Archive for the ‘Global Domination’ Category
Star Wars: KOTOR Fan Remake Shutting Down After Cease And Desist From Lucasfilm
Back in 2016, an ambitious group of fans began work on an Unreal Engine 4 “reboot” of role-playing, light-sabering classic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic called Apeiron. The project has made impressive progress since then, but it emitted a tragic Wilhelm scream this week when Lucasfilm lawyers zapped it out of existence. As […]
EU hijacking: self-driving car data will be copyrighted…by the manufacturer – not to be released by drivers / engineers / researchers / mechanics
Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened… The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable.” This […]
Ancestry Sites Could Soon Expose Nearly Anyone’s Identity, Researchers Say
Genetic testing has helped plenty of people gain insight into their ancestry, and some services even help users find their long-lost relatives. But a new study published this week in Science suggests that the information uploaded to these services can be used to figure out your identity, regardless of whether you volunteered your DNA in […]
The US Democracy is turning away so many people at polling stations, they need a What to Do If You’re Turned Away at the Polls guide
Several states have instituted stricter voter ID laws since the 2016 presidential election; more, still, are purging voter rolls in the lead up to the election, and the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold Ohio’s aggressive purging law means you can expect many more people to be removed. So, even if you’re registered to vote […]
Instagram explores sharing your precise location history with Facebook even when not using the app
Instagram is currently testing a feature that would allow it to share your location data with Facebook, even when you’re not using the app, reports app researcher Jane Manchun Wong (via TechCrunch). The option, which Wong notes is being tested as a setting you have to opt-in to, allows Facebook products to “build and use […]
Lawyers for Vizio data grabbing Smart TV owners propose final deal, around $20 per person. Lawyers themselves get $5.6 million.
Lawyers representing Vizio TV owners have asked a federal judge in Orange County, California to sign off on a proposed class-action settlement with the company for $17 million, for an affected class of 16 million people, who must opt-in to get any money. Vizio also agrees to delete all data that it collected. Notice of […]
New Zealand border cops warn travelers that without handing over electronic passwords ‘You shall not pass!’
Customs laws in New Zealand now allow border agents to demand travellers unlock their phones or face an NZ$5,000 (around US$3,300) fine. The law was passed during 2017 with its provisions coming into effect on October 1. The security conscious of you will also be pleased to know Kiwi officials still need a “reasonable” suspicion […]
Tim Berners-Lee Announces Solid, an Open Source Project Which Would Aim To Decentralize the Web
Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, thinks it’s broken and he has a plan to fix it. The British computer scientist has announced a new project that he hopes will radically change his creation by giving people full control over their data. Tim Berners-Lee: This is why I have, over recent years, […]
CBS Shuts Down Ambitious Fan Effort To Make A Virtual Starship Enterprise
Before there was Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s game about piloting the original Enterprise, there was Star Trek Stage-9, a fan project recreating the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation in Unreal Engine. This week the project is no more, following a cease and desist demand by CBS. One of the leads on the project, who […]
Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information – and you can’t find out what that is
Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him […]
Google Chrome Is Now Quietly Forcing You to Log In—Here’s What to Do About It
Once again, Google has rankled privacy-focused people with a product change that appears to limit users’ options. It’s easy to miss the fact that you’re automatically being logged-in to Chrome if you’re not paying attention. Chrome 69 released to users on September 5, and you likely noticed that it has a different look. But if […]
Hey, Microsoft, stop installing third-party apps on clean Windows 10 installs!
Before Windows 10, a clean install of Windows only included the bare essentials a user would need to get started using their PC. That included software built by Microsoft, such as Mail, Paint, and its web browser, and it never included “bloatware” or “trialware” that one might find on hardware purchased from a third-party OEM […]
Open-source alt-droid wants to know if it’s still leaking data to Google
/e/, a Google-free fork of Android, reached a milestone this month with its initial ROM release. It’s available for download, so you can kick the tires, with nightly builds delivered via OTA (over the air) updates. El Reg interviewed the project’s leader, Gael Duval, in the summer. Duval launched and led the Linux Mandrake project. […]
Zoho – GSuite competitor – pulled offline after phishing complaints by DNS registrar, millions of people couldn’t work. Love the cloud!
