By Aaron Kesel

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California tested Amazon’s facial Rekognition software and the program erroneously and hilariously identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for crimes...

Oh, the irony…Amazon’s new facial recognition software identified 28 members of Congress as criminals. This is pretty upsetting for statists everywhere as their precious masters are being “mislabeled.”

(* I see where The Duck is doing something about the google practise of burying stories that don't pass muster for. pushing their agenda , in the spirit of competitiveness )

"Twitter 'SHADOW BANNING' prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! "

YouTube has removed four clips shared by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after the popular radio host used his YouTube channel to denounce Muslim immigrants in Europe and the creators of a transgender cartoon.

The YouTube videos, which included footage of a man pushing a child to the ground, were shared by the Austin-based user on his Infowars website.

YouTube, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet Inc, has since removed the videos for promoting 'child endangerment and hate speech'.

Infowars posted a statement claiming YouTube had slapped the Jones' channel with a 'community strike,' meaning he cannot broadcast live on YouTube for 90 days.

HPC admin? Feeling slighted that all the good Spectre/Meltdown mitigation benchmarks ignore big iron? Fear not, a bunch of MIT boffins are on your side.

Unfortunately, what they found is that network connections, disk accesses, and computational workloads can all be affected by the fixes, whether in the operating system or the microcode.

Shares of Facebook dipped more than 20% to $173.73 in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The stock has risen about 23.2% so far this year.

By Wednesday evening, almost $150 billion had been wiped off of Facebook's market cap as a result of the stock's plunge.

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth dive roughly $20 billion to $63.6 billion. At the closing bell on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was worth $82.4 billion, according to Forbes.

Total monthly active users came in at 2.23 billion, which fell short of analysts' estimated 2.25 billion.

Users in Europe dropped from 377 million to 376 million, partly as a result of the new General Data Protection Regulation rules.

Facebook executives made investors even more nervous when they warned of further revenue deceleration in a call with analysts.

The impetus for this change is, surprisingly, Windows 10 itself. The latest upgrade to version 1803 has been a dumpster fire for many, and it’s only getting worse for anyone who hasn’t installed it on their machines yet. First the upgrade wouldn’t complete on computers running Avast Antivirus, then there were the BSODs and corrupt partitions on Intel and Toshiba solid state drives. There were freezing issues with Chrome and Edge when running GPU-accelerated workloads in the browser, and the black screen blanking and shader cache issues with the latest NVIDIA drivers. Then people started seeing broken installs, DPC latency spikes that would de-sync audio, various keys not working; heck, even Internet Explorer 11 is missing, and that was intentional.

By Aaron Kesel

Russia is the latest to propose draconian legislation to stop the spreading of “fake news.”

Russia has proposed the insane notion of fining social media companies. Under the new legislation, websites would be responsible for deleting inaccurate user comments...

A Mozilla executive says Google's redesign has made YouTube slower on Firefox and Edge.

Chris Peterson, the software community's technical program manager, tweeted on Tuesday that the video sharing site loads at a fifth of the speed on non-Chrome browsers due to its architecture, as first reported by Sofpedia.

YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR
— Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018

The above mentioned extension works for me.

The system that allowed spy agency GCHQ access to vast amounts of personal data from telecoms companies was unlawful for more than a decade, a surveillance watchdog has ruled.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal said that successive foreign secretaries had delegated powers without oversight.

Typing dog into Google Translate eight times with the settings on Hawaiian and translating it to English reveals the bizarre message: 'Do you want a dog to accept Jesus and be saved?'

Repeating the word 20 times triggers a response of: 'Doomsday Clock is three minutes at 12. We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments [sic] in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return.'

Typing 'dog' into Google Translate 18 times and selecting the input language as Maori results in the following message: 'Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return.'

Vulnerabilities in a range of robot vacuum cleaners allow miscreants to access the gadgets' camera, and remote-control the gizmos.

