Success is the Greatest Revenge

Enlarge / A Tim Hortons in Toronto in May 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

Canadian investigators determined that users of the Tim Hortons coffee chain's mobile app "had their movements tracked and recorded every few minutes of every day," even when the app wasn't open, in violation of the country's privacy laws.

"The Tim Hortons app asked for permission to access the mobile device's geolocation functions but misled many users to believe information would only be accessed when the app was in use. In reality, the app tracked users as long as the device was on, continually collecting their location data," according to an announcement Wednesday by Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The federal office collaborated with provincial authorities in Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta in the investigation of Tim Hortons.

"The app also used location data to infer where users lived, where they worked, and whether they were traveling," the Office of the Privacy Commissioner said. "It generated an 'event' every time users entered or left a Tim Hortons competitor, a major sports venue, or their home or workplace."

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: vladimir18 | Getty Images)

Russian companies have been plunged into a technological crisis by Western sanctions that have created severe bottlenecks in the supply of semiconductors, electrical equipment, and the hardware needed to power the nation’s data centers.

Most of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, including Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm, have halted business to Russia entirely after the US, UK, and Europe imposed export controls on products using chips made or designed in the US or Europe.

This has created a shortfall in the type of larger, low-end chips that go into the production of cars, household appliances, and military equipment. Supplies of more advanced semiconductors, used in cutting-edge consumer electronics and IT hardware, have also been severely curtailed.

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the company's manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, on Monday, Jan. 7, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk has ordered Tesla and SpaceX employees to work in the office full-time or quit their jobs.

On Tuesday, Musk sent two memos telling Tesla employees they must be in the office at least 40 hours per week or leave the company. "Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers," Musk wrote in a new memo circulating on Twitter, apparently first shared by Tesla stockholder and Full Self-Driving beta tester Sam Nissim. The email's subject line was "Remote work is no longer acceptble [sic]."

Musk seemed to confirm the emailed memo's authenticity. When asked to provide "any additional comment to people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept," Musk tweeted, "They should pretend to work somewhere else."

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / US and Texas flags flying outside the Texas State Capitol building in Austin. (credit: Getty Images | PA Thompson)

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the Texas law that prohibits social media companies from moderating content based on a user's "viewpoint." The Supreme Court order came about three weeks after the so-called "censorship" law was reinstated by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

"The application to vacate stay presented to Justice [Samuel] Alito and by him referred to the Court is granted," the ruling said. "The May 11, 2022 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit staying the district court's preliminary injunction is vacated."

It was a 5-4 decision with Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts voting to block the Texas law. Alito wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The ruling says separately that "Justice [Elena] Kagan would deny the application to vacate stay" but Kagan did not join Alito's dissent.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Chinese flag with digital matrix -Innovation Concept - Digital Tech Wallpaper - 3D illustration (credit: peterschreiber.media | Getty Images)

For the best part of a decade, US officials and cybersecurity companies have been naming and shaming hackers they believe work for the Chinese government. These hackers have stolen terabytes of data from companies like pharmaceutical and video game firms, compromised servers, stripped security protections, and highjacked hacking tools, according to security experts. And as China’s alleged hacking has grown more brazen, individual Chinese hackers face indictments. However, things may be changing.

Since the start of 2022, China’s Foreign Ministry and the country’s cybersecurity firms have increasingly been calling out alleged US cyberespionage. Until now, these allegations have been a rarity. But the disclosures come with a catch: They appear to rely on years-old technical details, which are already publicly known and don’t contain fresh information. The move may be a strategic change for China as the nation tussles to cement its position as a tech superpower.

“These are useful materials for China’s tit-for-tat propaganda campaigns when they faced US accusation and indictment of China’s cyberespionage activities,” says Che Chang, a cyber threat analyst at the Taiwan-based cybersecurity firm TeamT5.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Jacqui VanLiew | Getty Images)

Over the past 19 years, the imageboard 4chan has been tied to Gamergate, the inception of QAnon, the incubation of a particular brand of online racism, and a raft of domestic terror attacks that have killed scores of people.

Tragically, references and tributes to 4chan are littered throughout a 180-page screed believed to be written by the 18-year-old who is alleged to have shot 13 people in a predominately Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. All 10 victims killed in the massacre were Black. Just this week, 4chan’s users spread transphobic misinformation about the identity of the school shooter who killed 19 children and two adults in an elementary school in Uvdale, Texas, that quickly reached the feeds of a right-wing member of Congress.

