A petition with over 350,000 signatures is calling on Pornhub to stop posting non-consensual videos and marketing them as "pornography." Kate Isaacs writes via The Guardian: Pornhub's argument that "extremists" are lobbying to shut them down is ridiculous. I'm non-religious, liberal and sex positive and in no way "anti-porn." I started the #NotYourPorn campaign after a friend had her iCloud account hacked last year. Videos of her and an ex had been stolen from her phone and then uploaded to Pornhub. We have tried to have my friend's videos taken down: we told the company that she was underage, that she didn't consent to being on their website and still it took several weeks to remove it. Unfortunately, by then the damage was already done. When one video had been removed, an identical video with her full name attached would pop back up again. This cycle of reporting the video to Pornhub, delayed removal and subsequent re-uploading continued for months -- until she ended up on Pornhub's top five trending videos in the UK. My friend fell into a state of depression at the knowledge that she had been reduced to a search term, her body packaged up as porn and sold for profit.

Since then I have worked with 50 women who were turned into "porn stars" without their permission -- some of whom were under 18 -- when videos of them were posted on Pornhub without their consent. Before you tell yourself that this would never happen to you (because you wouldn't be so careless as to have a video of yourself like that in the first place) then I'd ask you to consider Catherine's* case. Catherine got in contact with me when she found that her ex had been secretly recording them having sex, and without her knowledge uploading these videos to Pornhub for glory -- and even a cash reward. When Catherine discovered his Pornhub page, she found videos of what appeared to be other unsuspecting victims too, all promoted under "secret recording" categories on the website. Secret recording categories can still be found on Pornhub. "Pornhub hide themselves behind freedom of expression and argue that all sexual fantasies on their site are just that: legitimate fantasies acted out by consenting adults. They have defended the "young teen" and "drunk stolen snapchat" categories as legitimate fantasy protected by freedom of speech," Isaac writes in closing.

"Let me be clear: this isn't about censorship or stifling kinks -- there are plenty of ethical porn companies who have strong systems in place to ensure everyone involved in production is a consenting adult. This is about a huge corporation profiting from non-consensual videos -- and an industry that publishes abusive content with no regulatory body or government holding them to account."

Sonos is reversing course on a plan to brick all trade-in devices, so if someone wants to give or sell you a used speaker, it will still work. For now. Ars Technica reports: Sonos launched its "trade up" program last October. Consumers who owned a handful of older devices would receive a 30 percent discount on newer models if they traded in their old versions -- a fairly typical program for expensive electronics, all things considered. The company drew customers' ire with one important deviation from others' trade-in programs, though. Although the company does indeed sell refurbished equipment, devices users traded in through the program were destined not to become part of that cycle. Instead, Sonos straight up bricked them.

Completing the trade-in process required putting your device in "recycle mode," which not only wipes all of the user's personal data but also permanently deactivates the product. Once a Sonos product has been deactivated, the company says, "the product cannot be re-added to any system or used to set up a new Sonos system, even if the product has been reset to its factory settings," and the decision to deactivate it is irreversible. Instead of bringing in old products and refurbishing or reselling them, Sonos tells users to bring them to an e-waste center or send it back to Sonos for component recycling. In recent days, however, Sonos quietly removed the recycle mode option from its app, replacing it with a prompt to call customer service. Additionally, the company now says it's working on posting a new trade-in flow to its website, which will remove recycle mode from the process.

According to a report Green Car Reports, Honda said it discontinued the company's Clarity Electric and has no plans for the model to return. CNET reports: The battery-electric version of the Clarity rounded out a diverse lineup of alternative-fuel options housed in the nameplate. Honda still sells a plug-in hybrid version of the Clarity and introduced modest updates to the Clarity Fuel Cell for 2020. Honda only offered the EV version in Oregon and California, however. Ditto for the fuel cell version as well. The Clarity Plug-In Hybrid was originally offered in numerous states, though low demand drove the car out of the Northeast last summer. At the time, Honda told Roadshow California will be the PHEV's main focus, though the car remains available to order at any Honda dealer nationwide.

Telecom operators in India have started to warn users of Covid-19 spread after more than three dozen cases have been detected in the nation. From a report: Subscribers of Reliance Jio, Airtel, and state-run BSNL were greeted with a warning in Hindi and English when they attempted to make a phone call on Sunday. The message, locally known as "caller tune," plays instead of regular phone ring. "Always protect your face with a handkerchief or tissue while coughing or sneezing. Regularly clean hands with soap. Avoid touching your face, eyes, or nose. If someone has cough, fever, or breathlessness maintain one metre distance. If needed, visit your nearest health centre immediately," the pre-recorded message said. Vodafone, the top telecom operator in India, has started to implement the warning message, too, while Airtel is looking to broaden the reach of its alert, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Australia's privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach -- which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the tech giant's share price yet only led to Facebook picking up a $5B FTC fine. Should Australia prevail in its suit against the tech giant the monetary penalty could be exponentially larger. Australia's Privacy Act sets out a provision for a civil penalty of up to $1,700,000 to be levied per contravention -- and the national watchdog believes there were 311,074 local Facebook users in the cache of ~86M profiles lifted by Cambridge Analytica . So the potential fine here is circa $529B. (A very far cry from the 500k pound Facebook paid in the UK over the same data misuse scandal.)

The Brave browser is working on a feature that will randomize its "fingerprint" every time a user visits a website in an attempt to preserve the user's privacy. From a report: Brave's decision comes as online advertisers and analytics firms are moving away from tracking users via cookies to using fingerprints. [...] "The unfortunate truth about all these approaches is that, despite being well-intentioned, none of them are very effective in preventing fingerprinting," the Brave team said of other browser makers' approaches. "The enormous diversity of fingerprinting surface in modern browsers makes these 'block', 'lie' or 'permission' approaches somewhere between insufficient and useless, unfortunately," they added. "Brave's new approach aims to make every browser look completely unique, both between websites and between browsing sessions," Brave developers said.

Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven't found a reason to switch back to Google. I combed through my browser's history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn't find what I wanted on Google either. Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I'll admit that I'm a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I'm not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don't know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me.

There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.

An excerpt from a piece on the situation at Wuhan, where many are quarantined: Schools are suspended until further notice. With many workplaces also shut, notoriously absent Chinese fathers have been forced to stay home and entertain their children. Video clips of life under quarantine are trending on TikTok. Children were presumably glad to be off school -- until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk's rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4. The app has had to beg for mercy on social media: 'I'm only five years old myself, please don't kill me.'

Twitter and activist hedge fund Elliott Management have agreed to a truce that will shake up the social-media company's board but leave its Chief Executive Jack Dorsey in place [The link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The agreement calls for Twitter to appoint two new board members, with a promise to search for a new independent director, and make $2 billion in share repurchases, the company said. The buyback is to be funded in part by a $1 billion investment from technology-focused investment firm Silver Lake. The agreement noticeably doesn't include the removal of Mr. Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, a central pillar of Elliott's campaign, which just came to light last week. Elliott has a roughly $1 billion stake in Twitter, people familiar with the matter have said.

Quartz tells the story of a large-scale heroin and methamphetamine dealer named Francisco Ruelas-Payan who's now serving 15 years in prison: While phone records and GPS location devices were useful in helping investigators keep tabs on Ruelas-Payan's location and near-term plans, it was his public Facebook activity that not only confirmed many of these leads but also offered additional clues authorities used to build their case. Ruelas-Payan posted lengthy videos to the social media network of himself driving to suspected drug deals, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration search warrant application unsealed late last month. The trips were further corroborated by GPS data from electronic tracking devices investigators placed on Ruelas-Payan's cars and phone...

In a 2012 survey, 4 out of 5 law enforcement officials said they used social media to solve crimes, and nearly 7 out of 10 said social media helps to close cases faster. Facebook received nearly 130,000 data requests from governments around the world during the first six months of 2019, according to the most recent figures available. Between January and June of last year, the U.S. government requested data from Facebook related to more than 82,000 accounts. About 88% of those requests were granted. The second-most requests came from the government of India, which asked for data on 33,000 accounts. Facebook agreed to provide about half of them.

Yet people often leave a trail of clues on their public social media profiles that investigators can see without ever needing a subpoena. Some, for example, take to Facebook Live to discuss an impending $10 million extortion attempt... Others post selfies in the same clothes they wore while robbing a bank.
It all provoked a bemused response from a former New York City detective sergeant interviewed by Quartz who now teaches police procedure at John Jay College.

"The 'look at me' generation can't help themselves."

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Airlines have wasted thousands of gallons of fuel running empty "ghost" flights during the coronavirus outbreak because of European rules saying operators can lose their flight slots if they keep their planes on the ground.

Demand for flights has collapsed across the globe amid growing fears about the outbreak. Under Europe's rules, airlines operating out of the continent must continue to run 80% of their allocated slots or risk losing them to a competitor. This has led to some operators flying empty planes into and out of European countries at huge costs, The Times of London reported.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a tale for our time: "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's all it took. Google's legal investigations support team emailed him to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a "geofence warrant," a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.
NBC News reports: An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone's location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim's house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said. "It was a nightmare scenario," McCoy recalled. "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.
McCoy's lawyer "pointed to an Arizona case in which a man was mistakenly arrested and jailed for murder largely based on Google data received from a geofence warrant. McCoy said he may have ended up in a similar spot if his parents hadn't given him several thousand dollars to hire Kenyon."

"I didn't realize that by having location services on that Google was also keeping a log of where I was going," McCoy said. "I'm sure it's in their terms of service but I never read through those walls of text, and I don't think most people do either...."

The article also notes a Google filing last year reporting that the requests from state and federal law enforcement authorities incrased by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and then again by 500 percent from 2018 to 2019.

In a scathing editorial, EFF continues to oppose Ethos Capital's plan to buy the PIR's .org domain registry for $1.1 billion, arguing that "the current system is stable and functional, and changing it threatens to introduce instability and dysfunction with no countervailing benefit to the community..."

"[W]hile there is nothing currently wrong with .ORG, there is a lot that could go wrong if this deal moves forward." Ethos and PIR have repeatedly defended the proposed deal by arguing that converting PIR to a privately owned, for-profit enterprise will allow it to offer "new products and services," but without explaining what those new offerings might be. On Thursday, they finally admitted that they actually don't know what additional products and services .ORG registrants want or need, citing a lack of market research...

The for-profit PIR that Ethos envisions would be a fundamentally different organization than today's PIR, and we have serious concerns about its business model and financial stability. Nothing we've heard from PIR and Ethos has convinced us that PIR should be transformed from something that we all know works to something that's unproven. To the contrary, the Ethos deal raises concrete dangers of censorship, financial and technical instability, and price-gouging of non-commercial .ORG registrants. And despite making their case for months, proponents of the deal haven't identified any specific benefits it would impart to .ORG users.

ICANN can, and should, reject this change to the .ORG registry. But that time is running out; ICANN's current deadline to make a decision is Friday, March 20. You can still speak out: the ICANN Board is holding a public forum next week, Monday March 9 at 10am-11:30am Eastern Daylight Time. Anyone can join by videoconference and address the Board.

"New academic research published last month looked at the phone-home [telemetry] features of six of today's most popular browsers and found that the Brave browser sent the smallest amount of data about its users back to the browser maker's servers," reports ZDNet: The research, conducted by Douglas J. Leith, a professor at Trinity College at the University of Dublin, looked at Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave, Microsoft Edge (the new Chromium-based version), and the Yandex Browser.

"In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex...." [T]he professor found evidence that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all tagged telemetry data with identifiers that were linked to each browser instance. These identifiers allowed Google, Mozilla, and Apple to track users across browser restarts, but also across browser reinstalls...

[T]he most intrusive phoning-home features were found in the new version of Microsoft Edge and the official Yandex Browser. According to Prof. Leith, both used unique identifiers that were linked to the device's hardware, rather than the browser installation. Tracking users by hardware allows Microsoft and Yandex to follow users across installations and potentially link browser installs with other apps and online identities. The professor said that Edge collected the hardware UUID of the user's computer, an identifier that cannot be easily changed or deleted without altering a computer's hardware. Similarly, Prof. Leith also found that Yandex transmitted a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to its backend servers.

"As far as we can tell this behaviour [in Edge and Yandex] cannot be disabled by users," the professor said.
The article also points out that Brave was the only browser that didn't use search autocomplete functionality to collect and send back information on a user's visited web pages. (Even though this can be disabled in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, it's on by default.)

But Edge and Yandex "also sent back information about visited web pages that did not appear to be related to the search autocomplete feature, suggesting the browsers had other ways to track users' browsing habits."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, a cybersecurity firm discovered the first-ever Android malware that came with the capability to steal the 2FA (two-factor authentication) codes generated by the Google Authenticator app. The malware, discovered by researchers from ThreatFabric, was named Cerberus, and its 2FA OTP code-stealing feature was still under development, yet to have been detected in a real-world attack. According to researchers, the malware was a hybrid between a banking trojan and a remote access trojan (RAT).

Once an Android user got infected, the hacker would use the malware's banking trojan features to steal credentials for mobile banking apps. If an account was protected by 2FA, and namely by the Google Authenticator app, the malware was designed to allow the Cerberus gang to connect to a user's device manually, via its RAT features. Hackers would then open the Authenticator app, generate one-time passcodes, take a screenshot of the codes, and then access the user's account. [...] Nightwatch researchers said that Google could have fixed this issue as early as October 2014, when this misconfiguration was first brought to its attention by someone on GitHub.

Italy's competition watchdog said on Friday it had fined former phone monopoly Telecom Italia (TIM) 116 million euros ($131 million) for abusing its dominant position in the broadband market in an attempt to obstruct the entrance of rivals. From a report: The Italian antitrust authority said in a statement that Telecom Italia had conducted a "premeditated anti-competition strategy" aimed at hindering its competitors' investments in ultra-fast broadband. The authority opened its investigation into TIM's superfast broadband rollout and wholesale pricing plans three years ago after TIM, then headed by Chief Executive Flavio Cattaneo, announced a plan, dubbed Cassiopea, to roll out fast broadband in so-called uneconomic areas. TIM had initially said it would not roll out broadband in areas where it could not guarantee a return on its investment, forcing Rome to step in with state subsidized tenders.

Many Lyft and Uber drivers have seen a bump in business from the spreading coronavirus, but they're also weighing the risks of staying safe versus continuing to earn a paycheck. From a report: A study published Friday shows that more than half of ride-hailing drivers said they were now "very concerned" about reduced earnings as a result of the virus and 41% said they've modified their driving strategy as a result. These changes include reducing hours, refusing airport rides and halting driving entirely. The survey of 871 drivers in the U.S. from March 1 to March 4 compared data with similar four-day periods in 2020 and was conducted by driver productivity app Gridwise. "They are doing what they have to do to continue earning," said Brandon Sellers, a product growth specialist at the Pittsburgh-based startup. About one-third of drivers are now wiping down their cars with disinfectant after every ride, using hand sanitizer and wearing a mask, he said. "The data is telling us that drivers are afraid."

An anonymous reader shares a report: FreeNAS is a free and open source operating system designed for network-attached storage (NAS) devices. For much of the past decade, the project has been led by the folks at iXsystems, which has also produced an enterprise version of the software called TrueNAS. Now iXsystems has announced that FreeNAS and TrueNAS are merging. Moving forward there will be a single operating system called TrueNAS rather than two different, but closely related operating systems. According to the company, the latest versions of the operating systems (FreeNAS 11.3 and TrueNAS 11.3) already share about 95-percent of the same source code. Starting with TrueNAS 12, there will only be a single OS image. But the company will offer two editions:
TrueNAS CORE: open source edition
TrueNAS Enterprise: commercial version with enterprise management and support.

Speaking at the RSA security conference last week, Microsoft engineers said that 99.9% of the compromised accounts they track every month don't use multi-factor authentication, a solution that stops most automated account attacks. From a report: The cloud giant said it tracks more than 30 billion login events per day and more than one billion monthly active users. Microsoft said that, on average, around 0.5% of all accounts get compromised each month, a number that in January 2020 was about 1.2 million. While all account hacks are bad, they are worse when the account is for enterprise use. Of these highly-sensitive accounts, only 11% had a multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution enabled, as of January 2020, Microsoft said. In most cases, the account hacks happen after rather simplistic attacks. The primary sources of most hacks of Microsoft accounts was password spraying, a technique during which an attacker picks a common and easy-to-guess password, and goes through a long list of usernames until they get a hit and can access an account using said password.

Ten years ago, David Wang pulled off a remarkable trick, installing Android on the first-generation iPhone. Now Wang and his colleagues at cybersecurity startup Corellium are doing it again with the ostentatiously titled Project Sandcastle. From a report: And Forbes got an exclusive hands-on look at their Android for iPhone product ahead of its public release scheduled for later this Wednesday. The timing is sure to have Apple fanboys rubbernecking: Corellium is in the middle of being sued by Apple. As previously reported by Forbes, in August last year, Corellium was taken to court over Apple claims the startup breached copyright laws by creating software versions of the iPhone for security and testing. The case took a surprise turn late last month when Apple subpoenaed Spanish banking giant Santander and the $50 billion U.S. military and intelligence contractor L3Harris.

But Corellium has lofty ambitions for Project Sandcastle, saying that it'll actually show how Apple's walled garden, which it has fiercely protected since launching its flagship phone in 2007, can be deconstructed and taken over by others' software. "Project Sandcastle is about having fun building something new from the sand -- from the literal silicon of the hardware," said Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton, in a statement sent to Forbes. "Apple restricts iPhone users to operate inside a sandbox, but users own that hardware, and they should be able to use that hardware the way they want. So where sandboxes create limits and boundaries on the hardware that users own, sandcastles provide an opportunity to create something new and wonderful from the limitless bounds of your imagination."