Security researchers at Positive Technologies (PT) this week disclosed that Dongguan Diqee 360 smart vacuum cleaners contain security flaws that hackers can exploit to snoop on people through the night-vision camera and mic, and take control of the Roomba rip-off.

Think of it as a handy little spy-on-wheels.

Google Chrome users who visit unencrypted websites will be confronted with warnings from tomorrow.

The changes will come for surfers using the latest version of Google Chrome, version 68. Any web page not running HTTPS with a valid TLS certificate will show a "Not secure" warning in the Chrome address bar from version 68 onwards.

A European study revealed that mobile health apps were sending health-related data to third-party companies, harming the privacy of its users. This study was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Pireus in Greece and Rovira I Virgili University in Spain.

The research team analyzed 20 well-known, free mobile health apps that could be downloaded from Google Play. The studied health apps had to have at least 100,000 to 10 million downloads each and a minimum rating of 3.5 out of five (in terms of popularity). These apps managed, stored, and monitored the biomedical data of their users, such as health condition, diseases, or medical to-do lists.

Fraudsters are selling credit card and bank details stolen from British consumers on hundreds of open forums accessed through Google searches.

The internet giant stands accused of fuelling the ‘prolific’ trade in private financial information.

Marketing themselves with online adverts, hackers around the globe offer stolen ID details for as little as £4, with discounts for bulk buyers.

To lure punters, the criminals openly publish online thousands of ‘freebies’ giving information about select UK-based victims.

This can include their full names, dates of birth, bank, credit card and National Insurance numbers, email addresses and passwords, bank security questions and answers, and mother’s maiden names.

When David Couldwell received a call on his landline from a BT engineer explaining that his internet router had been hacked and urgent security tests were needed, he was only too willing to help.

But unbeknown to David, the call was not from BT. It was from a fraudster who, by taking control of his computer remotely, removed almost £7,800 from his bank and saving accounts with NatWest.

By Aaron Kesel

Google was fined a mere $5 billion by the European Union and ordered to change the way it puts search and web browser apps on Android mobile devices in a global record for antitrust penalties, ABC News reported.

According to EU officials, Google’s terms for licensing its full-featured version of its Android OS, requires device makers to pre-install Google apps like Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and the Play Store. This agreement violates antitrust laws and puts competing products at an unfair disadvantage, they stated...

Join us for the Decentralization & Self--Ownership Day with Jeff Berwick (The Dollar Vigilante) & Luke Rudkowski (We Are Change) LIVE from Vilnius. Be with us at the #PillarUnconference!

The electronic-payments industry, which gets a cut from every electronic transaction, wants to kill cash. But wait…

The tech giant failed to have enough servers to handle the surge in traffic, resulting in Amazon cutting off international traffic, according to CNBC, which obtained the documents.

Amazon also had to launch a scaled-down homepage to help manage the issues.

Earlier this month it came out that among Facebook’s myriad algorithmically induced advertising categories was an entry for users whom the platform’s data mining systems believed might be interested in treason against their government.

By Aaron Kesel

According to a tweet by the internationally known organization WikiLeaks, its founder’s fate may be decided within a mere few days or weeks, and Julian Assange might be handed over on a silver platter by Ecuador to the UK government. Then presumably Assange will be handed over to the U.S. government and extradited to the United States.

The head of RT, Margarita Simonyan, tweeted in Russian that her sources indicate Assange will be handed over to UK authorities...

Huawei equipment could pose a threat to national security, senior British security officials have cautioned.

Intelligence experts say they can only provide limited assurances that the Chinese company is not a risk to broadband and phone networks in the UK.

The recommendation will be made in an as-yet unpublished annual report signed off by the GCHQ spy agency, according to inside sources.

Huawei, one of the world's biggest producer of telecoms systems, is a major supplier of broadband and mobile telephone network equipment in Britain.

To download your ‘secret’ Facebook file, click at the top right of Facebook’s navigation bar and select Settings. Then click “Download a copy of your Facebook data” beneath General Account Settings and click the green button. Then wait ten minutes and you should receive an email letting you know that “surveillance capitalism” is alive and well.

convenient, wasn't it?

