Bookmarks (305)

Automotive historian Dan Albert loves the "adorable tiny truck" he's driving. It's one of the small Japan-made "kei" pickups and minivans that "make up about a third of car sales in Japan." Americans can legally import older models for less than $10,000, and getting 40 miles per gallon they're "Cheap to buy and run... rugged, practical, no-frills machines — exactly what the American-built pickup...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A concert on Monday night at New York's Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents' wedding anniversary. He didn't end up seeing the show -- and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all...

Longtime Slashdot reader frank_adrian314159 writes: According to an article in Wired, Elon Musk has appointed a team of technologists from DOGE to "rewrite the code that runs the SSA in months." This codebase has over 60 million lines of COBOL and handles record keeping for all American workers and payments for all Social Security recipients. Given that the code has to track the byzantine...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle start-up Nikola who was sentenced to prison last year, was pardoned by Donald Trump late on Thursday, the White House confirmed on Friday. The pardon of Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for exaggerating the potential of his technology, could wipe out hundreds of millions...

Smart TV platforms are increasingly monitoring what appears on users' screens through Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, building detailed viewer profiles for targeted advertising. Roku, which transitioned from a hardware company to an advertising powerhouse, reported $3.5 billion in annual ad revenue for 2024 -- representing 85% of its total income. The company has aggressively acquired ACR-related firms, with Roku-owned technology winning an Emmy...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amnesty International published a new report this week detailing attempted hacks against two Serbian journalists, allegedly carried out with NSO Group's spyware Pegasus. The two journalists, who work for the Serbia-based Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), received suspicious text messages including a link -- basically a phishing attack, according to the nonprofit. In one case, Amnesty said its...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Despite Oracle denying a breach of its Oracle Cloud federated SSO login servers and the theft of account data for 6 million people, BleepingComputer has confirmed with multiple companies that associated data samples shared by the threat actor are valid. Last week, a person named 'rose87168' claimed to have breached Oracle Cloud servers and began selling...

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the location will be the South London suburb of Croydon. From a report: The two cameras will be installed in the city center in an effort to combat crime and will be attached to buildings and lamp posts on North End and London Road....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm has reportedly filed secret complaints against Arm with the European Commission, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Qualcomm argues that Arm's open licensing approach helped build a robust hardware and software ecosystem. However, this ecosystem is under threat now as Arm moves to restrict that access to benefit...

The president of Signal defended the messaging app's security on Wednesday after top Trump administration officials mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom they used to discuss looming U.S. military action against Yemen's Houthis. For a report: Signal's Meredith Whittaker did not directly address the blunder, which Democratic lawmakers have said was a breach of U.S. national security. But she described the app...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a...

China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on...

For weeks Signal has been one of the three most-downloaded apps in the Netherlands, according to a local news site. And now "Higher education institutions in the Netherlands have been looking for an alternative," according to DUB (an independent news site for the Utrecht University community): Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University...

Today long-time open source advocate/journalist Doc Searls revealed that years of work by consumer privacy groups has culminated in a proposed standard "that can vastly expand our agency in the digital world" — especially in a future world where agents surf the web on our behalf: Meet IEEE P7012 , which "identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they...

Reuters reported this week that several U.S. national security agencies "have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks..." The plan was led by the president's National Security Council (NSC) and involved at least seven national security agencies working with European allies to disrupt plots targeting Europe and the United States, seven former officials who participated in the working...

NASA is considering "closing its headquarters and scattering responsibilities among the states," reports Politico, citing two people familiar with the plan. "The proposal could affect up to 2,500 jobs and redistribute critical functions, including who manages space exploration and organizes major science missions." While much of the day-to-day work occurs at NASA's 10 centers, the Washington office plays a strategic role in lobbying for...

Hungary's Parliament not only voted to ban Pride events. They also voted to "allow authorities to use facial recognition software to identify attenders and potentially fine them," reports the Guardian. [The nationwide legislation] amends the country's law on assembly to make it an offence to hold or attend events that violate Hungary's contentious "child protection" legislation, which bars any "depiction or promotion" of homosexuality...

"Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google," reports Ars Technica, "with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers" to prevent people from reaching pirate streams of football games. "Italy's communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it to international tech firms." Spotted by TorrentFreak, AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio took to...

"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government." Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher...

The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore "are likely customers of Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions," reports TechCrunch, "according to a new technical report by a renowned digital security lab." On Wednesday, The Citizen Lab, a group of academics and security researchers housed at the University of Toronto that has investigated the spyware industry for more than a decade, published a...

Was the cutting of undersea cables part of a larger pattern? Russia and its proxies are accused by western officials of "staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago," reports the Associated Press. That includes cyberattacks and committing acts of sabotage/vandalism/arson, as well as spreading propaganda and even plotting killings, according to the article. ("Western...

"I intend to sue the National Archives," said Joseph diGenova, an 80-year-old former Trump campaign lawyer (and a U.S. Attorney from 1983 to 1988). While releasing 63,000 unredacted pages about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. government erroneously "made public the Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information of potentially hundreds of former congressional staffers and other people," reports USA Today....

Two "groundbreaking research reports" on open source security were announced this week by the Linux Foundation in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Europe. The reports specifically address the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (or CRA) and "highlight knowledge gaps and best practices for CRA compliance." "Unaware and Uncertain: The Stark Realities of CRA-Readiness in Open Source" includes a survey...

Hollywood filmmaker Carl Erik Rinsch has been charged with defrauding Netflix of $11 million after allegedly misusing funds intended for an unfinished science fiction series, federal prosecutors said. Rinsch, 47, was arrested in West Hollywood this week on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and unlawful monetary transactions that could result in decades of imprisonment if convicted. The FBI and Acting U.S. Attorney for...

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of arrest records including social security numbers, mugshots, and even email addresses to incorporate into its product, 404 Media reports. From the report: For years, Clearview AI has collected billions of photos from social media websites including Facebook, LinkedIn and others and sold access to its facial recognition tool to law enforcement....

Federal authorities have broken up an international crime ring that stole thousands of iPhones from porches nationwide [non-paywalled link], arresting 13 people last month after a sophisticated operation that combined high-tech tools with old-fashioned bribery. The thieves created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and paid AT&T store employees to provide customer order details and delivery addresses, according to WSJ, which cites prosecutors. Armed...

The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Ensuring broad access to the patent system is crucial for fostering innovation and promoting economic growth. To support this goal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers reduced fees for small and micro entities. This paper investigates whether fee rates affect the filing of applications by small and micro entities. Exploiting recent...

Trend Micro uncovered an eight-year-long spying campaign exploiting a Windows vulnerability involving malicious .LNK shortcut files, which attackers padded with whitespace to conceal commands. Despite being reported to Microsoft in 2023, the company considers it a UI issue rather than a security risk and has not prioritized a fix. The Register reports: The attack method is low-tech but effective, relying on malicious .LNK shortcut...

The Dutch parliament approved motions urging the government to reduce reliance on U.S. software companies by developing a sovereign cloud platform and reconsidering contracts with American firms. Reuters reports: While such initiatives have foundered in the past due to a lack of viable European alternatives, lawmakers said changing relations with the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump have given the issue fresh...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Thaler's AI system "DABUS" was...

HR software provider Rippling has sued competitor Deel for allegedly planting a spy in its Dublin office to steal trade secrets, court documents [PDF] showed on Monday. Rippling claims the employee, identified as D.S., systematically searched internal Slack channels for competitor information, including sales leads and pitch decks. The company discovered the alleged scheme through a "honeypot" trap -- a specially created Slack channel...

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: A group of U.S. consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday proposed legislation to address the growing epidemic of "zombie" Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have had software support cut off by their manufacturer, Fight To Repair News reports. The Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act is a collaboration between Consumer Reports, US PIRG, the Secure Resilient Future...

A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center. And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates to plant ransomware and negotiate with victims, notes the Register. "Even organizations that have good ransomware recovery...

