Court Rules Against WebWatcher Spying Software

The developer of an internet monitoring software has lost in an appeal filed by plaintiffs suing the company for invasion of privacy, according to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Awareness Technologies, creators of WebWatcher, had successfully filed to dismiss the lawsuit brought about by Javier Luis of Florida, but the higher court overturned that dismissal and said that Luis’ case against the software developer can move forward.

While this isn’t a victory for personal privacy, it should be making a few software developers nervous right now. The suit claims that WebWatcher violates several state and federal wire tapping laws, and that their advertising is purposely misleading. Rather than promoting their product as an added layer of cybersecurity, the company intentionally markets it as a way to spy on your spouse, your children, or even your employees.

And that’s where lawyers and privacy experts have weighed in. It’s one thing to monitor your company’s network for unlawful activity, such as downloading child pornography or stealing company data, but smart businesses will make it known to their employees that their activity is being monitored. If an employee is permitted to check his personal email at work or is able to communicate with someone outside the company, and they are not aware of products such as WebWatcher monitoring their communication in real-time, then their rights may very well have been violated.

On the home front, there are legal concerns that monitoring software like this can have serious consequences for individuals within the family. If parents are monitoring their son’s internet use behind his back, then withhold his college tuition after they discover he’s been visiting gay dating websites, that’s their right as parents. But is the company who produced the software that allowed them to intercept his private communications (especially if he has turned 18 before finishing school) and use that information to cause him financial harm, responsible?

Luis’ suit was brought about after he made an online friend, then that friend’s husband used WebWatcher to spy on their communications, something that he says is specifically promoted in the company’s advertising. Now that the appeals court has said their is sufficient reason for the lawsuit to move forward, it will remain to be seen how companies that create this type of spying software are held accountable for the fallout.

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Cisco Lays Off 5500 workers As Company Shifts To Cloud

Cisco Systems Inc has announced it will lay-off around 5,500 employees over the next 12 months; a large proportion of the network equipment maker’s global workforce.

Earlier credible reports had indicated that up to around 20%, or 14,400, jobs were to go, inciting controversy that the company may have leaked the news. Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO, however described the leaked news of the lay-offs as both insulting and irresponsible.

The job cuts will begin next year as the company attempts to accelerate a major restructuring project shifting its focus onto other growth areas such as security, internet of things, collaboration and cloud services.

Cisco had previously cut jobs back in both 2014 and 2013 when the company let 6000, and 4,000 go, respectively. Cisco is one of only several high profile technology companies that has found itself struggling to attempt to adapt to the ever accelerating growth of cloud based services.

While Cisco is still considered to the last word when it comes to network hardware, it has seen demand for their products fall consistently over the last 5 years or so.  The same is also true for other hardware manufacturers. IT equipment is generally lasting longer than previous generations as both people and business wait longer between upgrade cycles, as the advent of mobile applications and cloud based computing services increases. Margins in software services are also higher than hardware because they also bring an ‘evergreen’ model of recurring revenue, involve fewer people on the cost side, and also have far higher margins.

The upcoming job cuts announcement may not cover the whole story, as Cisco has allegedly already offered early retirement packages to an unspecified number of employees, perhaps in a bid to mask difficulties being faced by the business.

Cisco, declared it had more than 70,000 employees as of April this year.

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Arrest Made In Sage Data Breach

Agencies like the Identity Theft Resource Center, which first started tracking data breaches in 2005, have shown that the numbers have set new records almost every single year for the sheer volume of attacks and consumer records exposed. Security experts have found that no industry is immune to data breaches, and that businesses of any size, from mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies, are vulnerable.

So news of yet another data breach shouldn’t make waves in the security industry, but the recent Sage Group data breach certainly has, largely due to the fact that an arrest has already been made.

Sage is a worldwide provider of accounting software, with literally millions of global clients. Some of the services the company provides are cloud-based, which is where the threat came in. An expected 200 to 300 UK-based businesses who relied on Sage’s service for company bookkeeping, payroll, and more received calls that their employees’ personal data had been accessed in a data breach.

