Add another one to the list of scams soldiers should be looking out for. Apparently now internet grifters are pretending to have hacked your computer’s camera and taken videos of you or your family, and they’re threatening to release them unless you pay up.

Army Criminal Investigation Command is warning soldiers and families to beware of this “hijacked webcam” scam, according to a Thursday release from the Army.

“This is a scam. Do not send any payment to the blackmailer even if you receive an email specifically addressed to you,” CID Special Agent Daniel Andrews, with the Computer Crime Investigative Unit, said in the release. “Sometimes the email includes one or more of your real usernames and seems to directly target you.”

The head of Apple on Wednesday endorsed tough privacy laws for both Europe and the U.S. and renewed the technology giant's commitment to protecting personal data, which he warned was being 'weaponized' against users.

Speaking at an international conference on data privacy, Apple CEO Tim Cook applauded European Union authorities for bringing in a strict new data privacy law this year and said the iPhone maker fully supports a U.S. federal privacy law.

Cook's remarks, along with comments due later from Google and Facebook top bosses, in the European Union's home base in Brussels, underscore how the U.S. tech giants are jostling to curry favor in the region as regulators tighten their scrutiny.

'We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance,' Cook said. 'And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them.'

The city of San Francisco now has a new app that allows users to report poop in public places. The city, under complete totalitarian leftist control, has a large homeless population thanks to unaffordable housing and the high costs of living in the city.

Created by a tech-savvy resident, the SnapCrap app allows users to take photos of errant public human feces and send those photos to city management using the city’s 311 information hotline, which serves as San Francisco’s official “poop-reporting” phone number. According to the Daily Wire, Sean Miller, the app’s creator, told NBC‘s local affiliate that he was “inspired” to launch the poop-reporting system after moving to San Francisco and finding himself forced to step over human waste lying in the middle of city sidewalks, a phenomenon he hadn’t experienced in his home state of Vermont.

Apple CEO Tim Cook blasted Silicon Valley tech companies and their abuse of user privacy in a keynote address at a privacy conference in Brussels Wednesday, saying personal information is being "weaponized against us with military efficiency."

"Every day, billions of dollars change hands, and countless decisions are made, on the basis of our likes and dislikes, our friends and families, our relationships and conversations. Our wishes and fears, our hopes and dreams," Cook said. "These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold."

"Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions," Cook said.

Apple and its chief executive have long touted personal privacy, distancing themselves from recent, growing scandals among tech companies — but the comments from Cook are some of the strongest to date.

Apple’s latest iteration of iOS has reportedly turned the GrayKey hacking device into an expensive doorstop. Law enforcement around the world has taken to using GrayKey to break into locked iPhones but it appears Apple has finally gotten ahead of the device’s crafty manufacturers. For now.

It’s still unclear what exact change could have been made to shut GrayKey out. Previous reporting has told us that the tool uses a workaround to brute force its way in by guessing a users’ password until it gets it right. Apple has protections in place to stop that kind of tactic and GrayShift’s methods are a closely held secret. Not much is known about the company. In March, Forbes reported that GrayShift counts at least one ex-Apple security engineer as part of its team. You can’t even view its website without a login given to members of law enforcement, though there have been indications that it works with private entities in some capacity as well.

Purge of alt-media by FB is ‘us pushing back, just a beginning’ – censorship insider.

An employee of a leading Washington DC think tank has reportedly taken credit for the resent purge of alternative media by Facebook and Twitter, claiming it to be necessary to fight against ‘fake news’ from Russia and China.
In the latest act of apparent censorship of political speech online, US-based tech giants this month shut down hundreds of user accounts. Some belonged to well-established alternative media outlets with hundreds of thousands of followers, like The Free Thought Project or The Anti Media. A senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a leading think tank advocating US global supremacy, seems to have at least partially taken credit for this.

“Russia, China, and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system,” Jamie Fly said.

Two of the largest cryptocurrency companies, Coinbase and Circle, are joining forces to establish more ground rules in the quickly evolving asset class.

The start-ups announced a joint-venture known as the "CENTRE Consortium" on Tuesday, which they say aims at speeding up adoption of cryptocurrencies backed by actual government currencies like the U.S. dollar.

"Coinbase and Circle share a common vision of an open global financial system built on crypto rails and blockchain infrastructure, and realizing this vision requires industry leaders to collaborate to build interoperable protocols and standards," Circle co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville said in a news release Tuesday.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million US in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history.

The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a two-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren't disclosed until 2016.

It adds to the financial fallout from a security lapse that provided a mortifying end to Yahoo's existence as an independent company and former CEO Marissa Mayer's six-year reign.

Yahoo revealed the problem after it had already negotiated a $4.83-billion deal to sell its digital services to Verizon Communications. It then had to discount that price by $350 million to reflect its tarnished brand and the spectre of other potential costs stemming from the breach.

A privacy expert tasked with protecting personal data within a Google-backed smart city project has resigned as her pro-privacy guidelines would largely be ignored by participants.
“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in a resignation letter to Google sister company Sidewalk Labs.

“I felt I had no choice because I had been told by Sidewalk Labs that all of the data collected will be de-identified at source,” she added.

Cavoukian was an acting consultant involved in the plan by Canada’s Waterfront Toronto to develop a smart city neighborhood in the city’s Quayside development. She had created an initiative called Privacy by Design that aimed to ensure citizens’ personal data would be protected.

