An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Italian authorities are working on introducing a smartphone app that would help health services trace the contacts of people who test positive for the coronavirus as the government looks at ways of gradually lifting a lockdown imposed a month ago. Innovation minister Paola Pisano acknowledged that launching the app would raise major issues…
Tag: anonymity
Tails, the Security-Focused OS, Adds Support For Secure Boot
Tail OS, an operating system optimized for privacy and anonymity, has released version 4.5 this week, the first version that supports a crucial security feature named UEFI Secure Boot. From a report: Secure Boot works by using cryptographic signatures to verify that firmware files loaded during a computer’s boot-up process are authentic and have not been tampered. If any of the…
US Government, Tech Industry Discussing Ways To Use Smartphone Location Data To Combat Coronavirus
The U.S. government is in active talks with Facebook, Google and a wide array of tech companies and health experts about how they can use location data gleaned from Americans’ phones to combat the novel coronavirus, including tracking whether people are keeping one another at safe distances to stem the outbreak. From a report: Public-health experts are interested in the possibility…
Israel Takes Step Toward Monitoring Phones of Virus Patients
Israel has long been known for its use of technology to track the movements of Palestinian militants. Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to use similar technology to stop the movement of the coronavirus. From a report: Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Sunday authorized the Shin Bet security agency to use its phone-snooping tactics on coronavirus patients, an official confirmed, despite concerns from…
Iran’s Coronavirus Burial Pits Are So Vast They’re Visible From Space
“Iranian authorities began digging a pair of trenches for victims just days after the government disclosed the initial outbreak,” writes Slashdot reader schwit1. “Together, their lengths are that of a football field.” The Washington Post reports: Two days after Iran declared its first cases of the novel coronavirus — in what would become one of the largest outbreaks of the illness…
Reddit Has Become the Gospel of Personal Finance
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you look beyond the memes, cat videos, and quirky acronyms (TIL, OP, ELI5) you’ll find a treasure trove of resources that will help you quickly get acquainted with the topics that have long eluded you. For me, even though I worked on Wall Street for nearly 15 years, Reddit is the first…
Amazon Plans To Enter India’s Food Delivery Market
Weeks after Uber exited India’s food delivery market, conceding defeat to local giants Swiggy and Zomato, a new player is gearing up to challenge the heavily-backed duopoly: Amazon. From a report: The e-commerce giant plans to enter the Indian food delivery market in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The launch of the service, which would…
Alternative Browser ‘Waterfox’ Acquired By System1
Waterfox is an open-source web browser for x64, ARM64, and PPC64LE systems, “intended to be speedy and ethical, and maintain support for legacy extensions dropped by Firefox, from which it is forked,” according to Wikipedia. (Its tabs also still have angled sides with rounded corners.) Friday Waterfox’s original creator, 24-year-old Alexandros Kontos, announced that the browser “now has funding and a…
India Likely To Force Facebook, WhatsApp To Comply With ‘Traceability’ Demand
New Delhi is inching closer to recommending regulations that would require social media companies and instant messaging app providers to help law enforcement agencies identify users who have posted content — or sent messages — it deems questionable, TechCrunch reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: India will submit the suggested change to the local intermediary liability…
Amazon To Ramp Up Counterfeit Reporting To Law Enforcement
Amazon is planning to give more data on counterfeit goods to law enforcement in a further crackdown on fakes listed on its e-commerce sites. Reuters reports: In the past, the world’s largest online retailer has informed authorities of counterfeit peddlers when it thought it had enough information for police to pursue a culprit. Now, the company plans to disclose merchant information…