Zoho .com was pulled offline on Monday after the company’s domain registrar received phishing complaints, the company’s chief executive said. The web-based office suite company, which also provides customer relationship and invoicing services to small businesses, tweeted that the site was “blocked” earlier in the day by TierraNet, which administers its domain name. In an email […]
Article 11, Article 13: EU’s Dangerous Copyright Bill Advances: massive censorship and upload filters (which are impossible) and huge taxes for links.
Members of the European Parliament voted Wednesday to approve a sweeping overhaul of the EU’s copyright laws that includes two controversial articles that threaten to hand more power to the richest tech companies and generally break the internet. Overall, MEPs voted in favor of the EU Copyright Directive with a strong majority of 438 to […]
You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn’t. Didn’t you learn that from Amazon in 2009?
Remember when you decided to buy, rather than rent, that movie online? We have some bad news for you – you didn’t. Biologist Anders Gonçalves da Silva was surprised this week to find three movies he had purchased through iTunes simply disappeared one day from his library. So he contacted Apple to find out what […]
Top European Court Rules UK Mass Surveillance Regime Violates Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled this week that the United Kingdom government’s surveillance regime violated human rights laws. The matter first came to light in 2013 when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed British surveillance practices—namely that the government intercepts social media, messages, and phone calls regardless of criminal record or suspicions of […]
How Location Tracking Actually Works on Your Smartphone (and how to manipulate it – kind of)
As the recent revelation over Google’s background tracking of your location shows, it’s not as easy as it should be to work out when apps, giant tech companies and pocket devices are tracking your location and when they’re not. Here’s what you need to know about how location tracking works on a phone—and how to […]
Google Reportedly Bought Your Mastercard Data in Secret, and That’s Not Even the Bad News
Bloomberg reports that, after four years of negotiations, Google purchases a trove of credit card transaction data from Mastercard, allegedly for “millions of dollars.” Google then reportedly used that data to provide select advertisers with a tool called “store sales measurement” that the company quietly announced in a blog post last year, though it failed […]
Facebook is asking more financial institutions to join Messenger and give up your financial data
Facebook is asking more banks to join Messenger and bring their users’ financial information along with them. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday Facebook was asking banks for users’ financial information, like credit card transactions and checking account balances. The data would be used for Messenger features including account balance updates and fraud alerts, […]
Online photos can’t simply be re-published, EU court rules
Internet users must ask for a photographer’s permission before publishing their images, even if the photos were already freely accessible elsewhere online, the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday. “The posting on a website of a photograph that was freely accessible on another website with the consent of the author requires a new authorisation by that […]
TSA says ‘Quiet Skies’ surveillance snared zero threats but put 5000 travellers under surveillance and on no fly lists
SA officials were summoned to Capitol Hill Wednesday and Thursday afternoon following Globe reports on the secret program, which sparked sharp criticism because it includes extensive surveillance of domestic fliers who are not suspected of a crime or listed on any terrorist watch list. “Quiet Skies is the very definition of Big Brother,” Senator Edward […]
Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won’t take no for an answer
Google has admitted that its option to “pause” the gathering of your location data doesn’t apply to its Maps and Search apps – which will continue to track you even when you specifically choose to halt such monitoring. Researchers at Princeton University in the US this week confirmed on both Android handhelds and iPhones that […]
Spyware Company Leaves ‘Terabytes’ of Selfies, Text Messages, and Location Data Exposed Online
A company that sells surveillance software to parents and employers left “terabytes of data” including photos, audio recordings, text messages and web history, exposed in a poorly-protected Amazon S3 bucket. Image: Shutterstock This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their […]
Woman sentenced to more than 5 years for leaking info about Russia hacking attempts. Trump still on the loose.
A former government contractor who pleaded guilty to leaking U.S. secrets about Russia’s attempts to hack the 2016 presidential election was sentenced Thursday to five years and three months in prison. It was the sentence that prosecutors had recommended — the longest ever for a federal crime involving leaks to the news media — in […]
