Category Archives: Global Domination

EU delays decision over continuous spying on all your devices *cough* scanning encrypted messages for kiddie porn

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European Union officials have delayed talks over proposed legislation that could lead to messaging services having to scan photos and links to detect possible child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Were the proposal to become law, it may require the likes of WhatsApp, Messenger and Signal to scan all images that users upload — which would essentially force them to break encryption.

For the measure to pass, it would need to have the backing of at least 15 of the member states representing at least 65 percent of the bloc’s entire population. However, countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic were expected to abstain from the vote or oppose the plan due to cybersecurity and privacy concerns, Politico reports. If EU members come to an agreement on a joint position, they’ll have to hash out a final version of the law with the European Commission and European Parliament.

The legislation was first proposed in 2022 and it could result in messaging services having to scan all images and links with the aim of detecting CSAM and communications between minors and potential offenders. Under the proposal, users would be informed about the link and image scans in services’ terms and conditions. If they refused, they would be blocked from sharing links and images on those platforms. However, as Politico notes, the draft proposal includes an exemption for “accounts used by the State for national security purposes.”

[…]

Patrick Breyer, a digital rights activist who was a member of the previous European Parliament before this month’s elections, has argued that proponents of the so-called “chat control” plan aimed to take advantage of a power vacuum before the next parliament is constituted. Breyer says that the delay of the vote, prompted in part by campaigners, “should be celebrated,” but warned that “surveillance extremists among the EU governments” could again attempt to advance chat control in the coming days.

Other critics and privacy advocates have slammed the proposal. Signal president Meredith Whittaker said in a statement that “mass scanning of private communications fundamentally undermines encryption,” while Edward Snowden described it as a “terrifying mass surveillance measure.”

[…]

The EU is not the only entity to attempt such a move. In 2021, Apple revealed a plan to scan iCloud Photos for known CSAM. However, it scrapped that controversial effort following criticism from the likes of customers, advocacy groups and researchers.

Source: EU delays decision over scanning encrypted messages for CSAM

Watch out very very carefully  as soon as people start taking your freedoms in the name of “protecting children”.

FedEx’s Secretive Police Force Is Helping Cops Build An AI Car Surveillance Network

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[…] Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least four multi-billion dollar private companies. But publicly available documents reveal that some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx — a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus.

To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock’s car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren’t subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could “[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network.”

[…]

It’s unclear just how widely law enforcement is sharing Flock data with FedEx. According to publicly available lists of data sharing partners, two police departments have granted the FedEx Air Carrier Police Department access to their Flock cameras: Shelby County Sheriff’s Office in Tennessee and Pittsboro Police Department in Indiana.

Shelby County Sheriff’s Office public information officer John Morris confirmed the collaboration. “We share reads from our Flock license plate readers with FedEx in the same manner we share the data with other law enforcement agencies, locally, regionally, and nationally,” he told Forbes via email.

[…]

FedEx is also sharing its Flock camera feeds with other police departments, including the Greenwood Police Department in Indiana, according to Matthew Fillenwarth, assistant chief at the agency. Morris at Shelby County Sheriff’s Office confirmed his department had access to FedEx’s Flock feeds too. Memphis Police Department said it received surveillance camera feeds from FedEx through its Connect Memphis system

[…]

Flock, which was founded in 2017, has raised more than $482 million in venture capital investment from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, helping it expand its vast network of cameras across America through both public police department contracts and through more secretive agreements with private businesses.

Forbes has now uncovered at least four corporate giants using Flock, none of which had publicly disclosed contracts with the surveillance startup. As Forbes previously reported, $50 billion-valued Simon Property, the country’s biggest mall owner, and home improvement giant Lowe’s, are two of the biggest clients. Like FedEx, Simon Property also has provided its mall feeds to local cops.

[…]

Kaiser Permanente, the largest health insurance company in America, has shared Flock data with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, an intelligence hub that provides support to local and federal police investigating major crimes across California’s west coast

[…]

Flock’s senior vice president of policy and communications Joshua Thomas declined to comment on private customers. “Flock’s technology and tools help our customers bolster their public safety efforts by helping to deter and solve crime efficiently and objectively,” Thomas said. “Objective video evidence is crucial to solving crime and we support our customers sharing that evidence with those that they are legally allowed to do so with.”

He said Flock was helping to solve “thousands of crimes nationwide” and is working toward its “goal of leveraging technology to eliminate crime.” Forbes previously found that Flock’s marketing data had exaggerated its impact on crime rates and that the company had itself likely broken the law across various states by installing cameras without the right permits.

Source: FedEx’s Secretive Police Force Is Helping Cops Build An AI Car Surveillance Network

Signal, MEPs urge EU Council to drop law that puts a spy on everyone’s devices

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On Thursday, the EU Council is scheduled to vote on a legislative proposal that would attempt to protect children online by disallowing confidential communication.

The vote had been set for Wednesday but got pushed back [PDF].

Known to detractors as Chat Control, the proposal seeks to prevent the online dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by requiring internet service providers to scan digital communication – private chats, emails, social media messages, and photos – for unlawful content.

