Cluster of 295 Chrome extensions caught hijacking Google and Bing search results

The malicious Chrome extensions have been installed by more than 80 million users.

More than 80 million Chrome users have installed one of 295 Chrome extensions that hijack and insert ads inside Google and Bing search results.

The malicious extensions were discovered by AdGuard, a company that provides ad-blocking solutions, while the company's staff was looking into a series of fake ad-blocking extensions that were available on the official Chrome Web Store.

A subsequent investigation into the fake ad blockers unearthed a larger group of malicious activity spreading across 295 extensions.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cluster-of-295-chrome-extensions-caught-hijacking-google-and-bing-search-results

#google #chrome #bing #extensions #hijack

Why Microsoft wants TikTok

At first glance, a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok seems a little unusual. Microsoft has spent years walking back consumer plays like the Groove Music service, the Kinect Xbox accessory, its Microsoft Band fitness device, Windows Phone, and more recently the Mixer streaming service. Microsoft has been favoring its enterprise software and services, and even Cortana has transitioned to be productivity-focused. How does a service that caters to dancing teenagers fit with Microsoft’s buttoned-up business demographic?

If you dig a little deeper into Microsoft’s future ambitions, though, a move to acquire TikTok’s operations in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand could benefit many of Microsoft’s existing businesses while also setting the company up as a real competitor to YouTube and Facebook.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/3/21352309/microsoft-tiktok-acquisition-deal-why-us-countries-data

#us #microsoft #bytedance #tiktok

How Cops Can Secretly Track Your Phone

A guide to stingray surveillance technology, which may have been deployed at recent protests.

Since May, as protesters around the country have marched against police brutality and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists have spotted a recurring presence in the skies: mysterious planes and helicopters hovering overhead, apparently conducting surveillance on protesters. A press release from the Justice Department at the end of May revealed that the Drug Enforcement Agency and U.S. Marshals Service were asked by the Justice Department to provide unspecified support to law enforcement during protests.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/31/protests-surveillance-stingrays-dirtboxes-phone-tracking/

#us #phone #tracking #surveillance

Google to pay $7.5M in class action settlement. That's $5 a victim.

As confirmed by BleepingComputer, users today are receiving emails titled, "Notice of Class Action Settlement re Google Plus..." that offer details on the two-year class-action lawsuit Google had been litigating because of the Google+ data leak.

In October 2018, Google+ had shut down its services after information about a bug leaking user's personal data came to light.

Although aware of this bug since May 2018 and knowing it was leaking information from some 500,000 user accounts via the Google+ API. an internal committee at Google had decided not to disclose details on the bug sooner.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-to-pay-75m-in-class-action-settlement-thats-5-a-victim/

📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Google "accidentally" enables Home smart speakers to listen in to everyday house sounds

Users have received notifications when their Google Home speakers hear smoke alarms or breaking glass

Google "accidentally" enabled a feature for Google Home users which let the smart speaker listen to the sounds of objects in your house.

A user on Reddit spotted a notification on his phone from his smart speaker which alerted him to the fact his smoke alarm was going off while he was cooking.

Usually, Google Home devices only respond to its active ‘wake words’ – such as “Ok, Google” or “Hey, Google” – but in this instance the speaker was listening out to a passive sound and make “my dumb smoke detectors smart,” the Reddit user wrote.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-home-smart-speakers-listen-switch-on-smoke-detector-glass-breaking-a9652991.html

#google #home #smart #speaker #privacy

Virginia becomes first US state to debut COVID-19 tracing app using Apple and Google API

The Exposure Notification API developed by #Apple and #Google is officially being put to use in the United States. #Virginia has become the first U.S. state to offer a COVID-19 contact tracing application using the Apple and Google API, and it’s available to download today from the App Store for iOS and Google Play for Android.

The COVIDWISE app comes from the Virginia Department of Health. As we’ve explained in the past, Apple only allows public health agencies like Health Canada to access the Exposure Notification API. That is, not anyone can simply build an app using the API.

By using the Exposure Notification API, the COVIDWISE app uses Bluetooth to exchange random identifiers with nearby phones and subsequently checks against a list of identifiers from people who have reported a positive test.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/05/virginia-becomes-first-us-state-to-debut-covid-19-tracing-app-using-apple-and-google-api/

China 'exporting CCP speech controls to Australia' as second university caught in row

The Chinese Communist Party is harnessing an online cyber policing portal, accessible in Australia, to increase its international influence, as it encourages Chinese internet users to dob in acts that undermine Beijing's image.

Australian universities have been engulfed in a fresh row over academic freedom after co-ordinated protests from nationalist Chinese students forced UNSW to take down social media posts critical of the Chinese Communist Party's actions in Hong Kong. UNSW vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs on Wednesday apologised for the decision, telling staff there was "no excuse for our failure in this instance" and the social media posts should never have been removed.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/china-exporting-ccp-speech-controls-to-australia-as-second-university-caught-in-row-20200805-p55irf.html

'The fear is real': Chinese students in Australia dread reprisal from Beijing

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-fear-is-real-chinese-students-in-australia-dread-reprisal-from-beijing-20200804-p55iht.html

#australia #UNSW #china #CCCP #freespeech

Asia's regulators ignore rising influence of Big Tech at their peril

Market power of Alibaba, Reliance, Tencent and Gojek could outweigh US behemoths

The heads of the U.S. big four tech giants escaped their recent Capitol Hill grillings without lasting damage. Whether Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook will be so lucky in future is less clear, given the likely arrival of President Joe Biden later this year, and near-unanimity among his Democrat colleagues that America's tech giants need to be brought to heel.

