Pakistan Forced Down Apps Made By a Persecuted Religious Minority

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Over the last two years, the government of Pakistan has forced Google and Apple to take down apps in the country created by developers based in other nations who are part of a repressed religious minority. The move is part of a crackdown led by the country’s telecommunications regulator targeting the Ahmadiyya…

Airline pilot films ‘foo fighter’ UFO over Pakistan

A short clip of a strange orb-shaped object filmed from the cockpit of a passenger jet has recently gone viral. The unidentified object, which was sna… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/343450/airline-pilot-films-foo-fighter-ufo-over-pakistan…

YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Used To Upload ‘Pirate’ Movies and File DMCA Notices

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: YouTube says it has found a “smoking gun” to prove that a class-action lawsuit filed by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor Ltd was filed in bad faith. According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload ‘pirate’ movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the…

Report Claims America’s CIA Also Controlled a Second Swiss Encryption Firm

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike brings this report from AFP:
Swiss politicians have voiced outrage and demanded an investigation after revelations that a second Swiss encryption company was allegedly used by the CIA and its German counterpart to spy on governments worldwide. “How can such a thing happen in a country that claims to be neutral like Switzerland?” co-head of Switzerland’s Socialist Party,…

Google, Facebook and Twitter Threaten To Leave Pakistan Over Censorship Law

Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content. From a report: Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose “harms, intimidates or…

How the US Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard at Vice: The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include…

Pakistan’s PM Asks Facebook To Ban Islamophobic Content

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan called on Facebook to ban Islamophobic content on its platform, warning of a spike in radicalization amongst Muslims, hours after he hit out at the French president for “attacking Islam.” Reuters reports: Pakistan summoned the French ambassador in Islamabad as anger spread on Monday over President Emmanuel Macron’s reaction to the murder last week of a…

Facebook Touts Free Speech. In Vietnam, It’s Aiding in Censorship

An anonymous reader shares a report: For months, Bui Van Thuan, a chemistry teacher turned crusading blogger in Vietnam, published one scathing Facebook post after another on a land dispute between villagers and the communist government. In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village…

Chilling Report Suggests 1 Out of 5 Countries Could Be Headed For Ecosystem Collapse

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A new insurance index from the Swiss Re Institute has found just over half of all global GDP — nearly 42 trillion US dollars — is dependent on goods and services provided by the natural world. In many places around the world, however, that sturdy foundation is turning to sand. The report, referred…

Pakistan Bans TikTok

Pakistan has banned popular short video app TikTok in the nation, citing circulation of videos that it deemed “immoral and indecent.” From a report: The move comes months after the South Asian country raised serious concerns about the nature of some videos on ByteDance’s app and the impact they posed on society. Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the country’s telecommunication authority, said in…