The proposal [PDF], recognizing the difficulty of explicitly outlawing encryption, calls for “client-side scanning” or “upload moderation” – analyzing content on people’s mobile devices and computers for certain wrongdoing before it gets encrypted and transmitted.

The idea is that algorithms running locally on people’s devices will reliably recognize CSAM (and whatever else is deemed sufficiently awful), block it, and/or report it to authorities. This act of automatically policing and reporting people’s stuff before it’s even had a chance to be securely transferred rather undermines the point of encryption in the first place.

We’ve been here before. Apple announced plans to implement a client-side scanning scheme back in August 2021, only to face withering criticism from the security community and civil society groups. In late 2021, the iGiant essentially abandoned the idea.

Europe’s planned “regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” is not the only legislative proposal that contemplates client-side scanning as a way to front-run the application of encryption. The US Earn-It Act imagines something similar.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act of 2023 includes a content scanning requirement, though with the government’s acknowledgement that enforcement isn’t presently feasible. While it does allow telecoms regulator Ofcom to require online platforms to adopt an “accredited technology” to identify unlawful content, there is currently no such technology and it’s unclear how accreditation would work.

With the EU proposal vote approaching, opponents of the plan have renewed their calls to shelve the pre-crime surveillance regime.

In an open letter [PDF] on Monday, Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, which threatened to withdraw its app from the UK if the Online Safety Act disallowed encryption, reiterated why the EU client-side scanning plan is unworkable and dangerous.

“There is no way to implement such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating a dangerous vulnerability in core infrastructure that would have global implications well beyond Europe,” wrote Whittaker.

European countries continue to play rhetorical games. They’ve come back to the table with the same idea under a new label

“Instead of accepting this fundamental mathematical reality, some European countries continue to play rhetorical games.

“They’ve come back to the table with the same idea under a new label. Instead of using the previous term ‘client-side scanning,’ they’ve rebranded and are now calling it ‘upload moderation.’

“Some are claiming that ‘upload moderation’ does not undermine encryption because it happens before your message or video is encrypted. This is untrue.”

The Internet Architecture Board, part of the Internet Engineering Task Force, offered a similar assessment of client-side scanning in December.

Encrypted comms service Threema published its open variation on this theme on Monday, arguing that mass surveillance is incompatible with democracy, is ineffective, and undermines data security.

“Should it pass, the consequences would be devastating: Under the pretext of child protection, EU citizens would no longer be able to communicate in a safe and private manner on the internet,” the biz wrote.

EU citizens would no longer be able to communicate in a safe and private manner on the internet

“The European market’s location advantage would suffer a massive hit due to a substantial decrease in data security. And EU professionals like lawyers, journalists, and physicians could no longer uphold their duty to confidentiality online. All while children wouldn’t be better protected in the least bit.”

Threema said if it isn’t allowed to offer encryption, it will leave the EU.

And on Tuesday, 37 Members of Parliament signed an open letter to the Council of Europe urging legislators to reject Chat Control.

“We explicitly warn that the obligation to systematically scan encrypted communication, whether called ‘upload-moderation’ or ‘client-side scanning,’ would not only break secure end-to-end encryption, but will to a high probability also not withstand the case law of the European Court of Justice,” the MEPs said. “Rather, such an attack would be in complete contrast to the European commitment to secure communication and digital privacy, as well as human rights in the digital space.” ®

Source: Signal, MEPs urge EU Council to drop encryption-eroding law • The Register

Hey, EU, stop spying on us! We are supposed to be the free ones here.

If Creepy Spyware Clearview AI scanned your face, you may get equity in the company

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Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to an unusual settlement to a class action lawsuit, The New York Times reports. Rather than paying cash, the company would provide a 23 percent stake in its company to any Americans in its database. Without the settlement, Clearview could go bankrupt, according to court documents.

If you live in the US and have ever posted a photo of yourself publicly online, you may be part of the class action. The settlement could amount to at least $50 million according to court documents, It still must be approved by a federal judge.

Clearview AI, which counts billionaire Peter Thiel as a backer, says it has over 30 billion images in its database. Those can be accessed and cross-referenced by thousands of law enforcement departments including the US FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

Shortly after its identity was outed, Clearview was hit with lawsuits in Illinois, California, Virginia, New York and elsewhere, which were all brought together as a class action suit in a federal Chicago court. The cost of the litigation was said to be draining the company’s reserves, forcing it to seek a creative way to settle the suit.

The relatively small sum divided by the large number of users likely to be in the database means you won’t be receiving a windfall. In any case, it would only happen if the company goes public or is acquired, according to the report. Once that occurs, lawyers would take up to 39 percent of the settlement, meaning the final amount could be reduced to about 30 million. If a third of Americans were in the database (about 110 million), each would get about 27 cents.

