China’s new influencer law, which took effect on October 25, requires anyone creating content on sensitive topics, such as medicine, law, education, or finance, to hold official qualifications in those fields.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) says the goal is to fight misinformation and protect the public from false or harmful advice. But, the move has also raisedconcerns about censorship and freedom of expression.
Under the new rules, influencers who talk about regulated topics must show proof of their expertise, such as a degree, professional license, or certificate. Platforms like Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Bilibili, and Weibo must verify creators’ credentials and make sure their content includes proper citations and disclaimers.
For example, influencersmust clearly state when information comes from studies or when a video includes AI-generated material. Platforms are also required to educate users about their responsibilities when sharing content online.
The CAC has gone even further by banning advertising for medical products, supplements, and health foods to prevent hidden promotions disguised as “educational” videos.
However, critics warn that the law could harm creativity and limit freedom of speech. By controlling who can talk about certain topics, they argue, China might not only block misinformation but also restrict independent voices and critical debate.
Many worry that “expertise” will be defined too narrowly, giving authorities more power to silence people who question official narratives or offer alternative views.
Others, however, welcomed the move, saying that the new law would allow for well-informed content on important and sensitive topics. Many argued that only professionals in their field should be able to speak about and discuss said topic to prevent misinformation.
The rise of influencer culture has changed how people get information. Influencers are valued for being relatable and authentic, and being able to connect with audiences in ways traditional experts cannot. However, when these creators share misleading or inaccurate information, the effects can be serious, supporters of the new law argue.
Unfortunately, having people doing “research” by watching one Youtube video and then telling people that vaccines don’t work, or that 5G space bats cause covid and people want to inject chips into you has proven to be an absolute disaster, which prolonged a global pandemic and killed a lot of people.
These people should be jailed and it is a crying shame that a country like China is taking the lead in this, and not the EU.
When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.
Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.
News? Pegged.
There are always security risks when running code from untrusted sources. The stakes are higher these days when our computers are the gateways to our personal and financial lives.
The latest broadside fired in the war against platform freedom has been fired. Google recently announced new upcoming restrictions on APK installations. Starting in 2026, Google will tightening the screws on sideloading, making it increasingly difficult to install applications that haven’t been blessed by the Play Store’s approval process. It’s being sold as a security measure, but it will make it far more difficult for users to run apps outside the official ecosystem. There is a security argument to be made, of course, because suspect code can cause all kinds of havoc on a device loaded with a user’s personal data. At the same time, security concerns have a funny way of aligning perfectly with ulterior corporate motives.
It’s a change in tack for Google, which has always had the more permissive approach to its smartphone platform. Contrast it to Apple, which has sold the iPhone as a fully locked-down device since day one. The former company said that if you own your phone, you could do what you want with it. Now, it seems Google is changing its mind ever so slightly about that. There will still be workarounds, like signing up as an Android developer and giving all your personal ID to Google, but it’s a loss to freedom whichever way you look at it.
Beginnings
Sony put a great deal of engineering into the PlayStation to ensure it would only read Sony-approved discs. Modchips sprung up as a way to get around that problem, albeit primarily so owners could play cheaper pirated games. Credit: Libreleah, CC BY-SA 4.0,
The walled garden concept didn’t start with smartphones. Indeed, video game consoles were a bit of a trailblazer in this space, with manufacturers taking this approach decades ago. The moment gaming became genuinely profitable, console manufacturers realized they could control their entire ecosystem. Proprietary formats, region systems, and lockout chips were all valid ways to ensure companies could levy hefty licensing fees from developers. They locked down their hardware tighter than a bank vault, and they did it for one simple reason—money. As long as the manufacturer could ensure the console wouldn’t run unapproved games, developers would have to give them a kickback for every unit sold.
By and large, the market accepted this. Consoles were single-purpose entertainment machines. Nobody expected to run their own software on a Nintendo, after all. The deal was simple—you bought a console from whichever company, and it would only play whatever they said was okay. The vast majority of consumers didn’t care about the specifics. As long as the console in question had a decent library, few would complain.
Nintendo created the 10NES copy protection system to ensure its systems would only play games approved by the company itself, in an attempt to exert quality control after the 1983 North American video game crash. Credit: Evan-Amos, public domain
There was always an underground—adapters to work around region locks, and bootleg games that relied on various hacks—with varying popularity over the years. Often, it was high prices that drove this innovation—think of the many PlayStation mod chips sold to play games off burnt CDs to avoid paying retail.
At the time, this approach largely stayed within the console gaming world. It didn’t spread to actual computers because computers were tools. You didn’t buy a PC to consume content someone else curated for you. You bought it to do whatever you wanted—write a novel, make a spreadsheet, play games, create music, or waste time on weird hobby projects. The openness wasn’t a bug, or even something anybody really thought about. It was just how computers were. It wasn’t just a PC thing, either—every computer on the market let you run what you wanted! It wasn’t just desktops and laptops, either; the nascent tablets and PDAs of the 1990s operated in just the same way.
Then came the iPhone, and with it, the App Store. Apple took the locked-down model and applied it to a computer you carry in your pocket. The promise was that you’d only get apps that were approved by Apple, with the implicit guarantee of a certain level of quality and functionality.
Apple is credited with pioneering the modern smartphone, and in turn, the walled garden that is the App Store. Credit: Apple
It was a bold move, and one that raised eyebrows among developers and technology commentators. But it worked. Consumers loved having access to a library of clean and functional apps, built right into the device. Meanwhile, they didn’t really care that they couldn’t run whatever kooky app some random on the Internet had dreamed up.
Apple sold the walled garden as a feature. It wasn’t ashamed or hiding the fact—it was proud of it. It promised apps with no viruses and no risks; a place where everything was curated and safe. The iPhone’s locked-down nature wasn’t a restriction; it was a selling point.
But it also meant Apple controlled everything. Every app paid Apple’s tax, and every update needed Apple’s permission. You couldn’t run software Apple didn’t approve, full stop. You might have paid for the device in your pocket, but you had no right to run what you wanted on it. Someone in Cupertino had the final say over that, not you.
When Android arrived on the scene, it offered the complete opposite concept to Apple’s control. It was open source, and based on Linux. You could load your own apps, install your own ROMs and even get root access to your device if you wanted. For a certain kind of user, that was appealing. Android would still offer an application catalogue of its own, curated by Google, but there was nothing stopping you just downloading other apps off the web, or running your own code.