Slashdot has run nearly a dozen stories about Michael Mann, one of America's most prominent climate scientists and a co-creator of the famous "hockey stick" graph of spiking temperatures. In 2012 Mann sued two bloggers for defamation — and last year Mann finally won more than $1 million, reports the Washington Post. "A jury found that two conservative commentators had defamed him by alleging...

The IRS is pausing its technology modernization efforts to reassess its strategy in light of AI advancements. Reuters reports: The agency will review a number of technology modernization initiatives that have been taken in recent years, including a new direct free filing system for tax returns that was launched last year under the Biden administration, the official told reporters. The official said the IRS...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon's cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" enabled on their Echo. Starting on March...

In late 2023, the FBI alerted the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD) that it had been breached by a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group for over 300 days. With the help of cybersecurity firm Dragos and Department of Energy-funded sensors, LELWD confirmed the intrusion, identified the hackers' movements, and ultimately restructured its network to remove them. PCMag reports: At the time, LELWD had been...

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from the BBC: Meta has won an emergency ruling in the US to temporarily stop a former director of Facebook from promoting or further distributing copies of her memoir. The book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who used to be the company's global public policy director, includes a series of critical claims about what she witnessed...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the EFF: EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. Mark didn't set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a telecommunications technician for...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it. The data was lifted from Allstate's National General business unit, which ran a website for consumers who wanted to get a quote for a policy. That task required...

Internet shutdowns in Africa hit a record high in 2024, with 21 shutdowns across 15 countries. The previous record was 19 shutdowns in 2020 and 21. The Guardian reports: Authorities in Comoros, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritius joined repeat offenders such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Kenya. Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania were also on the list. But perpetrators also included militias and other non-state...

August, 2023: Thousands of Crypto Scammers are Enslaved by Human-Trafficking Gangsters, Says Bloomberg Reporter. ("They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia...with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling.") February, 2025: A coordinated response begins by Thai, Chinese and Myanmar authorities, which includes cutting power, internet, and fuel supplies to the scam centers. Today: The Associated Press reports that thousands...

The Washington Post reports: Meta was willing to go to extreme lengths to censor content and shut down political dissent in a failed attempt to win the approval of the Chinese Communist Party and bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a new whistleblower complaint from a former global policy director at the company. The complaint by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who...

Last week Google urged the U.S. government not to break up the company — but apparently, it didn't work. In a new filing Friday, America's Justice Department "reiterated its November proposal that Google be forced to sell its Chrome web browser," reports the Washington Post, "to address a federal judge finding the company guilty of being an illegal monopoly in August." The government also...

U.S. president Donald Trump called Daylight Saving Time "very costly to our nation" and "inconvenient" in December. Today the Washington Post remembers he'd vowed his Republican party would use their "best efforts" to eliminate it. But it's still proving to be politically difficult... Polls have shown that most Americans oppose the time shifts but disagree on what should replace them... [U.S. political leaders] also...

This week the Free Software Foundation "backed a lone developer's brave effort to overturn a pivotal court ruling that threatens to undermine the AGPLv3 — the foundation's GNU Affero General Public License, version 3," reports the Register. "At stake is the future of not just the AGPLv3, but the FSF's widely used GNU Public License it is largely based on, and the software covered...

Sam Bankman-Fried — one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party — "was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 25 years in prison and mostly went silent," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Until recently..." Now, from behind bars at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Bankman-Fried is orchestrating an extraordinary public-relations blitz that looks very much like a campaign to make the most audacious...

Equuleus42 (Slashdot reader #723) brings word that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sharing a new tool for fighting back against cellphone surveillance by Stingray cell-site simulators. Android Authority reports: "Rayhunter" uses an open-source software package designed to look for evidence of IMSI catchers in action, running on an old Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot. The great thing about that choice is that you...

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users' personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: "So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don't have to touch it, right?," Whittaker mused. Then she...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates. According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole "numerous 'pre-release'...