Facebook to Buy Kustomer, Startup Valued at $1 Billion

Facebook Inc. said it would buy Kustomer, a startup that specializes in customer-service platforms and chatbots, part of an effort by the social-media giant to help companies use its platforms to do business.

Facebook announced the deal in a posting Monday, confirming an earlier report by The Wall Street Journal. Though terms weren’t disclosed, people familiar with the matter said it would value New York-based Kustomer at a little over $1 billion.

Closely held Kustomer, whose technology takes conversations from different channels and puts them on a single screen, was valued at $710 million in a private funding round roughly a year ago, according to PitchBook.

Increasingly, customers are communicating with companies by messaging instead of calling. Facebook said more than 175 million people reach out every day to businesses using its WhatsApp messaging service.

Kustomer already has a relationship with Facebook. Its offerings allow companies to aggregate and respond to customer inquiries that come in through Facebook Messenger. In October, Kustomer said it also began integrating with Facebook’s Instagram messaging.

👀 👉🏼 http://telegra.ph/WSJ-News-Exclusive--Facebook-to-Buy-Kustomer-Startup-Valued-at-1-Billion-11-30

via www.wsj.com

#DeleteFacebook #fb #kustomer #startup
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Senator Wyden to introduce legislation to stop the IRS from spying on Americans

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been in hot water and under investigation by its oversight body for buying location information on American citizens without a warrant. Motherboard has seen the contract between Venntel and the IRS that confirms how the IRS was spying on American citizens. Now, Senator Wyden has unveiled plans to introduce legislation that will stop the IRS from buying location data from third party companies like Venntel.

This data is gathered by Venntel through agreements with mobile applications which siphon your personal information for advertising purposes. The thing is, the government is also utilizing this data – which they obviously aren’t allowed by the Constitution to collect by themselves. Besides the IRS, US Customs Border Protection (CBP) has also been revealed to have a Venntel contract. It seems that many three letter agencies, certainly not just limited to the IRS, have been using this tactic to spy on Americans and it’s high time that legislation was introduced to stop this widespread privacy violating practice.

Because the information comes directly from your mobile phone, it can provide accurate location data even if your phone is spoofing GPS coordinates and changing its IP address. The document between the IRS and Venntel highlights why the IRS would want to use this technology and what for:

“This allows tracing and pattern-of-life analysis on locations of interesting criminal investigations, allowing investigators to trace locations of mobile devices even if a target is using anonymizing technologies like a proxy server, which is common in cyber investigations.”

👀 👉🏼 https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/senator-wyden-to-introduce-legislation-to-stop-the-irs-from-spying-on-americans/

#usa #wyden #legislation #irs #spying
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Privacy / Interviews - Tutanota wants to file a complaint at the BGH (Federal Supreme Court)

Because of the court decision by the Regional Court of Cologne, the anonymous e-mail service Tutanota wants to bring about a decision by the highest court.

The anonymous e-mail service Tutanota wants to bring about a decision by the supreme court in response to the court ruling by the Cologne Regional Court. The company does not agree that they must provide the LKA NRW with access to unencrypted messages for individual users. However, the judgement does not indicate that the company has had a major impact on the German market to date.

The Regional Court of Cologne is forcing the cryptology service Tutanota to rebuild its technical infrastructure again. Once again, the company from Hanover is to guarantee the investigators access to individual accounts. The public prosecutor's office wants direct access to non-encrypted messages of an extortionist. Despite our current interview, we have again followed up on the incident with press spokeswoman Hanna Bozakov.

👀 👉🏼 Translated with DeepL
https://tarnkappe.info/tutanota-will-beschwerde-vor-dem-bgh-vorbringen/

#tutanota #bgh #encryption #email #backdoors #lka #interview #privacy
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Spain's Biggest Union Is Suing Amazon for Spying on Striking Workers

The union alleges that Amazon hired the Pinkertons, which subcontracted with a local firm, to surveil workers planning an October strike in Barcelona.

More evidence of Amazon's widespread worker surveillance program and the company's use of the Pinkerton spy agency has emerged in Spain.

El Diario reported on Monday that Amazon spied on workers planning an October 30, 2019 strike at its BCN1 warehouse in Barcelona. To spy on workers, the outlet reported, Amazon called on the Pinkertons, who subcontracted the job in Catalonia to a local firm named Castor & Polux. A retired police officer, Antonio Giménez Raso, was named as a "police liaison" between Castor & Polux and the Catalonia police force, Mossos d'Esquadra.

The Barcelona strike took place days before another strike in Poland that Motherboard reported was infiltrated by Pinkerton operatives working for Amazon.