Sadly, over the years, Android has been steadily walking back that openness. The justifications are always reasonable on their face. Security updates need to be mandatory because users are terrible at remembering to update. Sideloading apps need to come with warnings because users will absolutely install malware if you let them just click a button. Root access is too dangerous because it puts the security of the whole system and other apps at risk. But inch by inch, it gets harder to run what you want on the device you paid for.
Windows Watches and Waits
The walled garden has since become a contagion, with platforms outside the smartphone space considering the tantalizing possibilities of locking down. Microsoft has been testing the waters with the Microsoft Store for years now, with mixed results. Windows 10 tried to push it, and Windows 11 is trying harder. The store apps are supposedly more secure, sandboxed, easier to manage, and straightforward to install with the click of a button.
Microsoft has tried multiple times to sell versions of Windows that are locked to exclusively run apps from the Microsoft Store. Thus far, these attempts have been commercial failures.
Microsoft hasn’t pulled the trigger on fully locking down Windows. It’s flirted with the idea, but has seen little success. Windows RT and Windows 10 S were both locked to only run software signed by Microsoft—each found few takers. Desktop Windows remains stubbornly open, capable of running whatever executable you throw at it, even if it throws up a few more dialog boxes and question marks with every installer you run these days.
How long can this last? One hopes a great while yet. A great deal of users still expect a computer—a proper one, like a laptop or desktop—to run whatever mad thing they tell it to. However, there is an increasing userbase whose first experience of computing was in these locked-down tablet and smartphone environments. They aren’t so demanding about little things like proper filesystem access or the ability to run unsigned code. They might not blink if that goes away.
For now, desktop computing has the benefit of decades of tradition built in to it. Professional software, development tools, and specialized applications all depend on the ability to install whatever you need. Locking that down would break too many workflows for too many important customers. Masses of scientific users would flee to Linux the moment their obscure datalogger software couldn’t afford an official license to run on Windows;. Industrial users would baulk at having to rely on a clumsy Microsoft application store when bringing up new production lines.
Apple had the benefit that it was launching a new platform with the iPhone; one for which there were minimal expectations. In comparison, Microsoft would be climbing an almighty mountain to make the same move on the PC, where the culture is already so established. Apple could theoretically make moves in that direction with OS X and people would be perhaps less surprised, but it would still be company making a major shift when it comes to customer expectations of the product.
Here’s what bothers me most: we’re losing the idea that you can just try things with computers. That you can experiment. That you can learn by doing. That you can take a risk on some weird little program someone made in their spare time. All that goes away with the walled garden. Your neighbour can’t just whip up some fun gadget and share it with you without signing up for an SDK and paying developer fees. Your obscure game community can’t just write mods and share content because everything’s locked down. So much creativity gets squashed before it even hits the drawing board because it’s just not feasible to do it.
It’s hard to know how to fight this battle. So much ground has been lost already, and big companies are reluctant to listen to the esoteric wishers of the hackers and makers that actually care about the freedom to squirt whatever through their own CPUs. Ultimately, though, you can still vote with your wallet. Don’t let Personal Computing become Consumer Computing, where you’re only allowed to run code that paid the corporate toll. Make sure the computers you’re paying for are doing what you want, not just what the executives approved of for their own gain. It’s your computer, it should run what you want it to!
In 2010, he and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov — who were by then working in England — won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their experiments creating graphene, the world’s thinnest and strongest material.
His list of honors goes on and on, and Mr. Geim has the unique distinction of having been awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel, a satirical honor for strange scientific achievements (in his case, levitating a frog) that seem laughable but prompt thought.
Dutch authorities were happy to claim him as Dutch. The Netherlands knighted him for his contributions to science, an honor that is officially described as “rare, being given for example to Dutch Nobel Prize laureates.” He was made a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
“My bronze bust is somewhere in Den Haag to show off,” he said, referring to The Hague.
Mr. Geim moved to Britain in 2001 to work at the University of Manchester, where he remains today. His trouble began after he was offered a British knighthood, though he would not discover it until more than a dozen years later.
A non-Briton can receive a British knighthood, but only a British citizen is entitled to use the accompanying title, Sir or Dame. So he obtained citizenship.
“I took it to get the U.K. knighthood and to be called officially ‘Sir Andre,’ prestigious in the U.K.,” he said. “I took it only to receive the British knighthood.”
But by adopting British citizenship, he ran afoul of rules in the Netherlands, which seeks to limit dual nationalities. Voluntarily acquiring another citizenship can set off an automatic loss of Dutch citizenship.
The Dutch citizenship rules are not new, and there is a movement to loosen them. Within the European Union, multiple citizenship is fairly common, but people can also move freely from one country to another, living and working in a new home without needing a new legal status. Britain officially left the union in 2020.
In retrospect, Mr. Geim says, he might have made a different choice. “I would probably decline this knighthood if I knew the consequences for my Dutch nationality, but that was before Brexit and no one informed me about the consequences at that time.”
Though he says he got no practical benefit from his Dutch nationality, and did not expect to do so in the future, Mr. Geim has long seen himself as European above all else.
In an essay he wrote when he received the Nobel Prize, the physicist described growing up in Russia and experiencing discrimination in his education because of his family’s German roots, concluding that, after moving to the West in 1990, his life and work improved.
“I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary,” he wrote.
His loss is far from being the most severe at a time when migrants face increasing pressure around the world, risking — and sometimes losing — their lives to reach new shores and borders, or having rights like birthright citizenship in the United States challenged.
But his struggle with the Dutch authorities does hint at the complications immigrants face everywhere in contending with conflicting and opaque requirements, politics and unforeseeable consequences. And his difficulties show that no one is exempt from bureaucracy.
Mr. Geim — Sir Andre — says he has “spent thousands” in legal fees trying to convince Dutch authorities to let him keep his citizenship, including by citing an exception to the rule if it is in “the interest of the Dutch state,” to no avail.
Nobel or not, he said, “I was kicked out of the country as a useless thing.”
There is a Dutch minority opinion buy the anti-islamist Geert Wilders which has become some sort of unassailable mantra that multiple citizenship is some sort of traitorous thing and the Netherlands has been tightening the rules more and more.