That does beg the question of whether it would be worth just over a quarter to see one of the creepiest companies of all time to go bankrupt. To cite a small litany of the actions taken against it (on top of the US class action):

  • It was sued by the ACLU in 2020 (Clearview agreed to permanently halt sales of its biometric database to private companies in the US as part of the settlement.
  • Italy slapped a €20 million fine on the company in 2022 and banned it from using images of Italians in its database
  • Privacy groups in Europe filed complaints against it for allegedly breaking privacy laws (2021)
  • UK’s privacy watchdog slapped it with a £7.55 million fine and ordered it to delete data from any UK resident
  • The LAPD banned the use of its software in 2020
  • Earlier this year the EU barred untargeted scraping of faces from the web, effectively blocking Clearview’s business model in Europe

Source: If Clearview AI scanned your face, you may get equity in the company

Sonos draws more customer anger — this time for its privacy policy. Now they will sell your customer data, apparently

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It’s been a rocky couple of months for Sonos — so much so that CEO Patrick Spence now has a canned autoreply for customers emailing him to vent about the redesigned app. But as the company works to right the ship, restore trust, and get the new Sonos Ace headphones off to a strong start, it finds itself in the middle of yet another controversy.

As highlighted by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, Sonos has made a significant change to its privacy policy, at least in the United States, with the removal of one key line. The updated policy no longer contains a sentence that previously said, “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers.” That pledge is still present in other countries, but it’s nowhere to be found in the updated US policy, which went into effect earlier this month.

Now, some customers, already feeling burned by the new Sonos app’s unsteady performance, are sounding off about what they view as another poor decision from the company’s leadership. For them, it’s been one unforced error after another from a brand they once recommended without hesitation.

[…]

As part of its reworked app platform, Sonos rolled out web-based access for all customer systems — giving the cloud an even bigger role in the company’s architecture. Unfortunately, the web app currently lacks any kind of two-factor authentication, which has also irked users; all it takes is an email address and password to remotely control Sonos devices.

[…]

Source: Sonos draws more customer anger — this time for its privacy policy – The Verge

If I had an “idiocy” tag, I would have used it for these bozo’s.

Mozilla caves to public and restores Firefox add-ons banned in Russia that circumvent Russian censorship

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Mozilla has reinstated certain add-ons for Firefox that earlier this week had been banned in Russia by the Kremlin.

The browser extensions, which are hosted on the Mozilla store, were made unavailable in the Land of Putin on or around June 8 after a request by the Russian government and its internet censorship agency, Roskomnadzor.

Among those extensions were three pieces of code that were explicitly designed to circumvent state censorship – including a VPN and Censor Tracker, a multi-purpose add-on that allowed users to see what websites shared user data, and a tool to access Tor websites.

The day the ban went into effect, Roskomsvoboda – the developer of Censor Tracker – took to the official Mozilla forums and asked why his extension was suddenly banned in Russia with no warning.

[…]

“In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia,” the group declared. “Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

“We remain committed to supporting our users in Russia and worldwide and will continue to advocate for an open and accessible internet for all.”

[…]

Source: Mozilla restores Firefox add-ons banned in Russia • The Register

(see also: Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons which Circumvent Censorship in Russia)

Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons which Circumvent Censorship in Russia

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The Mozilla Foundation, the entity behind the web browser Firefox, is blocking various censorship circumvention add-ons for its browser, including ones specifically to help those in Russia bypass state censorship. The add-ons were blocked at the request of Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor — the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media — according to a statement by Mozilla to The Intercept.

“Following recent regulatory changes in Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store,” a Mozilla spokesperson told The Intercept in response to a request for comment. “After careful consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community.”

“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.”

Stanislav Shakirov, the chief technical officer of Roskomsvoboda, a Russian open internet group, said he hoped it was a rash decision by Mozilla that will be more carefully examined.

“It’s a kind of unpleasant surprise because we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information, and its policy was somewhat different,” Shakirov said. “And due to these values, it should not be so simple to comply with state censors and fulfill the requirements of laws that have little to do with common sense.”

Developers of digital tools designed to get around censorship began noticing recently that their Firefox add-ons were no longer available in Russia.

On June 8, the developer of Censor Tracker, an add-on for bypassing internet censorship restrictions in Russia and other former Soviet countries, made a post on the Mozilla Foundation’s discussion forums saying that their extension was unavailable to users in Russia.

The developer of another add-on, Runet Censorship Bypass, which is specifically designed to bypass Roskomnadzor censorship, posted in the thread that their extension was also blocked. The developer said they did not receive any notification from Mozilla regarding the block.

Two VPN add-ons, Planet VPN and FastProxy — the latter explicitly designed for Russian users to bypass Russian censorship — are also blocked. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are designed to obscure internet users’ locations by routing users’ traffic through servers in other countries.

The Intercept verified that all four add-ons are blocked in Russia. If the webpage for the add-on is accessed from a Russian IP address, the Mozilla add-on page displays a message: “The page you tried to access is not available in your region.” If the add-on is accessed with an IP address outside of Russia, the add-on page loads successfully.

[…]

According to Mozilla’s Pledge for a Healthy Internet, the Mozilla Foundation is “committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.” Mozilla’s second principle in their manifesto says, “The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.”

[…]

The same four censorship circumvention add-ons also appear to be available for other web browsers without being blocked by the browsers’ web stores. Censor Tracker, for instance, remains available for the Google Chrome web browser, and the Chrome Web Store page for the add-on works from Russian IP addresses. The same holds for Runet Censorship Bypass, VPN Planet, and FastProxy.