Castor & Polux’s report on the BCN1 warehouse, obtained by El Diario, is a detailed 51-page document featuring secretly-taken photographs of the strikers and their faces, as well as extensive comments collected from trade unionists, workers, and journalists reporting on the strike. The document also mentions a reporter who interviewed workers, prompting the agents to search for her vehicle, record the license plate and model, and take photographs of it.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. A spokesperson told el Diario that Amazon did not direct the Pinkertons or its affiliates to spy on the strike.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx8x8z/spains-biggest-union-is-suing-amazon-for-spying-on-striking-workers

👀 👉🏼 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-pinkerton-agency-spies-union-strike-spain-ccoo-legal-action-2020-12

#DeleteAmazon #amazon #spying #strikes #pinkertons #thinkabout
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This is the biggest general strike in history. Solidarity to the people of India ✊
https://redd.it/k5js26
@r_latestagecapitalism

Face mask no longer helps against face recognition

The developers of biometric face recognition have adapted their software to the pandemic. While the algorithms still had great difficulty with masked faces in the summer, five months later the situation looks completely different, a new study shows.

Face recognition is becoming more and more accurate, even if the monitored persons wear a facemask. This is the result of a study published on Tuesday by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which tested 152 different face recognition algorithms.

👀 👉🏼 (PDF)
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2020/NIST.IR.8331.pdf

#biometric #facerecognition #study #pdf
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No, the Darknet is not the stronghold of all evil!

The anonymization service Tor can be used for good and bad, a study examines what outweighs. However, this goes a long way wrong.

To obtain information about the usage patterns of the Tor network, scientists Eric Jardine (Virginia Tech/USA), Andrew Lindner (Skidmore College/USA) and Gareth Owenson (University of Portsmouth/UK) operated about 1 percent of the Tor entry nodes for about seven months between December 31, 2018, and August 18, 2019, and studied the connections that were made there.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/11/24/2011893117

#tor #darknet #study #thinkabout
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More than 400 lawmakers from 34 countries back 'Make Amazon Pay' campaign

LONDON (Reuters) - More than 400 lawmakers from 34 countries have signed a letter to Amazon.com Inc boss Jeff Bezos backing a campaign that claims the tech giant has “dodged and dismissed … debts to workers, societies, and the planet,” organisers said.

The “Make Amazon Pay” campaign was launched on Nov. 27 - the annual Black Friday shopping bonanza - by a coalition of over 50 organisations, with demands including improvements to working conditions and full tax transparency.

The letter’s signatories include U.S. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, former UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Vice President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala, co-convenors Progressive International and UNI Global Union said.

“We urge you to act decisively to change your policies and priorities to do right by your workers, their communities, and our planet,” the letter said.

“We stand ready to act in our respective legislatures to support the movement that is growing around the world to Make Amazon Pay.”

👀 👉🏼 https://telegra.ph/More-than-400-lawmakers-from-34-countries-back-Make-Amazon-Pay-campaign-12-03

via www.reuters.com

#DeleteAmazon #amazon #makeamazonpay
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Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against Facebook for Discriminating Against U.S. Workers

Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Favors H-1B Visa Workers and Other Temporary Visa Holders over U.S. Workers

The Department of Justice announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Facebook Inc. for discriminating against U.S. workers.

The lawsuit alleges that Facebook refused to recruit, consider, or hire qualified and available U.S. workers for over 2,600 positions that Facebook, instead, reserved for temporary visa holders it sponsored for permanent work authorization (or “green cards”) in connection with the permanent labor certification process (PERM). The positions that were the subject of Facebook’s alleged discrimination against U.S. workers offered an average salary of approximately $156,000. According to the lawsuit, and based on the department’s nearly two-year investigation, Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that Facebook instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders Facebook wanted to sponsor for green cards.

“The Department of Justice’s lawsuit alleges that Facebook engaged in intentional and widespread violations of the law, by setting aside positions for temporary visa holders instead of considering interested and qualified U.S. workers,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric S. Dreiband of the Civil Rights Division. “This lawsuit follows a nearly two-year investigation into Facebook’s practices and a ‘reasonable cause’ determination by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Our message to workers is clear: if companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable. Our message to all employers — including those in the technology sector — is clear: you cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider, or hire temporary visa holders over U.S. workers.”

👀 👉🏼 http://telegra.ph/Justice-Department-Files-Lawsuit-Against-Facebook-for-Discriminating-Against-US-Workers-12-03-2

via www.justice.gov

#DeleteFacebook #fb #facebook #doj #lawsuit #discrimination
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Zippyshare - known filehoster currently with problems

If you are currently trying to load something from Zippyshare, you may have already noticed. There is something wrong. The reason for the errors might be a certificate that expired yesterday. But there are also more and more virus warnings on the site.