Once it became apparent that citizen privacy could not be guaranteed, Cavoukian decided it was time to leave the project:

HERE ARE SOME SOCIAL MEDIA ALTERNATIVES TO CHECK OUT.

Before we get into the alternatives, please understand that all of them will start small. None of them will be able to take on Big Tech without a lot of help and support. We’ve gotten used to free social media because the companies with whom we’ve dealt have virtually raped us, reading our so-called “private” messages, and pillaging our date to sell to the highest bidders. So really, it isn’t that free after all.

You probably won’t find your parents, your best friend from kindergarten, and your Aunt Suzie on these platforms – not yet, anyway. But what you WILL be able to do is speak without fear of censorship. You’ll be able to find your favorite alternative media sources there and find answers that simply aren’t supported by the mainstream.

The only way to change this dystopian atmosphere is to actually make changes ourselves. Go where the freedom is!

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It has been the primary driving force behind all the major film and television releases in the last 10 years, such as with the Marvel and Star Wars film franchises.

ZDNet's parent company, CBS, is no exception. It's been making quite a go of it -- taking advantage of that nostalgia trend by re-casting familiar iconic characters on Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All-Access. In CBS prime time, the revival of Hawaii Five-O is renewed for its 9th season. And now, so has Magnum, P.I., as if it was back from the dead, sans Tom Selleck's mustache.

A BOUT OF NOSTALGIA
A fondness for reviving old brands is happening with tech as well. Palm seems to think that people have the same attachment to tech legacies as we do stuff like Luke Skywalker and Mister Spock. But I digress.

Google is not covered by the draft law intending to limit foreign participation in news aggregators, Deputy Head of the Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor Vadim Subbotin told TASS on Monday.

"Traffic at the time of considering the issue regarding its inclusion into the register of news aggregators was insufficient," Subbotin said. "It is not included into the register of news aggregators now," he noted.

Google "is not covered" at present by the submitted draft law in case it is approved, Subbotin added.

Authors of the draft law say in the explanatory note that "restrictions are offered for the purpose of preventing the threat to public order in Russia and creating thereby comfortable conditions for development of the civil society." Provisions of the bill stipulate a six-month term to bring constituent documents of companies in compliance with new rules.

Lu Wei, once the gatekeeper of the internet for the entire population of China, pleaded guilty on Friday to abuse of power and accepting what amounted to US$4.6 million in bribes over the span of his 15-year career.

Lu Wei also made a final statement to the court, and admitted guilt and expressed regret,” Xinhua said.

Wei became the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in 2014, after a career in which he rose to become the director of the state news agency Xinhua, then worked at the Beijing municipal party committee, and the party’s Central Publicity Committee.

As head of the CAC, Wei controlled China’s notorious regime of internet censorship—which included blocking access to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and introducing criminal charges against citizens who posted banned content.

The New York Police Department has suspended the use of almost 3,000 body cameras after one exploded, leaving some of the city’s police force unrecorded for the foreseeable future. According to studies, not much will change.
An NYPD officer noticed smoke rising from his camera on Saturday, and took it off before it exploded. Nobody was injured in the incident, but the department instructed all officers equipped with Vievu LE-5 body cameras to return them to their precincts.

“Nothing is more important than the safety of our officers, and equipping the NYPD with the best equipment is a paramount priority,” read a statement from the NYPD. The department believes that a battery malfunction caused the device to explode.

Haaretz investigation spanning 100 sources in 15 countries reveals Israel has become a leading exporter of tools for spying on civilians. Dictators around the world – even in countries with no formal ties to Israel – use them eavesdrop on human rights activists, monitor emails, hack into apps and record conversations

In all, there were 1,700 separate Facebook pages designed to look like they were run by local Women's March organizers, a source familiar with Facebook's investigation into the issue told CNN.

While the vast majority of the pages and events had no followers or attendees, some of the fake events promoting the wrong march date became popular.

Fake events for Philadelphia and Chicago received more than 10,000 RSVPs; the event posted for Seattle picked up more than 20,000. (As ever with numbers on social media sites, it is possible that at least some of the RSVPs came from fake accounts used to make a page seem more popular).

The network of fake pages highlights the increasing challenges facing both American activists and companies like Facebook as bad actors, both foreign and domestic, use social media platforms to tap into the highly charged and partisan nature of American politics for financial or political gain.

Facebook Inc. believes that the hackers who gained access to the private information of 30 million of its users were spammers looking to make money through deceptive advertising, according to people familiar with the company’s internal investigation.

Apple customers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can now download a copy of all the personal data Apple holds on them that's linked to an Apple ID.

Under GDPR, EU residents have the right to obtain a copy of data a company holds about them.

They can also withdraw previously given consent for a company to collect data about them and request that collected data be deleted. And consumers have the right to take data to another service, as well as to know how a company is processing it.

A new NATO military command centre to deter computer hackers should be fully staffed in 2023 and able to mount its own cyber attacks but the alliance is still grappling with ground rules for doing so, a senior general said on Tuesday.

YouTube has suffered a massive outage, with users from all across the globe rushing to alternative social media platforms to vent their frustration and seek psychological support from fellow victims of #YouTubeDOWN disaster.
The video-sharing website experienced a service disruption across the northeastern United States, as well as parts of the West and East Coasts.

Users in Australia, Mexico, Brazil and the EU have also been affected, according to thousands of reports on the Down Detector monitoring site. YouTube videos began returning errors around 9pm EST. The site infrastructure was still loading for users, but the videos themselves did not play and were replaced by error messages imploring users to “please try again later.”