[…]

Source: Mozilla Firefox Blocks Add-Ons to Circumvent Russia Censorship

This idealistic commitment Mozilla has is one of the reasons I use Firefox as my standard browser (apart from that it’s a really really good technology; has good addons; is anti-monopoly; doesn’t own the copyright of everything you type in it; doesn’t spy on you; etc), so to see them cave in to a country like Russia is a real disappointment.

We are losing vast swathes of our digital past, and copyright stops us saving it

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It is hard to imagine the world without the Web. Collectively, we routinely access billions of Web pages without thinking about it. But we often take it for granted that the material we want to access will be there, both now and in the future. We all hit the dreaded “404 not found” error from time to time, but merely pass on to other pages. What we tend to ignore is how these online error messages are a flashing warning signal that something bad is happening to the World Wide Web. Just how bad is revealed in a new report from the Pew Research Center, based on an examination of half a million Web pages, which found:

A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This digital decay occurs at slightly different rates for different online material:

23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.

54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

These figures show that the problem we discussed a few weeks ago – that access to academic knowledge is at risk – is in fact far wider, and applies to just about everything that is online. Although the reasons for material disappearing vary greatly, the key obstacle to addressing that loss is the same across all fields. The copyright industry’s obsessive control of material, and the punitive laws that can be deployed against even the most trivial copyright infringement, mean that routine and multiple backup copies of key or historic online material are rarely made.

The main exception to that rule is the sterling work carried out by the Internet Archive, which was founded by Brewster Kahle, whose Kahle/Austin Foundation supports this blog. At the time of writing the Internet Archive holds copies of an astonishing 866 billion Web pages, many in multiple versions that chart their changes over time. It is a unique and invaluable resource.

It is also being sued by publishers for daring to share in a controlled way some of its holdings. That is, the one bulwark against losing vast swathes of our digital culture is being attacked by an industry that is largely to blame for the problem the Internet Archive is trying to solve. It’s another important reason why we must move away from the copyright system, and nullify the power it has to destroy, rather than create, our culture.

Source: We are losing vast swathes of our digital past, and copyright stops us saving it – Walled Culture

First-mover advantage found in the arts shows copyright isn’t necessary to protect innovative creativity

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One of the arguments sometimes made in defence of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say, to prevent less innovative creators from producing works that are closely based on new, successful ideas. However, this approach has led to constant arguments and court cases over how close a “closely based” work can be before it infringes on the copyright of others. A good example of this is the 2022 lawsuit involving Ed Sheeran, where is was argued that using just four notes of a scale constituted copyright infringement of someone else’s song employing the same tiny motif. A fascinating new paper looks at things from a different angle. It draws on the idea of “first-mover advantage”, the fact that:

individuals that move to a new market niche early on (“first movers”) obtain advantages that may lead to larger success, compared to those who move to this niche later. First movers enjoy a temporary near-monopoly: since they enter a niche early, they have little to no competition, and so they can charge larger prices and spend more time building a loyal customer base.

The paper explores the idea in detail for the world of music. Here, first-mover advantage means:

The artists and music producers who recognize the hidden potential of a new artistic technique, genre, or style, have bigger chances of reaching success. Having an artistic innovation that your competitors do not have or cannot quickly acquire may become advantageous on the winner-take-all artistic market.

Analysing nearly 700,000 songs across 110 different musical genres, the researchers found evidence that first-mover advantage was present in 91 of the genres. The authors point out that there is also anecdotal evidence of first-mover advantage in other arts:

For example, Agatha Christie—one of the recognized founders of “classical” detective novel—is also one of the best-selling authors ever. Similarly, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer—a canonical work in the genre of cyberpunk—is also one of the earliest books in this strand of science fiction. In films, the cult classic The Blair Witch Project is the first recognized member of the highly successful genre of found-footage horror fiction.

Although copyright may be present, first-mover advantage does not require it to operate – it is simply a function of being early with a new idea, which means that competition is scarce or non-existent. If further research confirms the wider presence of first-mover advantage in the creative world – for example, even where sharing-friendly CC licences are used – it will knock down yet another flimsy defence of copyright’s flawed and outdated intellectual monopoly

Source: First-mover advantage in the arts means copyright isn’t necessary to protect innovative creativity – Walled Culture

Japan’s Push To Make All Research Open Access is Taking Shape

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The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. From a report: In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025. The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration,” says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA. The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026. When the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced Japan’s pivot to OA in February, it also said that it would invest around $63 million to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

Source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/05/31/1748243/japans-push-to-make-all-research-open-access-is-taking-shape?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Quite ironic that the original article is behind a paywall at Nature.com 🙂

Anyway, if the public paid for it, then the public should get it. A bit hugely late, but well done.

Google Leak Reveals Thousands of Privacy Incidents

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Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media. From the report: Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people’s lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally. These include issues with Google’s own products or data collection practices; vulnerabilities in third party vendors that Google uses; or mistakes made by Google staff, contractors, or other people that have impacted Google systems or data. The incidents include everything from a single errant email containing some PII, through to substantial leaks of data, right up to impending raids on Google offices. When reporting an incident, employees give the incident a priority rating, P0 being the highest, P1 being a step below that. The database contains thousands of reports over the course of six years, from 2013 to 2018. In one 2016 case, a Google employee reported that Google Street View’s systems were transcribing and storing license plate numbers from photos. They explained that Google uses an algorithm to detect text in Street View imagery.

