GoDaddy expels neo-Nazi site over article on Charlottesville victim

Found on BBC News on Monday, 14 August 2017
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"We informed the Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy said in a statement on Twitter.

"It's very unusual for a host to remove a website because they've got immunity in the US under the First Amendment," said Niri Shan, a media and freedom of speech lawyer at Taylor Wessing.

Funny how GoDaddy had no problems providing domain services in the past years, but as soon as things get hot, they suddenly notice there's a violation of their TOS.

Botched Firmware Update Bricks Hundreds of Smart Door Locks

Found on Bleeping Computers on Sunday, 13 August 2017
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On Tuesday, August 8, smart locks manufacturer LockState botched an over-the-air firmware update for its WiFi enabled smart locks, causing the devices to lose connectivity to the vendor's servers and the ability to open doors for its users.

The company is asking customers to send in their affected locks so engineers could update the device with the proper software. LockState estimates that the total time to fix and return the product will be around 5 to 7 days.

You paid $469 for an IoT security gadget (that's the first joke) that does not even have method for local firmware updates (here's the second joke). A few cents more could have added an USB port, allowing the owner to roll in the correct firmware with an USB stick and a master access code.

Researchers report >4,000 apps that secretly record audio and steal logs

Found on Ars Technica on Saturday, 12 August 2017
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A single threat actor has aggressively bombarded Android users with more than 4,000 spyware apps since February, and in at least three cases the actor snuck the apps into Google's official Play Market, security researchers said Thursday.

The report from Lookout is the latest reminder about the risks of installing apps from third-party markets, but they also make clear that limiting sources to Google Play are no guarantee an app is safe.

An operating system should by default access to devices so that the user has to grant them first. That's not a perfect solution, but it would make some wonder why their new cool flashlight app wants access to the network, the phonebook, your notes and everything else.

Why Amazon's UK tax bill has dropped 50%

Found on BBC News on Friday, 11 August 2017
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Taxes are paid on profit not turnover. It paid lower taxes because it made lower profits. Last year it made £48m in profit - this year it made only £24m so it paid £7m tax compared to £15m.

There is heightened sensitivity around the tax affairs of technology giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple. The challenge of adapting a tax code written for a bygone era to work effectively on technology multinationals who have socked billions away in low tax jurisdictions remains.

As long as politicians are afraid to poke big corprations that hire those experts who know all the tax loopholes, the government will not make as much money as it could.

Salesforce fires red team staffers who gave Defcon talk

Found on ZD Net on Thursday, 10 August 2017
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Salesforce has fired its director of offensive security and another senior staff member after they gave talk at the Defcon security conference talk in Las Vegas last month.

The talk was to reveal MEATPISTOL, a modular malware framework for implant creation, infrastructure automation, and shell interaction, aimed at reducing the time and energy spent on reconfiguration and rewriting malware.

Khalil Sehnaoui, a security researcher who was at the conference, said in a tweet: "If you're going to start a rebellion amongst all your red-teamers, don't do it at Defcon."

That's one real PR disaster for Salesforce.

No, Google Should Not Have Fired the 'Anti-Diversity' Engineer

Found on Inc on Wednesday, 09 August 2017
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Eaton points out that employees are allowed to talk among themselves about working conditions. This is why your boss can't ban you from sharing your salary with your co-workers.

In most states, political views aren't protected in the workplace, but in California they are. Love his views or hate them, they are definitely political in nature.

California law prohibits employers from threatening employees in order to get them to change their political views.

What Google uses to enforce tolerance is intolerance.

VPN Provider Accused of Sharing Customer Traffic With Online Advertisers

Found on Bleeping Computer on Tuesday, 08 August 2017
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In a 14-page complaint, the CDT accuses AnchorFree — the company behind the Hotspot Shield VPN — of breaking promises it made to its users by sharing their private web traffic with online advertisers for the purpose of improving the ads shown to its users.

"Hotspot Shield’s marketing claims that it does not track, log, or sell customers’ information, but its privacy policy and a source code analysis reveal otherwise," the CDT wrote in a press release yesterday.

Not much of a surprise actually, and sadly many won't really care much because they already give up their privacy already everywhere.

Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK

Found on The Register on Monday, 07 August 2017
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The British government is planning to impose criminal sanctions on people who intentionally re-identify individuals from data that should have protected their identities.

In a statement of intent (PDF), published today, the government says "intentionally or recklessly re-identifying individuals from anonymised or pseudonymised data" will be an offence. Those who knowingly handle or process such data will also be committing a crime, it adds.

If you can re-identify someone from anonymised data, the data was not anonymised correctly in the first place. They should change the law to cause problems for those who fail to anonymise the data they release. If this law goes through, a company can release data without really caring about privacy and later put the blame on those who re-identified people. That's not how it should work.

Why People Can’t Stop Talking About Zuckerberg 2020

Found on Wired on Sunday, 06 August 2017
Browse Politics

Very quickly, though, the public and the press began to interpret the highly-choreographed whistlestop tour as foregrounding a Zuckerberg 2020 presidential campaign. The 33-year-old billionaire hired a former White House photographer, whose images depict him, Obama-like, as a man of the people.

A recent poll showed Zuckerberg and Trump tying for 40 percent of the vote in 2020. It, but it also found that 47 percent of voters have no opinion about Zuckerberg and 29 percent have a negative one.

Zucky would be even worse than Trump.

ESET Spreading FUD About Torrent Files, Clients

Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 05 August 2017
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Like all such attempts at FUD, his treatise ended with a claim that ESET was the one true source whereby users could obtain "knowledge" to protect themselves.

Kubovic then used the old furphy which is resorted to by those who lobby on behalf of the copyright industry -- torrents are mostly illegal files and downloading them is Not The Right Thing To Do. But then he failed to mention that hundreds of thousands of perfectly legitimate files are also offered as torrents -- for instance, this writer regularly downloads images of various GNU/Linux distributions using a BitTorrent client because it is the more community-friendly thing to do, rather than using a direct HTTP link and hogging all the bandwidth available.

Letting such "experts" do PR work will backfire hard, especially when they come up with arguments like that.