An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024. It is unclear whether the hack included the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but one source with knowledge of the breach said it went "right into the heart of Downing Street."

Intelligence sources in the US indicated that the Chinese espionage operation, known as Salt Typhoon, was ongoing, raising the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer and his senior staff may also have been exposed. MI5 issued an "espionage alert" to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from the Chinese state. [...] The attack raises the possibility that Chinese spies could have read text messages or listened to calls involving senior members of the Government. Even if they were unable to eavesdrop on calls, hackers may have gained access to metadata, revealing who officials were in contact with and how frequently, as well as geolocation data showing their approximate whereabouts.

Skylight, an open-source, TikTok-style video app built on the AT Protocol, surged past 380,000 users after last week's shake-up around TikTok's U.S. ownership and privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: Launched last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight's mobile app is built on the AT Protocol, the technology that also powers the decentralized X rival Bluesky, which now has north of 42 million users. Skylight, co-founded by CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer, offers a built-in video editor; user profiles; support for likes, commenting, and sharing; and the ability for community curators to create custom feeds for others to follow. The app now has over 150,000 videos uploaded directly to the platform. It can also stream videos from Bluesky because of its AT Protocol integration.

Harmeyer said Saturday that 1.4 million videos were played on the app the day before, up 3x over the past 24 hours. The app had also seen sign-ups increase more than 150%. Other noteworthy stats include over a 50% increase in returning users, over 40% rise in video played on average, and over 100% increase in posts created. This surge was likely triggered by concerns over TikTok's change in ownership and its unfortunately timed technical glitches. [...] Over the weekend, Skylight's CEO, Tori White, said the app added around 20,000 new users and is continuing to grow. So far this January, the app has seen around 95,000 monthly active users. "We've seen what happens when one person dictates what's pushed into people's feeds," White told TechCrunch. "Not only does it harm a creator's connection with their followers, but the entire health of the platform. That's why we built Skylight Social on open standards. We wanted creator and user power to be guaranteed by the technology. Not an empty promise, but an irrevocable right."

California tech executive Gordon Abas Goodarzi has been arrested and charged with murder in the death of his estranged wife, Aryan Papoli, whose body was found last November down an embankment off Highway 138 in San Bernardino County. Authorities initially believed the injuries were consistent with a fall, but the case was later ruled a homicide following a months-long investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge and that he is set to appear in court Monday," reports SFGATE. From the report: Goodarzi, a California tech executive with ties to BattleBots, is publicly listed as the president and CEO of Magmotor, which describes itself as a "proud" supporter of the combat robot community and claims to support several teams each year. According to his LinkedIn, Goodarzi also previously worked as a research affiliate at UCLA's B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences since 2023.

Originally from Iran, Papoli and Goodarzi settled in Los Angeles County's verdant Rolling Hills community because of its tranquility and natural beauty, Papoli previously wrote. [...] She described her husband, Goodarzi, as a pioneer in the world of renewable energy, developing both electric and hybrid vehicles since the 1980s. According to Papoli, he also worked as the technical director at Hughes Electronics, which developed and manufactured the EV1, an early iteration of the electric car, in the 1990s.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people's private conversations through their phones. [...] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake -- the phone thinking someone had said its activation phrase when they had not -- and recorded conversations intended to be private. They alleged the recordings were then sent to advertisers for the purpose of creating targeted advertising. The proposed settlement was filed on Friday in a California federal court, and requires approval by US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman.

The claim has been brought as a class action lawsuit rather than an individual case -- meaning if it is approved, the money will be paid out across many different claimants. Those eligible for a payout will have owned Google devices dating back to May 2016. But lawyers for the plaintiffs may ask for up to one-third of the settlement -- amounting to about $22 million in legal fees. The tech firm also denied any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it "recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation" without consent.

Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...)

This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...

"I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice."

Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong....

"Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty."

And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."

"Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."