Whether the expired certificate is also responsible for the slowly increasing number of virus warnings on Zippyshare, we do not know at this time. However, the first virus tests were negative.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/www18.zippyshare.com/detection

#zippyshare #certificate #viruswarning
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My Phone Was Spying on Me, so I Tracked Down the Surveillants

There are 160 apps on my phone. What they’re actually doing, I don’t know. But I decided to find out.

I have a feeling these apps are spying on me. Well, not listening in, but that they’re keeping track of where I am at all times. That my every move is shared on. When I am shopping for groceries, having a drink, or hanging out with friends.

I know there are those that buy and sell such information. How are they tracking us, and what do they want with our data?

To try to get to the bottom of this, I started an experiment in February. I installed lots of apps on a spare phone. I would then carry that phone everywhere.

Or almost. I left it at home when I took a COVID-19 test in April.

Easy to misuse
There is a good reason for why my feeling of being monitored has increased over the years. This spring, I was part of an NRK team documenting how more than 8,300 mobile phones were being tracked while they were at hospitals or women’s shelters.

For the sum of 35,000 NOK (3,300 EUR / 4,000 USD), we got access to location data showing where tens of thousands of Norwegians had travelled in 2019.

👀 👉🏼https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/my-phone-was-spying-on-me-so-i-tracked-down-the-surveillants/

👀 👉🏼 https://nrkbeta.no/2020/12/03/telefonen-spionerte-pa-meg-slik-fant-jeg-overvakerne/

#smartphone #spying #surveillants #surveilling #tracking #thinkabout
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Zippyshare: Sharehoster spreads malware

Via Malvertising has been spreading a script on the sharehoster Zippyshare malware for a few days. The download page is affected.

The sharehoster Zippyshare is currently under criticism in several underground forums. Apparently, since a few days more and more malware is spread from there. For example, the illegal music portal CannaPower explicitly warns against using this provider.

In CannaPower's forum, it is suspected that cyber criminals may have infiltrated a malicious script to the sharehoster Zippyshare via advertising. All users are advised to use the site with utmost caution at this time.

👀 👉🏼 Translated with DeepL
https://tarnkappe.info/zippyshare-sharehoster-verbreitet-malware-ssl-zertifikat-war-abgelaufen/

#zs #zippyshare #malware #malvertising #alert
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U.S. Used Patriot Act to Gather Logs of Website Visitors

A disclosure sheds new light on a high-profile national security law as lawmakers prepare to revive a debate over it in the Biden administration.

WASHINGTON — The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show.

But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather, according to letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The disclosures come at a time when Congress is struggling with new proposals to limit the law, known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The debate ran aground in the spring amid erratic messages from President Trump, but is expected to resume after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office in January.

Enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Section 215 of the Patriot Act permits the F.B.I. to obtain a secret court order to collect any business records deemed relevant to a national security inquiry — a very easy standard for investigators to meet. The legal authority for it and two other surveillance-related investigative tools lapsed for new inquiries earlier this year, although the F.B.I. can still use them for pre-existing cases.

Section 215 has been at the center of repeated fights over the balance between empowering national security investigators to detect potential threats and preserving Americans’ privacy and freedom to read what they want or call other people without fear of government observation. In the Bush years, civil liberties advocates raised alarms over the possibility that the F.B.I. might use it to monitor people’s library records. In 2013, an uproar erupted over the disclosure that the National Security Agency had been secretly using it to collect bulk logs of all Americans’ phone calls.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/us/politics/section-215-patriot-act.html

#patriotact #usa #fbi #logging #privacy #thinkabout
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Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life.

👀 👉🏼 https://nitter.net/Snowden/status/1334608745192677380

#snowden #assange #trump #amnesty
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EFF Podcast: Control Over Users, Competitors, and Critics

Cory Doctorow joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how large, established tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook can block interoperability in order to squelch competition and control their users, and how we can fix this by taking away big companies' legal right to block new tools that connect to their platforms – tools that would let users control their digital lives.

🎙 https://archive.org/details/eff-podcast-episode-4-interroperability

#eff #doctorow #podcast #apple #google #facebook
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Telegram: the devastating verdict at heise.de - an analysis

The scathing verdict on Telegram bei heise still causes indignation. We explain why WhatsApp is worse. A guest commentary.

The devastating contribution of the editor Jürgen Schmidt caused a veritable wave of indignation in many cases. heise online presents Durows Messenger as a real "data protection nightmare". Even Zuckerberg's market leader WhatsApp works much more effectively when it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, Schmidt argues. Instead of presenting Telegram as a refuge for hackers, conspiracy theorists, right-wing radicals and other cyber criminals, heise took a closer look at the security aspects of Telegram. Our guest author shrugg1e took a closer look at the argumentation.

Is Telegram really a privacy nightmare?