Edit: There are two laws going through the system, one since 2016 (!) and the other from 2023, aiming to allow multiple nationalities without having to give up the Dutch one:
34 632 (R2080) Voorstel van Rijkswet van de leden Sjoerdsma en Kuiken tot wijziging van de Rijkswet op het Nederlanderschap teneinde het nationaliteitsrecht te moderniseren, alsmede tot de in verband daarmee houdende goedkeuring van het voornemen tot opzegging van hoofdstuk I van het op 6 mei 1963 te Straatsburg tot stand gekomen Verdrag betreffende beperking van gevallen van meervoudige nationaliteit en betreffende militaire verplichtingen in geval van meervoudige nationaliteit (Trb. 1964, 4) en daarmee van het daarbij behorende Tweede Protocol (Trb. 1994, 265)
Let’s hope they can get through and end the ridiculousness.
A US bankruptcy court has blocked the sale of Infowars to parody news site The Onion, ruling that the auction didn’t yield the best potential bids. At the same time, judge Christopher Lopez rejected claims by Infowars‘ owner, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, that any “collusion” was involved in the case.
The Onion reportedly outbid competitor First American United Companies, affiliated with a Jones business, for the rights to the site. Though its cash offer was lower, The Onion valued it at $7 million because Sandy Hook families would allow some of the proceeds to be distributed to other creditors.
However, the appeals judge said that the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee made a “good-faith error” by requesting final offers instead of allowing back-and-forth bidding between The Onion and First American. “This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.”
Now, the trustee must work to resolve some of the disputes between creditors before making another attempt to sell Infowars. The trustee, Christopher Murray, said that First American only complained about the process after losing the bid.
Alex Jones was found liable in 2022 for nearly $1.5 billion in damages for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six adult staffers. One of the assets put up for sale was Jones’ Infowars site, and The Onion said it received the blessing of the families of the victims to acquire the site. It reportedly planned to transform the site into one with “noticeably less hateful disinformation,” and a gun safety nonprofit reportedly planned to advertise on the rebooted site. Last week, X said that The Onion wouldn’t be given Alex Jones’ Infowars X accounts, opening up a new can of worms about who owns social media handles.
Impact, an app that describes itself as “AI-powered infrastructure for shaping and managing narratives in the modern world,” is testing a way to organize and activate supporters on social media in order to promote certain political messages. The app aims to summon groups of supporters who will flood social media with AI-written talking points designed to game social media algorithms.
In video demos and an overview document provided to people interested in using a prototype of the app that have been viewed by 404 Media, Impact shows how it can send push notifications to groups of supporters directing them at a specific social media post and provide them with AI-generated text they can copy and paste in order to flood the replies with counter arguments.
One demo video viewed by 404 Media shows one of the people who created the app, Sean Thielen, logged in as “Stop Anti-Semitism,” a fake organization with a Star of David icon (no affiliation to the real organization with the same name), filling out a “New Action Request” form. Thielen decides which users to send the action to and what they want them to do, like “reply to this Tweet with a message of support and encouragement” or “Reply to this post calling out the author for sharing misinformation.” The user can also provide a link to direct supporters to, and provide talking points, like “This post is dishonest and does not reflect actual figures and realities,” “The President’s record on the economy speaks for itself,” and “Inflation has decreased [sic] by XX% in the past six months.” The form also includes an “Additional context” box where the user can type additional detail to help the AI target the right supporters, like “Independent young voters on Twitter.” In this case, the demo shows how Impact could direct a group of supporters to a factual tweet about the International Court of Justice opinion critical of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and flood the replies with AI-generated responses criticizing the court and Hamas and supporting Israel.
[…]
Becca Lewis, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Department of Communication, said that when discussing bot farms and computational propaganda, researchers often use the term “authenticity” to delineate between a post shared by an average human user, and a post shared by a bot or a post shared by someone who is paid to do so. Impact, she said, appears to use “authentic” to refer to posts that seem like they came from real people or accurately reflects what they think even if they didn’t write the post.
“But when you conflate those two usages, it becomes dubious, because it’s suggesting that these are posts coming from real humans, when, in fact, it’s maybe getting posted by a real human, but it’s not written by a real human,” Lewis told me. “It’s written and generated by an AI system. The lines start to get really blurry, and that’s where I think ethical questions do come to the foreground. I think that it would be wise for anyone looking to work with them to maybe ask for expanded definitions around what they mean by ‘authentic’ here.”
[…]
The “Impact platform” has two sides. There’s an app for “supporters (participants),” and a separate app for “coordinators/campaigners/stakeholders/broadcasters (initiatives),” according to the overview document.
Supporters download the app and provide “onboarding data” which “is used by Impact’s AI to (1) Target and (2) Personalize the action requests” that are sent to them. Supporters connect to initiatives by entering a provided code, and these action requests are sent as push notifications, the document explains.
“Initiatives,” on the other hand, “have access to an advanced, AI-assisted dashboard for managing supporters and actions.”
[…]
“I think astroturfing is a great way of phrasing it, and brigading as well,” Lewis said. “It also shows it’s going to continue to siphon off who has the ability to use these types of tools by who is able to pay for them. The people with the ability to actually generate this seemingly organic content are ironically the people with the most money. So I can see the discourse shifting towards the people with the money to to shift it in a specific direction.”
Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report showing that not only has Tesla aggressively lied about its EV ranges for the better part of the last decade, it created teams whose entire purpose was to lie to customers about it when they called up to complain. The story lasted all of two days in the news cycle before it was supplanted by clickbait stories about a billionaire fist fight that never actually happened.
Now Reuters is back again, with another major story showcasing how for much of that same decade, Tesla routinely blamed customers for the failure of substandard parts the company knew to be defective. The outlet reviewed thousands of Tesla documents and found a pattern where customers would complain about dangerously broken and low-quality parts, only to be repeatedly gaslit by the company:
“Wheels falling off cars at speed. Suspensions collapsing on brand-new vehicles. Axles breaking under acceleration. Tens of thousands of customers told Tesla about a host of part failures on low-mileage cars. The automaker sought to blame drivers for vehicle ‘abuse,’ but Tesla documents show it had tracked the chronic ‘flaws’ and ‘failures’ for years.”
The records show a repeated pattern across tens of thousands of customers where parts would fail, then the customer would be accused of “abusing” their vehicle. They also show that Tesla meticulously tracked part failures, knew many parts were defective, and routinely not only lied to regulators about it, but charged customers to repair parts they knew had high failure rates and were systemically prone to failure:
“Yet the company has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public– and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers.”
This is obviously a very different narrative than the one Musk presented last month at that unhinged New York Times DealBook event:
“We make the best cars. Whether you hate me, like me or are indifferent, do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?”
