One 2016 report found that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools," with most people joining at the suggestion of Facebook's "Groups You Should Join" and "Discover" algorithms. "Our recommendation systems grow the problem," the researchers said, according to The Journal.
The Journal reported that Facebook teams pitched multiple fixes, including limiting the spread of information from groups' most hyperactive and hyperpartisan users, suggesting a wider variety of groups than users might normally encounter, and creating subgroups for heated debates to prevent them from derailing entire groups.
This week, the US House of Representatives is expected to consider the act that reauthorizes that warrantless data collection: the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act. The House already passed the reauthorization act, sent it to the Senate, and will this week consider the Senate’s tweaks before sending it to President Trump for his signature.
On Friday, leading up to the House’s vote later this week, a group of seven internet companies and organizations suggested that legislators just might want to rethink the legislation’s disregard for Americans’ privacy.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) continues to use every arrow in its prosecutorial quiver to go after those participants who are exposing and sharing U.S. research and technologies to China via the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Thousand Talents Program.
The Thousand Talents Program, also referred to as the Thousand Talents Plan, was created to identify and recruit leading experts around the globe to bring their knowledge back to China. While the program primarily targets ethnic Chinese, it has also recruited a small number of non-Chinese individuals.
The U.S. Senate in its November 2019 report, “Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans,” characterized the Chinese program as part of the country’s “strategic plan to acquire knowledge and intellectual property from researchers, scientists, and the U.S. private sector.”
Bruce Schneier, the well-known security expert, coined the term "security theater". His inspiration? The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Wasting billions of dollars a year on pointless and invasive airport screening post-9/11 satisfied our emotional need to do something but did not, and does not, make us any safer.
Likewise, cargo cult security is more common in cybersecurity than you might think. The Polynesian cargo cults were newly discovered South Pacific tribes who were so awed by airplanes, and the Western food that arrived in said aircraft, that they built life-sized model airplanes out of sticks, thinking doing so would bring more food. Are you so much smarter? Maybe not. Today technology is so advanced that we are all cargo cultists in one way or another. Going through the motions without understanding the "why" creeps quickly into cargo cult territory.
Finding and eliminating security theater and cargo cult security in your organization can be the difference between preventing a business-destroying data breach and staying afloat until the pandemic is over.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to "strongly regulate" or even shut down social media platforms after Twitter applied a fact-check to two of his tweets this week.
Trump did not elaborate on what actions he could take. But the threat is Trump's clearest expression of intent to use the power of government to target his perceived political enemies in the private sector -- businesses that already enjoy wide latitude under the law to moderate their platforms as they see fit. And it raises the stakes for Twitter and Facebook as they grapple with Trump's misleading claims about mail-in voting and his baseless insinuations that a cable TV news host had a hand in an aide's death decades ago.
The vaccine, called Ad5-nCoV, is being developed by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics, and was one of the first coronavirus vaccines to enter early human trials back in March. Now, there are more than 100 different coronavirus vaccines in development worldwide, with at least eight of those in the process of human trials.
Ad5-nCoV uses a weakened version of a common cold virus (known as an adenovirus) — which infects human cells but doesn't cause disease — to deliver a fragment of genetic material from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This genetic material provides instructions for making the "spike protein" on the surface of SARS-CoV-2. The idea is that a person's immune system will create antibodies against the spike protein, which will help fight off the coronavirus if the person is later exposed to it.
Academics say they discovered 26 new vulnerabilities in the USB driver stack employed by operating systems such as Linux, macOs, Windows, and FreeBSD....
Researchers found one bug in FreeBSD, three in MacOS (two resulting in an unplanned reboot and one freezing the system), and four in Windows 8 and Windows 10 (resulting in Blue Screens of Death).
However, the vast majority of bugs, and the most severe, were found in Linux -- 18 in total.
A Kremlin-linked hacking group has continued its long-running efforts to target German companies in the energy, water and power sectors, according to a confidential German government advisory obtained by CyberScoop....Berserk Bear is best known in the U.S. for a years-long campaign to collect data on U.S. energy companies, which the Trump administration blamed on the Russian government in 2018. It is one of a handful of hacking teams that Moscow can call on to spy on industrial computer networks, analysts say. Another group — known as Sandworm and believed to be operating on behalf of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency — gained notoriety for cutting off power in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016.
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