An anonymous reader writes: "Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook -- but their surveillance is much harder to avoid," writes Salome Viljoen in an opinion piece for The Guardian. From the report: "Facebook isn't the only company that amasses troves of data about people and leaves it vulnerable to exploitation and misuse. As of last year, Congress extended the same data-gathering practices of tech companies like Google and Facebook to internet providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. Because service providers serve as gatekeepers to the entire internet, they can collect far more information about us, and leave us with far less power to opt out of that process. This means that the risks of allowing our internet providers to collect and monetize the same type of user data that Facebook collects -- and the potential that such data will therefore be misused -- are much, much worse. Your internet provider doesn't just know what you do on Facebook -- it sees all the sites you visit and how much time you spend there. Your provider can see where you shop, what you watch on TV, where you choose to eat dinner, what medical symptoms you search, where you apply for work, school, a mortgage. Everything that is unencrypted is fair game. But internet providers don't just pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook -- their surveillance is also far harder to avoid. 'Choosing' not to use an internet provider to avoid surveillance is not really a choice at all. As of 2016, only about half of Americans have more than one option for broadband internet. In rural areas, this number drops to just 13%.

An anonymous reader writes: Three of four TERiX executives were sentenced to prison yesterday for a scheme through which they created three fake companies to pirate Oracle firmware patches and Solaris OS updates. By doing this, the execs avoided paying a per-server fee for every Oracle product their company serviced, instead paying for one patch/update alone.

Court documents show that Oracle was aware of the scheme and eventually connected the dots between the fake companies and TERiX when one of the execs downloaded files from Oracle's servers via one of the fake company's accounts from a TERiX IP address. Oracle filed a complaint with the FBI, but also a civil suit. A judge awarded Oracle damages last year totaling $57.423 million. The judge also barred TERiX from servicing Oracle products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or "issue" ads on "debated topics of national legislative importance" like education or abortion to verify their identity and location. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked. Meanwhile, Facebook plans to use this information to append a "Political Ad" label and "Paid for by" information to all election, politics and issue ads. Users can report any ads they think are missing the label, and Facebook will show if a Page has changed its name to thwart deception. Facebook started the verification process this week; users in the U.S. will start seeing the labels and buyer info later this spring, and Facebook will expand the effort to ads around the world in the coming months.

The FBI has reportedly seized the sex marketplace website Backpage.com, according to a posting on its website on Friday. "The posting said the U.S. Justice Department would provide more information at 6 p.m. EDT," reports Reuters. "It said U.S. attorneys in Arizona and California, as well as the Justice Department's section on child exploitation and obscenity and the California and Texas attorneys general had supported the work in shutting down the website." From the report: Lawmakers and enforcement officials have been working to crack down on the site, the second largest classified ad service in the country after Craigslist that is used primarily to sell sex. The U.S. Senate passed legislation last month making it easier for state prosecutors and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep sex trafficking and other exploitative materials off their platforms. The Supreme Court in January 2017 refused to consider reviving a lawsuit against backpage.com filed by three young women alleging the site facilitated their forced prostitution. But the site has since then faced a slew of other lawsuits alleging child sex trafficking. According to AZCentral, local FBI officials have confirmed "law enforcement activity" Friday morning at the Sedona-area home of Michael Lacey, a co-founder of Backpage.com. The raid comes amid what appears to be a shut-down of the website.

Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people's minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking. From a report: The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin. "Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that's more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?" said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT's Media Lab.

Kapur describes the headset as an "intelligence-augmentation" or IA device, and was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interface conference in Tokyo. It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Unfortunately, while C-suite executives talk "strategy," they're often confused about what it means. Why this confusion? The problem starts with the word itself -- a scarily misunderstood concept in management and board circles. The most basic mix-up is between "objective," "strategy," and "action." (I see this frequently in published strategic plans as well.) Grasp this, I tell my audience, and your day will be well spent.

An "objective" is something you're trying to achieve -- a marker of the success of the organization. At the other end of the spectrum is "action." This occurs at the individual level -- a level that managers are presented with day after day. So naturally when they think "strategy" they focus on what they do. But this isn't strategy either. "Strategy" takes place between these two at the organization level and managers can't "feel" that in the same way. It's abstract. CEOs have an advantage here because only they have a total view of the organization.

The key to strategy is that it's the positioning of one business against others -- such GM against Ford and Toyota, for example. What exactly is positioning? It's placement on the strategic factors relevant to each key stakeholder group.