This comes as a new study shows that Tesla vehicles have the highest accident rate of any brand on the road. As usual, U.S. regulators have generally been asleep or lethargic during most of this, worried that enforcing basic public safety standards would somehow be stifling “innovation.”
The deaths from “full self driving” have been going on for the better part of the last decade, yet the NHTSA only just apparently figured out where its pants were located. But a lot of the problems Reuters have revealed should be slam dunk cases for the FTC under the “unfair and deceptive” component of the FTC Act, creating what will likely be a very busy 2024 for Elon Musk.
A lot of this stuff has been discussed by Tesla critics for years. It’s only once Musk began his downward descent into full racist caricature and undeniable self-immolation that press outlets with actual resources started to meaningfully dig beyond the hype. There’s cause for some significant U.S. journalism introspection as to why that is that probably will never happen.
Meanwhile, for a supposed innovation super-genius, most Musk companies have the kind of customer service that makes Comcast seem empathic and competent.
There’s no shortage of nightmare stories about Tesla Solar customer service. And we’ve well documented how Starlink can’t even respond to basic email inquiries by users tired of being on year-long waiting lists and seeking refunds. And once you burn past the novelty, gimmicks, and fanboy denialism, Tesla automotive clearly isn’t any better.
That said, this goes well beyond just bad customer service. The original Reuters story from July about the company lying about EV ranges clearly demonstrates not just bad customer service, but profound corporate culture rot:
“Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.”
As with much of what Musk does, a large share of what the press initially sold the public as unbridled innovation was really just cutting corners. It’s easy to accomplish more than the next guy when you refuse to invest in customer service, don’t care about labor or environmental laws, don’t care about public safety, don’t care about the customer, and have zero compulsion about lying to regulators or making things up at every conceivable opportunity.
In 2018, the European Parliament voted to ban geo-blocking, meaning blocking access to a network based on someone’s location. Geo-blocking systems block or authorise access to content based on where the user is located.
On Wednesday, following a 2020 evaluation by the Commission on the regulation, MEPs advocated for reassessing geo-blocking, taking into account increased demand for online shopping in recent years.
Polish MEP Beata Mazurek from the Conservative group, who was the rapporteur for the file, said ahead of the vote in her speech that “the geo-blocking regulation will remove unjustified barriers for consumers and companies working within the single market”.
“We need to do something when it comes to online payments and stop discrimination on what your nationality happens to be or where you happen to live. When internet purchases are being made, barriers need to be removed. We need to have a complete right to access a better selection of goods and services through Europe,” she said.
While the original text of the regulation banned geo-blocking, due to discrimination, for example, as Mazurek pointed out, a new amendment goes against this, saying this would result in revenue loss and higher prices for consumers.
The new legislation approved by European Parliament requires websites to sell their goods throughout the EU regardless of the country the buyer resides in. It could apply to online cultural content like music streaming and ebooks within two years. EURACTIV.fr report
Audiovisual content
According to Mazurek, fighting price discrimination entails making deliveries easier across borders and making movies, series, and sporting events accessible in one’s native language.
“The Commission should carefully assess the options for updating the current rules and provide the support the audio-visual sector’s needs,” she added.
However, in a last-minute amendment adopted during the plenary vote, MEP Sabine Verheyen, an influential member of the Parliament’s culture committee, completely flipped the wording that applies to the audiovisual sector, such as the streaming of platforms’ films.
According to Verheyen’s amendment, removing geo-blocking in this area “would result in a significant loss of revenue, putting investment in new content at risk, while eroding contractual freedom and reducing cultural diversity in content production, distribution, promotion and exhibition”.
It also emphasises that the inclusion would result “in fewer distribution channels”, and so, ultimately, consumers would have to pay more.
Mazurek said before the vote that while the report deals with audiovisual material, they “would like to see this done in a step-by-step way, bearing in mind the particular circumstances pertaining to the creative sector”.
“We want to look at the position of the interested parties without threatening the way cultural projects are financed. That might be regarded as a revolutionary approach, but we need to look at technological progress and the consumer needs which have changed over the last few years,” the MEP explained.
Yet, Wednesday’s vote on this specific amendment means the opposite as it did in the original regulation, with lawmakers now being against ending geo-blocking for audiovisual material.
Grégoire Polad, Director General of the Association of Commercial Television and Video on Demand Services in Europe (ACT), stressed that the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers “have now made it abundantly clear that there is no political support for any present or future inclusion of the audiovisual sector in the scope of the Geo-blocking regulation.”
The European Parliament adopted a report on Tuesday (9 May), on the implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), including criticism of the belated transposition from certain EU countries.
However, the European Consumer Organisation threw its weight against the carve-out for the audiovisual and creative sectors in the regulation, calling on policymakers to make audiovisual content available across borders.
A Commission spokesperson told Euractiv that they are aware of the “ongoing debate” and “will carefully analyse its content, including proposals related to the audiovisual content”, once it is adopted.
“The Commission engaged in a dialogue with the audiovisual sector aimed at identifying industry-led solutions to improve the availability and cross-border access to audiovisual content across the EU,” the spokesperson explained.
This stakeholder dialogue ended in December 2022, and the Commission will consider its conclusions in the upcoming stocktaking exercise on the Geo-blocking Regulation.
Strangely enough this is the one sector that is wholly digital and where geoblocking makes the least sense, as digital goods are moved globally for exactly the same cost, whereas physical goods need different logistics chains, where the last step to the consumer is only a tiny part of that chain. The logistical steps before they get sent from the website mean that geography actually can have a measurable effect on cost.
The movie / TV / digital rights bozo’s definitely have a big lobby on this one, and shows the corruption – or outright stupidity – in the EP. Yes, Sabine Verheyen, you must be one or the other.
Over the years we’ve covered a lot of attempts by relatively clueless governments and politicians to enact think-of-the-children internet censorship or surveillance legislation, but there’s a law from France in the works which we think has the potential to be one of the most sinister we’ve seen yet.
It’s likely that if they push this law through it will cause significant consternation over the rest of the European continent. We’d expect those European countries with less liberty-focused governments to enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and we’d also expect the European hacker community to respond with a plethora of ways for their French cousins to evade the snooping eyes of Paris. We have little confidence in the wisdom of the EU parliament in Brussels when it comes to ill-thought-out laws though, so we hope this doesn’t portend a future dark day for all Europeans. We find it very sad to see in any case, because France on the whole isn’t that kind of place.