Security experts discovered 90 per cent of login attempts on e-commerce sites are from cyber criminals attempting to access customers' account and payment details.

Banks (58 per cent) and airlines (60 per cent) are also highly targeted by hackers.

Cyber criminals attempt to gain access to an online account by flooding it with email and passwords leaked in previous data breaches – a practice known as 'credential stuffing'.

Those who use the same combination of email address and password across multiple online services are likely to fall victim to this type of attack.

Apple is deliberately slowing down its £2,700 ($3,500) MacBook Pro, according to a prominent gadget expert.

The high-end notebook, which launched earlier this week, purportedly has problems with overheating and Apple is restricting its processing power to compensate.

By Aaron Kesel

Thousands of leading scientists have urged their colleagues against helping governments create killer robots, making the movie The Terminator a reality.

2,400 scientists have pledged to block the development of lethal weaponry using Artificial Intelligence, The Guardian reported.

In other words, killer robots, that could eventually develop a mind of their own and take over the world. Scientists have vowed they will not support robots “that can identify and attack people without human oversight.”...

Assange pointed out that many high up Google employee names appear within Clinton’s leaked email transcripts, a searchable list of which Assange has compiled here. A name that appears with regularity is that of Jared Cohen, the founder of ‘Google Ideas’ – now rebranded as ‘Jigsaw’. Cohen’s team at Google was revealed to be working with Clinton alongside Al Jazeera in attempts to influence regime change in Syria following the publishing of Clinton’s emails by Wikileaks.

“We should understand that Google… is intensely aligned with U.S. exceptionalism… personally at the top aligned with Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and almost certainly once Hillary Clinton becomes president, those people in Google, like Jared Cohen, will be placed into positions around the new Clinton presidency” said Assange, heavily implying that Google and it’s employees could directly benefit from a Clinton presidency.

Through five experiments carried out in two countries, the study found that the search engine manipulation effect (SEME) could even be used to determine an election outcome if the proportion of undecided voters is calculated first. SEME is described as a "virtually invisible" form of social influence that is currently not subject to any specific regulations anywhere in the world.

"What the research shows is that when a candidate is ranked higher on Google, that shifts the votes of undecided voters towards that candidate because we've all learned they have such incredible trust in those rankings," Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behaviour Research and Technology and co-author of the study, told WhoWhatWhy. "Some 50% of all of our clicks go to the top two [search results] and [more than] 90% of all clicks go on the first page.

Research I have been directing in recent years suggests that Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated, according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson.

Given that many elections are won by small margins, this gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide.

Hackers say they will leak patient and employee records stolen from a Canadian healthcare provider unless they are paid off.

The records include medical histories and contact information for tens of thousands of home-care patients in Ontario, Canada, and belong to CarePartners.

This week we reported on an email offering £70 to do a survey that looked like it was sent by Facebook. The social media giant said it was a scam.

That reply came when This is Money contacted Facebook. We were told that it was a scam and as such, to report it to its scam centre.

But then a day later something strange happened: Facebook got back in touch with a U-turn - the email was genuine after all.

That's a pretty embarrassing state of affairs for Facebook - and it's disappointing for This is Money because it means that we reported something we had told was true, only to discover that wasn't the case.

So, how did this all happen and what does it say about how difficult everyday people find it to tell scammers and genuine messages apart?

All over the western world banks are shutting down cash machines and branches. They are trying to push you into using their digital payments and digital banking infrastructure. Just like Google wants everyone to access and navigate the broader internet via its privately controlled search portal, so financial institutions want everyone to access and navigate the broader economy through their systems.

A bombshell revelation on the security of voting in the United States has just surfaced in the form of a letter from the country’s largest voting machine manufacturer. The company, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) admitted that despite denying previous allegations of its voting systems coming installed with remote-access software, their systems did, indeed, allow for remote connections.