Apart from the refreshing change of actually tracking down a hacker and making an arrest, one of the other surprises in the Sage breach was the fact that it was an inside job. Someone with an internal login accessed the information, and apparently did a sloppy job of covering her tracks. While the company has not announced what the employee intended to do with the information, she was arrested trying to leave the UK at Heathrow Airport yesterday.

The fact that this aspect of the breach is still surprising is one of the real contributors to data breaches and security violations. In approximately 43% of data breaches, the fault lies with an employee who either maliciously or accidentally caused the breach.

What really has cybersecurity experts alarmed about this breach, though, is the fact that Sage (like so many companies) seemingly allowed anyone from the CEO down to the janitor who sweeps the hallway to have unrestricted access to company data. Whether it’s a database of customer payment information, access to the personnel files for the entire company, or even proprietary information on the company’s products or business, too many businesses don’t restrict the level of access, which  their employees can have. In this climate of pay-for-data, the end result really shouldn’t be so surprising.

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Russian ‘ Pizza Hacker’ Begins Trial In US Court

The trial of a Russian man accused of orchestrating a hacking scheme that targeted US pizza restaurants began this week in the USA.

Prosecutors allege that Seleznev was the master hacker behind $170 million worth of fraudulent purchases, that mostly took place at targeted pizza restaurants in the USA.

As part of the case against him, Seleznev allegedly also hacked into the restaurants, stole credit card information, and then sold it via underground dark web internet forums.

Roman Seleznev, the son of a prominent Russian politician was arrested in the Maldives in 2014.

When Seleznev was arrested, Federal agents claim to have found a treasure trove of 1.7 million stolen credit card numbers on his laptop computer.

Seleznev faces a 40-count indictment that charges him with running a hacking scheme from 2008 until his arrest in the Maldives in July 2014.

“The evidence will show that for seven years, the defendant was one of the largest traffickers of stolen credit card numbers in the world.”

Defence lawyers for Seleznev had initially argued that his arrest was tantamount to a kidnapping, or illegal rendition and as such, had violated international law, however a US District judge disallowed the argument from trial.

Seleznev’s lawyers have also stated that by searching the accused Russian’s laptop without a warrant, Seleznev was not given due process and subsequent data being used by the prosecution may have been altered or directly tampered with.

Agents started on Seleznev’s trail in 2010 after a deli in Idaho was hacked and credit card data was stolen, Wilkinson said. The U.S. Secret Service and local detectives traced the hack to a computer server in Russia, he said.

Seleznev was indicted in 2011, but the agents couldn’t arrest him in Russia. But in 2014 when they learned he was on vacation in the Maldives, they worked with local police to arrest him at the airport.

The trial continues.

 

 

 

 

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Will Autonomous Car Software Stop Road Rage?

There are a lot of reasons to applaud the innovations behind autonomous vehicles, or so-called ‘self-driving’ cars. Visually impaired individuals will theoretically have greater access to daily task independence, like driving to work or to the market. Commercial transit will ideally improve, with long-distance truck drivers no longer covering massive distances on very little sleep, yet still operating a potentially deadly vehicle.

Unfortunately, too many people seem to be gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation of the day when a self-driving car is free rein to drink and drive, or operate a car while otherwise under the influence. As even self-driving cars still require at least one sober, reliable driver to be ready to react and switch off the auto-pilot, the DUI idea is frightening, to say the least.

But there’s a very real danger that too many giddy consumers are overlooking, and that’s the very real threat of drivers who intentionally employ aggressive driving tactics. Whether it’s speeding, tailgating, weaving in and out of traffic, or other intentional and dangerous behaviors; the autonomous car can only do so much. Once the autopilot is switched off because the driver doesn’t want to travel at 30 mph in a school zone, the great innovation is once again no safer than any other car on the road.

And that’s where software comes in, according to an op-ed by Janusz Zalewski, Ph. D., a professor in the software engineering department at Florida Gulf Coast University. Dr. Zalewski’s research is in safety-critical systems and security mechanisms, and he feels that without software to curb aggressive driving, the autonomous car is just another cool gadget.

