Twitter on Monday filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), saying that his office launched an investigation into the social media giant because it banned former President Trump from its platform. From a report: Twitter is seeking to halt an investigation launched by Paxton into moderation practices by Big Tech firms including Twitter for what he called "the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President," days after they banned him following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In the suit, filed in a Northern California court, Twitter said "Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees." Twitter said it has rights under the First Amendment "to make decisions about what content to disseminate through its platform," including "the discretion to remove or otherwise restrict access to Tweets, profiles, or other content posted to Twitter." The company added in an emailed statement that in this case, "the Texas Attorney General is misusing the powers of his office to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment rights and attempt to silence free speech."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Banking Authority on Monday said it had been targeted by hackers, although no data had been obtained and it was redoubling efforts to shield itself amid a global cyber attack exploiting flaws in Microsoft's mail server software. The European Union's banking regulator, which gathers and stores swathes of sensitive data about banks and their lending, said it believed the cyber attack had struck only its email servers. It is the latest prominent victim among tens of thousands of organizations in Asia and Europe targeted in a campaign which Microsoft Corp says makes use of previously undetected vulnerabilities in different versions of its mail server software. The hacks are continuing despite emergency patches issued by Microsoft, which has said it is working with government agencies and security companies to help customers. However, one scan of connected devices showed only 10% of those vulnerable had installed the patches by Friday, though the number was rising.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Al Jazeera: Documents obtained by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit (I-Unit) and Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal how the Bangladesh government spent at least $330,000 on phone-hacking equipment made by an Israeli company, even though the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Developed by the Cellebrite security firm, UFED is a product that is capable of accessing and extracting data from a wide range of mobile phones. Its ability to hack encrypted phone data has worried civil rights campaigners, who have long called for its use to be more strictly regulated. It is unclear whether UFED was provided to Bangladesh directly by the Israeli company or via a Cellebrite subsidiary based elsewhere in the world, presumably with the intention to mask its origins.

The latest documents obtained by I-Unit, which Al Jazeera also found on the Bangladesh home ministry's own website, relate to contracts signed in 2018 and 2019. They are from the Public Security Division, a department in the Ministry of Home Affairs that is in charge of domestic security and whose agencies include the Bangladesh police force and border guards. The paperwork details how nine officers from the country's Criminal Investigations Department were given the approval to travel to Singapore in February 2019 to receive training on UFED to allow them to unlock and extract data from mobile phones. It outlines how the Bangladeshi staff would ultimately qualify as Cellebrite Certified Operators and Cellebrite Certified Physical Analysts.

The documents also say the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), a paramilitary force that has a well-documented record of abductions, torture and disappearances, would be trained on the usage of Cellebrite's hacking systems under an ongoing project that began in 2019 and is set to be completed in June 2021. The latest revelation that Bangladesh security services are being equipped with highly intrusive devices capable of accessing encrypted phones that contain private messages comes amid growing concerns over the country's human rights record.

The Associated Press reports: After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday. The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free...

Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state's tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city's median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year. When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period.

"These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself," said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Stockton mayor who'd started the program told reporters to "tell your friends, tell your cousins, that guaranteed income did not make people stop working."

"WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform used by 2 billion people largely in the global south, has become a particularly troublesome vector for misinformation," writes Quartz — though it's not clear what the answer is: The core of the problem is its use of end-to-end encryption, a security measure that garbles users' messages while they travel from one phone to another so that no one other than the sender and the recipient can read them. Encryption is a crucial privacy protection, but it also prevents WhatsApp from going as far as many of its peers to moderate misinformation. The app has taken some steps to limit the spread of viral messages, but some researchers and fact-checkers argue it should do more, while privacy purists worry the solutions will compromise users' private conversations...

