Saturday, November 23

USA

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Former Yahoo CEO, Equifax CEO to testify at U.S. Senate hearing
2Nov By reutersNo Comments
USA

Former Yahoo CEO, Equifax CEO to testify at U.S. Senate hearing

Former Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer and the current and former CEOs of Equifax Inc will testify before a U.S. Senate panel on Nov. 8 on two massive data breaches, the committee said Wednesday. Verizon Communications Inc, the largest U.S. wireless operator, acquired most of Yahoo Inc’s assets in June. Yahoo disclosed in October that a 2013 data breach affected all 3 billion of its accounts, compared with an estimate of more than 1 billion disclosed in December. The Senate Commerce Committee said Mayer, interim Equifax CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. and former Equifax CEO Richard Smith would testify, as well as Karen Zacharia, Verizon’s deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer. Verizon and Equifax did not immediately comment. Mayer plans to appear, a representative fo...
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U.S. Senators Hammer Facebook For Power Over Elections
1Nov By reutersNo Comments
USA

U.S. Senators Hammer Facebook For Power Over Elections

U.S. senators on Tuesday pressed Facebook Inc’s chief lawyer on why the company did not catch 2016 election ads bought using Russian rubles, why its investigation of them took so long and how much it knows about its 5 million advertisers. Democrats and Republicans at the Senate crime subcommittee hearing fired questions for much of two hours at Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, who said that in retrospect the company should have done more. “In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens. There are signals we missed,” Stretch said under questioning from Democratic Senator Al Franken about how the company missed political ads bought with Russian money. Stretch called the Russia-based ads “reprehensible” for their political divisiveness. The hearing marked the first time tech exec...
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Russian Groups Made 43 Hrs Of YouTube Video During U.S. Elections
31Oct By RishabhNo Comments
USA

Russian Groups Made 43 Hrs Of YouTube Video During U.S. Elections

Google has recently revealed reports about Kremlin-linked groups spending around $4,700 on advertising platforms, during the 2016 U.S. elections. These ads were although not targeted to any specific group of users or no evidence of targeting by geography were found. It was also revealed by Google, that its YouTube, which strictly prohibit things like ​hate ​speech, ​violent ​or ​graphic ​content; found 18 channels closely associated with this campaign that made videos, which were in English-language, public, with the political content in them. There ​were ​1,108 ​such ​videos ​uploaded, ​representing- ​43 ​hours ​of ​content ​and ​totaling ​309,000 U.S. ​views ​from ​June ​2015 ​to ​November ​2016. The report also said that these “videos ​were ​not ​targeted ​to ​the ​U.S.” and th...
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Facebook Says 126M Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts
31Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Facebook Says 126M Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts

Facebook Inc said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Facebook’s latest data on the Russia-linked posts - possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age - far exceeds the company’s previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter Inc separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company’s written testimony said. That estimate is up from a ...
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Twitter Overstated Its Monthly Users Figures For 3 Years
27Oct By PriyankaNo Comments
USA

Twitter Overstated Its Monthly Users Figures For 3 Years

Twitter said on Thursday that it overstated its monthly user numbers since 2014 after accidentally including third-party application's data in its count. The revelation came when the company reported that its net loss had slowed in the third quarter and that the number of daily active users had risen by 14 per cent. The disclosure, however, could further damage Twitter's reputation as the company criticizes Russia's role in its efforts to interfere in the presidential election and complains about what critics have called scattershot efforts to prevent abuse and harassment on its platform, and skepticism among some investors, who are concerned that global growth in users is falling. At least initially investors were not particularly worried about the excessive number of users. Twit...
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25Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Twitter To Label Election Ads After U.S. Regulatory Threat

Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it would add labels to election-related advertisements and say who is behind each of them, after a threat of regulation from the United States over the lack of disclosure for political spending on social media. Twitter, acting a month after Facebook Inc launched a similar overhaul of political ads, said in a blog post it would start a website so people could see identities of buyers, targeting demographics and total ad spend by election advertisers. Silicon Valley social media firms and the political ads that run on their websites have generally been free of the disclaimers and other regulatory demands that U.S. authorities impose on television, radio and satellite services. Calls for that to change have grown, however, after Twitter, Facebook and Alpha...
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Apple Hit With Trademark Lawsuit Over iPhone X “Animoji” Feature
21Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Apple Hit With Trademark Lawsuit Over iPhone X “Animoji” Feature

A Japanese software company is suing Apple Inc in a U.S. court over the trademark for the term “animoji”, alleging the U.S. technology company stole the name to use on a feature of its iPhone X. Tokyo-based Emonster kk sued Apple on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, saying it holds the U.S. trademark on the term animoji and that Apple’s use of the word is a “textbook case” of deliberate infringement. An Apple spokesman declined to comment. Apple’s animoji feature allow users to animate the facial expressions of emojis using facial recognition technology. It will be included on the iPhone X which is scheduled for release in November. Phil Schiller, Apple’s chief marketing officer, touted the animoji feature during the iPhone X launch event on Sept. 12, calling it a “g...
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Microsoft Responded Quietly After Detecting Secret Database Hack In 2013
17Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Microsoft Responded Quietly After Detecting Secret Database Hack In 2013

Microsoft Corp’s secret internal database for tracking bugs in its own software was broken into by a highly sophisticated hacking group more than four years ago, according to five former employees, in only the second known breach of such a corporate database. The company did not disclose the extent of the attack to the public or its customers after its discovery in 2013, but the five former employees described it to Reuters in separate interviews. Microsoft declined to discuss the incident. The database contained descriptions of critical and unfixed vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used software in the world, including the Windows operating system. Spies for governments around the globe and other hackers covet such information because it shows them how to create tools for e...
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Tesla Fired Hundreds of Employees in Past Week
14Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Tesla Fired Hundreds of Employees in Past Week

Luxury electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc fired about 400 employees this week, including associates, team leaders and supervisors, a former employee told Reuters on Friday. The dismissals were a result of a company-wide annual review, Tesla said in an emailed statement, without confirming the number of employees leaving the company. “It’s about 400 people ranging from associates to team leaders to supervisors. We don’t know how high up it went,” said the former employee, who worked on the assembly line and did not want to be identified. Though Tesla cited performance as the reason for the firings, the source told Reuters he was fired in spite of never having been given a bad review. RELATED Tesla To Raise $1.5 Bn Junk Bond To Fund Model 3 Production The Palo Alto, Californ...
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Uber Appeals On Legal Decision To Revoke Its London Licence
13Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Uber Appeals On Legal Decision To Revoke Its London Licence

Uber lodged a court appeal on Friday to overturn a decision by London’s transport regulator that stripped the taxi app of its operating licence in its most important European market, the first stop on what is set to be a long legal road. Transport for London (TfL) shocked the Silicon Valley firm last month by deeming it unfit to run a taxi service and refusing to renew its licence, citing its approach to reporting serious criminal offences and background checks on drivers. The appeal marks the beginning of months of legal wrangling in a battle that had pitched one of the world’s richest cities against a Silicon Valley giant known for forays into new markets across the globe that have stoked competition for established cab companies. Uber, whose backers include Goldman Sachs and Bl...
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Google Uncovered Russia-Backed Ads on YouTube, Gmail : Source
10Oct By reutersNo Comments
USA

Google Uncovered Russia-Backed Ads on YouTube, Gmail : Source

Google has discovered Russian operatives spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads on its YouTube, Gmail and Google Search products in an effort to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a person briefed on the company’s probe told Reuters on Monday. The ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated entity that bought ads on Facebook Inc, but may indicate a broader Russian online disinformation effort, according to the source, who was not authorized to discuss details of the confidential investigation by Alphabet Inc’s Google. Microsoft Corp said separately on Monday that it was looking at whether Russians bought U.S. election ads on its Bing search engine or other Microsoft-owned products and platforms. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment further. ...
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