“What is at stake is how various kinds of disturbances affect the drive, to which the software must appropriately respond. Among those often dangerous elements one can include interacting with pedestrians, who are very unpredictable, sudden changes in driving conditions (especially weather), vehicles entering traffic unexpectedly or unexpectedly stopping in the middle of a road, drivers with malicious intentions, zombie drivers, and “hit-and-run” incidents. How do you write software to respond to something which is so unpredictable? It’s not the usual but definitely the unusual which makes it difficult.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Zalewski concludes that we’re decades away from resolving the safety and security concerns the self-driving vs human drivers raises. And with startling statistics on aggressive driving and road rage, it appears as though the real work should focus on the humans who have to release control of their cars to a computer, not the other way around.

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Stolen NSA Files Put Up for Auction By Hackers

A hacker collective known as the Shadow Brokers are holding a Bitcoin auction to ransom off a collection of malware files stolen from the US National Security Agency.

The hackers say they will give the malicious files to the highest bidder, whoever they may be.

According to experts, the samples released, so potential buyers can verify the files authenticity, could very well be genuine.

According to various news sources, including the Guardian, the Shadow Broker hackers may not have hacked the NSA itself, but rather a US government sponsored elite hacking unit with close ties.

The ‘Equation group’ is said to be managed indirectly by the NSA itself, and frequently uses state sponsored ‘cyber weapons.’ As part of their auction blurb, the Shadow Brokers claims it is offering high profile malware created by the makers of Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu.

Auction ends whenever we feel like it

The Shadow Brokers have posted no end date for the auction, and will only send the alleged stolen files and the corresponding decryption instructions when “we feel it is time to end”.

Unlike most auctions, all bidders for the malicious software have to pay up front, and crucially, their bids will not be refunded even if someone bids more, a move calculated to ensure that bidders will come to the party with their best offer

However, the highest bidder is not necessarily guaranteed to end up with the files in any case. Should Shadow Brokers receive total cumulative bids of over a million Bitcoins, roughly $500 million, the hackers say they may release the code for free. As the group say in their FAQ section of their auction:

“No trust, risk. You like reward, you take risk, maybe win, maybe not, no guarantees.”

I’ll let the guys at Wired, who seem to have hit the mark closer than anyone else with this story, have the final words today:

“Any hackers capable of compromising the Equation Group or another NSA hacker team would likely have to be extremely sophisticated…Anyone capable of finding NSA hackers’ infrastructure, not to mention penetrating it, would likely have to possess government-level resources and talent.”

 

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China Launches Unhackable Quantum Satellite

In a remote section of the Gobi Desert, China launched the world’s first quantum satellite early on Tuesday morning, and in doing so may have just made the future hacking of communication networks almost impossible.

Chinese state media reported the official launch as technological breakthrough seeking to harness the power of particle physics and in the process build an “unhackable” encrypted communications system.

Nicolas Gisin, a professor and quantum physicist at the University of Geneva, told the Wall Street Journal:

“There’s been a race to produce a quantum satellite, and it is very likely that China is going to win that race… It shows again China’s ability to commit to large and ambitious projects and to realise them.”

If the prototype tests are successful, China will have taken an undeniable leap forward past other countries efforts in the field, and have begun the process of building a worldwide network that can’t be wire tapped or cracked through conventional methods.

The satellite nicknamed after the 5^th Century Chinese scientist and philosopher, Micius, main mission is to try and validate the viability of quantum technology in communication over long distances.

The theory behind quantum communications is that the process of entangling photons allows users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light. Any attempt to ‘hack’ the quantum stream will destroy the contained message and also alert the sender that an attempted hack has been made.

A quantum of Solace (for the logistics of making it all work)

The current problem is one of consistency. While short range quantum communication between two specific points has been tested successfully, variances in atmosphere, gravity, and even distance can disrupt sub atomic quantum messages.

Micius has been tasked with sending secure messages between Beijing and Urumqi, a massive disparate region of desert and mountains in China’s extreme west.

Future implications of quantum

The application for Quantum messaging could become a major defense against hackers, and could in the next few decades become a global standard. Initially though, China will seek to develop the technology for military, financial, and government communications.

Digital arms race?

China is the world’s 2^nd biggest economy after the US, so yes.

In recent years, China has begun pouring large amounts of its resources into massive national projects on everything from clean energy to science…even mining asteroids.