In April 2020, WhatsApp began slowing the spread of "highly forwarded messages," the smartphone equivalent of 1990s chain emails. If a message has already been forwarded five times, you can only forward it to one person or group at a time. WhatsApp claims that simple design tweak cut the spread of viral messages by 70%, and fact-checkers have cautiously cheered the change. But considering that all messages are encrypted, it's impossible to know how much of an impact the cut had on misinformation, as opposed to more benign content like activist organizing or memes. Researchers who joined and monitored several hundred WhatsApp groups in Brazil, India, and Indonesia found that limiting message forwarding slows down viral misinformation, but doesn't necessarily limit how far the messages eventually spread....

This isn't just a semantic argument, says EFF strategy director Danny O'Brien. Even the smallest erosion of encryption protections gives Facebook a toehold to begin scanning messages in a way that could later be abused, and protecting the sanctity of encryption is worth giving up a potential tool for curbing misinformation. "This is a consequence of a secure internet," O'Brien says. "Dealing with the consequences of that is going to be a much more positive step than dealing with the consequences of an internet where no one is secure and no one is private...."

No matter what WhatsApp does, it will have to contend with dueling constituencies: the privacy hawks who see the app's encryption as its most important feature, and the fact-checkers who are desperate for more tools to curb the spread of misinformation on a platform that counts a quarter of the globe among its users.

Whatever Facebook decides will have widespread consequences in a world witnessing the simultaneous rise of fatal lies and techno-authoritarianism.

The Seattle Times reports: Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...

He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.

And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...

A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."

If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."

Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...
The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.

In the areas where Amazon operates, "low-wage workers at other businesses have seen significant wage growth since 2018..." reports the New York Times, "and not because of new minimum-wage laws." The gains are a direct result of Amazon's corporate decision to increase starting pay to $15 an hour three years ago, which appears to have lifted pay for low-wage workers in other local companies as well, according to new research from economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brandeis University... [T]he research illustrates how difficult it can be for low-wage workers to command higher pay in the modern American economy — until a powerful outside actor, like a large employer or a government, intervenes.

Most directly, there is little evidence in the paper that raising the minimum wage would lead to significant job loss, even in low-cost rural areas, a finding consistent with several recent studies. Other research, including a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, has found a larger negative effect on jobs, although still smaller than many economists believed in the past.

The authors of the latest study — Ellora Derenoncourt of Berkeley and Clemens Noelke and David Weil of Brandeis — studied Amazon, Walmart and Target, which operate in areas where wages tend to be low. But even in those places, the researchers found, wage increases by the large corporate employers appear to drive up wages without driving down employment. "When you have major changes in the wage policies of large actors in the labor market, this has ripple effects," Dr. Derenoncourt said in an interview.

At the same time, Dr. Weil added, "the sky doesn't fall."

Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality". He's the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age , and Bloomberg calls him an "outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants."

They add that now the Columbia University media law professor "is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry's biggest companies." Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday. Wu's appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power...

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook's strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil's tactics in the 19th century. "What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition," Wu wrote. "Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose."

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department's complaint against Google targets the heart of its business — Internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon... Wu argued in his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy.
A White House press briefing Friday included this response to a question about Biden's plans for big tech companies: The President has been clear — on the campaign, and, probably, more recently — that he stands up to the abuse of power, and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives. And Tim will help advance the President's agenda, which includes addressing the economic and social challenges posed by the growing power of tech platforms; promoting competition and addressing monopoly and market power issues; expanding access to broadband for low-income and rural communities across the country...

We don't have new policy to announce here... Just that the President believes, as he's talked about before, that it's important to promote competition and address monopoly and market power issues.
Interestingly, last August Wu also wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "A TikTok Ban is Overdue," arguing that China's "extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad..." The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves...

[China] bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference... Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies...

The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong. Some think that it is a tragic mistake for the United States to violate the principles of internet openness that were pioneered in this country. But there is also such a thing as being a sucker. If China refuses to follow the rules of the open internet, why continue to give it access to internet markets around the world...?

We need to wake up to the game we are playing when it comes to the future of the global internet. The idealists of the 1990s and early '00s believed that building a universal network, a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, would lead to world peace and harmony. No one buys that fantasy any longer. But if we want decency and openness to survive on the internet — surely a more attainable goal — the nations that hold such values need to begin fighting to protect them.