Viewed from Asia, the hearing spectacle looked curious, however. Governments here have come to view Big Tech more positively, with China and India in particular racing to nurture dominant national technology champions. The result could leave Asia with a cluster of cyber behemoths with even more entrenched power than their U.S. equivalents -- a profound long term economic development that may turn out to be a mixed blessing at best.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Asia-s-regulators-ignore-rising-influence-of-Big-Tech-at-their-peril

#asia #BigTech

WhatsApp spyware attack: senior clergymen in Togo among activists targeted

Bishop from Togo among 1,400 individuals alerted by WhatsApp to malware attack

A prominent Catholic bishop and a priest in Togo have been told they were targeted by spyware made by the private surveillance firm NSO Group, in the first known case of its kind involving members of the clergy.

A joint investigation by the Guardian and the French newspaper Le Monde can reveal that Bishop Benoît Alowonou and five other critics of Togo’s repressive government were alerted by WhatsApp last year that their mobile phones had been targeted with the spying technology.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/03/senior-clergymen-among-activists-targeted-by-spyware

#africa #togo #whatsapp #spyware

China’s ride-hailing king DiDi faces uphill battle in Russia

Protectionism and fierce competition await the onetime Uber-slayer

MOSCOW -- China's ride-hailing giant DiDi Chuxing is preparing to make its debut in Russia, the latest step in the company's ambitious global expansion -- but one that experts say is unlikely to be easy, citing established local competitors and protectionist attitudes.

DiDi has begun recruiting drivers in the southwestern city of Kazan, offering applicants earnings starting from 3,000 rubles ($41) per shift, surcharges for every order, and a commission rate of only 10%.

Sources within the Russian taxi industry expect DiDi to launch in Kazan as early as this month (August), Russian business daily RBC reported in July. From there, the company is looking to expand its operations to Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, and St. Petersburg before the end of the year.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-ride-hailing-king-DiDi-faces-uphill-battle-in-Russia

#asia #china #russia #DiDi

NSA urges military personnel to turn off cellphone location data

The National Security Agency is urging US military and intelligence personnel to turn off location-sharing services on their cellphones to prevent security breaches.

The secretive intelligence agency warned in a bulletin Tuesday that the common app feature can pose a real threat to national security, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Location-sharing can be critical for the function of apps like Google Maps, but the information it collects about users’ whereabouts is also collected by tech companies that then sell the anonymized data to marketers and advertisers.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/04/nsa-presses-military-to-turn-off-cell-phone-location-data/

#us #NSA #military #phone #location

Google pulls 2,500 China-linked YouTube channels over disinformation

(Reuters) - Google says it has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the videosharing platform.

The Alphabet-owned company said the channels were removed between April and June “as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.”

The channels generally posted “spammy, non-political content,” but a small subset touched on politics, the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-google-disinformation/google-pulls-2500-china-linked-youtube-channels-over-disinformation-idUSKCN251384

#google #china #youtube

How to Fight Against Big Tech’s Power

We are beholden to a few Big Tech overlords for much of our digital lives. We can be more conscientious about it.

In the morning, you check email. At noon, you browse social media and message friends. In the evening, you listen to music while shopping online. Around bedtime, you curl up with an e-book.

For all of those activities, you probably used a product made or sold by Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook. There’s no simple way to avoid those Big Four. Even if you subscribed to Spotify, you would probably still be using a Google Android phone, an Amazon speaker or an Apple iPhone to stream the music. Even if you deleted Facebook, you might still be using the Facebook-owned Instagram or WhatsApp.

Being beholden to a small set of companies that touch every corner of our digital lives is precisely why lawmakers have summoned the chief executives of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple to testify in an antitrust hearing on Wednesday. Expect the tech titans to be grilled over whether their companies have become so powerful and far-reaching that they harm rivals and all of us, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/technology/personaltech/big-tech-power-how-to-fight.html

#BigTech

Distributed Denial of Secrets: Questions wanted for an exclusive interview!

For an exclusive interview we have the makers of the collective DDoSecrets at hand. In contrast to other disclosure platforms, most leaks are not published on a website, but by telegram. Many actions are also announced on Twitter.

Distributed Denial of Secrets fights against dictatorships, corruption, police violence, tax evaders and much more

Last month the public prosecutor's office in Zwickau confiscated a server located in Germany. The reason was the so-called BlueLeaks, which activists of Distributed Denial of Secrets circulated. They distributed no less than 269 gigabytes, which had originally been hacked by a member of Anonymous. The extensive leak includes US police reports and documents. It includes bank details, names, email addresses, emails with attachments, phone numbers, photos, videos etc. pp. After receiving a request for legal assistance, the responsible public prosecutor's office became active the previous month.