Source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/06/03/1655212/google-leak-reveals-thousands-of-privacy-incidents?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Adobe changes TOS, says it can republish what you made for free

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Adobe has decided that if you use its software, it can re-use anything you create. Considering you pay to use the software, that’s a bit grating.

4.2 Licenses to Your Content. Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate as intended, such as enabling you to share photos with others. Separately, section 4.6 (Feedback) below covers any Feedback that you provide to us.

Source: Legal

They say it’s to detect kiddie porn, people think it’s to train their AIs. Obviously, people are upset.

Time to start learning the free and (fortunately) great Photoshop alternative: Gimp.

YouTube’s Crackdown on Adblockers Makes Videos Unwatchable – now skips to end of video

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YouTube has been at war with adblockers for quite some time now and has employed various tactics to keep users off those extensions. Its most recent defense strategy is to skip right to the end of the video you’re playing. If you try replaying it, it’ll do that again. If you tap anywhere on the timeline, your video will buffer indefinitely. Here’s what it looks like in action.

[…]

one of its first moves was to send a pop-up warning saying, “Video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.” However, users could close that pop-up and resume watching their videos.

Next, it tried to make videos unplayable by showing a never-ending loading screen. Then it refused to do even that and would pop up an immovable prompt to disable the adblocker.

[…]

This latest move is frustrating, and that’s the point. There was a time when its ads were tolerable, but with the recent increase of ads on the video platform, users are finding it extremely hard to sit through a 20-second unskippable ad followed by a 5-second skippable one. Ad runtime isn’t proportionate to a video’s length, which adds to the bizarreness.

Google is aware of its monopoly over the video-sharing industry and has jacked up its ad-free Premium tier prices to $14 monthly. It has also extended its crackdown on mobile, resulting in buffering issues and error messages for users who dare to use an adblocker on their phones.

[…]

Users have also figured out workarounds. Some are switching to AdBlock alternatives, such as uBlock Origin, while others recommend browser substitutes like Brave to fix the issue. A few disappointed consumers are also considering bidding farewell to the platform.

[…]

Source: YouTube’s Crackdown on Adblockers Makes Videos Unwatchable

Samsung Requires Independent Repair Shops to Share Customer Data, Snitch on People and destroy phones Using Aftermarket Parts, Leaked Contract Shows

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In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

[…]

The contract also requires the “daily” uploading of details of each and every repair that an independent company does into a Samsung database called G-SPN “at the time of each repair,” which includes the customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier. 404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source. No provisions have been changed.

The use of aftermarket parts in repair is relatively common. This provision requires independent repair shops to destroy the devices of their own customers, and then to snitch on them to Samsung.

[…]

People have a right to use third-party parts under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, for one thing, and it’s hard to square this contact language with that basic consumer right.”

[…]

The contract shows the incredible level of control that Samsung has over “independent” repair shops, which need to sign this agreement to get repair parts from Samsung. Signing this contract does not even make a repair shop an “authorized” repair center, which is a distinction that requires shop owners to jump through even more hoops.

[…]

“This is exactly the kind of onerous, one-sided ‘agreement’ that necessitates the right-to-repair,” Kit Walsh, a staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation and right to repair expert told me. “The data collection is excessive. I may not have chosen to disclose my address or identity to Samsung, yet an added cost of repair—even at an independent shop—is giving that information up. In addition to the provision you mentioned about dismantling devices with third-party components, these create additional disincentives to getting devices repaired, which can harm both device security and the environment as repairable devices wind up in landfills.”

[…]

The contract also functionally limits the types of repairs these “independent” repair shops are allowed to do and does not authorize the stores to do repairs that require soldering or so-called board-level repair, which are increasingly common types of repairs.

Independent repair shops are also required to get a certification from an organization called WISE, which costs $200 annually and is an arm of the CTIA, a trade group made up of wireless companies like Verizon and AT&T that has repeatedly lobbied against right to repair laws. In effect, independent shops are required to fund an organization lobbying against their interests.

In 2020, Motherboard obtained a contract that Apple required independent repair companies to sign in order to get repair parts from the company. At the time, experts said that Apple’s contract was problematic because it allowed Apple to audit and inspect the shops at any time. The Samsung document is even more onerous because it requires them to essentially serve as enforcers for Samsung and requires the proactive sharing of consumer data.

[…]

Source: Samsung Requires Independent Repair Shops to Share Customer Data, Snitch on People Who Use Aftermarket Parts, Leaked Contract Shows

Netflix app update for Windows PCs will ditch downloads and offline viewing but give you stuff you never wanted.

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In the past few weeks, users have received notifications on their Netflix Windows indicating that a new update is coming. The update will ship with many new features and quality-of-life improvements, including support for watching live events, improved streaming quality, compatibility with ad-supported plans, and more.

Wait – who wants any of this stuff? What quality-of-life is improved here?

[…]

However, the update will also include a new change that won’t allow users to download movies or series via the Netflix app for offline viewing or when facing intermittent internet connection issues.

Source: An official Netflix app update for Windows PCs will ditch downloads and offline viewing following a crackdown on account sharing | Windows Central

So you get stuff you really don’t want to lose stuff you really do want – especially if you travel. Which most people do.

