Digital Freedom

“We know from news stories that PayPal has been discriminating on the basis of viewpoints, shutting down accounts that differ from their ‘woke’ political principles,”

This company got screwed by Apple and Google

Facebook has generated more than a hundred pages for U.S.-designated terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al Qaeda, giving greater visibility to organizations involved in real-world violence.

TTP’s investigation adds to growing questions about how the major tech platforms facilitate terrorist organizing and recruitment.

Under a key internet law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, tech companies are not legally responsible for what users post on their platforms.

Because Facebook itself is creating these pages—and is not simply hosting them on its platform—the company may not be able to rely on Section 230 to shield it from lawsuits over the content.

ISIS has long been known for its heavy reliance on social media to spread propaganda, recruit supporters, and expand its reach. As TTP’s new investigation shows, the group is getting a regular assist from Facebook, which has generated more than 100 pages for the terrorist organization and its regional offshoots.

Despite repeated warnings over the years about this problem, Facebook hasn’t taken any discernible steps to stop generating terrorist pages, which violate its own content policies and raise legal liability questions for the company.

Despite resembling Twitter so much, Bluesky is set to have some technical features designed to make it very different from Elon Musk’s social media giant. The platform aims to provide a decentralized social network protocol, which is expected to make its user data free from influence by any government or corporation.

Bluesky is built on the AT protocol, a new federated social network that integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies. Originally known as the authenticated transfer protocol, or ADX, the AT protocol is Bluesky’s main effort to enable a new way for servers to communicate with each other, allowing individuals and businesses to self-host and have multiple websites instead of one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/9190

So this feels big! I'm curious how feature compatible it is going to be with Lemmy

#ActivityPub #Lemmy #Discourse

A December 2021 report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance showed that Amazon took 34 cents out of every dollar in third-party sales that year, nearly double what it took seven years earlier.

Amazon wants to make every e-commerce site on the web an Amazon site. And instead of selling its own goods, it wants to be a back-end logistics provider taking a cut of every economic transaction. Sellers already found it hard to avoid putting up a shop on Amazon; the company’s goal is to make it impossible not to interact with Amazon no matter where you sell. And Amazon has shown that it will extract a healthy price from everyone involved.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/392649

Time to jump ship from Google products?

The more competition, the better

cross-posted from: https://community.nicfab.it/post/26179

PayPal is sending out data breach notifications to thousands of users who had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing attacks that exposed some personal data.

Credential stuffing are attacks where hackers attempt to access an account by trying out username and password pairs sourced from data leaks on various websites.

This type of attack relies on an automated approach with bots running lists of credentials to "stuff" into login portals for various services.

Credential stuffing targets users that employ the same password for multiple online accounts, which is known as "password recycling."

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credits @[email protected]

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/74518

Take back control of your software development process, self-host your projects and get everyone involved in delivering quality software on the same page.

Imagine Outlook writing an email to your colleagues explaining you’re unwell, based purely on a “write an email to my team explaining I’m out sick” query. Microsoft is also reportedly planning to launch a version of Bing that uses ChatGPT to answer search queries. This new feature could be available as soon as March, in a bid to make Bing more competitive with Google.

cross-posted from: https://community.nicfab.it/post/24973

A class action lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, accusing LastPass of failure to secure sensitive customer data and seeking monetary relief for losses caused by recent data breaches.

LastPass is a widely used password manager, password generator, and secure vault app, offering over 30 million users and 85,000 firms an easy way to create, store, manage, and use their secrets.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/73409

DC press corps, including WaPo & POLITICO, have failed to cover congressional leader Adam Schiff strong-arming Twitter to ban a journalist, abridging press freedom & free speech,despite the smoking-gun email released from #TwitterFiles. Protecting a prominent Democrat

Rochko said this was a “stark reminder that centralized platforms can impose arbitrary and unfair limits on what you can and can’t say,” adding that monthly active users of Mastodon increased from 300,000 to 2.5 million between October and November.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/70679

The noteworthiness is that this development is a bellwether of current trends and things to come. Other fast food giants like White Castle are flirting similarly with fully replacing outdated human resources with tech.