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Apple Adds New Privacy To iOS…Thanks To Microsoft

In the current technology climate, privacy is every bit a commodity as the latest consumer gadget. With more and more everyday tech users understanding the ramifications of turning over control of their information to a corporation or the government, there’s big money to be made in guaranteeing that no one is looking over our shoulders.

Unfortunately, a lot of what drives the innovation behind our favorite new hardware or the latest app comes from violating our privacy…sort of. The autocorrect keyboard and predictive keyboard technology, for example, are powered largely from collected data from users’ own interactions with their devices.

But what if there was a way to collect data about how users play with their gadgets without ever really knowing who that person was and what they were doing? There is. Thanks to research from Microsoft that is now being put into use by Apple in the upcoming iOS version, tech companies can harvest the need-to-know information in a collective pool of data that has no ability to single out an individual user.

That’s a huge oversimplification of the process behind different privacy, and there’s a really great explanation of the technical side of things here. What’s really important for the average consumer to understand is why we all benefit from this level of security.

Apple, Google, and other tech companies have faced stiff opposition for their stances on protecting their customers’ privacy from government intrusion, even while admitting that they themselves gleaned data all the time in order to improve their products for consumers. Differential privacy basically takes all of the user data and swirls in it a big mixing bowl before anyone can ever get their hands on it. Tech engineers can still figure out how consumers respond to innovation, but can no longer put an individual’s name on any single behavior.

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Picasa Fans Urged To Switch To Google Photos

Digital cameras have been widely available in the consumer space for well over a decade, and have only gotten more inexpensive and more accessible as time has passed. With the advent of better quality camera phones, practically everyone carries a camera within reach at all times. The problematic end result for users was what to do with all of those photos in order to clear them out of memory sticks or camera storage.

A number of photo storage and editing services have sprung up to meet that need over the years, and many of them didn’t anticipate from early on how popular they would be with users. Some of them, like Facebook, have already had to revamp their strategies in order to meet the need. Picasa (Google’s storage, editing, and retrieval app) has also faced severe changes that have now limited its usefulness.

Google’s intent was to switch its Picasa fans over to Google Photos, and in doing so they have had to not only produce a better photo experience in the new offer, but also remove all support for Picasa.

Everything about Picasa’s last version (3.9) still works, and users who can’t fathom working with their photos with any other desktop app aren’t going to be left out in the cold. But Google will not only no longer release updates of provide customer support for Picasa, it has actively removed downloads of previous versions from external websites.

But never fear. Google isn’t pulling the plug and walking away. This laundry list of FAQs about what Picasa can still do helps ease the transition, as does the site welcoming users to Google Photos. Those who are interested in making the switch will find their Picasa web albums–complete with captions, comments, etc.–already ported over to Google Photos. If anyone had used Picasa to incorporate photos into a blog, for example, they will find their photos in the Picasa archives.

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IRS Warns Of New Tax-Related Phishing Scam

In the world of data breaches, phishing scams are some of the easiest to pull off, requiring very little tech know-how, at least compared to something like a retail or hospital data breach. As the name implies, the scammer simply casts the net by sending out mass emails, entices the would-be victim to click a link or otherwise respond, and then the game of stealing identities, money, or both begins.

Fortunately, with the targeted widespread action campaigns by various law enforcement agencies and advocacy groups, the old phishing scams like the infamous Nigerian prince emails are proving less and less successful. On the other hand, scammers have had to turn to more fruitful, nefarious tactics like CEO phishing, spoofing, and outright ransomware.

In the US, nabbing taxpayers’ filing information is big business that leads to billions of dollars a year being paid out to identity thieves by the IRS. Tax return fraud is now a major focus for identity thieves as the payout can be exponentially higher than something like credit card fraud.

The IRS has issued an alert about a new phishing scam that seems to be specifically targeting tax preparers and tax accountants, but where Nigerian prince emails are so ludicrously worded as to almost be humorous, this phishing scam is anything but funny. And with nearly half of US taxpayers relying on a tax preparer of some kind, many of them lower income individuals who already lack the means to fight against fraud, the scam may only prove even more worthwhile for the criminals.

The unfortunate tie-in to software is that the thieves target tax preparers by posing as a contact from a tax prep software company, but that’s where the sophistication stops. The bogus software company email instructs the recipient to download the software from the included link, and once complete, the resulting virus gathers up client data and tax information.

