Cryptography Could Protect Privacy in Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

Clever Cryptography Could Protect Privacy in Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Apps

But the next iteration of the app will build in the ability to sort all the recorded locations of any users diagnosed as Covid-19 positive into "tiles" of a few square miles, and then cryptographically "hash" each piece of location and time data.

Facebook Says Encrypting Messenger by Default Will Take Years

Facebook Says Encrypting Messenger by Default Will Take Years

Millican's presentation at the conference, in fact, wasn't about how Facebook plans to pull off the transition to default encryption for Messenger, which currently offers the feature only through its Secret Conversations mode .

Why Ring Doorbells Perfectly Exemplify the IoT Security Crisis

Why Ring Doorbells Perfectly Exemplify the IoT Security Crisis

News reports this week are raising a different issue: hackers are breaking into users' Ring accounts, which can also be connected to indoor Ring cameras, to take over the devices and get up to all sorts of invasive shenanigans.

A Flawless Twitter Dunk 12 Years in the Making

A Flawless Twitter Dunk 12 Years in the Making

Within an hour, Twitter user @flawlessisop—understandably eager to lop a few characters off of his handle—quote-tweeted Navarra: “Ur days are numbered @flawless.” Two minutes passed.“The only purpose of my account is to keep up with Selena Gomez’s tweets as she’s releasing an album one of these days,” says @flawless.

Meet the Elite Shot Putter Chasing a World Record

Meet the Elite Shot Putter Chasing a World Record

At the Summer Olympics in Rio, in 2016, Crouser sent a shot flying an astonishing 22.52 meters, or just shy of 74 feet.That’s still shy of the world record, which stands at 23.12 meters, but Crouser says it’s only a matter of time before someone sends one flying even further.

A Strange Radioactive Cloud Likely Came From Russia

A Strange Radioactive Cloud Likely Came From Russia

After the ruthenium plume was detected in late 2017, IRSN issued a report in which it theorized that the accident occurred when Mayak attempted to create a highly compact, highly radioactive material that could emit a large number of neutrinos (difficult-to-detect fundamental particles) for a physics experiment in Italy called SOX.

Remembering Rutger Hauer, Black-Armored Knight of the Genre

Remembering Rutger Hauer, Black-Armored Knight of the Genre

In an oral history of the movie that ran in Los Angeles magazine in 2007—I can’t find a link, but I saved a copy of the story because I am like that— Blade Runner ’s director Ridley Scott recounts that by the time they were ready to shoot the nighttime scene, they’d been working for 30 hours straight and the studio was about to pull the plug on him.

The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop

The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop

In the case of the pedophile scandal, YouTube's AI was actively recommending suggestive videos of children to users who were most likely to engage with those videos. The feedback loop works like this: (1) People who spend more time on the platforms have a greater impact on recommendation systems.

A Zoom Flaw Gives Hackers Easy Access to Your Webcam

A Zoom Flaw Gives Hackers Easy Access to Your Webcam

Zoom patched this DoS issue in a May update but for now is only adjusting its auto-join video settings, giving users a more prominent way of choosing whether their video feed automatically launches when they click a Zoom call link.

The Simple Way Apple and Google Let Domestic Abusers Stalk Victims

The Simple Way Apple and Google Let Domestic Abusers Stalk Victims

With a few seconds of physical access to a phone, even apps as common as Google Maps and Apple's Find My Friends can be tweaked to persistently share a user's location with another contact while offering the phone's owner no notification or warning, the researchers told me.

Are Facebook Ads Discriminatory? It’s Complicated

Are Facebook Ads Discriminatory? It’s Complicated

The Facebook optimization team could come up with a best guess as to the gender, race, and ethnicity of every user, and make sure that the delivery of ads within certain categories like housing and employment are unbiased.

This Dating App Exposes the Monstrous Bias of Algorithms

This Dating App Exposes the Monstrous Bias of Algorithms

And a study from Cornell found that dating apps that let users filter matches by race, like OKCupid and The League, reinforce racial inequalities in the real world. While Monster Match is just a game, Berman has a few ideas of how to improve the online and app-based dating experience.

Snapchat Employees Reportedly Spied on Private Snaps

Snapchat Employees Reportedly Spied on Private Snaps

Security News This Week: Snapchat Employees Reportedly Spied on Private Snaps. Motherboard reports that according to former and current employees, Snapchat developed a tool called SnapLion to allow the company to access user accounts in order to comply with legitimate legal requests from law enforcement.

Hacker Eva Galperin Has a Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware

Hacker Eva Galperin Has a Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware

Ahead of her talk, Galperin has notched her first win: Russian security firm Kaspersky announced today that it will make a significant change to how its antivirus software treats stalkerware on Android phones, where it's far more common than on iPhones.

No, Data Is Not the New Oil

No, Data Is Not the New Oil

Newly installed California governor Gavin Newsom recently proposed an ambitious “data dividend” plan , whereby companies like Facebook or Google would pay their users a fraction of the revenue derived from the users’ data.

Privacy Groups Claim Online Ads Can Target Abuse Victims

Privacy Groups Claim Online Ads Can Target Abuse Victims

New documents filed Monday with regulators in Poland, the UK, and Ireland claim that the way personal data is handled during the process of matching advertisements to ad slots does not comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a strict set of consumer privacy rules that went into effect in May. The documents focus on the categories that key players in the ad-tech industry have adopted to instantly match advertisers with appropriate users or content.

The Pitfalls of Facebook Merging Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp Chats

The Pitfalls of Facebook Merging Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp Chats

"If the goal is to allow cross-app traffic, and it’s not required to be encrypted, then what happens?" Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins University In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Thursday evening, Zuckerberg wrote that, "There’s no question that we collect some information for ads—but that information is generally important for security and operating our services as well." An indelible identity across Facebook's brands could have security benefits like enabling stronger anti-fraud protections.

Switch Your Devices to Dark Mode to Give Your Eyes a Break

Switch Your Devices to Dark Mode to Give Your Eyes a Break

Windows XP, released in 2001, featured multiple high-contrast themes and the option to change the color of the user interface, which allowed for a more natural appearance that isn’t much different than the few well-designed dark modes of today.