Factory jobs are increasingly automated. Soon customer service will be as well. Even the arts, once thought off-limits to machines, will eventually succumb to the AI takeover.

We have learned the FBI is not the only government agency censoring and surveilling Americans. Twitter was a veritable “pig pile” when it comes to spying on We the People. The DOD, CIA, and even local police had their fingers in the pie. And Twitter was only one of the pies. Other Big Tech firms, including Facebook and Verizon (pssst that’s a cell phone carrier), were in on the game. Big Brother is watching. We are being spied on, and frequently silenced. Well, at least those of us who speak out against the Stalin-like censoring and surveilling of Americans.

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

The other shots show rooms from homes around the world, some occupied by humans, one by a dog. Furniture, décor, and objects located high on the walls and ceilings are outlined by rectangular boxes and accompanied by labels like “tv,” “plant_or_flower,” and “ceiling light.”

Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State.

Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Plaintiffs accused Facebook of granting “numerous third parties access to their Facebook content and information without their consent, and that Facebook failed to adequately monitor the third parties’ access to, and use of, that information,” according to the law firm.

FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan attempting to get Twitter’s then-Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth to hand over information to the agency without legal process.

The term “legal process” describes information requests made in compliance with existing laws.

PayPal abruptly announced a major new partnership with the Anti-Defamation League to investigate the financial transactions of its users.

PayPal’s own policies provide zero reassurance that the company refrains from using and abusing customer data however it wishes. The company’s “privacy” policy is anything but, as it merely lists all the information about users that PayPal reserves the right to gather and preserve.

An analysis of the historical record reveals that the ADL has a long history of using underhanded and even illegal tactics against its enemies, including full-blown espionage, theft, and surveillance.

Last January, the ADL published an article explaining that “Doxing Should Be Illegal,” but “Reporting Extremists Should Not.”

In other words, when the ADL or “activists” it agrees with dox their enemies online they are operating in the right “mental state,” so no matter the consequences of their behavior it is always good. But if the ADL’s opponents do the same behavior, it is by definition done with a “criminal mental state,’ and it can credibly be a criminal offense.

A group that panics over hand signs and the phrase “It’s Okay to Be White,” a group that illegally spied on thousands of Americans, a group that lies about supporting “free speech” while strongarming megacorporations into doing its bidding and demanding the cancellation of shows it doesn’t like.

The time to worry about this collaboration is right now.

• Twitter didn't monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices
• Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments. At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.
• Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.
• whistleblower wanted to take action to prevent potential sabotage by a rogue employee. He learned it was not possible for Twitter to secure its production environment.
• Mudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter's data. He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.
• Twitter had no software development lifecycle, and misled both the FTC and its Board about this fact for a decade.
• Mudge informed Agrawal that there were thousands of failed login attempts to Twitter's engineering system every day. Agrawal did nothing.
• Twitter did not keep backups of employee computers. They used to, but then the system broke, was never fixed, and execs decided this was good because it meant they couldn't comply with regulators.
• "Every new employee has access to data they do not need to have access to."
• Twitter does not have licenses for the machine learning models it uses in its most basic products.
• Twitter knowingly allowed itself to be infiltrated by, or otherwise a tool of, many governments.
• After Agrawal became CEO, he wanted to present materially misleading information to the Board, overriding Mudge's objections. Other employees raised similar objections. Ultimately it seems the material was shared anyway, and Mudge described the presentation to the Board as fraud.

The bill prohibits a covered company from (1) requiring developers to use an in-app payment system owned or controlled by the company as a condition of distribution or accessibility, (2) requiring that pricing or conditions of sale be equal to or more favorable on its app store than another app store, or (3) taking punitive action against a developer for using or offering different pricing terms or conditions of sale through another in-app payment system or on another app store.

A covered company may not interfere with legitimate business communications between developers and users, use non-public business information from a third-party app to compete with the app, or unreasonably prefer or rank its own apps (or those of its business partners) over other apps.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/65791

“PayPal seems to be moving in the direction of social credit and restricting transactions – that’s concerning,” PayPal co-founder, and now Tesla and Twitter CEO, Elon Musk