 

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Cloud Software Will Make Up 25% Of All Sold Software By 2020

The reality of having Cloud Software becoming the major source of sold software may no longer be up in the clouds.

Cloud Storage

According to IDC, a quarter of all software sales by the year 2020 will be made on Cloud based services, seeing revenue for this sector more than double the estimated figure for 2016 to around $200 billion.

The news comes in a half yearly report by IDC analysing Cloud spending trends. Senior research analyst at IDC, Benjamin McGrath, said of the current Cloud based growth:

“Cloud software will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery over the next five years, growing nearly three times faster than the software market as a whole and becoming the significant growth driver to all functional software markets.”

The growth in cloud software was dominated in 2015 by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, accounting for around 84% of Cloud based revenue.

That said, IDC also expects those figures to flip on their head with the almost exponential current growth of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) over the next few years.

IDC surveyed 20 industries across 54 countries for their research and found that the main drivers pushing Cloud based spending were those companies in the financial and banking sectors.

The IDC report also expected retail, media, and telecommunications industries to significantly boost their revenues and growth in the next five years in relation to Cloud software.

Eileen Smith, a director of IDC’s insights and analysis division said:

“Cloud computing is breaking down traditional technology barriers as line of business leaders and their IT organisations rely on cloud to flexibly deliver IT resources at the lower cost and faster speed that businesses require…Organisations across all industries are now free to adapt to market changes quicker and take more risks, as they are no longer bound by legacy IT constraints.”

 

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AdBlock Plus: Facebook ad block bypassing is ‘anti user.’

AdBlock Plus has reacted to the news that Facebook is to prevent ad blocking software from working on the desktop version of its social media site by labelling Facebook as ‘anti-user.’

We already published a story here this week about Facebook’s intentions to prevent adblockers from working on PCs and laptops while not currently implementing such a move on its mobile apps, but now the communications and operations manager of the company that creates AdBlock Plus has weighed into the argument in a blog post.

Calling the anti-AdBlock policy being implemented by Facebook an ‘unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice,’ Ben Williams also said there was no need for users of adblockers to overreact. “Cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.”

Quoting the Facebook blog post announcing the social media giant’s intention to bypass adblockers, Williams makes a very salient point:

“… you kind of have to wonder about the thinking that went into this decision. I mean, let’s also not forget something their blog post said: “When we asked people about why they used ad blocking software, the primary reason we heard was to stop annoying, disruptive ads.” So if that’s true, Facebook apparently agrees that users have a good reason for using ad-blocking software … but yet those users shouldn’t be given the power to decide what they want to block themselves?”

Facebook had originally publicly admitted that they were becoming more concerned by the use of adblockers on their site back in January when they listed their effect on potential revenue in a US tax filing.

More recently, big spend advertising companies are beginning to ask questions about blanket ad coverage on Facebook, with Proctor and Gamble telling the Wall Street Journal that it was cutting down on targeted Facebook ads.

Ben Williams, however, has seen the direct action of Facebook as something of a self created Trojan horse: Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room created digital age leviathan:

“If nothing else, all this attention from Facebook shows that ad blocking has finally made the big time. We’re ready for our close up …”

Time will tell.

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Hospital Ransomware Attacks On The Rise

In the realm of data breaches and hacking events, there are a handful of victims who are easy targets, for one reason or another. Elder scams, for example, are quite common–and utterly reprehensible, committed by the lowest humans on the planet–due to the perception that senior citizens are both naive and overly trusting of others. Child identity theft (another of the more reprehensible crimes) also preys upon a particularly lucrative demographic due to the fact that most children don’t check their credit reports until they become adults.

But one victim demographic is at even more risk than most due to the criminal and civil penalties that they can incur for being victimized. Yes, in the case of hospital ransomware attacks, the medical center can be held responsible for hackers choosing to target them, which is why the crime works so well.

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise in recent months as hackers have discovered the facilities’ willingness to pay up in order to regain control of their networks or their data. The fear of lawsuits when patients die due to the inability to access digital medical records is quite an incentive to cooperate; in the US, regardless of how the patient information ended up online, the hospital will face severe penalties for the HIPAA privacy violation if the attackers follow through with the threat of putting the records on the Internet.

