By Aaron Kesel

WikiLeaks founder and former editor Julian Assange has been charged under The Espionage Act on 17 new counts in a superseding indictment for his role in obtaining and publishing classified military and diplomatic documents prior to his extradition hearing on May 30th, Reuters reported.

The charges carry a shocking sentence of 175 years in prison if found guilty by the secret Espionage court — a horrendous statement to send to journalists and truth tellers.

“The Department of Justice wants to imprison Assange for crimes allegedly committed outside of the United States. This extraterritorial application of US law is explicit throughout the indictment… thereby classifying any territory in the world as subject to US law,” WikiLeaks wrote in a statement, adding...

After Google restricted Huawei’s use of Android for its future smartphones, effectively cutting off Huawei from everything Google other than the Android Open Source Project, new reports from Chinese media have come out with the claim that Huawei’s in-house operating system (OS) for its smartphones will reportedly be called HongMeng.

While it’s been an open secret that Huawei has been working on its own operating system as a contingency plan in case the US-China trade war escalated the way that it now has, apparently, the company has been working on the new OS since as far back as 2012. The reports in the Chinese media are also claiming that the OS is being tested already and will gradually replace Android on Huawei’s hardware soon.

AT&T can claim up and down that it’s asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they’re signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way.

Publicly accessible security-scan data shows that many public organizations have failed to do more than put a bandage over long-standing system vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could bring their operations to a standstill.

While the method by which RobbinHood ransomware infected the network of Baltimore City two weeks ago is still unknown, insiders within city government have pointed to the incomplete efforts by the Office of Information Technology to get a handle on the city's tangle of software, aging servers, and wide-flung network infrastructure. Baltimore isn't even the only city to have been hit by ransomware in the last month—Lynn, Massachusetts, and Cartersville, Georgia, both had electronic payment systems taken offline by ransomware this month. Greenville, North Carolina, was struck by the same RobbinHood ransomware affecting Baltimore in April.

Huawei is to make its own chips at a new factory in Cambridge UK technology hotspot as it fights back from the latest backlash from the US-China trade war.

The chip factory is slated for the 550-acre former Spicers site at Sawston for which Huawei recently paid £37.5 million, as first revealed by Business Weekly.

It appears the Chinese ICT giant had anticipated escalation of the bitter China-US impasse in making the Cambridge land acquisition as part of multi-billion dollar investment in the UK economy.

Researchers at the Samsung AI Center in Moscow developed a way to create "living portraits" from a very small dataset—as few as one photograph, in some of their models.

The paper, "Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models," was published on the preprint server arXiv on Monday.

The researchers call this few- and one-shot learning, where the model can be trained using just one image to create a convincing, animated portrait. With a few more shots—as few as eight or 32 photographs—the realism improves even more.

By Nicholas West

“Comcast is already in talks with hospitals about taking on shared savings — if it can keep people from expensive emergency room visits.” — CNBC

It is becoming clearer each day that new technologies are further highlighting the great expanse between intention and application. As with all technologies of value, medicine has pitted the powerful desire of human liberation from suffering and the pursuit of a longer life up against the powerful desire to create centralized systems of management, both for profit and control.

The fact is that Big Data and its attendant analytics is irresistible for central authorities...

Comments at: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1131560677942878209

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels…back in the news again
Political season is upon us, and some odd traffic coincidences
We’re left to guess why traffic patterns suddenly altered
The fact we can’t tell why…portends regulation
Lack of social media algorithm transparency…
…IS the end of our Republic
Not necessarily a coordinated conspiracy, but same result
Joe Biden has no legislative accomplishments
A career in politics, and NO accomplishments to show?
VP candidate traditionally boring, watered-down version of POTUS
Biden was more boring than President Obama
Now Biden has to select his own VP, that’s even more boring
CNN and MSNBC producing stories out of colorful words
CNN reports Pelosi says she’s getting under POTUS skin
Social media wasn’t able to obtain their desired result in 2016

Mobile phone retailers in some Asian countries are refusing to accept Huawei devices for trade-ins, as more consumers look to offload their device on worries Google suspending business with the Chinese firm will disrupt services.

A security researcher who goes by the handle SandboxEscaper published code to GitHub that allegedly shows how a malicious hacker can gain higher privileges on a Windows 10 machine and wreak havoc. The security vulnerability was earlier reported on by ZDNet.

