schwit1 shares a report from TechCrunch: A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found. The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone’s…
Tag: Presidential Election
DNC, RNC To Test Limits of Virtual Events as Election Enters Final Stage
The Democratic and Republican nominating conventions, long mainstays of the US presidential election cycle, have been forced online, creating the biggest test yet for conducting life remotely during the coronavirus. From a report: Robbed of the energy of convention halls, the parties will seek to re-create that enthusiasm in high-production streaming events that beam their luminaries from around the country to…
Belarus Has Shut Down the Internet Amid a Controversial Election
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Internet connectivity and cellular service in Belarus have been down since Sunday evening, after sporadic outages early that morning and throughout the day. The connectivity blackout, which also includes landline phones, appears to be a government-imposed outage that comes amid widespread protests and increasing social unrest over Belarus’ presidential election Sunday. The ongoing…
US Now Offers $10 Million Reward For Election Interference Tips
The US Department of State announced today rewards of up to $10 million for any information leading to the identification of any person who works with or for a foreign government for the purpose of interfering with US elections through “illegal cyber activities.” From a report: This includes attacks against US election officials, US election infrastructure, voting machines, but also candidates…
Facebook Must Better Police Online Hate, State Attorneys General Say
Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. From a report: In a letter [PDF] to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They…
Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Starbucks: More Major Advertisers Are Now Boycotting Facebook
Some of America’s biggest brands — Coca-Cola, The Hershey Company and the Levi Strauss & Co. — “are among the latest in pledging to halt advertising on Facebook as part of a growing boycott,” reports USA Today: Despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlining several steps the social network will take to combat hate speech ahead of the 2020 presidential election Friday,…
Super Secretive Russian Disinfo Operation Discovered Dating Back To 2014
Social media research group Graphika published today a 120-page report unmasking a new Russian information operation of which very little has been known so far. ZDNet reports: Codenamed Secondary Infektion, the group is different from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Sankt Petersburg company (troll farm) that has interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Graphika says this new and separate…
Why a Voting App Won’t Solve Our Problems This November
XXongo writes: Although the problems with internet voting have been pointed out over and over again, with the arrival of COVID-19, the idea has again been brought up as a way to avoid the problems of in-person voting. If we can do banking by internet, why can’t we do online voting? But, voting by an app is still a really stupid…
Bernie Sanders Has an Audacious — and Hugely Expensive — Climate Plan
Senator Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential election, has put forth the most audacious climate plan among the contenders. But there are doubts about the political and economic feasibility of his sweeping vision, as well as the wisdom of some of his particular technical proposals. From a report: Notably, the plan restricts tools that could…
Facebook Says It Won’t Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads
Facebook said on Thursday that it would not make any major changes to its political advertising policies, which allow lies in ads, despite pressure from lawmakers who say the company is abdicating responsibility for what appears on its platform. The New York Times: The decision, which company executives had telegraphed in recent months, is likely to harden criticism of Facebook’s political…