Therefore, several large medical centers have already attempted to “play nice” with hackers, and in some of those cases, the hackers took the money and still wouldn’t unlock the hospital’s network.

DataBreaches.net and Protenus have released their monthly data breach report for July, and have found that ransomware attacks against hospitals accounted for almost 30% of the breaches that month, many of them attributed to the same hacker. The month before saw record-setting numbers of attacks, with 41% of the attacks involving ransomware, which compromised more than 11 million records in those thirty days alone.

 

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Where Are The Digital Textbooks?

Only a handful of years ago, digital publishing proponents touted the benefits of digital textbooks and their ability to replace the outdated dead tree model of educational publishing. Costs were reportedly going to drop exponentially, schools were going to save money in licensing, and the short life span of an outdated textbook was going to be forever changed due to the ability to update the book with a simple add-on chapter as needed.

Like most areas of the tech and software realms, there were more important factors than just the cost considerations. The capabilities of HTML5, for example, meant fully immersive learning. Tap a screen to open a full-color 3D rendering of a beating human heart, or simply poke the hyperlink to hear a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., without ever leaving your history book. Distance learning, global study groups, typed collaborative annotations that could be shared with learners around the world were all going to change the face of education.

So what went wrong? Why has digital textbook adoption not happened on the scale we’d originally hoped?

First, as too many stakeholders in the game did not realize, the extreme cost of producing a print textbook isn’t in the ink and paper. It’s the hefty price associated with getting a team of Ph.D.-level experts to write it. Even at the elementary school level, the front matter of any textbook will contain columns of names with a lot of letters after their them.

But the biggest consideration of all may be in the one piece of the puzzle that really wasn’t heard in the discussion: the students. Reports have shown that students don’t want digital textbooks, at least not as compared to those who prefer print. Why?

One long-speculated reason is in the way we as a society interact with software and technology. While many of the decision-makers in educational publishing looked at the convenience and the cost savings, students looked at the activity of studying itself. Their mobile devices are reserved for connectivity and social interaction, and their laptops are tasked with producing content. To really oversimplify things, their screen time is basically precious to them and they’re not as likely to use it for schoolwork.

Of course, there are other, far more practical considerations. Students at higher levels often crave used print books, not just for their cost savings but for the highlighting and annotations of the students who’ve come before them. While digital textbooks often include bonus features like practice tests and study help, there’s nothing quite so useful as seeing the things a real student has deemed important. Some reports have also shown that the students are the ones who admit they’re too easily distracted by a screen; why study chemistry when you can tap a button and check Facebook? Finally, students as young as elementary school have admitted something that too many adults might take for granted: they simply love to hold a book and read the “old-fashioned” way. Whether it’s better interaction, less eye strain, or simply nostalgia, they enjoy the feel of a traditional book.

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Google Denies Deleting Palestine From Google Maps

Accusations, outrage, and half truths abound online after a glitch caused the West Bank and Gaza to briefly disappear from Google Maps.

Validating the truism that on the internet a lie can go viral before the truth has even checked for status updates, Google has found itself accused of deleting Palestine from its Google Maps service, despite the fact it was never labelled by Google in the first place.

Accusations and outrage abounded online after a glitch caused the West Bank and Gaza to briefly disappear from Google Maps.

A petition on Change.org,  signed by 250,000 people described Google’s alleged airbrushing as akin to ethnic cleansing:

“Google has no grounds wha[t]soever for omitting Palestine from its maps. The fact that Israel – an artificial state established on Palestinian territory – is clearly designated on Google Maps, while Palestine itself has been “airbrushed” out, is outrageous and deeply offensive to Palestinians. It is the online parallel of Israel’s policy of demolishing Palestinian villages and changing Palestinian place names in an effort to erase Palestine from the map. Google is aiding and abetting the Israeli government in this ethnic cleansing program.”

The truth however is somewhat more complicated and veiled with shades of grey, and serves mainly as an example of how Google attempts to deal with areas that have disputed borders

Google Maps shows the Gaza strip and the West bank with a dashed border instead of solid line that normally denotes a country’s border, indicating the fact that the area is in dispute over which country lays a definitive claim to what section of land.