What are they thinking at Netflix? Well, I guess it’s out with the pirate hat again and download what I want to watch offline – even if it is available to me on a service I pay for…

Adobe threatens to sue Nintendo emulator Delta for its look-alike logo

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Delta, an emulator that can play Nintendo games, had to change its logo after Adobe threatened legal action. You’d think it would face trouble from Nintendo, seeing as it has been going after emulators these days, but no. It’s Adobe who’s going after the developer, which told TechCrunch that it first received an email from the company’s lawyer on May 7. Adobe warned Delta that their logos are too similar, with its app icon infringing on the well-known Adobe “A,” and asked it to change its logo so it wouldn’t violate the company’s rights. Delta reportedly received an email from Apple, as well, telling the developer that Adobe asked it to take down the emulator app.

A purple icon.
Delta

If you’ll recall, Apple started allowing retro game emulators on the App Store, as long as they don’t offer pirated games for download. Delta was one of the first to be approved for listing and was at the top of Apple’s charts for a while, which is probably why it caught Adobe’s attention. At the time of writing, it sits at number six in the ranking for apps in Entertainment with 17,100 ratings.

The developer told both Adobe and Apple that its logo was a stylized version of the Greek letter “delta,” and not the uppercase letter A. Regardless, it debuted a new logo, which looks someone took a sword to its old one to cut it in half. It’s a temporary solution, though — the developer said it’s releasing the “final” version of its new logo when Delta 1.6 comes out.

Source: Adobe threatens to sue Nintendo emulator Delta for its look-alike logo

Top EU court says there is no right to online anonymity, because copyright is more important

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A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that it is:

The Court, sitting as the Full Court, holds that the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights.

IP addresses refer to the identifying Internet number assigned to a user’s system when it is online. That may change each time someone uses the Internet, but if Internet Service Providers are required by law to retain information about who was assigned a particular address at a given time, then it is possible to carry out routine surveillance of people’s online activities. The CJEU has decided this is acceptable:

EU law does not preclude national legislation authorising the competent public authority, for the sole purpose of identifying the person suspected of having committed a criminal offence, to access the civil identity data associated with an IP address

The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.

As one of the groups that brought the original case, La Quadrature du Net, writes, this latest decision also has serious negative consequences for human rights in the EU:

Whereas in 2020, the CJEU considered that the retention of IP addresses constituted a serious interference with fundamental rights and that they could only be accessed, together with the civil identity of the Internet user, for the purpose of fighting serious crime or safeguarding national security, this is no longer true. The CJEU has reversed its reasoning: it now considers that the retention of IP addresses is, by default, no longer a serious interference with fundamental rights, and that it is only in certain cases that such access constitutes a serious interference that must be safeguarded with appropriate protection measures.

As a result, La Quadrature du Net says:

While in 2020 [the CJEU] stated that there was a right to online anonymity enshrined in the ePrivacy Directive, it is now abandoning it. Unfortunately, by giving the police broad access to the civil identity associated with an IP address and to the content of a communication, it puts a de facto end to online anonymity.

This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.

Source: Top EU court says there is no right to online anonymity, because copyright is more important – Walled Culture

Patent troll hits Microsoft with $242 million US verdict in Cortana lawsuit

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Microsoft (MSFT.O) must pay patent owner IPA Technologies $242 million, a federal jury in Delaware said on Friday after determining that Microsoft’s Cortana virtual-assistant software infringed an IPA patent.

The jury agreed with IPA after a week-long trial that Microsoft’s voice-recognition technology violates IPA’s patent rights in computer-communications software.
IPA is a subsidiary of patent-licensing company Wi-LAN, which is jointly owned by Canadian technology company Quarterhill (QTRH.TO)
, opens new tab and two investment firms. It bought the patent and others from SRI International’s Siri Inc, which Apple acquired in 2010 and whose technology it used in its Siri virtual assistant.
“We remain confident that Microsoft never infringed on IPA’s patents and will appeal,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Representatives for IPA and Wi-LAN did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the verdict.
IPA filed the lawsuit in 2018, accusing Microsoft of infringing patents related to personal digital assistants and voice-based data navigation.
The case was later narrowed to concern one IPA patent. Microsoft argued that it does not infringe and that the patent is invalid.
IPA has also sued Google and Amazon over its patents. Amazon defeated IPA’s lawsuit in 2021, and the Google case is still ongoing.

Source: Microsoft hit with $242 million US verdict in Cortana patent lawsuit | Reuters

So basically some company that never did anything except buy some rights from somewhere managed to extort a quarter of a billion dollars from MS. What a brilliant system copyright is!

iPhone users report deleted photos reappearing after update – turns out for Apple, delete doesn’t mean delete

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Some iPhone users are reportedly seeing photos they had previously deleted resurface on their devices ever since updating to the latest version of iOS.

The user reports originate from Reddit, and it’s not just a couple of Apple users experiencing issues. By our count, 16 people who deleted their photos say they’ve come back. The deleted photos are apparently marked as recently added, making it very obvious which have made a comeback.

One user says that even photos from 2010 reappeared, and that they have “deleted them repeatedly.”

The Register was able to find a handful of instances of X users reporting the same problem.