At the end of November an article about the popular Messenger Telegram was published on the news portal heise.de. Within a few days, almost 1,100 (!) comments accumulated there. The article obviously hit a sensitive nerve. So let's take a closer look at the published theses. By the way, just one year earlier, the same editor had publicly demonized WhatsApp at heise for disclosing far too much data to third parties.

👀 👉🏼 Translated with DeepL
https://tarnkappe.info/telegram-das-vernichtende-urteil-bei-heise-de-eine-analyse/

#telegram #heise #shitpost #commentary #pleaseshare
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LineageOS adopts SeedVault as its open source backup solution

For those not familiar with SeedVault, it is an open-source backup app that uses the same internal APIs as adb backup. The application doesn’t need root access, but it must be compiled with the operating system. The backup location is user-configurable, with options ranging from a USB flash drive to a remote self-hosted cloud alternative such as NextCloud. This makes SeedVault a particularly viable option for users who doesn’t want to store their personal data to Google’s proprietary cloud-based storage.

👀 👉🏼 https://nitter.net/t_grote/status/1220036097293586432#m

👀 👉🏼 http://telegra.ph/LineageOS-adopts-SeedVault-as-its-open-source-backup-solution-12-06

via www.xda-developers.com

#lineage #android #seedvoult #opensource #backup #tool
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Bengaluru cops to rope in banks, ISPs to fight cyber crime

Only about 10 per cent of cyber-crimes are investigated to the satisfaction of complainants —nearly 60 per cent of whom are people who have lost money in frauds or have been targeted with morphed pictures.

On December 12 last year, Bengaluru city’s cyber crime FIR system registered its 9,999th case. Soon after, it crashed. The automated registry of the main cyber crime police station in India’s IT capital was simply not built to log cases beyond the four-figure mark.

Cut to 2020, and eight specialised cyber crime and economic offences police stations across the city are sharing the burden of the nearly 7,800 cyber-crime cases registered till the end of November.

The city’s police may have increased its cyber-crime combatting footprint, but a vital issue persists. Only about 10 per cent of cyber-crimes are investigated to the satisfaction of complainants —nearly 60 per cent of whom are people who have lost money in frauds or have been targeted with morphed pictures.

A key reason for the poor resolution rate, particularly in cases of online monetary fraud, is the crucial time gap between the discovery of the crime by the victim and the registration of a complaint by the police—referred to as the “golden period”.

Now, the Bengaluru Police are now working on creating an automated, real-time system for stopping cyber crimes which will work in conjunction with banks, payment services, internet service providers, social media firms, and even judiciary, to catch these crimes early.

👀 👉🏼 http://telegra.ph/Bengaluru-cops-to-rope-in-banks-ISPs-to-fight-cyber-crime-12-06

via indianexpress.com

#bengaluru #india #cybercrime #fraud #isp #police
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Ever wanted to download a Youtube video on Windows without using shady apps?

This little context menu script will grab the link from your clipboard, download the video (or audio) and encode it to mp4 with NVENC hardware acceleration (mp3 for audio).

https://gist.github.com/notthebee/7d544c568ac3cdfc2bd32938d85f2a18

https://nitter.net/notthebeeee/status/1330960152527327243#m

#youtube #download #youtubedl #tool #windows
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EU Parliament clears way for screening of private messages

Facebook and Skype have for years automatically searched private pictures and videos for evidence of child abuse. A new law, which was passed today in the EU Parliament in a fast-track procedure, is to continue this practice - despite surveillance concerns.

MEPs today gave the green light for a new EU law that will allow providers like Facebook to continue screening private messages for possible signs of child abuse images and videos. The law, which was proposed by the Commission as recently as the summer, is currently being rushed through the EU institutions. It could be passed as early as the beginning of 2021.

The reason for the law is a change in the law in the previous year, which initially received little attention. As a result, service providers such as Facebook and Skype will lose the ability to screen chat messages and private groups for child abuse content on a massive scale as of December 21, 2020. The European Code for Electronic Communications strengthens the confidentiality of e-mail, messenger services and Internet telephony. Such services will then be legally equivalent to telephone and fax, and the secrecy of telecommunications will apply.

The change was called for by the EU Commission, security authorities and child rights activists. Even the US actor Ashton Kutcher intervened in the process. There is skepticism, however, from the digital civil society, the Greens and the Left. They consider the plans to soften the confidentiality of online communication to be a mistake, even if they are intended to serve a good cause.

Source (german)
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/gesetz-gegen-kindesmissbrauch-eu-parlament-gibt-weg-frei-fuer-durchleuchten-privater-nachrichten/

#surveillance #privacy #messages #eu #parlament #childabuse #authorities #police #thinkabout
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📡@BlackBox_Archiv
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