Despite the fact 136 countries of the UN recognise Palestine as an independent state, crucially, the US and several other Western countries don’t, and therein lies the rub. So in real terms, at least in the case of Google Maps, nothing has changed, but this didn’t stop the news going viral.

Without getting into the moral, ethical, and political dimensions of the dispute between Palestine and Israel, the outcry has shown that how tech companies such as Google view the world, or try to map it objectively, they should take more care in how they represent areas where not everyone agrees with what what belongs to who.

 

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Facebook Bypasses Adblockers On Desktops

Facebook has, according to a post on their blog, found a way around installed adblockers on desktop browsers.

Quite how the social media giant has managed this hasn’t been totally revealed as of yet, but if the news is correct, then even Facebook users deploying ad-blocking software will begin seeing ads appearing on the desktop version of the social network.

According to the blog, it looks like Facebook intends to make it tougher for ad-blocking software to distinguish between ordinary posts, status updates and ads.

Researchers say Facebook use can lead to a decline in happiness and satisfaction.

“When they’re relevant and well-made, ads can be useful, helping us find new products and services and introducing us to new experiences — like an ad that shows you your favorite band is coming to town or an amazing airline deal to a tropical vacation. But because ads don’t always work this way, many people have started avoiding certain websites or apps, or using ad blocking software, to stop seeing bad ads. These have been the best options to date.”

The move shows how seriously Facebook is taking the rise of ad-blocking software, and how fiercely it intends to protect its income streams. Facebook generates most of its revenue from ads, and it has to walk the line between how many adverts users will put up with before they start turning off.

Not of course that Facebook is struggling for cash. Facebook and Google control an astonishing 64% of online digital advertising between them.

But the advertising industry as a whole complains that ad-blocking software costs billions of dollars a year in lost revenue, and the use of adblockers is growing.

For the moment though, the social media giant will only be bypassing adblockers on the desktop version of its website. Mobile users with adblockers will continue to experience an ad-free version.

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Apple’s Latest AI Acquisition

There’s no shortage of companies–Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more, who are providing a less-than-sci-fi-movie quality experience with AI. While the days of walking into your house and being welcomed by Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey haven’t quite panned out the way future-forward thinkers have envisioned. We have at least reached the stage where you can call out for information on movie times in your town, and a computerized-yet-soothing voice will answer you.

For many AI watchers, Amazon’s Echo has come the closest to being an all-around solution, largely because the company opened its platform to developers. These outside content creators have pushed Echo’s “skills,” or new features that the virtual assistant can do. It was right in line with another one of Amazon’s long-held corporate views, that of avoiding its hardware becoming obsolete by building it to be remotely updated. (I still remember receiving an email that told me my $300 first-generation Kindle e-reader was now an MP3 player and could browse the net.)

Apple may be upping the stakes, though, at least for Siri. According to reports, Apple may or may not have just bought Seattle-based startup Turi for $200 million, at least if its blanket statement about purchasing new companies and technologies is any indication. Turi is an interesting acquisition; instead of buying a company that has made huge headway in AI, this is a company that helps outside people work within the AI sphere. Turi is a solutions provider that lets content creators have the necessary tools to make their content compatible with a virtual assistant of some kind.

A logical connecting-the-dots would mean this could speak to better outside content for Siri, which would certainly give Amazon a run for its Alexa money. If the same model that lets really great apps find their way to the App Store was somehow a part of letting outside developers create new abilities for Siri, then the Turi price tag will have been completely worth it.

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Bitfinex Bitcoin Clients To Share 36% Hit To Asset Base Following Exchange Hack

Bitfinex, the popular online bitcoin storage exchange has told its users that they will all lose 36% of their assets following a cyber-attack.

The exchange, based in Hong Kong, said it had lost up to $65m following the successful cyber-attack that occurred last week. News of the hack, and the subsequent theft of bitcoin caused the overall price of Bitcoin to drop about 20%, and despite rallying and rebounding it still hasn’t fully recovered to pre-hack levels.

 

Bitfinex stated that a total of 119,756 bitcoins were taken by hackers in the attack. But it’s not the first time this has happened to the bitcoin exchange. Back in May of last year, around 1500 bitcoins were stolen in a similar online break in.