[…]

The recent complaints were preceded by a different Reddit thread where three users reported the exact same thing happening in the beta version of iOS 17.5.

[…]

Some users previously reported disappearing photos on older versions of iOS 17, and the fix may have resulted in both accidentally and purposefully deleted photos being brought back to life.

If the issue is genuine, it wouldn’t be the first time iCloud has kept its hands on data after it was supposedly deleted, despite Apple’s emphasis on the privacy of its users. Back in 2017, iCloud was patched to fix a glitch where user browser history was retained for up to a year or so.

Source: iPhone users report deleted photos reappearing after update • The Register

FCC fines America’s largest wireless carriers $200 million for selling customer location data without permission

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The Federal Communications Commission has slapped the largest mobile carriers in the US with a collective fine worth $200 million for selling access to their customers’ location information without consent. AT&T was ordered to pay $57 million, while Verizon has to pay $47 million. Meanwhile, Sprint and T-Mobile are facing a penalty with a total amount of $92 million together, since the companies had merged two years ago. The FCC conducted an in-depth investigation into the carriers’ unauthorized disclosure and sale of subscribers’ real-time location data after their activities came to light in 2018.

To sum up the practice in the words of FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel: The carriers sold “real-time location information to data aggregators, allowing this highly sensitive data to wind up in the hands of bail-bond companies, bounty hunters, and other shady actors.” According to the agency, the scheme started to unravel following public reports that a sheriff in Missouri was tracking numerous individuals by using location information a company called Securus gets from wireless carriers. Securus provides communications services to correctional facilities in the country.

While the carriers eventually ceased their activities, the agency said they continued operating their programs for a year after the practice was revealed and after they promised the FCC that they would stop selling customer location data. Further, they carried on without reasonable safeguards in place to ensure that the legitimate services using their customers’ information, such as roadside assistance and medical emergency services, truly are obtaining users’ consent to track their locations.

Source: FCC fines America’s largest wireless carriers $200 million for selling customer location data

Helldivers 2 PC players suddenly have to link to a PSN account and they’re not being chill about it

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Nintendo sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice for over 8,000 GitHub repositories hosting code from the Yuzu Switch emulator, which the Zelda maker previously described as enabling “piracy at a colossal scale.” The sweeping takedown comes two months after Yuzu’s creators quickly settled a lawsuit with Nintendo and its notoriously trigger-happy legal team for $2.4 million.

GamesIndustry.biz first reported on the DMCA notice, affecting 8,535 GitHub repos. Redacted entities representing Nintendo assert that the Yuzu source code contained in the repos “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.”

GitHub wrote on the notice that developers will have time to change their content before it’s disabled. In keeping with its developer-friendly approach and branding, the Microsoft-owned platform also offered legal resources and guidance on submitting DMCA counter-notices.

Nintendo’s legal blitz, perhaps not coincidentally, comes as game emulators are enjoying a resurgence. Last month, Apple loosened its restrictions on retro game players in the App Store (likely in response to regulatory threats), leading to the Delta emulator establishing itself as the de facto choice and reaching the App Store’s top spot. Nintendo may have calculated that emulators’ moment in the sun threatened its bottom line and began by squashing those that most immediately imperiled its income stream.

Sadly, Nintendo’s largely undefended legal assault against emulators ignores a crucial use for them that isn’t about piracy. Game historians see the software as a linchpin of game preservation. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make a part of history obsolete for future generations, as their corresponding hardware will eventually be harder to come by.

[…]

This has royally pissed off PC players, though it’s worth noting that it’s free to make a PSN account. This has led to review bombing on Steam and many promises to abandon the game when the linking becomes a requirement, according to a report by Kotaku. The complaints range from frustration over adding yet another barrier to entry after downloading an 80GB game to fears that the PSN account would likely be hacked. While it is true that Sony was the target of a huge hack that impacted 77 million PSN accounts, that was back in 2011. Obama was still in his first term. Also worth noting? Steam was hacked in 2011, impacting 35 million accounts.

[…]

Source: Helldivers 2 PC players suddenly have to link to a PSN account and they’re not being chill about it

Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns

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Nintendo sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice for over 8,000 GitHub repositories hosting code from the Yuzu Switch emulator, which the Zelda maker previously described as enabling “piracy at a colossal scale.” The sweeping takedown comes two months after Yuzu’s creators quickly settled a lawsuit with Nintendo and its notoriously trigger-happy legal team for $2.4 million.

GamesIndustry.biz first reported on the DMCA notice, affecting 8,535 GitHub repos. Redacted entities representing Nintendo assert that the Yuzu source code contained in the repos “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.”

GitHub wrote on the notice that developers will have time to change their content before it’s disabled. In keeping with its developer-friendly approach and branding, the Microsoft-owned platform also offered legal resources and guidance on submitting DMCA counter-notices.

Nintendo’s legal blitz, perhaps not coincidentally, comes as game emulators are enjoying a resurgence. Last month, Apple loosened its restrictions on retro game players in the App Store (likely in response to regulatory threats), leading to the Delta emulator establishing itself as the de facto choice and reaching the App Store’s top spot. Nintendo may have calculated that emulators’ moment in the sun threatened its bottom line and began by squashing those that most immediately imperiled its income stream.