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

"Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change," argues a new article in MIT's Technology Review (shared by long-time Slashdot reader mspohr): Data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue. Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement... Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip...

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it — leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.

Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google's ad-targeting algorithms.

Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.
Will we someday see "white-hat data poisoners" trying to convince tech companies that the best place to advertise is the classified sections of small local newspapers?

While the researchers believe sporadic individual actions have little impact, the article takes this to its ultimate conclusion. "What if millions of people were to coordinate to poison a tech giant's data well...? That might just give them some leverage to assert their demands."

Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares a new article from Linux magazine: The danger and irritations of the modern web have unleashed a movement dedicated to creating a safer and simpler alternative. The old Gopher network and the new Gemini protocol have emerged as building blocks for this new "small Internet."

Anyone who has used the World Wide Web (WWW) lately knows that something bad is happening to it. It does not resemble the WWW of the early years, with enthusiastic amateurs freely sharing ideas and information. These things still exist, and the web is still an indispensable medium connecting the world. But the web experience is now encumbered with advertising, invasions of privacy in the form of pervasive tracking, enormous file sizes, CPU straining JavaScript, the danger of exploits, and door slams asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before viewing a site.

This unpleasant environment has led to a backlash. There are now some communities of developers and computer users who still desire a connected information system, but who seek a refuge from the noise, danger, and increasingly resource-hungry WWW. They feel that web technology does too much, and that since it makes various forms of abuse too easy, no lasting reform is possible.

The solution is to use or create a separate protocol that is simply not capable of supporting the technologies that enable advertising networks, user fingerprinting, or the myriad of other things that exploit users rather than helping them. This small movement has approached the problem from two directions that in practice are often merged: the revival of the Gopher protocol and the creation of a new protocol called Gemini.
Gemini would support its own lightweight hypertext format, and would co-exist with Gopher and HTTP as an alternative client-server protocol with built-in privacy-assuring features like mandatory Transport Layer Security and a "Trust On First Use" public-key security model. ("Connections are closed at the end of a single transaction and cannot be reused," notes the Project Gemini home page.) "You may think of Gemini as 'the web, stripped right back to its essence,'" explains its FAQ, "or as 'Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little', depending upon your perspective..."

"Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a 'do it yourself' computing ethos."

schwit1 shares a report: One of China's largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai. In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas -- more than 28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security cameras installed, according to state media. Those cameras weren't just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss. The security footage could also be viewed on smartphones.

In 2015 the Chinese government announced that a similar program would be rolled out across China, with a particular focus on remote and rural towns. It was called the "Xueliang Project," or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from communist China's former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who once wrote that "the people have sharp eyes" when looking out for neighbors not living up to communist values. China's next five-year plan, which covers 2021 to 2025 (PDF), places specific emphasis on giving social governance to local municipalities via the grid system, as well as building out even more security projects, to "strengthen construction of the prevention and control system for public security." This means the future of China's surveillance apparatus likely looks a lot like Sharp Eyes: More power and social control given to local governments, so neighbors watch neighbors.

John McAfee, creator of the eponymous anti-virus software, has been indicted in Manhattan federal court on fraud and money laundering conspiracy crimes, stemming from two schemes concerning the fraudulent promotion to investors of cryptocurrencies, officials said on Friday. From a report: McAfee and his bodyguard Jimmy Gale Watson Jr were charged for a scheme to exploit McAfee's large Twitter following by publicly touting cryptocurrency offerings and digital tokens that they later sold once prices rose on the promotions, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. McAfee is being detained in Spain on separate criminal charges filed by the Justice Department's tax division, the department said. Watson, an executive adviser of McAfee's so-called cryptocurrency team, was arrested on Thursday night, the Justice Department said.

