An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Over 500,000 Zoom accounts are being sold on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, given away for free. These credentials are gathered through credential stuffing attacks where threat actors attempt to login to Zoom using accounts leaked in older data breaches. The successful logins are then compiled into lists that are sold to other hackers. Some of these Zoom accounts are offered for free on hacker forums so that hackers can use them in zoom-bombing pranks and malicious activities. Others are sold for less than a penny each.

Cybersecurity intelligence firm Cyble told BleepingComputer that around April 1st, 2020, they began to see free Zoom accounts being posted on hacker forums to gain an increased reputation in the hacker community. These accounts are shared via text sharing sites where the threat actors are posting lists of email addresses and password combinations. The purchased accounts include a victim's email address, password, personal meeting URL, and their HostKey. Cyble has told BleepingComputer that these accounts include ones for well-known companies such as Chase, Citibank, educational institutions, and more. You can use Have I Been Pwned and Cyble's AmIBreached to check if your email address has been leaked in a data breach.

Google has removed 49 Chrome extensions from the Web Store that posed as legitimate cryptocurrency wallet apps but contained malicious code that stole crypto-wallet private keys, mnemonic phrases, and other raw secrets. From a report: The 49 extensions were discovered by Harry Denley, Director of Security at the MyCrypto platform, who shared his findings exclusively with ZDNet last week. Denley says the 49 extensions appear to have been put together by the same person/group, believed to be a Russian-based threat actor. "Whilst the extensions all function the same, the branding is different depending on the user they are targeting," Denley said. The MyCrypto security researcher says he has identified malicious extensions posing as known crypto-wallets apps such as Ledger, Trezor, Jaxx, Electrum, MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, Exodus, and KeepKey.

Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year -- and eventually Chromebooks as well, Axios reported Tuesday. From the report: The move could help Google better compete with Apple, which designs its own chips. It would be a blow to Qualcomm, which supplies processors for many current high-end phones, including the Pixel. The chip, code-named Whitechapel, was designed in cooperation with Samsung, whose state-of-the-art 5-nanometer technology would be used to manufacture the chips, according to a source familiar with Google's effort. Samsung also manufactures Apple's iPhone chips, as well as its own Exynos processors.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving -- literally. Researchers have created software that borrows concepts from Darwinian evolution, including "survival of the fittest," to build AI programs that improve generation after generation without human input. The program replicated decades of AI research in a matter of days, and its designers think that one day, it could discover new approaches to AI. The program discovers algorithms using a loose approximation of evolution. It starts by creating a population of 100 candidate algorithms by randomly combining mathematical operations. It then tests them on a simple task, such as an image recognition problem where it has to decide whether a picture shows a cat or a truck.

In each cycle, the program compares the algorithms' performance against hand-designed algorithms. Copies of the top performers are "mutated" by randomly replacing, editing, or deleting some of its code to create slight variations of the best algorithms. These "children" get added to the population, while older programs get culled. The cycle repeats. In a preprint paper published last month on arXiv, the researchers show the approach can stumble on a number of classic machine learning techniques, including neural networks.

MountainLogic writes: With the U.S. Postal Service slated to run out of money this summer, a congressional bailout has become embroiled in the usual, critical and unusual political fights. Every day letter carriers deliver some of our web orders, there are many other functions the post office performs including providing an address validation API that is the core of many shipping systems. Would the collapse of this service mean a major disruption of e-commerce? What other impacts to technology would we face with the collapse of this constitutionally guaranteed service (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7).

Are there other services that the post office could perform to gain revenue? For example, the post office is where many Americans who live outside of major metro areas go to get a passport. A U.S. passport is the gold standard of ID. Could the post office become the ultimate place to go to validate ID and act as a signing authority? If you forget your password, go in to your local post office, show ID and reset your password. Seems like financial institutions would happily pay a few cents per reset to prevent billions in identity theft. Is there any other institution in America that could perform such a service on this scale. How else can the post office become more relevant and more solvent? Is profitability even a reasonable standard as we do not hold DoD to such a standard?