Holmes surrendered to the Bureau of Prisons in California on May 30 to serve out her sentence at a minimum-security all-female federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Less than two months after she reported to prison, her sentence was quietly changed, with her new release date scheduled for December 29, 2032, the Bureau’s site says. The Bureau has not provided additional information for why Holmes’ projected release date was shortened, but its site says an inmate’s good behavior, substance abuse program completion, and time credits they receive for activities and programs they’ve completed can result in a lessened sentence.
Only last month, Theranos’ former president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s 13-year sentence was likewise reduced by two years, making his new projected release date April 11, 2034.
Theranos collapsed in 2018 after an explosive investigative piece by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Holmes had made false claims that the blood-testing technology was accurate.
A couple of weeks back, we discussed how Google had delisted the app Downloader from the Play Store after a DMCA notice was issued by a firm representing several Israeli TV networks. The problem with all of this is simple: Downloader doesn’t have anything to do with copyright infringement or piracy. All it does is combine a file manager and basic web browser. The DMCA notice centered on the latter, complaining that users could get to piracy sites from the browser. You know, just like you can from any browser.
Google has reversed the suspension of an Android TV app that was hit with a copyright complaint simply because it is able to load a pirate website that can also be loaded in any standard web browser. The Downloader app, which combines a web browser with a file manager, is back in the Google Play Store after nearly a three-week absence.
In addition to the rejected appeal, Saba filed a DMCA counter-notification with Google. That “started a 10-business-day countdown for the [TV companies’] law firm to file legal actions against me,” Saba wrote today. “Due to the app being removed on a Friday and the Memorial Day holiday, 10 business days had elapsed with no word from the law firm on June 6th and I contacted Google to have the app reinstated.”
All of which is why Google, further down the article, is quoted as saying they followed the standard playbook to DMCA takedown notices. The counter-notification kicked off that process, giving the firm that issued the original notice time to decide whether to file a lawsuit or not, which it presumably did not. The quote has all the hallmarks of Google resting on that process to wipe its hands clean of the whole situation.
But that’s stupid. It also serves as an example proving Saba’s point: the DMCA takedown process is broken. That a bunch of foreign TV networks can get a perfectly legit app removed from the app store for weeks just by pushing paperwork around is absurd.
As is Google’s continued inability to get things right with regard to this particular app.
In yet another example of the Google Play Store’s absurdity, Google had determined that my app collected email addresses without declaring so. Since there is no way for my app itself to collect email addresses, and without any additional information or help from Google, I can only assume that Google is referring to the email mailing list signup form on this website, which loads by default in the web browser of the Downloader app.
Once again, that isn’t the app doing a thing; it’s the web browser doing it if someone signs up to be on an email list.
So, the app is back, a lawsuit has not yet been filed, and everyone will probably forget about this entire thing, meaning the broken nature of the DMCA process will remain broken. Bang up job all around.
A Finnish newspaper is circumventing Russian media restrictions by hiding news reports about the war in Ukraine in an online game popular among Russian gamers.
“While Helsingin Sanomat and other foreign independent media are blocked in Russia, online games have not been banned so far,” said Antero Mukka, the editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat.
The newspaper was bypassing Russia’s censorship through the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike, where gamers battle against each other as terrorists and counter-terrorists in timed matches.
While the majority of matches are played on about a dozen official levels or maps released by the publisher Valve, players can also create custom maps that anyone can download and use.
“To underline press freedom, [in the game] we have now built a Slavic city, called Voyna, meaning war in Russian,” Mukka said.
In the basement of one of the apartment buildings that make up the Soviet-inspired cityscape, Helsingin Sanomat hid a room where players can find Russian-language reporting by the newspaper’s war correspondents in Ukraine.
“In the room, you will find our documentation of what the reality of the war in Ukraine is,” Mukka said.
The walls of the digital room, lit up by red lights, are plastered with news articles and pictures reporting on events such as the massacres in the Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin.
On one of the walls, players can find a map of Ukraine that details reported attacks on the civilian population, while a Russian-language recording reading Helsingin Sanomat articles aloud plays in the background.
This was “information that is not available from Russian state propaganda sources”, Mukka said.
Since its release on Monday, the map has been downloaded more than 2,000 times, although the paper cannot currently track downloads geographically.
“This definitely underlines the fact that every attempt to obstruct the flow of information and blind the eyes of the public is doomed to fail in today’s world,” Mukka said.
He said an estimated 4 million Russians played the game. “These people may often be in the mobilisation or drafting age.”
“I think Russians also have the right to know independent and fact-based information, so that they can also make their own life decisions,” he added.
Chronic pain patients were implanted with “dummy” pieces of plastic and told it would ease their pain, according to an indictment charging the former CEO of the firm that made the fake devices with fraud.
Laura Perryman, the former CEO of Stimwave LLC, was arrested in Florida on Thursday. According to an FBI press release, Perryman was indicted “in connection with a scheme to create and sell a non-functioning dummy medical device for implantation into patients suffering from chronic pain, resulting in millions of dollars in losses to federal healthcare programs.” According to the indictment, patients underwent unnecessary implanting procedures as a result of the fraud.
Perryman was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud, and one count of healthcare fraud. Stimwave received FDA approval in 2014, according to Engadget, and was positioned as an alternative to opioids for pain relief.
[…]
The Stimwave “Pink Stylet” system consisted of an implantable electrode array for stimulating the target nerve, a battery worn externally that powered it, and a separate, 9-inch long implantable receiver. When doctors told Stimwave that the long receiver was difficult to place in some patients, Perryman allegedly created the “White Stylet,” a receiver that doctors could cut to be smaller and easier to implant—but was actually just a piece of plastic that did nothing.
“To perpetuate the lie that the White Stylet was functional, Perryman oversaw training that suggested to doctors that the White Stylet was a ‘receiver,’ when, in fact, it was made entirely of plastic, contained no copper, and therefore had no conductivity,” the FBI stated. “In addition, Perryman directed other Stimwave employees to vouch for the efficacy of the White Stylet, when she knew that the White Stylet was actually non-functional.”
Stimwave charged doctors and medical providers approximately $16,000 for the device, which medical insurance providers, including Medicare, would reimburse the doctors’ offices for.
[…]
“As a result of her illegal actions, not only did patients undergo unnecessary implanting procedures, but Medicare was defrauded of millions of dollars,” FBI Assistant Director Michael J. Driscoll said.
“A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus(Warning: source paywalled; alternative source),” reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn’t know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to “McCarthyism.”
Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.
Amazing that people at a place like Stanford didn’t get that this was going to be abused and used to scare the shit out of people – a bit like how these systems were scary in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, North Korea, etc etc.