Even as the imageboard continues to rise in infamy, a question lingers: Who actually owns 4chan?

Read 62 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Jupiter Images | Getty)

It was a monumental day for the environmental movement more than 30 years ago when all 198 countries in the world agreed on something for the first and only time ever. They signed on to the Montreal Protocol, making a pact to phase out a roster of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer. Chief among these were the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons used by the cooling and refrigeration industry. Alternatives, such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were quickly found.

But in recent years, scientists have come to realize that the Montreal Protocol of 1987 might have traded an immediate problem for a long-term one. Though HFCs don’t cause the same damage to the ozone layer as CFCs do, the chemicals have warming potentials hundreds to thousands of times higher than that of CO2—making their growing global use a cause for concern.

The 20th-century industrial revolution saw a major boom in the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry in Europe and North America. Now, as developing nations boost their economies, countries such as China, India, and Nigeria are seeing skyrocketing demand for these appliances.

Read 50 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Rafael Elias | Getty Images)

Kayla Williams has never said the word “suicide” on TikTok, even though she uses the platform to discuss mental health issues with her 80,000 followers. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the 26-year-old student from Berkshire, England, has posted multiple videos about suicidal ideation and her stay in a psychiatric ward. Some of these clips are lighthearted, others far more serious. Yet Williams does not utter the word “suicide” to her front-facing camera, or type it in her captions, for fear the TikTok algorithm will censor or remove her content. Instead, she uses the word “unalive.”

The hashtag #unalivemeplease has 9.2 million views on TikTok; #unaliving has 6.6 million; #unaliveawareness has an additional 2.2 million. Though #suicideprevention is a frequently used tag on the app, the hashtags #suicide and #suicideawareness do not exist—if you search for them, TikTok pulls up the number for a local crisis helpline. It’s a well-intentioned policy, initiated in September 2021, a year after a graphic video of a suicide spread across the app. But users have also come to fear elusive content moderation filters that seemingly suppress or remove videos discussing death, suicide, or self-harm.

While the word “unalive” first became popular in 2013 (when it was used in an episode of Ultimate Spider-Man), Google searches for the term have spiked dramatically in 2022. From TikTok, “unalive” has spread to Twitter and Reddit; YouTubers also use it so their content isn’t demonetized. Depending on the context, the word can refer to suicide, murder, or death. Though “unalive” is often used comedically on TikTok, people like Williams also use it to talk candidly, forge a community, and signpost resources on the app. The rapid rise of “unalive” therefore raises a worrying question: What happens when we don’t openly say “suicide”?

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Diyun Zhu)

Three Republican senators are proposing a law to prohibit app stores from carrying apps that accept payments using China's digital currency. The "Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act" would prohibit app stores in the US from carrying or supporting any app "that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY," also known as the digital yuan or digital renminbi.

The app stores would also be prohibited from supporting or enabling digital yuan transactions. The bill defines an app store broadly as "a publicly available website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device."

The bill was proposed by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Mike Braun (R-Indiana), and Marco Rubio (R-Florida). "The Chinese Communist Party will use its digital currency to control and spy on anyone who uses it. We can't give China that chance—the United States should reject China's attempt to undermine our economy at its most basic level," Cotton said in a press release on Thursday.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

Elon Musk was sued by a Twitter investor who alleges that he broke the law in a scheme to drive down Twitter's stock price.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Musk and Twitter in US District Court for the Northern District of California. It recounts much of Musk's behavior since he began investing in Twitter and since he agreed to buy the company for $44 billion.

The lawsuit noted that "Tesla's stock is worth much less now than when Musk agreed to buy Twitter" as "Tesla's shares have declined by over 37 percent since the announcement of the Buyout." Musk, the CEO of Tesla, "pledged his Tesla stock as collateral for a $12.5 billion loan to finance the buyout of Twitter" and is thus "at risk of a margin call or a requirement to put up more cash," it says.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Twitter agreed to the fine and "robust compliance measures to protect users' data privacy" to settle a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the US government.

"As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads," Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said. "This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter's primary source of revenue."

The settlement was reached with both the FTC and Department of Justice. "The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today's proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users' privacy," DOJ Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. The payment will go to the US Treasury, according to the settlement.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A pro-choice demonstrator in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on May 11, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Stefani Reynolds)

More than 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions.