Samsung is reportedly shutting off the servers for its S-Voice voice assistant on June 1, 2020, "at which point Samsung's original voice assistant will stop attempting to respond to your voice queries," reports Ars Technica. From the report: S-Voice arose in the early days of voice assistants, when Android OEMs were scrambling to photocopy Apple's Siri voice assistant, which launched in 2011. Samsung licensed the same underlying technology for S-Voice that Apple originally used for Siri -- Nuance Communication's voice recognition -- and set about building its Siri sibling. S-Voice was Samsung's chosen voice assistant for its smartphones until it rebooted its voice efforts with the launch of "Bixby" in 2017. Samsung's Bixby project initially grew out of an acquisition of Viv Labs, a voice-assistant company founded by members of the original Siri team (see a pattern here?).

The Galaxy S8 and every device after it launched with Bixby and not S-Voice, so this shutdown should only effect older devices. SamMobile hunted down a list of applicable devices, saying "The affected models that have the S Voice icon on the app screen include the Galaxy A3, A5, A7, A8, A9, Galaxy Note FE, Galaxy Note 2, 3, 4, 5, Galaxy S3, 4, S5, S6, S6 edge in addition to the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, Galaxy W, Galaxy Tab 4, Galaxy Tab 4 8.0/10.1, Galaxy Tab S8.4 and S10.5.

The coronavirus has proven ten times deadlier than the swine flu outbreak that spread across the globe a decade prior, the World Health Organization has confirmed. The Independent reports: The swine flu pandemic, which spanned a stretch of time between January 2009 and August 2010, saw more than 1.6 million confirmed cases, resulting in the confirmed deaths of 18,449 people. Now the World Health Organization's top official Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned the coronavirus pandemic currently gripping the planet has outstripped the fatalities caused by the H1N1 strain tenfold.

"We can only say what we know, and we can only act on what we know," he said. "Evidence from several countries is giving us a clearer picture about this virus, how it behaves, how to stop it and how to treat it. We know that Covid-19 spreads fast and we know that it is deadly -- ten times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic. We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes. We know that early case finding, testing, isolating, caring for every case, and tracing every contact is essential for stopping transmission. We know that in some countries cases are doubling every three to four days. However while Covid-19 accelerates very fast it decelerates much more slowly. In other words the way down is much slower than the way up. That means control measures must be lifted slowly and with control."

The move to expand unlicensed Wi-Fi use into the much wider 6GHz band has the potential to generate more than $180 billion in U.S. revenue over the next 5 years, according to a new new industry-funded study, which comes 10 days before the FCC votes on the proposal. CNET reports: Released Monday, the report was funded by WifiForward, an industry advocacy group whose membership includes Google, Microsoft, Comcast, Charter, Broadcom, Arris and others. It was put together by Dr. Raul Katz, director of business strategy research at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information and president of Telecom Advisory Services, LLC. Its key takeaways (PDF) on the potential impact of the FCC's move include:

- The addition of $106 billion to the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025 due to increased broadband speeds, accelerated deployment of the Internet of Things, and expanded market access for augmented and virtual reality applications.
- A producer surplus of $69 billion due to enterprise wireless traffic savings and the sales of Wi-Fi and AR/VR equipment.
- Consumer surplus of $8 billion from increased broadband speeds.

That adds up to a total of $183.44 billion added to the US economy by 2025. You can read the full report for yourself here (PDF), but here are a couple of highlights from the data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Internal confidential documents belonging to some of the largest aerospace companies in the world have been stolen from an industrial contractor and leaked online. The data was pilfered and dumped on the internet by the criminals behind the DoppelPaymer Windows ransomware, in retaliation for an unpaid extortion demand. The sensitive documents include details of Lockheed-Martin-designed military equipment -- such as the specifications for an antenna in an anti-mortar defense system -- according to a Register source who alerted us to the blueprints. Other documents in the cache include billing and payment forms, supplier information, data analysis reports, and legal paperwork. There are also documents outlining SpaceX's manufacturing partner program.