President Biden on Friday named Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, to the National Economic Council on Friday as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, putting one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech's power into the administration. From a report: The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust laws. During his campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be open to breaking up tech companies. That confrontational approach toward the tech industry would be a continuation of the one taken by the Trump administration. Late last year, federal and state regulators sued Facebook and Google, accusing them of antitrust violations. The regulators continue to investigate claims that Amazon and Apple unfairly squash competition.

Mr. Biden has also expressed skepticism toward social media companies and the legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He told The New York Times editorial board in January 2020 that Section 230 "should be revoked, immediately." The tech companies have fought vigorously against new antitrust laws and regulations, building out some of the most potent lobbying forces in Washington to push back. Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation's economy resembled the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. "Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership," Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." "Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon," he added. Wu is best known for advocacy against powerful telecom companies and for coining the term "net neutrality," the regulatory philosophy that consumers should get equal access to all content on the internet.

Earlier this week, Google said that after it finishes phasing out third-party cookies over the next year or so, it won't introduce other forms of identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web. Instead, the search giant plans to use something called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which the company says has shown promising results. In a deep-dive, EFF has outlined several issues surrounding the usage of FLoC. The introductory excerpt follows: The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement. No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web; phasing out tracking cookies and other persistent third-party identifiers is long overdue. However, as the foundations shift beneath the advertising industry, its biggest players are determined to land on their feet. Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn't learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious -- and potentially the most harmful.

FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting. Google's pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the "privacy sandbox") will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between "old tracking" and "new tracking." It's not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.

We stand at a fork in the road. Behind us is the era of the third-party cookie, perhaps the Web's biggest mistake. Ahead of us are two possible futures. In one, users get to decide what information to share with each site they choose to interact with. No one needs to worry that their past browsing will be held against them -- or leveraged to manipulate them -- when they next open a tab. In the other, each user's behavior follows them from site to site as a label, inscrutable at a glance but rich with meaning to those in the know. Their recent history, distilled into a few bits, is "democratized" and shared with dozens of nameless actors that take part in the service of each web page. Users begin every interaction with a confession: here's what I've been up to this week, please treat me accordingly. Users and advocates must reject FLoC and other misguided attempts to reinvent behavioral targeting. We implore Google to abandon FLoC and redirect its effort towards building a truly user-friendly Web.

A security flaw in a website run by the government of West Bengal in India exposed the lab results of at least hundreds of thousands of residents, though likely millions, who took a COVID-19 test. TechCrunch reports: The website is part of the West Bengal government's mass coronavirus testing program. Once a COVID-19 test result is ready, the government sends a text message to the patient with a link to its website containing their test results. But security researcher Sourajeet Majumder found that the link containing the patient's unique test identification number was scrambled with base64 encoding, which can be easily converted using online tools. Because the identification numbers were incrementally sequenced, the website bug meant that anyone could change that number in their browser's address bar and view other patients' test results.

The test results contain the patient's name, sex, age, postal address and if the patient's lab test result came back positive, negative or inconclusive for COVID-19. Majumder told TechCrunch that he was concerned a malicious attacker could scrape the site and sell the data. "This is a privacy violation if somebody else gets access to my private information," he said. Majumder reported the vulnerability to India's CERT, the country's dedicated cybersecurity response unit, which acknowledged the issue in an email. He also contacted the West Bengal government's website manager, who did not respond. TechCrunch independently confirmed the vulnerability and also reached out to the West Bengal government, which pulled the website offline, but did not return our requests for comment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Peter Sunde is one of the original Pirate Bay founders, but in recent years he's mostly known for his role in various Internet-related startups. This includes domain registrar Sarek, for which Sunde tried to get ICANN accreditation. However, this request was denied, apparently due to Sunde's "uncomfortable" background. Needless to say, Sunde was disappointed with the decision and he took his frustration to Twitter a few days ago. Initially, he assumed that the application was denied because ICANN concluded that he 'lied' about his background.