People against vaccine and mask mandates have argued that they impose on a person’s bodily autonomy.
That rallying cry of “my body, my choice” was rooted in the abortion-rights battles of Roe v. Wade.
Yet those people against vaccine and mask mandates are now encouraging the potential demise of abortion rights.
The leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would end Roe v. Wade has been met with approval by many conservatives who championed the very same notion of bodily autonomy and personal choice throughout the pandemic.
Yet, while railing against vaccine mandates last June, he said that they ultimately mean that “personal autonomy means nothing. It is no longer your body, it is no longer your choice.”
For the past decade, unidentified miscreants have been planting incriminating evidence on the devices of human-rights advocates, lawyers, and academics in India seemingly to get them arrested.
That’s according to SentinelOne, which has named the crew ModifiedElephant and described the group’s techniques and targets since 2012 in a report published on Wednesday.
“The objective of ModifiedElephant is long-term surveillance that at times concludes with the delivery of ‘evidence’ – files that incriminate the target in specific crimes – prior to conveniently coordinated arrests,” said Tom Hegel, threat researcher at SentinelOne, in a blog post.
Hegel said the group has operated for years without attracting the attention of the cybersecurity community because of its limited scope of operations, its regionally-specific targeting, and its relatively unsophisticated tools.
ModifiedElephant prefers phishing with malicious Microsoft Office attachments to attack targets, and infect them with Windows malware.
In 2013, its messages relied on executable file attachments with deceptive double extensions in the file name (eg filename.pdf.exe). After 2015, the group used .doc, .pps, .docx, .rar, and password protected .rar files. In 2019, its attack vector involved links to hosted malicious files, and the group is also said to have employed large .rar archives to avoid detection.
The gang was also observed throwing Android malware at victims.
“There’s something to be said about how mundane the mechanisms of this operation are,” said Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, threat researcher at SentinelOne and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, via Twitter. “The malware is either custom garbage or commodity garbage. There’s nothing technically impressive about this threat actor, instead we marvel at their audacity.”
[…]
SentinelOne does not explicitly state that ModifiedElephant acts on behalf of the Indian government but notes how the group’s activities are consistent with the government’s interests.
“We observe that ModifiedElephant activity aligns sharply with Indian state interests and that there is an observable correlation between ModifiedElephant attacks and the arrests of individuals in controversial, politically-charged cases,” wrote Hegel.
According to the report, ModifiedElephant’s web infrastructure overlaps with Operation Hangover, a surveillance effort dating back to 2013 against targets of interest to Indian national security. The security firm also said that Wilson had been targeted by a second threat group, known as SideWinder [PDF], which has attacked government, military, and private sector organizations across Asia.
Hegel observes that SentinelOne last year reported on a threat actor operating in and around Turkey, dubbed EGoManiac, that planted incriminating evidence on the devices of journalists to support arrests made by the Turkish National Police.
As detailed by Wowhead, there are a lot of changes, some of them leaving characters with as few as two lines of dialogue to cycle through. And while some are clearly the result of combing back through the archives and removing content that, in the wake of Blizzard’s current crisis, is clearly inappropriate, other cuts are simply down to the fact that it’s now 2021 and some of this stuff is either horribly dated or simply bad.
Some examples of jokes that are being removed are:
Draenei Male: If you could get your hands on my family jewels I would be deeply appreciative.
Goblin Female: I’m a modern goblin woman. Independent? I still let men do nice things to me. But I stopped giving them any credit.
Orc Female: What’s estrogen? Can you eat it?
Tauren Male: Homogenized? No way, I like the ladies.
Meanwhile here are some of the flirts being cut:
Blood Elf Demon Hunter Male: Are you sure you’re not part-demon? I find myself wanting to stalk you.
Blood Elf Female: Normally, I only ride on epic mounts… But, let’s talk.
Dwarf Male: You look pretty, I like your hair, here’s a drink… Are you ready now?
Goblin Male: I got what you need. *sound of zipper*
Highmountain Tauren Female: Are you staring at my rack?
Nightborn Male: Mmmm, I wanna tap that ley line.
Orc Male: Um… You look like a lady.
Troll Female: When enraged, and in heat, a female troll can mate over 80 times in one night. Be you prepared?
After Take-Two Interactive sent a legal letter to Github referencing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the people behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects, Github has now removed the repositories for a second time. Take-Two has also demanded the removal of many project forks and wants Github to take action under its repeat infringer policy. TorrentFreak reports: Just before the weekend, a new entry in Github’s DMCA repository revealed the existence of a letter (PDF) sent to Github from Take-Two’s legal team. Dated September 9, 2021 (a week after the copyright lawsuit was filed) it informs Github that legal action is underway and it has come to the company’s attention that the contentious content (and numerous ‘fork’ repositories) continue to be made available on Github’s website. “We request that Github take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the materials [in the attached exhibit], together with any other instances of the same materials available within the same primary ‘GTAmodding/re3’ fork network (e.g. in ‘private’ or newly-created repositories),” it reads.
In common with the first DMCA notice, Github has responded by taking the project’s repositories down. Given that the defendants in the case already stand accused of previously sending ‘bad faith’ counter-notices, it seems unlikely that they will follow up with another set of similar responses that will soon be under the scrutiny of the court. Take-Two also follows up with a line that is becoming more and more popular in copyright infringement matters, one that references so-called ‘repeat infringers.’ “Furthermore, it is requested that Github take appropriate measures to prevent further infringement by the parties responsible, including pursuant to any ‘repeat infringer’ policies maintained by Github.”
This means that if any of the contentious content is reposted to Github, Take-Two would like the code repository to implement its own ‘repeat infringer’ process. It states that “in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion, [Github will] disable and terminate the accounts of users who may infringe upon the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of GitHub or others.” The letter also provides a laundry list of repository forks that, on the basis they are also infringing, should be removed. While Github appears to have complied in many cases, there are two notable exceptions. After being targeted by earlier DMCA takedowns, Github users ‘td512‘ and ‘erorcun‘ filed DMCA counter-notices to have their repositories restored. The former previously informed TorrentFreak that he believed Take-Two’s infringement claims to be incorrect. At the time of writing, both repos are still online.
A stalkerware company that’s designed to let customers spy on their spouses’s, children’s, or employees’ devices is exposing victims’ data, allowing anyone on the internet to see screenshots of phones simply by visiting a specific URL.
