Facebook revealed the identities of dozens of moderators it employs to screen terrorist propaganda to the very groups who create those posts, the Guardian reported. The data exposure was caused by a software bug that was discovered last year. Facebook confirmed the incident.
The latest craze in the cryptocurrency markets just got crazier. An outfit called the Bancor Foundation raised $153 million worth of ether (the coin of the cryptocurrency ethereum) by selling its digital tokens (the equivalent of shares) for three hours on June 12, making it the largest token sale ever.
Programmers face an embarrassment of riches when looking for a new job. In fact, the abundance of offers can be so overwhelming that it becomes a problem in itself. (A good sort of problem, but a problem nonetheless.)
In the bitcoin world, even insolvency is just a bull run away from being reversed.
The internet is being reshaped by private networks owned by the world’s tech giants: firms like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. The majority of internet traffic already flows over such private networks, called content delivery networks (CDNs), but that proportion is set to increase to over 70% of global internet traffic over the next five years, according to Cisco’s annual forecast of internet traffic trends.
The internet today is driven by smartphones, tablets, and personal computers: devices that deliver information for human consumption. In five years, those devices will be in the minority, outnumbered by machines designed to communicate with one another in “smart” homes, offices, cities, and cars, according to Cisco’s annual forecast of internet trends.
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When swathes of the internet were taken offline for hours last year, it was because Internet of Things devices had been hijacked by a malicious botnet, known as “Mirai,” that overwhelmed parts of the global network with streams of data.
The Irish Independent has published correspondence between Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, obtained through a freedom of information law request. Facebook’s European headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland.
The head of one of the world’s largest asset management firms came out today (May 23) as a huge fan of bitcoin. Abigail Johnson, chief executive of Fidelity, which manages $1.9 trillion in mutual fund assets, told an audience at the 2017 Consensus conference—a blockchain technology summit—in New York that she was there because she “loves this stuff.”
Wences Casares has been called the “patient zero” of bitcoin among Silicon Valley’s elite. He got Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and countless other luminaries into bitcoin at gatherings of the rich and famous in Sun Valley and elsewhere.
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In one of the largest penalties levied against it (paywall), Facebook was hit with a €110 million ($122 million) fine by the European Commission today for providing “misleading information” over its ability to match its users with WhatsApp’s users when it acquired the chat platform in 2014.
Facebook is breaking data privacy laws in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and faces investigations in Spain and the German city of Hamburg, privacy regulators from those respective areas announced today. French authorities also announced they were slapping Facebook with the maximum fine allowed under French privacy law, of €150,000 ($164,000). To put that in perspective, Facebook generated $27.6 billion in revenues last year.
DeepMind obtained 1.6 million patient records from Britain’s National Health Service using a mechanism that was without an “appropriate legal basis,” according to a leaked letter from the UK’s top data privacy adviser, Sky News reported today. The letter has been verified as authentic by its source.
The hackers who unleashed a global ransomware attack on Friday (May 12) have netted themselves over $42,000 in payments from victims so far—a paltry sum compared with the hundreds of millions in market value that cybersecurity companies around the world have gained since the attacks hit.
A second wave of global infections caused by hackers in a global ransomware attack has been halted. The hackers responsible for the cyber attack, unprecedented in its global scale, demanded ransom be sent to three bitcoin addresses. So far they have amassed the equivalent of over $42,000 in ransom. But a new ”kill switch” by Matthieu Suiche, the founder of cybersecurity startup Comae Technologies, has prevented about 10,000 infected machines from propagating the ransomware since it was flipped roughly 24 hours ago.
Users with infected computers in Russia and South Korea are so far the two biggest ransom payers to the hackers who mounted a global ransomware attack, called “Wannacry,” yesterday, according to new data from Chainalysis, a provider of software that works with banks, law enforcement agencies, and bitcoin companies to analyze the blockchain for financial crimes.
Bitcoins traded at over $1,800 late last week, marking a new all-time high. To understand how significant this is, even in the volatile bitcoin market, the cryptocurrency’s previous record price of $1,165 took three years to topple, which happened in February this year when bitcoin traded at $1,210. That milestone has now been crushed just two months later. What’s going on?
Robocallers in Britain, beware. The UK’s privacy watchdog, known as the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has issued its biggest-ever fine for automated nuisance calls. A company called Keurboom Communications was slapped with a £400,000 ($517,000) penalty yesterday, after making nearly 100 million robocalls that triggered more than 1,000 complaints. Keurboom is closing shop as a result; it was placed in voluntary liquidation after the fine.
Norwegian chemicals group Yara announced today that it’s building a battery-powered ship that will be able to drive itself by 2020. It says the new container vessel will replace 40,000 of the diesel truck journeys it makes hauling fertilizer from its plant to ports every year.
Malaysians erupted with excitement when Maria Ozawa, a Japanese actress best known for her adult films, signaled her presence in the country via Instagram three days ago:
It seems Amazon will stop at nothing to live up to its moniker of being “the everything store.” The e-commerce giant is now organizing live gigs in London—the first one is a Blondie show—exclusively for Prime members.
Blockchain technology has been an obsession on Wall Street for years, as banks try to apply the notion of a shared, permanent ledger to antiquated financial plumbing. It could speed up transactions and make record keeping flawless. But the benefits of the technology could soon flow to an unlikely group: songwriters seeking the millions of dollars in royalties that the world’s biggest streaming platforms owe them.