Following last week’s hack of Bitfinex, the exchange closed down trading, withdrawals and deposits thereby frustrating hundreds, if not thousands, of bitcoin users.

Bitfinex’s answer to the hack has been to spread the cost of the exchanges losses across all bitcoin accounts within the exchange:

“After much thought, analysis, and consultation, we have arrived at the conclusion that losses must be generalized across all accounts and assets. This is the closest approximation to what would happen in a liquidation context. Upon logging into the platform, customers will see that they have experienced a generalized loss percentage of 36.067%. “

However, there’s still a chance that affected bitcoin clients will be compensated for their 36% loss, in the long term, at least:

The company said it has given all affected clients a “BFX” token crediting them for their losses that can eventually be redeemed by the exchange or for shares in iFinex, the exchange’s parent company.

“We are actively discussing various strategic options with numerous potential investors as part of our strategy to fully compensate our customers. Such discussions, however, are in early stages and will likely take time to play out. “

The value of bitcoin has surged in recent months thanks to the rapid adoption by Chinese users who have flocked to the virtual currency, using the cryptocurrency to bypass stringent Chinese capital controls.

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Stopping Rogue Employees With Software

Data breaches and hacking are on the shortlist of fears that plague many business executives, and with good reason. The Identity Theft Resource Center has been tracking data breaches since 2005, and almost every single year since then has seen a record number of breaches and hacking; these events aren’t limited to major companies either, but instead are found in businesses of every size and in every type of industry.

Vunerabilities such as Heartbleed can leave organizational data wide open to hacks.

Unfortunately, the numbers of “inside job” data breaches, whether intentional or completely accidental, like the recent Snapchat boss phishing attack–mean companies would do well to guard their own gates while they’re investing in top-notch cybersecurity protocols. A 2015 data breach at Morgan Stanley resulted in the termination of employment and even criminal proceedings against a 30-year-old employee who downloaded the account information for about 10% of the investment firm’s wealthiest clients, or around 900 accounts. Unfortunately, not only was the employee not smart enough to cover his theft-tracks, he seems to have accidentally posted the full database of information online.

So how are companies supposed to stop unwanted activity while still giving their employees the necessary tools to do their jobs?

One concept is in employee monitoring software, or software that can work behind the scenes in your company’s network and monitor the computer activity that goes on. Largely using predictive data, like a dramatic increase in the number of emails someone sends, or a sudden shift in working extra hours when no one else is around, the software can at least alert the IT department or executives to the potential for data theft, insider trading, or even stealing proprietary products.

This type of spying actually sits well with industry watchers, who say it’s no different than monitoring the company’s network for fraudulent computer use or “piddling around” on the job. Where things get shady, though, is in the software’s ability to detect an employee who might be gathering his information in order to leave the company and head to a job with a competitor. So long as he’s not taking sensitive account data or company secrets with him, experts say that’s pretty much outside the employer’s right to know.

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Mozilla Testpilot: No More 404

Mozilla are test piloting a new project called No More 404 on its official Test Pilot website.

The add on for Firefox has been designed to provide users with the option of reading deleted versions of web pages.

In essence, the idea behind the project is that the new experimental feature in lets you bypass annoying 404 dead-ends and instead of receiving 404 error messages, the 404 No More feature will instead present webpages from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and replace the missing web pages with archive.org versions before the page before vanished.

Not that it’s perfect of course, old or popular pages are likely to have snapshots available, but Mozilla’s doesn’t work if there’s no central archive for the pages in question, or if the site automatically redirects browsers to another page, or encounters another kind of error.

The message users encounter in cases like this reads:

“This page appears to be missing. View a saved version courtesy of the Wayback Machine.” Users are then given the option to open the internet archive and see an older version of the page, or just go back.

In order to try it out users have to install the Firefox Test Pilot browser plugin in order to access their development features.  The 404 no more feature can be turned on or off along with some other experimental features.

The idea behind Test Pilot is that Mozilla thinks it will streamline the process of testing new functionality, features and ideas in Firefox itself, while also opening up the new functions to a wider audience than just dedicated beta users.

One of the best things about using Test Pilot is that users who run into trouble or suffer from compatibility issues can simply turn the offending component off but still use the rest of the browser extension without issues.

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