Ante el aumento de ciberataques y la falta de personal cualificado, cada vez más compañías recurren a estos servicios para que expertos en ciberseguridad ‘freelance’ les ayuden a detectar errores en sus códigos a cambio de recompensas económicas. Los mejores pueden ganar sumas importantes
Source: MIT
Los grandes defensores de la web que confiaban plenamente en su capacidad para mejorar la sociedad se han topado con una cruda realidad de noticias falsas, odio y falta de privacidad que les ha dividido en cuatro grandes grupos de pensamiento: puristas, esperanzados, desilusionados y revisionistas
Source: MIT
Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that prevented Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it.
TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader, Lawrence Miller, who couldn’t find any information about the issue in Facebook’s Help Center. We’ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook.
Given the real-time nature of social media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it’s possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize their old posts have been removed.
In fact, we only found a handful of public complaints about the deletions, so far.
For example:
@facebook I used the Twitter for Facebook app for years, and I realize it’s not working and isn’t going to. But I just discovered all the Facebook updates it put have been deleted and dissappeared from my timeline! Is there a way to retrieve this?
A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to our Facebook profile or page and all of our previous Twitter posts were deleted by Facebook. #dfwwx#txwx#planohttps://t.co/sAOsbdBjVO
Above: selected complaints from Twitter about the data loss
Above: a comment on TechCrunch following our post on the API changes
Some of those who were impacted were very light Facebook users and had heavily relied on the cross-posting to keep their Facebook accounts active. As a result of the mass removals, their Facebook profiles are now fairly empty.
TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino is one of those here who was impacted. He points out that the ability to share tweets to Facebook was a useful way to reach people who weren’t on Twitter in order to continue a discussion with a different audience.
“I’ve had tweet cross-posting turned on for years, from the early days of it even existing. This just removed thousands of posts from my Facebook silently, with no warning,” Matthew told me. “Even though the posts didn’t originate on Facebook, I often had ongoing conversations about the posts once my Facebook friends (and audience) saw them. Many of them would never see them on Twitter either because they don’t follow me or they don’t use it,” he said.
“It’s wild to have all of that context just vanish,” he added.
As you may recall, Facebook earlier this month made a change to its API platform to prevent third-party apps from publishing posts to Facebook as the logged-in user. The change was a part of Facebook’s larger overhaul and lockdown of its API platform in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where as many as 87 million Facebook users had their data improperly harvested and shared.
Since then, Facebook has been trying to plug up the holes in its platform to prevent further data misuse. One of the changes it made was to stop third-parties from being able to post to Facebook as the logged-in user.
For existing apps, like Twitter, that permission was revoked on August 1, 2018.
Above: Twitter’s cross-posting feature, on the day it was disabled by the Facebook API change
Before the API changes, Twitter users were able to visit the “Apps” section from Twitter on the web, then authenticate with Facebook to have their tweets cross-posted to Facebook’s social network. Once enabled, the tweets would appear on the user’s page as a Facebook post they had published, and their friends could then like and comment on the post as any other.
In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from continuing to cross-post their tweets to Facebook automatically. It shouldn’t have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users’ profiles and business users’ Facebook Pages.
This is a breach of trust from a company that’s in the process of trying to repair a broken trust with its users across a number of fronts, including data misuse. Regardless of whatever new policy is in effect around apps and how they can post to Facebook, no one would have ever expected that Facebook would actually remove their old posts without warning.
We’re hoping that the problem is a bug that Facebook can resolve, and not something that will result in permanent data loss.
Facebook tells us while it doesn’t have further information about the problem at this time, it should have more to share tonight or tomorrow about what’s being done.
A deep dive in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday dug out new details on a massive email scanning operation by Oath, the Verizon-owned subsidiary that’s the combined business of AOL and Yahoo. The email scanning program analyzes over 200 million AOL and Yahoo inboxes for data that can be sold to advertisers. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon by way of Oath.)
The logic goes that by learning about its users, the internet giant can hone its ad targeting effort to display the most relevant ads.
But where other major email providers have bailed from email scanning amid privacy scandals and security issues, Oath remains the outlier.
Google ended its ad-targeting email scanning operation across its consumer Gmail service last year — a decision lauded after facing criticism for years over the practice — though the company still uses machine learning to help you reply to emails. Meanwhile, Microsoft told TechCrunch in a statement that it does “not use email content for ad targeting in any way, anywhere in Microsoft.” And Apple has never scanned its customers’ inboxes for advertising, though its privacy policy says it can access your data for law enforcement purposes or for more vague reasons like “issues of public importance.”
