10 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2020
    1. Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.
  2. Mar 2020
    1. When joining a Zoom meeting, the "join from your browser" link is intentionally hidden. This browser extension solves this problem by transparently redirecting any meeting links to use Zoom's browser based web client.

      Using this extension means one won't be affected by the tracking that occurs via Zoom's apps for desktop and mobile devices.

    1. The host of a Zoom call has the capacity to monitor the activities of attendees while screen-sharing. This functionality is available in Zoom version 4.0 and higher.

      This is true if one uses the Zoom apps for desktop or mobile devices.

      There is a Chrome extension that redirects Zoom meetings via a web browser.

  3. Nov 2019
    1. Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts. After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated.
    1. In 2013, Facebook began offering a “secure” VPN app, Onavo Protect, as a way for users to supposedly protect their web activity from prying eyes. But Facebook simultaneously used Onavo to collect data from its users about their usage of competitors like Twitter. Last year, Apple banned Onavo from its App Store for violating its Terms of Service. Facebook then released a very similar program, now dubbed variously “Project Atlas” and “Facebook Research.” It used Apple’s enterprise app system, intended only for distributing internal corporate apps to employees, to continue offering the app to iOS users. When the news broke this week, Apple shut down the app and threw Facebook into some chaos when it (briefly) booted the company from its Enterprise Developer program altogether.
  4. Apr 2019
    1. In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

      Google is passing on location data to law enforcement without letting users know.

    1. Per a Wednesday report in Business Insider, Facebook has now said that it automatically extracted contact lists from around 1.5 million email accounts it was given access to via this method without ever actually asking for their permission. Again, this is exactly the type of thing one would expect to see in a phishing attack.

      Facebook are worse than Nixon, when he said "I'm not a crook".

  5. May 2016
    1. Introduction to the algebraic effects system in Eff which is one of the inspirations behind React's new reconciler infrastructure. See https://github.com/reactjs/react-basic#algebraic-effects

  6. Nov 2014
    1. Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

      Still trying to grasp the implications. Anybody else studying this?

    1. This criterion requires an independent security review has been performed within the 12 months prior to evaluation. This review must cover both the design and the implementation of the app and must be performed by a named auditing party that is independent of the tool's main development team. Audits by an independent security team within a large organization are sufficient. Recognizing that unpublished audits can be valuable, we do not require that the results of the audit have been made public, only that a named party is willing to verify that the audit took place.