The zero-day vulnerability is what's called a "local privilege escalation." That means that the vulnerability won't necessarily allow hackers or malware to gain access to your machine. They have to already be on your machine. Instead, the vulnerability, when exploited, will give them full control over your machine by upping their privileges to the System level.

This is a bigger problem than it seems, because most malware can be constrained by the limits of the user account it has infected. Privilege escalation busts out of that straitjacket and gives even low-level malware godlike powers.

MICROSOFT LOOKS set to become the latest company to suspend ties with Huawei after it was discovered that all reference to its flagship laptop, the MateBook X Pro, has been removed from the Microsoft Store.

The top-end laptop has had rave reviews since it launched at MWC but has now disappeared from view, suggesting that Microsoft may be preparing to take action to comply with the recent trade ban with the Chinese tech giant.

Microsoft is yet to make a statement either way, but given that Google was forced to suspend licensing Android to Huawei, it's quite likely that Microsoft will be in the same boat and will need to stop issuing Windows licences.

UK-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei, according to internal documents obtained by the BBC.

ARM instructed employees to halt "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements” with Huawei and its subsidiaries to comply with a recent US trade clampdown.

ARM's designs form the basis of most mobile device processors worldwide.

In a company memo, it said its designs contained “US origin technology”.

As a consequence, it believes it is affected by the Trump administration's ban.

One analyst described the move, if it became long-term, as an “insurmountable” blow to Huawei’s business.

The growth of intelligence agencies in the 21st century has been powered by the development of new technologies, created by start-ups, which are powered by intelligence agencies. This unvirtuous circle of money and espionage is a new and daunting challenge for civil liberties and human rights groups.

Researchers from Secure-D, the mobile ad fraud division of UK-based mobile monetization firm Upstream, detailed their findings in a post published on Monday.

They discovered that VidMate has a hidden component within the app that delivers hidden ads, generates fake clicks and purchases, installs malicious apps and siphons off users' private information - all without their knowledge.

As a result, it eats up users' data allowance and costs them money.

Upstream researchers blocked over 128 million malicious mobile transactions that were attempted by the VidMate app on 4.8 million devices.

Had they not been blocked, they could have cost users a boatload of unwanted charges.

By Alex Moss

A fight over unmasking an anonymous Reddit commenter has turned into a significant win for online speech and fair use. A federal court has affirmed the right to share copyrighted material for criticism and commentary, and shot down arguments that Internet users from outside the United States can’t ever rely on First Amendment protections for anonymous speech.

EFF represents the Reddit commenter, who uses the name “Darkspilver.” A lifelong member of the Jehovah’s Witness community, Darkspilver shared comments and concerns about the Jehovah’s Witness organization via one of Reddit’s online discussion groups. Darkspilver’s posts included a copy of an advertisement asking for donations that appeared on the back of a Watch Tower magazine, as well as a chart they edited and reformatted to show the kinds of data that the Jehovah’s Witness organization collects and processes...

Oddly enough, the attack doesn't work on most Android devices because they're cheaper than Apple's, in all senses of the word, and generally aren't calibrated, though the researchers did find that some Google Pixel handsets did feature calibrated MEMS.

Beresford joked: "There's a certain sense of irony that because Apple has put more effort in to provide more accuracy, it has this unfortunate side effect!"

Apple has patched the flaws in iOS 12.2 by blocking "access to these sensors in Mobile Safari just by default" as well as adding "some noise to make the attack much more difficult".

The researchers have set up a website which includes both the full research paper and their layman's explanation, along with a proof-of-concept video. Get patching, Apple fanbois.

TalkTalk failed to inform 4,545 customers their personal information, including bank account details, were stolen as part of the 2015 data breach.

Viewers contacted BBC Watchdog Live about concerns that their details had been breached by TalkTalk.

But the company had told them that their details were not comprised.

"The customer data referred to by BBC Watchdog relates to the historical October 2015 data breach. It is not a new incident," the firm said.

The BBC consumer show investigated and found the personal details of approximately 4,500 customers available online after a Google search.

The details included full names, addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, TalkTalk customer numbers, mobile numbers and bank details for thousands of customers.

A consumer advocacy group has discovered that not all Facebook users have access to a privacy setting that lets them opt out of the site's facial recognition technology.