The news highlights the continuing lax security practices that many stalkerware companies use; not only do these companies sometimes market their tools specifically for illegal surveillance, but the targets are re-victimized by these breaches.
[…]
The stalkerware company, called pcTattleTale, offers the malware for Windows computers and Android phones.
[…]
Security researcher Jo Coscia showed Motherboard that pcTattleTale uploads victim data to an AWS server that requires no authentication to view specific images. Coscia said they found this by using a trial version of the stalkerware. Motherboard also downloaded a copy of the trial version of pcTattleTale and verified Coscia’s findings.
The URL for images that pcTattleTale captures is constructed with the device ID—a code given by pcTattleTale to the infected device that appears to be sequentially generated—the date, and a timestamp. Theoretically, an attacker may be able to churn through different URL combinations to discover images uploaded by other infected devices
[…]
Coscia said they used the free trial version of pcTattleTale when discovering the issue. In promotional emails, pcTattleTale said it would delete users’ data after the free trial expired. But Coscia found the screenshots were still accessible after their free trial period ended.
[…]
In one video online, Fleming said he built the code for pcTattleTale in 2003 over the better part of a year before launching it. Then he rewrote the code base when he bought out his business partner in 2012, he added. At one point Fleming complains about his server crashing because more and more people are using the service. Later on he says that pcTattleTale receives about 40,000 unique visitors a month.
“The market’s good, you know,” he said.
“To catch a cheating spouse using an android phone you will need to know their pass-code and have access to the phone for about 5 minutes. The best time to do this is when they are sleeping,” one guide on the company’s website reads. Another separate post from the company tells users how to trick their spouse into handing over their iCloud password.
Facebook said Tuesday that it has removed hundreds of accounts linked to a mysterious advertising agency operating out of Russia that sought to pay social media influencers to smear Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
A network of 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts was traced back to Fazze, an advertising and marketing firm working in Russia on behalf of an unknown client.
The network used fake accounts to spread misleading claims that disparaged the safety of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. One claimed AstraZeneca’s shot would turn a person into a chimpanzee. The fake accounts targeted audiences in India, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the U.S., using several social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram.
[…]
The Fazze network also contacted social media influencers in several countries with offers to pay them for reposting the misleading content. That ploy backfired when influencers in Germany and France exposed the network’s offer.
[…]
Fazze’s effort did not get much traction online, with some posts failing to get even a single response. But, while the campaign may have fizzled, it’s noteworthy because of its effort to enlist social media influencers, according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy.
“Although it was sloppy and didn’t have very good reach, it was an elaborate setup,” Gleicher said on a conference call announcing Tuesday’s actions.
[…]
Facebook investigators say some influencers did post the material, but later deleted it when stories about Fazze’s work began to emerge.
French YouTuber Léo Grasset was among those contacted by Fazze. He told The Associated Press in May that he was asked to post a 45- to 60-second video on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube criticizing the mortality rate of the Pfizer vaccine.
When Grasset asked Fazze to identify their client, the firm declined. Grasset refused the offer and went public with his concerns.
The offer from Fazze urged influencers not to mention that they were being paid, and also suggested they criticize the media’s reporting on vaccines.
hould probably sit down for this one. Sam Altman, the former CEO of famed startup incubator Y Combinator, is reportedly working on a new cryptocurrency that’ll be distributed to everyone on Earth. Once you agree to scan your eyeballs.
Yes, you read correctly.
You can thank Bloomberg for inflicting this cursed news on the rest of us. In its report, Bloomberg says Altman’s forthcoming cryptocurrency and the company behind it, both dubbed Worldcoin, recently raised $25 million from investors. The company is purportedly backed by Andreessen Horowitz, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Day One Ventures.
“I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better,” Altman told Bloomberg, explaining what fever dream inspired this.
[…]
What supposedly makes Worldcoin different is it adds a hardware component to cryptocurrency in a bid to “ensur[e] both humanness and uniqueness of everybody signing up, while maintaining their privacy and the overall transparency of a permissionless blockchain.” Specifically, Bloomberg says the gadget is a portable “silver-colored spherical gizmo the size of a basketball” that’s used to scan people’s irises. It’s undergoing testing in some cities, and since Worldcoin is not yet ready for distribution, the company is giving volunteers other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in exchange for participating. There are supposedly fewer than 20 prototypes of this eyeball scanning orb, and currently, each reportedly costs $5,000 to make.
Supposedly the whole iris scanning thing is “essential” as it would generate a “unique numerical code” for each person, thereby discouraging scammers from signing up multiple times. As for the whole privacy problem, Worldcoin says the scanned image is deleted afterward and the company purportedly plans to be “as transparent as possible.”
Debian Project Secretary Kurt Roeckx has announced the results of a closely-watched vote on what statement would be made about Richard Stallman’s readmission to the Free Software Foundation’s board.
Seven options were considered, with the Debian project’s 420 voting developers also asked to rank their preferred outcomes:
Option 1: “Call for the FSF board removal, as in rms-open-letter.github.io”
Option 2: “Call for Stallman’s resignation from all FSF bodies”
Option 3: “Discourage collaboration with the FSF while Stallman is in a leading position”
Option 4: “Call on the FSF to further its governance processes”
Option 5: “Support Stallman’s reinstatement, as in rms-support-letter.github.io”
Option 6: “Denounce the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF”
Option 7: “Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue”
While all seven options achieved a quorum of votes, two failed to achieve a majority — options 5 and 6. (“Support Stallman’s reinstatement” and “Denounce the witch-hunt…”) The option receiving the most votes was #7 (not issuing a public statement) — but it wasn’t that simple. The vote’s final outcome was determined by comparing every possible pair of options to determine which option would still be preferred by a majority of voters in each possible comparision.
In this case, that winner was still the option which had also received the most votes:
Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue. The Debian Project will not issue a public statement on whether Richard Stallman should be removed from leadership positions or not.
Any individual (including Debian members) wishing to (co-)sign any of the open letters on this subject is invited to do this in a personal capacity.
The results are captured in an elaborate graph. Numbers inside the ovals show the final ratio of yes to no votes (so a number higher than 1.00 indicates a majority, with much higher numbers indicating much larger majorities). Numbers outside the ovals (along the lines) indicate the number of voters who’d preferred the winning choice over the losing choice (toward which the arrow is pointing).
After a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Anti-Vax Watch found that a huge percentage of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines can be traced back to just a dozen people, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter told Congress they weren’t sure they would ban them.