👀 👉🏼 Deadline for questions ends on August 20, 2020 ! 👈🏼 👀

What do you want to know from the people who run it? They face a public interview for the first time! Our deadline ends in exactly 14 days. 👇🏼 👇🏼

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 https://tarnkappe.info/distributed-denial-of-secrets-questions-wanted-for-an-exclusive-interview/

👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 https://tarnkappe.info/distributed-denial-of-secrets-fragen-fuer-ein-exklusives-interview-gesucht/


💡 This exclusive interview with DDoSecrets will be published in German and English. Questions can therefore be submitted in both languages.

Please ask your questions either in the Tarnkappe Forum, or use one of the following Telegram-Groups:.

👉🏼 Tarnkappe.info

👉🏼 NoGoolag

Please do not forget to mark your question(s) with #DDoSecrets

#DDoSecrets #interview
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
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Chrome for Android may soon send notifications reminding you to use Chrome

For years now, Google Chrome has been an absolute dominant force in the world of web browsers, but since the relaunch of Microsoft Edge based on Google’s Chromium, that position has been challenged. Now, Google is preparing to drive more Android owners back to using Chrome through targeted notifications.

Over the admittedly brief history of the Internet, there have been a number of fierce competitions, commonly called “browser wars,” between companies, in an effort to get more people to use their particular web browser. Mozilla and Netscape waged war against Internet Explorer, and Chrome fought and won against Firefox. Most recently, Microsoft Edge and Samsung Internet have begun to wage war against Chrome on desktop and Android respectively.

https://9to5google.com/2020/08/04/chrome-android-notifications-reminding-use-chrome/

#google #chrome

What Really Does and Doesn’t Work for Fair Use in the DMCA

On July 28, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held another in its year-long series of hearings on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The topic of this hearing was “How Does the DMCA Contemplate Limitations and Exceptions Like Fair Use?”

We’re glad Congress is asking the question. Without fair use, much of our common culture would be inaccessible, cordoned off by copyright. Fair use creates breathing space for innovation and new creativity by allowing us to re-use and comment on existing works.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/what-really-does-and-doesnt-work-fair-use-dmca

#us #DMCA

I've got nothing to hide

Employees at Blizzard, maker of 'World of Warcraft' and 'Overwatch,' were reportedly paid so little they were forced to skip meals to pay rent while the CEO made $40 million

With some of the most popular, best-selling video game franchises in the world, Activision and its subsidiary, Blizzard Entertainment, are money-making powerhouses.

But some employees at Blizzard — the studio responsible for hits like "World of Warcraft," "Overwatch," and the upcoming "Diablo 4" — said they were paid so poorly that they used free office coffee as an appetite suppressant, skipped meals in the employee cafeteria, and, in one case, chose not to have kids due to an inability to afford them.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/employees-at-blizzard-maker-of-world-of-warcraft-and-overwatch-were-reportedly-paid-so-little-they-were-forced-to-skip-meals-to-pay-rent-while-the-ceo-made-40-million/ar-BB17yp2B

Australian PM says no evidence of TikTok abusing user data

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday there was no evidence that Chinese-owned TikTok had abused the data of its hundreds of millions of users.

“We have had a good look at this, and there is no evidence for us to suggest … that there is any misuse of any people’s data,” he told the Aspen Security Forum meeting in Aspen, Colorado.

“There are plenty of things that are on TikTok that are embarrassing enough in public, but it’s that sort of social media device,” he said via videoconference, chuckling.

However, he said, Australians need to be “very aware” that TikTok and other social media platforms, including US-owned companies, reap enormous amounts of information on users and subscribers.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3096060/australian-pm-says-no-evidence-tiktok-abusing-user-data

#australia #tiktok

DHS Obtained Protesters' Encrypted Messages, Used Them To Craft 'Intelligence' Reports

The more the DHS inserts itself into the ongoing civil unrest, the more unrestful it gets. President Trump sent his federal forces to Portland, Oregon -- the first of many "democrat" cities the president feels are too violent/unrestful -- to protect federal buildings from violent graffiti outbursts or whatever. When the DHS arrived -- represented by the CBP, ICE, US Marshals, and other federal law enforcement -- it announced its arrival with secret police tactics straight out of the Gestapo playbook.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200801/16413745019/dhs-obtained-protesters-encrypted-messages-used-them-to-craft-intelligence-reports.shtml

#us #DHS #protesters #telegram #surveillance

Indonesia imposes 10% VAT on Facebook, Disney, Tiktok: tax office

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia has added more techology companies that will be obligated to apply 10% value-added tax on sales to Indonesian customers to include Facebook, Disney and TikTok, the tax office said in a statement on Friday.

Southeast Asia’s biggest country, which has a population of nearly 270 million people, announced last month it will impose 10% VAT on sales by technology firms including Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and Google, as spending patterns shift with increased remote working amid the pandemic, which has hit government finances.

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSKCN2530CZ

#asia #indonesia #facebook #disney #tiktok #tax