So it’s basically just Oath, then.
Scanning the inboxes of its hundreds of millions of email users is a gutsy move for the year-old internet giant, which prior to its rebranding was responsible for two data breaches at Yahoo exposing over thee billion users’ data and a separate breach at AOL in 2014. Yahoo reportedly built a secret customer email scanning tool at the behest of the US intelligence community, which led to the departure of former Yahoo infosec chief Alex Stamos, who until recently was Facebook’s chief security officer.
Although the email scanning program isn’t new — announced earlier this year — it does go deeper than Gmail’s scanning ever did.
“Yahoo mined users’ emails in part to discover products they bought through receipts from e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com,” said the WSJ. “In 2015, Amazon stopped including full itemized receipts in the emails it sends customers, partly because the company didn’t want Yahoo and others gathering that data for their own use.”
Although some content is excluded from the scanning — such as health and medical information — it remains to be seen how (or even if) Oath can exclude other kinds of sensitive data from its customers’ inboxes, like bank transfers and stock receipts.
Yahoo Mail’s privacy policy says email accounts are subject to “manual review,” which allows certain Oath employees access to inboxes.
TechCrunch asked Oath and its parent Verizon about what assurances they could provide that confidential emails and information won’t be collected or used in any way. We also asked how consent was obtained from users in Europe, where data protection rules under the newly-implemented GDPR regulations are stricter.
Neither Verizon or Oath responded by our deadline.
It should go without saying, email isn’t the most sensitive or secure communications medium, and inboxes should never be assumed to be private — not least from law enforcement and the companies themselves.
Deleting your account might be overkill, especially if you don’t want anyone to hijack your email address once it’s recycled. But if there’s ever been a time to find a better inbox, now might be it.
Cody Wilson, the self-described crypto-anarchist who on Monday was blocked from distributing schematics for 3D-printed guns online, is making good on his promise for “one hell of a week.”
Exploiting what Wilson says is a loophole in the judge’s injunction against the distribution of the plans for how to print a firearm using 3D printers, Wilson has replaced the “download” option for the schematics on his website with an option to purchase.
At a news conference in Texas, Wilson said he had begun selling the plans on Tuesday morning and had already received nearly 400 orders, according to a report by The Associated Press.
“Anyone who wants to get these files is going to get them,” the AP quoted Wilson. “They can name their own price.”
By selling the schematics and distributing them via email or secure digital download, it looks like Wilson may just skirt the judges injunction on the distribution of the plans.
As Vice noted in its report on Wilson’s plans, the judge who issued the ruling wrote that, “Regulation under [The Arms Export Control Act] means that the files cannot be uploaded to the internet… But they can be emailed, mailed, securely transmitted, or otherwise published within the United States.”
The Arms Export Control Act is the original statute that the State Department cited when it first demanded that Wilson pull his blueprints. Then, in 2015, Wilson counter-sued the State Department claiming that his First Amendment free speech rights had been violated by the State Department order.
After several years of litigation, the government blinked and, earlier this year, settled with Wilson — acceding to the argument that he had a First Amendment right to distribute the plans.
However, in a Monday ruling, Judge Robert S. Lasnik of the Federal District Court in Seattle ruled in favor of attorneys general from Washington, D.C., and 19 states who argued that the distribution of 3D-printed guns posed a threat to national safety.
The judge wrote that any First Amendment arguments and issues “are dwarfed by the irreparable harms the states are likely to suffer if the existing restrictions are withdrawn and that, over all, the public interest strongly supports maintaining the status quo through the pendency of this litigation.”
That ruling extends a July 31 temporary restraining order on distribution of the files until the case brought by the attorneys general is settled.
By distributing the plans for the 3D-printed weapons, Wilson runs the risk of being held in contempt of court — something that the anarchist appears to relish.
Importantly, the plans have already made their way onto other platforms. Earlier this week, a book that compiled all of the schematics in one bound edition was being sold on Amazon. The online retailer took it down.
Intel announced an expansion to its 8th-Gen family with new U-series and Y-series chips. These CPUs are optimized for mobile, bringing better connectivity, battery life, and performance to laptops and convertibles.
