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Submission + - Joy Dantong Ma on why Trump is targeting Huawei

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: The White House last week delivered a one-two punch so stunning The Washington Post likened the second act to a divorce. First came an executive order that vividly paints a picture of foreign adversaries sabotaging US communications networks and compromising critical infrastructure. It directs the commerce secretary to draft a ban on telecommunications technology that poses a risk to US national security. Minutes later, the Commerce Department announced it will include the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to its so-called entity list, curtailing the firm’s critical ability to buy components from the United States. This interview with China expert Joy Dantong Ma explains several dramatic changes in US policy that have expanded the definition of national security, and the scope of scrutiny, to competitive technology, including 5G and artificial intelligence.

Submission + - Twitter arbitrarily bans Babalú Blog website, but not Cuban propaganda web (babalublog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Babalú Blog has been reporting news on Cuba and providing commentary for 16 years. Over a decade and a half we have written and reported on the struggle against tyranny in Cuba, the human rights atrocities committed by the Castro regime, the courageous acts by the island’s dissidents, and U.S-Cuba policy.

In the meantime, while Babalú is blocked from reporting any news on Cuba, the Cuban dictatorship is still able to post links to their propaganda sites such as Granma and Juventud Rebelde. Twitter seems more than happy to oblige them and provide a platform to disseminate their lies.

Submission + - Google Uses Gmail To Track a History of Things You Buy - and It's Hard To Delete (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A page called “Purchases” shows an accurate list of many — though not all — of the things I’ve bought dating back to at least 2012. I made these purchases using online services or apps such as Amazon, DoorDash or Seamless, or in stores such as Macy’s, but never directly through Google. But because the digital receipts went to my Gmail account, Google has a list of info about my buying habits. Google even knows about things I long forgot I’d purchased, like dress shoes I bought inside a Macy’s store on Sept. 14, 2015.

But there isn’t an easy way to remove all of this. You can delete all the receipts in your Gmail inbox and archived messages. But, if you’re like me, you might save receipts in Gmail in case you need them later for returns. There is no way to delete them from Purchases without also deleting them from Gmail — when you click on the “Delete” option in Purchases, it simply guides you back to the Gmail message. Google’s privacy page says that only you can view your purchases. But it says “Information about your orders may also be saved with your activity in other Google services ” and that you can see and delete this information on a separate “My Activity” page. Except you can’t. Google’s activity controls page doesn’t give you any ability to manage the data it stores on Purchases.

Submission + - Drinking champagne every day 'could help prevent dementia and Alzheimer's' (cosmopolitan.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

In news that both offers hope and baffles, scientists have found that drinking three glasses of champagne every day can help to prevent the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's. A compound found in pinot noir and pinot meunier, the black grapes used to make a bottle of the fizzy stuff, can ward off brain diseases and increase spatial memory.

The science isn't settled, but why take chances?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Are The Big Players In Tech Even Competing With Each Other? 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: For capitalism to work for consumers in a beneficial way the big players have to compete hard against each other and innovate courageously. What appears to be happening instead, however, is that every year almost everybody is making roughly the same product at roughly the same price point. Most 4K TVs at the same price point have the same features — there is little to distinguish manufacturer A from manufacturer B. Ditto for smartphones — nobody suddenly puts a 3D scanning capable lightfield camera, shake-the-phone-to-charge-it or something similarly innovative into their next phone. Ditto for game consoles — Xbox and Playstation are not very different from each other at all. Nintendo does "different", but underpowers its hardware. Ditto for laptops — the only major difference I see in laptops is the quality of the screen panel used and of the cooling system. The last laptop with autostereoscopic 3D screen I have seen is the long discontinued Toshiba Satellite 3D. Ditto for CPUs and GPUs — it doesn't really matter whether you buy Intel, AMD or Nvidia. There is nothing so "different" or "distinct" in any of the electronics they make that it makes you go "wow, that is truly groundbreaking". Ditto for sports action cameras, DSLRs, portable storage and just about everything else "tech". So where precisely — besides pricing and build-quality differences — is the competition in what these companies are doing? Shouldn't somebody be trying to "pull far ahead of the pack" or "ahead of the curve" with some crazy new feature that nobody else has? Or is true innovation in tech simply dead now?

Submission + - Slack Patches Vulnerability In Windows Client That Could Be Used To Hijack Files (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On May 17, researchers at Tenable revealed that they had discovered a vulnerability in the Windows version of the desktop application for Slack, the widely used collaboration service. The vulnerability, in Slack Desktop version 3.3.7 for Windows, could have been used to change the destination of a file download from a Slack conversation to a remote file share owned by an attacker. This would allow the attacker to not only steal the files that were downloaded by a targeted user, but also allow the attacker to alter the files and add malware to them. When victims opened the files, they would get a potentially nasty surprise. Tenable reported the vulnerability to Slack via HackerOne. Slack has issued an update to the Windows desktop client that closes the vulnerability.

Submission + - Salesforce inadvertently provides view/modify access to data worldwide (salesforce.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A worldwide outage of Salesforce has been ongoing since early morning on May 17th. The outage is caused by the deployment of a database script that resulted in granting users broader data access than intended.

There remains no estimation of the issue to be resolved, and users of businesses utilizing the Salesforce platform remain unable to access their data.
To attempt to minimize data leakage, Salesforce disabled all access to data objects resulting in a near complete outage for users. Salesforce did not acknowledge the issue publicly for hours, leaving worldwide users and administrators attempting to spend resources to troubleshoot the issues in isolation.

On Salesforce's trust page a message was eventually posted:
"To protect our customers, we have blocked access to all instances that contain impacted customers until we can complete the removal of the inadvertent permissions in the impacted customer orgs. As a result, customers who were not impacted may experience service disruption."

Submission + - Huawei Activated All Its Backup Techs to Fight US Blacklisting (ft.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: HiSilicon, Huawei’s chipmaking arm, said on Friday it has long been prepared for the “extreme scenario” that it could be banned from purchasing U.S. chips and technology, and is able to ensure steady supply of most products and had turned its “[all] Plan Bs into Plan As overnight” a day after the Trump administration raised the prospect of a US ban on export of parts and components to the Chinese telecoms group. “Today, the circle of destiny turns to this extreme and dark moment, the Superpower has mercilessly interrupted the technical and industrial system of global co-operation, made the most insane decision, put Huawei into the Entity List with no founded basis,” said HiSilicon CEO He Tingbo in an internal memo. Support for the company poured in on China’s social media on Friday morning with “HiSilicon’s midnight internal letter” becoming one of the top trending topics on Weibo, attracting more than 210 million views and 98,000 posts in a few hours. ZTE Corp, a state-owned competitor of the privately-held Huawei, was brought to the brink of collapse by the US denial order that prevented it from buying US products and attracted huge amount of criticism at home for failing to develop in-house technologies.

Submission + - Group Seeks Investigation of Deep Packet Inspection Use by ISPs

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: European Digital Rights (EDRi), together with 45 NGOs, academics and companies across 15 countries, has sent an open letter to European policymakers and regulators, warning about widespread and potentially growing use of deep packet inspection (DPI) by internet service providers (ISPs). DPI is far more than is required by the ISP to perform its basic purpose, and by its nature privacy invasive, and not strictly legal within the EU. Nevertheless, many are concerned that its practice and use within Europe is growing, and that "some telecom regulators appear to be pushing for the legalization of DPI technology." One of the drivers appears to be the growing use of 'zero-rating' by mobile operators. "A mapping of zero-rating offers in Europe conducted by EDRi member Epicenter.works identified 186 telecom services which potentially make use of DPI technology," writes (PDF) EDRi.

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