The files were siphoned from Visser Precision by the DoppelPaymer crew, which infected the contractor's PCs and scrambled its files. When the company failed to pay the ransom by their March deadline, the gang -- which tends to demand hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to restore encrypted files -- uploaded a selection of the documents to a website that remains online and publicly accessible. Visser is a manufacturing and design contractor in the U.S. whose clients are said to include aerospace, automotive, and industrial manufacturing outfits -- think Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Tesla, Boeing, Honeywell, Blue Origin, Sikorsky, Joe Gibbs Racing, the University of Colorado, the Cardiff School of Engineering, and others. The leaked files relate to these customers, in particular Tesla, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and SpaceX.

The world's abrupt slowing down in the past few weeks may have introduced millions of Covid-19-wary professionals to the whole new paradigm of work-from-home. Yet, a third of India's four million IT employees are still trudging regularly to the office even if mostly to make life easier for clients abroad. From a report: Every working day, these thousands risk contracting coronavirus, jeopardising even their families' health, by going to work amid India's ongoing 21-day lockdown. Only because their jobs, in cities like Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad, form the backroom spine of some of the world's corporate behemoths. Indian IT majors like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and Wipro service giants like General Electric, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Airbus, Cisco, British Telecom, Vodafone, and Nielsen, among thousands of other companies across the globe.

"We power the financial backbones of several countries, support some of the largest health care and pharmacy companies in the world, run technology for governments and public services organisations," a TCS spokesperson told Quartz when asked about the lockdown. Besides, many global businesses also have essential functions -- accounting, payments, billing, human resources, and payroll -- being carried out in their own back offices in India.

A team in Colombia is to test a ventilator made with a Raspberry Pi computer and easy-to-source parts. From a report: The design and computer code were posted online in March by a man in California, who had no prior experience at creating medical equipment. Marco Mascorro, a robotics engineer, said he built the ventilator because knew the machines were in high demand to treat Covid-19. His post prompted a flood of feedback from healthcare workers. He has used the advice to make improvements. "I am a true believer that technology can solve a lot of the problems we have right now specifically in this pandemic," he told the BBC. The Colombian team said the design was important for their South American country because parts for traditional models could be hard to obtain. By contrast, Mr Mascorro's design uses only easy-to-find parts -- for example, the valves it employs can commonly be found at car and plumbing supply stores. The machine is set to be put through a fast-tracked round of tests at two institutions in Bogota -- the University Hospital of the Pontifical Xavierian University and Los Andes University.

"Elon Musk says Tesla's plan for 1 million robotaxi vehicles on the road by the end of the year is still on — pending regulatory approval," writes the electric car news site Electrek: At Tesla's 'Autonomy Day' event last year, Musk announced Tesla's plan to deploy 1 million 'Robotaxi' vehicles for a self-driving ride-sharing network by the end of 2020. It's an extension of Tesla's 'Full Self-driving Capability' plan to improve its Autopilot system in all its vehicles produced since 2016 — leading to those vehicles being capable of self-driving. Once that capability is available through an over-the-air software update, which Tesla aims to be by the end of 2020, Tesla anticipates that it will have over 1 million vehicles on the road with the hardware necessary to run the new software...

Today, Tesla's CEO says that he still believes in Tesla's ability to deliver on the functionality of the robotaxi fleet by the end of the year...

However, Tesla and Musk have been wrong about their Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability timeline before.
Electrek's skeptical writer predicts that instead Tesla won't have a robotaxi fleet until "around the end of 2021."

Saturday Musk also cited robotaxis as the reason that Tesla's Model 3 ships with a camera pointed inside offering a clear, wide-angle view of the car's interior -- to keep an eye on passengers -- though he also sees other applications, according to Engadget.