Sadly, Nintendo’s largely undefended legal assault against emulators ignores a crucial use for them that isn’t about piracy. Game historians see the software as a linchpin of game preservation. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make a part of history obsolete for future generations, as their corresponding hardware will eventually be harder to come by.

Source: Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns

Russia arrests in absentia former world chess champion Garry Kasparov on foreign agent and terrorist charges

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Russia has arrested Garry Kasparov and charged him in connection with foreign agent and terrorist charges – much to the former chess champion’s amusement.

The city court in Syktyvkar, the largest city in Russia‘s northwestern Komi region, announced it had arrested the grandmaster in absentia alongside former Russian parliament member Gennady Gudkov, Ivan Tyutrin co-founder of the Free Russia Forum – which has been designated as an ‘undesirable organisation in the country – as well as former environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova.

All were charged with setting up a terrorist society, according to the court’s press service. As all were charged in their absence, none were physically held in custody.

[…]

Kasparov responded to the court’s bizarre arrest statement in an April 24 post shared on X, formerly Twitter. “In absentia is definitely the best way I’ve ever been arrested,” he said. “Good company, as well. I’m sure we’re all equally honoured that Putin’s terror state is spending time on this that would otherwise go persecuting and murdering.”

Kasparov has found himself in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s firing line after he voiced his opposition to the country’s leader. He has also pursued pro-democracy initiatives in Russia. But he felt unable to continue living in Russia after he was jailed and allegedly beaten by police in 2012, according to the Guardian. He was granted Croatian citizenship in 2014 following repeated difficulties in Russia.

[…]

Source: Russia arrests former world chess champion Garry Kasparov on foreign agent and terrorist charges – World News – Mirror Online

People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them

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Last month the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a major story on how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack up your rates.

The absolute bare minimum you could could expect from the auto industry here is that they’re doing this in a way that’s clear to car owners. But of course they aren’t; they’re burying “consent” deep in the mire of some hundred-page end user agreement nobody reads, usually not related to the car purchase — but the apps consumers use to manage roadside assistance and other features.

Since Kashmir’s story was published, she says she’s been inundated with complaints by consumers about similar behavior. She’s even discovered that she’s one of the folks GM spied on and tattled to insurers about. In a follow up story, she recounts how she and her husband bought a Chevy Bolt, were auto-enrolled in a driver assistance program, then had their data (which they couldn’t access) sold to insurers.

GM’s now facing 10 different federal lawsuits from customers pissed off that they were surreptitiously tracked and then forced to pay significantly more for insurance:

“In 10 federal lawsuits filed in the last month, drivers from across the country say they did not knowingly sign up for Smart Driver but recently learned that G.M. had provided their driving data to LexisNexis. According to one of the complaints, a Florida owner of a 2019 Cadillac CTS-V who drove it around a racetrack for events saw his insurance premium nearly double, an increase of more than $5,000 per year.”

GM (and some apologists) will of course proclaim that this is only fair that reckless drivers pay more, but that’s generally not how it works. Pressured for unlimited quarterly returns, insurance companies will use absolutely anything they find in the data to justify rising rates.

[…]

Automakers — which have long had some of the worst privacy reputations in all of tech — are one of countless industries that lobbied relentlessly for decades to ensure Congress never passed a federal privacy law or regulated dodgy data brokers. And that the FTC — the over-burdened regulator tasked with privacy oversight — lacks the staff, resources, or legal authority to police the problem at any real scale.

The end result is just a parade of scandals. And if Hill were so inclined, she could write a similar story about every tech sector in America, given everything from your smart TV and electricity meter to refrigerator and kids’ toys now monitor your behavior and sell access to those insights to a wide range of dodgy data broker middlemen, all with nothing remotely close to ethics or competent oversight.

And despite the fact that this free for all environment is resulting in no limit of dangerous real-world harms, our Congress has been lobbied into gridlock by a cross-industry coalition of companies with near-unlimited budgets, all desperately hoping that their performative concerns about TikTok will distract everyone from the fact we live in a country too corrupt to pass a real privacy law.

Source: People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them | Techdirt

Ring Spy Doorbell customers get measly $5.6 million in refunds in privacy settlement

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In a 2023 complaint, the FTC accused the doorbell camera and home security provider of allowing its employees and contractors to access customers’ private videos. Ring allegedly used such footage to train algorithms without consent, among other purposes.

Ring was also charged with failing to implement key security protections, which enabled hackers to take control of customers’ accounts, cameras and videos. This led to “egregious violations of users’ privacy,” the FTC noted.

The resulting settlement required Ring to delete content that was found to be unlawfully obtained, establish stronger security protections

[…]

the FTC is sending 117,044 PayPal payments to impacted consumers who had certain types of Ring devices — including indoor cameras — during the timeframes that the regulators allege unauthorized access took place.

[…]

Earlier this year, the California-based company separately announced that it would stop allowing police departments to request doorbell camera footage from users, marking an end to a feature that had drawn criticism from privacy advocates.

Source: Ring customers get $5.6 million in refunds in privacy settlement | AP News

Considering the size of Ring and the size of the customer base, this is a very very light tap on the wrist for delivering poor security and something that spies on everything on the street.