Digital Freedom

• Monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its wards

• not just to detect online “threats,” but also pinpoint their exact location by combining various surveillance techniques and data sources.

• The document cites access to Twitter’s “firehose,” which would grant the Army the ability to search public tweets and Twitter users without restriction, as well as analysis of 4Chan, Reddit, YouTube, and Vkontakte, a Facebook knockoff popular in Russia. Internet chat platforms like Discord and Telegram will also be scoured

• The contract says the Army would use “misattribution”: deceiving others about who is actually behind the keyboard. The document says the Army would accomplish this through falsifying web browser information and by relaying Army internet traffic through servers located in foreign cities, obscuring its stateside origin.

• Ooops, the Army also does not want to advertise its interest in broad data collection. The redacted copy of the contract document, while public, is marked as CUI, for “Controlled Unclassified Information,” and FEDCON, meant for federal employees and contractors only.

What could possibly go wrong?

Many influencers who don't have credit lines with the 'bank of mom and dad' are embracing a 'do whatever it takes' altitude to live in the city and capture those TikTok-worthy moments. However, you won't ever see their struggles in their videos -- just a life of fake luxury.

"I worked so hard to get here, I didn't want to compromise on the life I wanted to live," said Phillips. She explained, "The cost of living here is an investment in myself. It sounds crazy to justify $25 cocktails, but being here opens doors for my career. That's worth the costs."

What this all suggests is that universities and colleges are failing to teach basic financial literacy to the younger generation, who blow all their money on maintaining some fake luxurious lifestyle on social media while, in real life, they struggle to make ends meet.

Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe that the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/114018

The newspaper discovered that there were 11 instances in 2021 where foreign Uber and Bolt drivers abducted women who had booked rides with them, took them to secluded locations, and sexually assaulted them or molested them. Law enforcement agencies recorded another nine such cases as of May 2022, but there could be many more unreported sexual assaults.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/102843

Smells like corruption to me:

• Prometheum received approval to become the first special purpose broker-dealer (SPBD) of its kind for securities with digital assets. In doing so, Prometheum became the first company to receive approval from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to provide custody of digital securities as a broker-dealer.

• Kaplan apparently read off prepared notes during his hearing that were apparently coordinated with Democratic members of Congress and the SEC.

• Prometheum have their own chain and their own token. They have already sold some of this token, among others to the Wanxiang Blockchain company

• Wanxiang is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) affiliate.

• Wanxiang’s most famous employee is Vitalik Buterin, according to Wanxiang’s homepage.

• Prometheum obtained its crypto-securities license from FINRA despite not yet offering a single token (neither Bitcoin or Ethereum)

• They paid more than $1.5 million in sales commissions to a New Jersey-based firm called Network 1 Financial Securities.

• a “shady” broker with a Chinese subsidiary and a terrible compliance record of more than 20 regulatory or civil cases against them.

Bizarre that this fringe player with no biz model is being held up as an example of compliance by the SEC when the actual businesses in the United States can’t get a fair shot. An SEC PSYOP to have the Dems oppose McHenry-Thompson market structure bill?

Governments don’t want to kill the blockchain upon which cryptos are based. They want to control it.

The fact is governments enjoy a monopoly on money creation and they’re not about to surrender that monopoly to cryptocurrencies.

But governments know they cannot stop the technology platforms on which the cryptocurrencies are based. Blockchain technology has come too far to turn back. That’s why they’re co-opting it.

“To put a human scale on this, what we’re talking about is not just random typos or wrong clicks; we’re looking at things like pulling up batches of thousands of political donors in one go, without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” Laperruque said. “We’ve had reports of journalists, political commentators, a domestic political party; these compliance violations are the most worrisome type of politically focused surveillance.”

"I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations."

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/100200

“Neither the AI nor the companies operating it are democratically elected,” Steinmeier said while delivering his remarks during a recent event in Berlin, according to Bloomberg.

"Citizens should be better equipped to scrutinize answers provided by AI, and recognize when artificial intelligence technologies have manipulated images or text. This is important since disinformation can now be generated and spread quickly, triggering confusion among the public," the German president noted.

Zeus is apparently in violation of Apple’s guidelines which require apps to provide proof of appropriate licenses – such as money transmitter licenses – in order to facilitate the “transmission” of cryptocurrencies.

Many legal experts agree that non-custodial wallets like Zeus that don’t take custody of funds or private keys should not be classified as money transmitters, a classification typically reserved for custodial wallets like those offered by Coinbase and Binance that do assume custody of customer funds.

Get it done

Until China uses its rapidly growing navy to take control of the undersea cables

The short answer is no

The long answer is hell no

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/95690

Chad Scharf, who served as the vice president of software engineering at Bitwarden’s Jacksonville, Florida location, and was responsible for supervising fifty-one people, alleges that his termination was a violation of his Title VII rights against religious discrimination.

“Mr. Scharf is Catholic; at the very core of his religion is the doctrine that God created man in his own image, and created them male and female. This has been a Catholic doctrine for over two thousand years,” the lawsuit states.

According to the Nostr protocol, on which Damus is based, zaps are simply tips.

Apple’s quibble with the feature is its non-adherence to guideline 3.1.1, which mandates the use of in-app purchases for transactions connected with digital content. Apple is unwavering on this: “We noticed that your app allows users to send ‘tips’ associated with receiving content from digital content creators with a mechanism other than in-app purchase,” the company pointed out.

Public Prosecutors Office in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, said it has arrested and indicted a former executive of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix Inc. on charges of stealing Samsung’s trade secrets to build a copycat semiconductor plant in China.

They contend an agreement between Apple and Amazon that went into effect that year restricted the number of competitive resellers in violation of antitrust provisions.

In 2018, according to the lawsuit, there were some 600 third-party Apple resellers on Amazon. Apple agreed to give Amazon a discount on its products if Amazon reduced the number of Apple resellers from its marketplace, the lawsuit alleged.

Apple has argued that its agreement with Amazon limited the number of authorized resellers to help minimize counterfeit Apple goods being sold on the e-commerce platform.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/94003

Microsoft knew that certain users were children but nonetheless continued to collect personal information, such as telephone numbers, before notifying parents of Microsoft’s information collection practices and before obtaining parental consent. In addition, the complaint alleges that, while Microsoft provided some notice to parents, that notice was incomplete and thus failed to comply with the COPPA Rule’s requirements. Finally, the complaint alleges that in certain instances when children started, but did not complete, creating Xbox Live accounts, Microsoft retained their personal information for longer than permitted by the COPPA Rule.

“If the government can buy its way around Fourth Amendment due-process, there will be few meaningful limits on government surveillance,” Wyden said in a statement, referring to the U.S. Constitution’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The report contained a paragraph that appeared to be marked classified but that was nevertheless included that acknowledges that the U.S. government has the capability to attribute personal identities to the data, and said few policies addressed the collection of such information.

The report cited “inconsistencies between how different [intelligence community] elements define and treat” information collected from commercial sources. Some agencies treat the data as foreign, and thereby lacking robust privacy protections.

Since the 1970s, the intelligence community has been circumscribed in using intrusive surveillance techniques on Americans without court oversight. However, data available for sale is generally considered “open source” and its collection doesn’t require special authorizations.