Consumer Reports examined a set of Facebook accounts and found that a significant number didn't have the ability to toggle off Face Recognition, a feature that uses facial recognition technology to identify users in tagged photos.

That's despite Facebook announcing almost two years ago that all users would be able to opt out of facial recognition entirely through the setting.

Consumer Reports looked at the accounts of 31 Facebook users and found that eight of them didn't have the privacy setting.

Additionally, the site created several new Facebook accounts to test if they had the setting and found that about a half-dozen of them did not.

It's not clear exactly how many of Facebook's 2 billion-plus users lack access to the Face Recognition privacy setting.

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably clicked “I agree” on many online contracts without ever reading them. Soon you may be deemed to have agreed to a company’s terms without even knowing it. A vote is occurring Tuesday that would make it easier for online businesses to dispense with that click and allow websites that you merely browse — anything from Amazon and AT&T to Yahoo and Zillow — to bind you to contract terms without your agreement or awareness.

As public outcry mounts over companies like Facebook collecting and selling user information, the new proposal would prime courts and legislatures to give businesses even more power to extract data from unwitting consumers. If the proposal is approved, merely posting a link to a company’s terms of service on a homepage could be enough for the company to conclude that a user has agreed to its policies.

You might've tried your best to keep your passwords hidden, but a bug could've allowed Google employees to view those login credentials.

In a blog post Tuesday, Google notified G Suite customers that some passwords were stored on its internal servers without any encryption -- meaning anyone who found them could read them in plain text. Suzanne Frey, Google Cloud Trust's vice president of engineering, said in the post that this bug affects only business users -- so if you're using Google for free, this doesn't affect you.

Facebook has supplied phone companies with customers' private data without their knowledge or consent, and even helped those companies use Facebook behavior to evaluate users' creditworthiness, documents reportedly show.

The social network supplied data on location, interests, and friend groupings to phone carriers and manufacturers without users' permission – data that went far beyond mere technical specs. Users' activity on Facebook, Instagram and even Messenger was fair game for data-mining, and the platform encouraged and even assisted over 100 global telecoms to use customers' data for purposes including evaluating their creditworthiness, according to documents seen by the Intercept, which suggest the program is still going on.

The US Navy is seeking to create an archive that will store no less than 350 billion social media posts, as part of the military branch’s “research efforts” into “modes of collective expression.”

The Department of the Navy has posted a solicitation asking contractors to bid on a project that would amass a staggering 350 billion social media posts dating from 2014 through 2016. The data will be taken from a single social media platform – but the solicitation does not specify which one.

Last Friday the text of the new EU Copyright Directive was published on the Official Journal of the EU. However, due to glaring error, the Italian translation of Article 17 (formerly 13) requires online platforms such as YouTube to prevent the availability of works "that do not infringe copyright", even in cases where such works are "subject to an exception or limitation".

A security researcher has discovered a massive online database that exposes the personal contact information of nearly 50 million influencers and brands.

According to a report from TechCrunch, researcher Anurag Sen discovered the database contained the personal contact information of 'prominent food bloggers, celebrities and other social media influencers.'

Sen alerted the site to the list's existence in an attempt to find its creator and get it secured, TechCrunch noted.

TechCrunch reports that the information in the database appears to have been scraped from publicly available social media accounts and was traced back to a social media marketing firm Chtrbox based in Mumbai, India.

Chtrbox, which pays influencers to post sponsored content onto their pages, also included information on what a post with each person listed in the database would cost, including their number of followers, likes, and reach.

Among the mega-corporations that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment. A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.

The Chinese company has developed a proprietary OS as tensions between the company and the US government could impact the availability of US-made operating systems used on Huawei devices, Huawei’s mobile chief Richard Yu Chengdong, said in an interview with German publication Die Welt.
Yu’s comments confirm an earlier report

by the South China Morning Post in April 2018, which revealed the existence of a years-long project to build an alternative to Google’s Android OS. Huawei started building its own operating system after a US investigation into Huawei and ZTE Corp in 2012, a person familiar with the matter said in the report.

It seems like both Huawei and Google aren’t exactly certain about what’s going to happen going forward. The plan forward is a big uncertainty for both the companies and Huawei being one of the biggest phone makers in the world, that’s a huge problem for the entire market.