"Musk hinted it might help you record your 'caraoke' sessions, and the company recently applied for a patent on using the camera to recognize occupants and apply settings (such as seat position or climate controls) when they're inside. For now, though, the in-cabin camera is more a symbol of Tesla's lofty, as yet unfulfilled dreams of putting fully self-driving cars on the road."

ICANN chief executive Goran Marby has a message for its hundreds of registrars. Though ICANN can't involve itself in content issues, "That does not mean we are unconcerned or unaware of how certain domain names are being misused in fraudulent activities during this global pandemic." It is this concern that prompted me to contact the registries and registrars thanking them for their efforts and actions aimed at helping to mitigate and minimize the abusive domain names being used to maliciously take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic. For example, the Registrar Stakeholder Group has posted a useful guide, entitled "Registrar approaches to the COVID-19 Crisis" that provides a number of steps and resources the registrar community can use in their efforts.

Many of our contracted parties already support a Framework to Address Abuse, which deals with DNS abuse and website content abuse. I continue to commend them for making this commitment to protect the DNS from those who would maliciously exploit domain names. In my correspondence to the registries and registrars, I expressed ICANN org's appreciation for their work during the pandemic.

Additionally, I'm pleased to tell you that ICANN org has joined registries, registrars, security experts, law enforcement, Internet engineers, and others, in the COVID-19 Cyber Threat Coalition (CTC). The CTC's mission is to, "operate the largest professional-quality threat lab in the history of cybersecurity out of donated cloud infrastructure and with rapidly assembled teams of diverse, cross-geography, cross-industry threat researchers."

I am proud that so many in the Internet ecosystem are joining together during this crisis to stop those who prey on the desperate.
AFP reports that just in March at least 100,000 websites were registered with names including terms like "COVID," "corona," and "virus," according to recent report prepared for ICANN. "COVID-19 is unique in that it is truly global; and the cyber bad guys haven't drifted toward it, they have rushed toward it like a barrel off Niagra Falls," ICANN security chief John Crain told AFP.

"This is a new low, preying on people at a time like this."

Phoronix reports on a new concern about Qt, the free and open-source widget toolkit for creating GUIs and cross-platform applications: Wednesday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues... [Slashdot editor's note: the comment also claims the Qt Company "says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas."] This comes months after The Qt Company already shifted to make Qt long-term support releases customer-only, among other steps to boost their commercial business at the beginning of the year.

Following all the speculation and concerns from the statement by KDE's Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer, The Qt Company released this very brief statement:

There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company.

The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model.
But in the event of a one-year freeze on free releases, Phoronix now reports, "several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it." The hope is first and foremost that The Qt Company and KDE / KDE Free Qt Foundation can reach a mutual agreement without this embargo on future releases, which would effectively close up its development... Among those backing the concept of forking Qt as a last resort if necessary has been developers from consulting firm KDAB, the Qute browser developer, and the QGIS project as one of the leading geographic information system software packages, among many KDE developers themselves.

The mailing list thread is quite active in talking about the possible fork if necessary, including aspects like web-hosting down to what such a fork should be called ("Kt" seems to be a popular choice so far with several different members in the community).

In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet's 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, "with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice." "Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design," explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google in 2005 to name him its "Chief Internet Evangelist," a title he still holds...

Cerf, along with fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn, was a driving force in developing key Internet protocols in the 1970s for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned. Cerf also was among a gang of self-described "Netheads" who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the "Bellheads" for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies.

Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until it was broken up in the 1980s, and similar monopolies in other countries wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market -- or government regulators -- would allow. The vision of the Netheads was comparatively anarchic, relying on technological insights and a lot of faith in collaboration. The result was a network -- or really, a network of networks -- with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws. In their place were technical protocols, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, that offered anyone access to the digital world from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more...

Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there's a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who's online -- a category that includes more than half of the world's almost 8 billion people. But the lack of a central authority is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of unforeseen demands. Some of the early Internet architects -- Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon -- were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets...

Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier.
"They're deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high five right now," added one Comcast vice president (who "has briefed some members of the Internet's founding generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.")

And last week Vint Cerf reported good news about his own recent COVID-19 infection -- that he is no longer contagious -- and briefly summed up the experience for the Washington Post.

"I don't recommend it... It's very debilitating."

Wired investigated the vast spread of 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theories -- and reports that "Amongst the conspiracy sludge, one voice stands out."

"For more than a year, propaganda broadcaster RT has been attacking the roll-out of 5G." While RT has never outright linked 5G to coronavirus, it has played a role in adding legitimacy to conspiracy theories surrounding the technology. As The New York Times reports, RT's disinformation campaign against 5G — seemingly created to hinder the global roll-out of the technology so Russia can catch up — has since spread to a network of blogs and social media accounts, where it has been decoupled from Moscow's propaganda firehose.

And it doesn't stop at 5G. On January 29, RT's Greenstein opened an afternoon news show with a five-minute monologue asking viewers to question the role of Bill Gates in the coronavirus pandemic. "Maybe this is something to consider when you're reading headlines about how the Gates Foundation is pledging money to fight the coronavirus," she says... While Greenstein stops short of accusing Gates of somehow planning the coronavirus outbreak, RT's winks and nods have added fuel to another conspiracy theory that has also gone viral...

None of these conspiracy theories have a shred of truth in them, while some are outright dangerous.
The theory was spread further by a former U.K. sportsballer who livestreamed a two and a half hour interview Monday linking 5G and the coronavirus pandemic.

The BBC reports that YouTube has since deleted the video -- watched by 65,000 viewers -- in which a former football player turned conspiracy theorist "claimed that a coronavirus vaccine, when one is developed, would include 'nanotechnology microchips' that would allow humans to be controlled. He added that Bill Gates — who is helping fund Covid-19 vaccine research — should be jailed."

Ironically, efforts to launch 5G networks are well underway in Russia itself, VentureBeat noted last spring, "and the New York Times reports that Russians have embraced even more extreme views on the high-frequency wireless signals: It's believed that they can be used to heal wounds, fight hair loss, rejuvenate skin, and treat cancer."

There's a new landspeed record for driving from New York City to Los Angeles -- but "unlike most speed records and races, there's no sanctioning body or official rules," notes Road and Track. "That's because setting a 'Cannonball' record invariably involves breaking multiple traffic laws."

But now Cannonball purists "are criticizing the run as grossly irresponsible while the nation deals with an emergency of unseen magnitude." schwit1 shares their report from Thursday: Only a few months have passed since we reported that the New York-to-Los Angeles Cannonball record was broken. It's allegedly been broken again. The 26 hour, 38 minute time — which beats the record set in November by more than 45 minutes — appears to be legitimate, according to Ed Bolian, a Cannonball insider and driver who set his own 28 hour, 50 minute record in 2013....

All we know about this new set of scofflaws is that there were three, maybe four of them, and that they were driving a white 2019 Audi A8 sedan with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt... [A]n exuberant friend posted a picture of the Audi on Facebook this week — situated among a number of other high-dollar cars, with its trunk open to show the auxiliary fuel tanks — along with the team's alleged time. Within a day, hundreds of people had shared the post, and social media chat groups were abuzz with Cannonball aficionados offering up opinions on the matter...

[R]esponses ran the gamut from "Nice job!" to "Who the hell do those guys think they are?" to "Who the hell are we to judge them?" There was talk of not recognizing the new 26:38 time set by the white Audi team as a record, due to the extraordinary circumstances.

But as John Ficarra, the creator and organizer of The 2904, pointed out, there is no sanctioning body for illegal cross-country races and time trials.
Slashdot covered previous records in 2007 (31 hours, 4 minutes) and in 2013 (28 hours, 50 minutes).

The average speed of this run was over 103 miles per hour -- for more than 26 hours.

Conspiracy theorists have committed more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism against U.K. wireless towers and other telecom gear, reports the New York Times, citing police reports and a telecom trade group.

But what's stirring them up? For starters, over two million people watched a 5G conspiracy video on YouTube last month, the Times notes, adding that the misinformation is also spreading widely through other social media sites: An analysis by The New York Times found 487 Facebook communities, 84 Instagram accounts, 52 Twitter accounts, and dozens of other posts and videos pushing the conspiracy. The Facebook communities added nearly half a million new followers over the past two weeks. On Instagram, a network of 40 accounts nearly doubled its audience this month to 58,800 followers. On YouTube, the 10 most popular 5G coronavirus conspiracy videos posted in March were viewed over 5.8 million times. Today, the conspiracy can be found on Facebook in over 30 countries, including Switzerland, Uruguay and Japan...

"This is nonsense of the absolute highest order," said Julian Knight, a member of Parliament who leads a committee investigating coronavirus-related online misinformation. He said Facebook and YouTube needed to "get a grip" on the situation or risk undermining the crisis response. Mr. Knight added that the spread of 5G conspiracies raised alarms about how information about a future coronavirus vaccine would be disseminated. "If we were to get a vaccine for Covid-19, can we trust the social media companies to ensure that the right public health messages are put out about that vaccine?" he asked...

Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was "starting to remove false claims that 5G technology causes the symptoms of or contraction of Covid-19." YouTube said it would reduce recommendations of videos linking the coronavirus to 5G, while Twitter said it had taken action against misleading and harmful content about the illness.

Telecommunications companies, which have added more security and are working with law enforcement, said the attacks against their workers and equipment had been widespread, threatening communication networks during the crisis.
A YouTube spokesman told the BBC this week that YouTube has toughened its stance against conspiracy theories. "Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the World Health Organization and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies. This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G."

But "Everything about this is senseless," says the head of BT, who points out that most of the attacked phone masks don't even carry the 5G signal.

Ghacks writes: Observant Firefox users on Windows who have updated the web browser to Firefox 75 may have noticed that the upgrade brought along with it a new scheduled tasks. The scheduled task is also added if Firefox 75 is installed on a Windows device. The task's name is Firefox Default Browser Agent and it is set to run once per day...
Mozilla says:

• "We're collecting information related to the system's current and previous default browser setting, as well as the operating system locale and version. This data cannot be associated with regular profile based telemetry data..."
• "We'll respect user configured telemetry opt-out settings by looking at the most recently used Firefox profile."
• "We'll respect custom Enterprise telemetry related policy settings if they exist. We'll also respect policy to specifically disable this task."

"Collecting telemetry is one way we're able to ensure we can understand default browser trends in a way that helps us improve Firefox. It's our hope that by better understanding more about our users and their choices around browser preferences, we can continue to build a better Firefox."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes, "Opting out can be done via the Privacy & Security section of the preferences screen. You can view collected telemetry and view your current settings at about:telemetry."

Bleeping Computer also notes that by default, "For some time, Firefox has been collecting telemetry data about how you use the browser, such as the number of web pages you visit, safebrowsing information, the number of open tabs and windows, what add-ons are installed, and more. This telemetry data is kept for 13 months and IP addresses listed in server logs are deleted every 30 days.

"On my computer, Firefox has collected over 400KB of information."

Long-time Slashdot reader robbyyy writes: Facebook has been accused of violating its users rights by tracking users internet activity even after they have logged out of the platform. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that users could now pursue them under various privacy and wiretapping laws.

Facebook is still dealing with the legal ramifications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal both in Australia and around the world.
"Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Facebook set an expectation that logged-out user data would not be collected, but then collected it anyway," the judge wrote. "In addition, the amount of data allegedly collected was significant...

"In light of the privacy interests and Facebook's allegedly surreptitious and unseen data collection, Plaintiffs have adequately alleged a reasonable expectation of privacy."