The CCDH/Anti-Vax Watch report found that some 73 percent of misinformation on Facebook, and 17 percent on Twitter, is linked to a group of 12 accounts including prominent anti-vaxxers Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ty & Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, and Rizza Islam. The report also identified what it concluded were clear violations of platform policies on the spread of disinformation about the novel coronavirus pandemic and vaccines in general. The report was prominently cited in a letter by 12 state attorneys general to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding they do more to fight coronavirus-related misinformation; according to the Washington Post, this mirrors internal Facebook research showing relatively tiny groups of users are primarily responsible for flooding the site with anti-vaccine content.
“Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen,” the report states. “Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.”
“Research conducted by CCDH last year has shown that platforms fail to act on 95 percent of the Covid and vaccine misinformation reported to them, and we have uncovered evidence that Instagram’s algorithm actively recommends similar misinformation,” they added. “Tracking of 425 anti-vaccine accounts by CCDH shows that their total following across platforms now stands at 59.2 million as a result of these failures.”
What do you do if Google disables your cloud life? Andrew Spinks, co-author of the Terraria game and president of Re-Logic Games, does not know either, but has declared Google “a liability” and cancelled the port of Terraria to its Stadia platform.Terraria, co-designed by Spinks, was first released for Windows in 2011 and has sold over 30 million copies across PC, consoles, and mobile devices, states a post on the official forums last year.The problems started, according to the official Twitter account, when Re-Logic Games received an email concerning its YouTube channel “saying there was a TOS [Terms of Service] violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes.”Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial,” said Re-Logic.The YouTube channel itself was not disabled, only the access to it.The complaint was spotted on Twitter by YouTube support, which provided a link to the standard Google Account Recovery process. “We have attempted this process twice and received an automated response declining our request,” said Re-Logic.That was late last month. Now it seems the problem is still not fixed. “My account has now been disabled for over 3 weeks. I still have no idea why, and after using every resource I have to get this resolved you have done nothing but given me the runaround,” said Spinks. “My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on Google Play. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can’t finish it. My Google Drive data is completely gone. I can’t access my YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my gmail address of over 15 years.”I absolutely have not done anything to violate your terms of service, so I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge. Consider it burned. Terraria for Google Stadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little. Doing business with you is a liability.”The incident would be unremarkable except that Spinks is not the first to complain of shoddy treatment in the one-sided relationship users have with tech giants and Google in particular. Users complain that it is challenging getting past automated responses, or equally uninformative responses from support, and that discovering and correcting the real reason for bans and blocks is challenging.
In two reports, the researchers contended that an app on Google’s Android operating system that powers drones made by China-based Da Jiang Innovations, or DJI, collects large amounts of personal information that could be exploited by the Beijing government. Hundreds of thousands of customers across the world use the app to pilot their rotor-powered, camera-mounted aircraft.
The world’s largest maker of commercial drones, DJI has found itself increasingly in the cross hairs of the United States government, as have other successful Chinese companies. The Pentagon has banned the use of its drones, and in January the Interior Department decided to continue grounding its fleet of the company’s drones over security fears. DJI said the decision was about politics, not software vulnerabilities.
[…]
The security research firms that documented it, Synacktiv, based in France, and GRIMM, located outside Washington, found that the app not only collected information from phones but that DJI can also update it without Google reviewing the changes before they are passed on to consumers. That could violate Google’s Android developer terms of service.
The changes are also difficult for users to review, the researchers said, and even when the app appears to be closed, it awaits instructions from afar, they found.
“The phone has access to everything the drone is doing, but the information we are talking about is phone information,” said Tiphaine Romand-Latapie, a Synacktiv engineer. “We don’t see why DJI would need that data.”
[…]
Synacktiv did not identify any malicious uploads but simply raised the prospect that the drone app could be used that way.
A New York Times analysis of the software confirmed the functionality. An attempt to update the app directly from DJI’s servers delivered a message indicating that the phone The Times used “did not meet the qualifications for an update package.”
Note: nowhere do they say what data is supposedly being stolen, in fact they admit there has been no data stolen as far as they have seen. This is stirring the pot: you want your stuff to get updates in life. That’s called security.
The Washington Post’s Tony Romm reported on Monday night that Twitter has decided it will allow certain right-wing accounts to spread disinformation about the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, including tweets that suggest the results are being “rigged.”
Trump campaign manager Brad Pascal tweeted on Monday, “Quality control = rigged?,” citing a second Trump campaign official who had used the hashtag #RiggedElection.
There is no evidence of vote tampering in Iowa and the Trump campaign’s claims are entirely baseless. (Technical issues with an app used by election officials have caused delays in tallying the results.)
Twitter’s decision would seem to provide political fraudsters with a clear message: deceiving voters into believing U.S. election results have been falsified is an acceptable use of Twitter’s platform.
Twitter did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Earlier in the day, Charlie Kirk, the leader of a college-focused conservative group called Turning Point USA, tweeted that Iowa election officials were involved in “voter fraud” citing a debunked report by the right-wing activist group Judicial Watch.
The Judicial Watch report falsely claimed that the number of registered voters in Iowa exceeded the number of voting-age residents in each county. Judicial Watch’s fake figures were quickly shot down by Iowa’s Republican secretary of state, Paul D. Pate.
“It’s unfortunate this organization continues to put out inaccurate data regarding voter registration, and it’s especially disconcerting they chose the day of the Iowa Caucus to do this,” Pate said in a statement.
Pate continued: “My office has told this organization, and others who have made similar claims, that their data regarding Iowa is deeply flawed and their false claims erode voter confidence in elections. They should stop this misinformation campaign immediately and quit trying to disenfranchise Iowa voters.”
The Iowa secretary of state’s office pointed to “actual data” from the U.S. Census Bureau to say Judicial Watch’s claims about Iowa’s population are “greatly underestimated.”
Nevertheless, the tweet by Kirk invoking the debunked claim had over 42,500 retweets at press time.
Twitter spokesman Brandon Borrman told the Washington Post that the company would take no action against users working to sow mistrust in the official election results, which were not expected until Tuesday.
“The tweet is not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote,” Borrman told the Post, regarding tweets by prominent conservatives claiming the Democratic caucuses were “rigged.”
Twitter’s claim that such tweets do not “suppress voter turnout” is unlikely to go unchallenged by federal lawmakers who view this particular form of deception as an attempt to discourage participation in a “rigged” election.
The underlying message being propagated by the Trump campaign, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA seems an obvious one: Your vote doesn’t count, so why bother?