The accreditation form requires applicants to tick a box if they have been convicted for fraud or something similar. Sunde didn't tick this box, as he was convicted for criminal copyright infringement. This 'error' was swiftly noticed by ICANN, which is also uneasy with other parts of the Pirate Bay founder's history. "After the background check I get a reply that I've checked the wrong boxes," Sunde wrote. "Not only that, but they're also upset I was wanted by Interpol." The Twitter thread didn't go unnoticed by ICANN who contacted Sunde over the phone to offer clarification. As it turns out, the 'wrong box' issue isn't the main problem, as he explains in a follow-up Twitter thread.

"I got some sort of semi-excuse regarding their claim that I lied on my application. They also said that they agreed it wasn't fraud or similar really. So both of the points they made regarding the denial were not really the reason," Sunde clarifies. Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is 'not comfortable' doing business with him. "They basically admitted that they don't like me. They've banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it's concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet." Making matters worse, ICANN will also keep the registration fee, so this whole ordeal is costing money as well.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services in Gallup, New Mexico, was hit with a cyberattack earlier this year, the hospital's staff had to revert to pen and paper to keep things running. Publicly available details about the hack are scarce, and the hospital has declined to comment beyond confirming that the security breach briefly forced its staff off its computers. But sensitive employee files posted online by a hacker group known for ransomware attacks and seen by NBC News indicated just how deep an attack the hospital had suffered: files on everything from job applications and background checks to staff injury reports.

Ransomware attacks, in which hackers gain access to a private system to hold it hostage for payment, have been a problem for businesses for more than three years. Some hospitals have poor cybersecurity, and unscrupulous gangs see them as potentially flush with cash and easily coerced with the threat of leaked patient data. Last year, at least 560 health care facilities were infected with ransomware, according to a survey from the cybersecurity company Emsisoft. In October, amid a particularly brutal wave of attacks, several federal agencies issued warnings of "an increased and imminent cybercrime threat" to hospitals. An advisory from the American Hospital Association laid out how the Covid-19 pandemic had encouraged cybercriminals "to exploit, victimize and profit" from ransomware attacks.

Social media app Parler has dropped its federal case against Amazon.com for cutting off its web-hosting services and filed a separate lawsuit against the company and its web services unit in a Washington state court, according to court documents from late Tuesday. From a report: The new lawsuit filed by Parler accused Amazon of defamation and breach of contract. Parler, an app popular among American right-wing users, came back online last month after going dark in January as many service providers pulled back support, accusing it of failing to monitor violent content related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the nation's legislative seat, by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Parler sued Amazon, accusing it of making an illegal, politically motivated decision to shut it down to benefit Twitter but a U.S. judge rejected its demand that Amazon restore services for the platform later in January. A month later, Parler re-launched its services online and said the new platform was built on "sustainable, independent technology."

The United States Navy is liable for a mass copyright infringement. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with the German software company Bitmanagement, which accused the Navy of copying software without permission. Bitmanagement claimed more than $500 million in damages, but the final amount has yet to be determined. From a report: The dispute started when the US Navy decided that it would like to run the software across its entire network. This meant that it would be installed on hundreds of thousands of computers, with "Flexera" software keeping track of the number of simultaneous users. Bitmanagement didn't offer such a license by default, so the Navy requested this option separately. These requests took place through a reseller, Planet 9 Studios, which complicated matters. After several back and forths, the Navy was convinced that it had permission, but Bitmanagement later disagreed. The problem for the Court was that the Navy and Bitmanagement didn't sign a contract, so there was no direct permission given. This meant that the Court had to review the conversations and exchanges that took place, to determine which side was right.

After reviewing all evidence, the Federal Claims court eventually sided with the US Navy, dismissing the copyright infringement claim. However, this wasn't the end of it. Bitmanagement maintained that the Navy clearly committed mass copyright infringement and the company took the matter to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, with success. In an order issued a few days ago, the Appeals Court agrees with pretty much all conclusions of the Federal Claims Court. The evidence indeed shows that Bitmanagement 'authorized' the U.S. Navy's copying of BS Contact Geo across its network. While this wasn't formalized in an official contract, the Navy had an "implied license."