By Netizen Report Team

The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in technology and human rights around the world. This report covers news and events from May 10 – 17, 2019.

On May 13, WhatsApp users in multiple countries were targeted with malicious software developed by the Israeli company NSO group and deployed by governments that had purchased the software...

By Sam Bocetta

Technology has increasingly come to occupy a central role in our lives. Growing numbers of people, however, have expressed concerns over how much of our privacy we’ve sacrificed for the sake of convenience.

Networks are under assault from cyber attacks like never before, resulting in frequent, massive data breaches. Perhaps even more significantly, companies seem to be gathering data on customers, often without their knowledge, in an effort to more precisely target their advertising...

More than 4,500 individuals at federal and local law enforcement agencies currently have access to a facial recognition database hosted by the Ohio Attorney General’s office, including at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Even though many in the scientific community are loudly warning about the potential health effects that 5G technology could have on the general population, Verizon and AT&T are starting to put up their 5G networks in major cities all across the nation. Today, the total number of cell phones exceeds the entire population of the world, and the big cell phone companies are making a crazy amount of money providing service to all of those phones. And now that the next generation of cell phone technology has arrived, millions of cell phone users are looking forward to better connections and faster speeds than ever before. In fact, President Trump says that 5G networks will be up to 100 times faster than the current 4G networks that we are using right now…

Civil liberties activists trying to inspire alarm about the authoritarian potential of facial recognition technology often point to China, where some police departments use systems that can spot suspects who show their faces in public. A report from Georgetown researchers on Thursday suggests Americans should also focus their concern closer to home.

Windows 7 support will end in January of next year, and that is a huge problem for both business and home users that are still running the aging operating system. Can't these people just upgrade to Windows 10? Well, yeah, but many just don't want to. Windows 10 has extreme telemetry that many people consider to be spying. As a result, they simply don't trust Microsoft's latest operating system. Not to mention, for businesses and organizations with many computers, the upgrade to Windows 10 could prove to be a costly affair.

And now, as a result of the upcoming death of Windows 7 support, the South Korean government has reportedly decided to ditch Microsoft Windows entirely. According to The Korea Herald, the Asian country's government will switch from Windows 7 to a Linux-based operating system.

New smartphones made by the company will also lose access to Google's app store and software such as Gmail, the news agency's story says.

Comments at: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1129748787868700673

Border psychology: Telling people we’ll be sending them back soon
A simple tweet that reduces those swarming our border
President Trump uses psychology to protect our homeland
President Trump has a highly criticized style, BUT…
Future Presidents will be compared to his energy, results
President Trump does counter-narrative things ALL the time
Enemy press and Dems push “racist” narratives about him
President’s actions and priorities counter their narratives
The essential claim for needing immigration reform
If your incentives aren’t correct, immigration is a disaster
GOOD FRAMING: Heartbeat bills, a beating heart equals life
GOOD FRAMING: immigration policies like those in…Canada, Japan
Merit based policies like our friends in Canada and Japan

By John Vibes

In 2017, a startup called “Lyrebird” made headlines with AI-generated replications of celebrity voices that were extremely convincing.

Tracks posted to SoundCloud featured the voices of Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton making a pitch for the Lyrebird’s new technology. In the video, a Fake President Trump voice says, “They can make us say anything now.”

While the story gathered some attention initially, it quickly disappeared from the news cycle, except for just about one place, The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast...

By Aaron Kesel

You can’t run, you can’t hide; facial recognition technology is advancing at a quickening pace, it’s becoming more widespread and accurate, and we are entering the path of no return.

A report from Georgetown researchers states that agencies in Chicago and Detroit have bought real-time facial recognition systems. Meanwhile, a privacy bill failed to pass in San Francisco. Elsewhere, in the UK an unidentified man was arrested for hiding his face from facial recognition technology and was gifted an insane disorderly behavior fine of £90...

A preliminary report into a fatal accident involving a Tesla Model 3 in the US has found Autopilot had been engaged 10 seconds before the crash.

The Tesla was travelling above the speed limit when it crashed into a truck towing a trailer in March 2019.

The roof of the car was sheared off in the accident and the driver was killed.

According to the report, the driver did not appear to have his hands on the wheel and neither he nor the Autopilot took any evasive action.