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Submission + - Should Facebook, Google Be Liable For User Posts? (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post. “No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans,” Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230’s broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form,” he said.

Section 230 says online companies such as Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information they provide. This largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. The increased size and power of online platforms has also left consumers with fewer options, and the lack of feasible alternatives is a relevant discussion, Barr said, adding that the Section 230 review came out of the Justice Department’s broader look at potential anticompetitive practices at tech companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Barr said the department would not advocate a position at the meeting. But he hinted at the idea of allowing the U.S. government to take action against recalcitrant platforms, saying it was “questionable” whether Section 230 should prevent the American government from suing platforms when it is “acting to protect American citizens.”

Submission + - US Natural Gas Plant and Pipelines Shut After Ransomware Attack (infosecurity-magazine.com)

Submitted by Garabito
Garabito writes: The Department of Homeland Security has revealed that an unnamed US natural gas compression facility was forced to shut down operations for two days after becoming infected with ransomware.

The plant was targeted with a phishing e-mail, that allowed the attacker to access its IT network and then pivot to its OT (control) network, where it compromised Windows PCs used as human machine interface (HMI), data historians and polling servers, which led the plant operator to shut it down along with other assets that depended on it, including pipelines.

According to the DHS CISA report, the victim failed to implement robust segmentation between the IT and OT networks, which allowed the adversary to traverse the IT-OT boundary and disable assets on both networks.

Comment House Keys (Bad Analogy) (Score 1) 234

I heard someone talking about this and their comment was "If my house is locked and the police have a warrant they can break in". This is such a horrible analogy. If I give you my house keys, I'm not giving you the keys to everyone else's house too. If there's a backdoor, it's for everyone's phone not one. If anyone is using this or any similar point in an argument for unlocking the phone, please stop. You are just doing damage to your own argument.

Comment Browsing vs Buying DUH! (Score 5, Informative) 76

I have been known to drive through car dealerships to check out the latest in cars. Not because I want to buy, but because I want to keep up to date on something I'm interested in. In a store I might check out a product because I find some humor in it, or because I heard about it on an advertisement. Again. I'll look but I have no intention of buying. This doesn't require AI. I am not at all unique in this and I'm sure many people search Amazon for all sorts of things for a variety of reasons that has no connection to them actually buying it.

Submission + - SPAM: Vox Media fires hundreds of freelance writers over California 'gig economy' law 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

"This is a bittersweet note of thanks to our California independent contractors," said SB Nation executive director John Ness in a statement published on Monday.

"In 2020, we will move California's team blogs from our established system with hundreds of contractors to a new one run by a team of new SB Nation employees," he explained.

California Assembly Bill 5 will go into effect in 2020 and is intended to force "gig economy" giants like Uber and Lyft to pay their drivers as if they're employees and provide more benefits. But it is also affecting other freelance workers and causing confusion among employers.

To paraphrase future Beverly Hills gynecologist Eric Stratton, the fired Voxers f***ed up; they trusted Vox:
Link to Original Source

Submission + - For Now Women, Not Democracy, Are the Main Victims of Deepfakes (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While the 2020 U.S. presidential elections have lawmakers on edge over AI-generated fake videos, a new study by Netherlands-based deepfake-detection outfit Deeptrace shows that the main victims today are women. According to Deeptrace, deepfake videos have exploded in the past year, rising from 8,000 in December 2018 to 14,678 today. And not surprisingly for the internet, nearly all of the material is pornography, which accounts for 96% of the deepfake videos it's found online. The fake videos have been viewed 134 million times.

The numbers suggest deepfake porn is still niche but also growing quickly. Additionally, 90% of the fake content depicted women from the US, UK, and Canada, while 2% represented women from South Korea and 2% depicted women from Taiwan. "Deepfake pornography is a phenomenon that exclusively targets and harms women," the company notes. That small number of non-pornographic deepfake videos it analyzed on YouTube mostly contained (61%) synthesized male subjects. According to Henry Ajder, a researcher at Deeptrace, currently most of the deepfake porn involves famous women. But he reckons the threat to all women is likely to increase as it becomes less computationally expensive to create deepfakes. As for the political threat, there actually aren't that many cases where deepfakes have changed a political outcome.

Submission + - Cryptojacking Worm Infects Exposed Docker Deployments (csoonline.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Researchers from Palo Alto Networks have discovered a self-spreading, cryptojacking botnet that has infected over 2,000 Docker Engine deployments. “This is the first time we see a cryptojacking worm spread using containers in the Docker Engine (Community Edition),” the researchers said in a report released today. The new worm, dubbed Graboid, was distributed from Docker Hub, a public repository of Docker container images. Attackers uploaded images to Docker Hub with malicious scripts that, when executed, deployed the malware to other insecure servers. The researchers found several container images associated with the attack for different stages of the infection chain. They were removed after the Docker Hub maintainers were notified of the abuse.

Submission + - First-of-Its-Kind Satellite Servicing Spacecraft Launches on Russian Rocket (space.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The era of commercial satellite servicing is upon us. The robotic Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) launched atop a Russian Proton rocket today (Oct. 9) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:17 a.m. EDT (1017 GMT, 4:17 p.m. local Kazakhstan time). MEV-1, which was built by Virginia-based company Northrop Grumman, launched along with the Eutelsat 5 West B communications satellite. If all goes according to plan, both spacecraft will deploy into a supersynchronous transfer orbit about 16 hours after liftoff.

MEV-1 will then make its way to geostationary orbit and eventually link up with the Intelsat 901 communications satellite, which has been circling Earth since June 2001 and is low on fuel. Using its onboard electric thrusters, MEV-1 will take control of the pointing and orbit-maintenance duties for Intelsat 901 — something no other commercial satellite has ever done.

Comment I learned Linux because of porn.. (Score 5, Funny) 52

Being a young man in the 90s lead me to learn the Linux shell that our local dial up BBS provider had to access the internet. Once I realized there were horrible quality gifs of naked ladies doing much more than I ever saw in playboy I knew I had to try out the internet! Now I'm 20 years into an IT career and using Linux everyday. Thank you naked ladies!

Submission + - CNN Uses XKCD Illustration to Debunk Trump's Anti-Impeachment Map 2

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: CNN.com cites a cartoon from the geek-popular site XKCD:

"On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted a 2016 map with the words "Try to impeach this" written across it. [The map] is a county-by-county rendering of the 2016 election. And it is, as far as it goes, accurate. Trump won 2,626 counties to Hillary Clinton's 487 in the last presidential election, according to the Associated Press. But the map is also quite misleading...

When you allow for actual population in the country, the map looks a lot different. This one, by cartoonist Randall Munroe on his XKCD website, is a much more accurate depiction of what the 2016 election actually looked like."

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