Come this June, Twitter says it will disable "streaming services", a feature third-party Twitter clients such as Talon, Tweetbot, Twitterrific use to stream the timeline and send push notifications. A replacement for streaming service, the Account Activity API, isn't being made available to third-party developers. In a letter, developers wrote: The new Account Activity API is currently in beta testing, but third-party developers have not been given access and time is running out. With access we might be able to implement some push notifications, but they would be limited at the standard level to 35 Twitter accounts -- our products must deliver notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. No pricing has been given for Enterprise level service with unlimited accounts -- we have no idea if this will be an affordable option for us and our users.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year. This change affects people who use third-party Twitter apps. All software platforms are affected, but it's worse on iOS and Android where users rely on push notifications to know when something happens on Twitter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an interview with Today airing Friday morning, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg insisted that Facebook does not sell or give away user information, but made clear that Facebook's entire model is based on being able to share user data with advertisers. If Facebook users don't like its ad-based model, the only other option would be to have users pay for the service so they could keep their data to themselves. As Sandberg told Today: "Our service depends on your data, [so] we don't have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product."

Last Friday, SpaceX wasn't able to give its fans a view of the 10 new Iridium satellites it released into orbit from its Falcon 9 upper stage. Here's why. From a report: Weirdly, company engineers staffing the launch webcast blamed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration restrictions for the blackout from the stage, a staple of most SpaceX launches. Well, at least those that don't involve deploying spy satellites or top-secret space planes. The story behind the missing live feed is a muddy bureaucratic affair. It appears that NOAA has recently decided to start interpreting or enforcing a decades-old law in a new way. The agency says SpaceX and other commercial space companies must apply for a license to broadcast video from orbit.

"The National and Commercial Space Program Act requires a commercial remote sensing license for companies having the capacity to take an image of Earth while on orbit," NOAA said in a statement last week. "Now that launch companies are putting video cameras on stage 2 rockets that reach an on-orbit status, all such launches will be held to the requirements of the law and its conditions."

An anonymous reader writes: Wages in the United States are going up, but their growth is shrinking, says Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain. Wages should be rising an average of 3%-4% given the tightness of the job market, Chamberlain says. According to official data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, wage growth was a lower 2.6% in February. Glassdoor data -- based on a survey of 100,000 salaries posted by the jobs site every month -- show even lower growth, shrinking to just 1% last month.

An anonymous reader writes: For years, embedded device manufacturers have been illegally using Linux. Typically, they use Linux without publishing their device's source code, which Linux's GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) requires them to do. Well, guess what? Another vendor, this time Symantec, appears to be the guilty party. This was revealed when Google engineer and Linux security expert Matthew Garrett was diving into his new Norton Core Router. This is a high-end Wi-Fi router. Symantec claims it's regularly updated with the latest security mechanisms. Garrett popped his box open to take a deeper look into Symantec's magic security sauce.

What he found appears to be a Linux distribution based on the QCA Software Development Kit (QSDK) project. This is a GPLv2-licensed, open-source platform built around the Linux-based OpenWrt Wi-Fi router operating system. For Symantec's purposes, QSDK and OpenWrt are an excellent choice. Instead of a read-only firmware, OpenWrt has a fully writable filesystem with package management. This enables Symantec to easily customize its router with updated security features. But -- and it's a big but -- if it's indeed based on QSDK and OpenWrt, Symantec needs to share the Norton Core Router's code with the world.

An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu Linux 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" is almost here -- it is due on April 26. In the interim, today, the second -- and final -- beta becomes available. Bionic Beaver is very significant, as it is an LTS version, meaning "Long Term Support." This is important to those that prefer stability to bleeding edge and don't want to deal with the hassle of upgrades. In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years. In comparison, non-LTS Ubuntu versions get a mere 9 months.

There is plenty to be excited about with Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2, including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment -- Beta 1 did not include GNOME at all. Of course, all the other DE flavors are available too, such as KDE and Xfce. The kernel is at 4.15, which while not the most current version, is still quite modern. Also included is LibreOffice 6.0 -- an essential tool that rivals Microsoft Office. Wayland is available as a technical preview, although X remains the default display server -- for now.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You can't remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspiculously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook's Download Your Information tool. Casey Newton, a reporter at The Verge, tweeted, "Deleting Mark's messages while leaving the recipients' intact highlights Facebook's actual views on privacy better than any statement it makes on the subject ever will"

Update: Facebook has just announced that it will give all users an option to unsend messages.

Russia's state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has filed a lawsuit to block Telegram in the country because the instant messaging company has refused to hand over the encryption keys that would allow Russian authorities to read messages sent using the service. From a report: Ranked as the world's ninth most popular mobile messaging app, Telegram is widely used in countries across the former Soviet Union and Middle East. Active users of the app reached 200 million in March. As part of its services, Telegram allows users to communicate via encrypted messages which cannot be read by third parties, including government authorities. But Russia's FSB Federal Security service has said it needs access to some messages for its work, including guarding against terrorist attacks. Telegram has refused to comply with its demands, citing respect for user privacy.