"[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google's current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That's because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies," Democrats wrote Tuesday in a letter led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). The letter was sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Specifically, Google should stop collecting "unnecessary customer location data" or "any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against women," lawmakers wrote. They also told Google that people who use iPhones "have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices."

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge

A hack on police servers in China’s Xinjiang region has yielded thousands of graphic images and videos of Uighur detainees suffering in detention camps in one of the starkest accounts yet of the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country’s persecution of ethnic minorities.

The images are accompanied by training manuals, detailed police work rosters, and instructions for guarding the camps. Using a euphemism to describe inmates, one document states: “If students do not respond to warning shots and continue to try to escape, the armed police shoot to kill,” the BBC reported. Images show one prisoner in an iron torture device known as a tiger chair, which immobilizes the arms. Der Spiegel, one of the other outlets that published the tranch of hacked photos and documents, said it confirmed their authenticity in part by analyzing GPS data included in some of the images.

“The material is unprecedented on several levels,” Dr. Adrian Zenz, director and senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who obtained the files and shared them with news outlets, wrote on Twitter. His thread provided a broad overview of the leaked materials that included “high-level speeches, implicating top leadership and containing blunt language,” “camp security instructions, far more detailed than China Cables [that] describe heavily armed strike units with battlefield assault rifles,” and other evidence of Uighur oppression at the hands of the Chinese government.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Tesla cars in a lot at the company's factory in Fremont, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Tesla can't force a woman who sued the company over sexual harassment into arbitration, a judge ruled on Monday.

Jessica Barraza sued Tesla in November 2021 in Alameda County Superior Court in California, alleging that she and other women working in the carmaker's Fremont factory were subjected to "nightmarish conditions of rampant sexual harassment." The Tesla factory "resembles a crude, archaic construction site or frat house," with women enduring sexual comments, propositions, and inappropriate touching, the lawsuit said.

Barraza also alleged Tesla retaliated against her after she complained about sexual harassment and that she was "denied certain privileges and benefits that were afforded to women who did not object to supervisors' sexual advances and flirtations." Many more details are in our coverage of the lawsuit.

Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies via video conference during a House antitrust subcommittee hearing on online platforms and market power on July 29, 2020. (credit: Getty Images)

Mark Zuckerberg was sued Monday by District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, who says the Facebook founder should be held financially responsible for the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The lawsuit was filed in DC Superior Court and demands that Zuckerberg pay civil penalties and restitution or damages.

"We're suing Mark Zuckerberg for his role in Facebook's misleading privacy practices and failure to protect millions of users' data," Racine wrote on Twitter. "Our investigation shows extensive evidence that Zuckerberg was personally involved in failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica incident. This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary. Misleading consumers, exposing their data, and violating the law come with consequences, not only for companies that breach that trust, but also corporate executives."

Racine's lawsuit says that "Facebook's 2010 decision to open up the Facebook Platform to third parties" was "the brainchild of Zuckerberg." This change let developers "access the massive trove of user data that Facebook had collected through the 'side door' of applications," the lawsuit said, continuing:

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Florida law that makes it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians likely violates the First Amendment, according to a unanimous ruling by a panel of three federal appeals court judges.

The ruling, released today by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, upheld key portions of a preliminary injunction issued by a US District Court judge in June 2021. Florida appealed that injunction. As a result of today's ruling, the state still cannot enforce the law's content-moderation requirements.

"It is substantially likely that [the Florida law's] content-moderation restrictions and its requirement that platforms provide a thorough rationale for every content-moderation action violate the First Amendment," the appeals court judges found in today's ruling. It wasn't a complete loss for Florida, as the judges said it is "unlikely that the law's remaining (and far less burdensome) disclosure provisions violate the First Amendment." Florida can thus enforce those less burdensome disclosure requirements while litigation is pending.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer )

With tech groups asking the US Supreme Court to block the new Texas law against social media "censorship," the state's defense relies in part on an opinion issued last year by Justice Clarence Thomas in a case involving Donald Trump and Twitter.

Thomas' opinion, as we wrote at the time, criticized the Section 230 legal protections given to online platforms' moderation decisions and argued that free-speech law shouldn't necessarily prevent lawmakers from regulating those platforms as common carriers.

"In many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers," Thomas wrote. "Though digital instead of physical, they are at bottom communications networks, and they 'carry' information from one user to another. A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way." The similarity between online platforms and common carriers "is even clearer for digital platforms that have dominant market share," Thomas also wrote.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments