The Verge reports: The CEO of the conservative-friendly social app Parler said that all of its vendors have abandoned the company following recent bans from Google, Apple, and Amazon. “Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us too, on the same day,” Parler CEO John Matze said in an interview with Fox News on…
Tag: text message
Messaging App Go SMS Pro Exposed Millions of Users’ Private Photos and Files
Go SMS Pro, one of the most popular messaging apps for Android, is exposing photos, videos and other files sent privately by its users. Worse, the app maker has done nothing to fix the bug. TechCrunch reports: Security researchers at Trustwave discovered the flaw in August and contacted the app maker with a 90-day deadline to fix the issue, as is…
Now Is the Time To Bring Back Away Messages
Life is totally online — we need ways to politely disconnect. From a report: I spend most Thursdays heads down writing. The task is one that, at least for me, requires absolute focus, a quality that I have to essentially beg some corner of my brain to extend to me for a few hours. This usually fails, making the draft take…
Coronavirus: Apple iPhones Can Contact-Trace Without COVID-19 App
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Apple has begun letting its iPhones carry out contact-tracing without the need for users to download an official Covid-19 app.
As an alternative, owners are being invited to opt in to a scheme called Exposure Notifications Express (ENE). This keeps a 14-day log of other phones detected via Bluetooth and serves an alert…
An Embattled Group of Hackers Picks Up the WikiLeaks Mantle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate…
Six Former eBay Employees Charged in Federal Cyberstalking Case Targeting Natick Couple
Six eBay employees including a former police captain in California last year engaged in a relentless campaign of harassment and cyberstalking of a Natick couple that published a newsletter critical of the online retailer, sending items including fly larvae, live spiders, and a bloody pig mask to their home and travelling to Massachusetts to conduct surveillance of the victims in an…
Biden Prepares Attack on Facebook’s Speech Policies
The Biden presidential campaign, emboldened by a recent surge in support, is going after a new target: Facebook. From a report: After months of privately battling the tech giant over President Trump’s free rein on its social network, the campaign will begin urging its millions of supporters to demand that Facebook strengthen its rules against misinformation and to hold politicians accountable…
How to spot ISS in your sky
Learn to watch ISS moving silently and steadily across your night sky, and think of the 2 astronauts currently making their way there. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/how-to-spot-the-international-space-station…
Google Purged Almost 1,000 Abusive ‘Creeperware’ Apps. Now Some Are Coming Back.
In June 2019, a group of cybersecurity researchers notified Google of more than 1,000 potentially malicious apps on the company’s Play Store that can be used to surveil, monitor, and harass users. Their findings, which have not previously been reported, eventually led to one of the largest ever mass removals of Android apps. Less than a year later, there are signs…
In Fast-Moving Pandemic, Sources of Falsehoods Spread by Text, Email, WhatsApp and TikTok Elude Authorities
Misleading text messages claiming that President Trump was going to announce a national quarantine buzzed into cellphones across the country over the weekend, underscoring how rapidly false claims are spreading — and how often it is happening beyond the familiar misinformation vehicles of Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The false texts spread so widely that on Sunday night the White…