Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Developer Unlocks Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release Software (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: An app developer has jailbroken Echelon exercise bikes to restore functionality that the company put behind a paywall last month, but copyright laws prevent him from being allowed to legally release it.

Last month, Peloton competitor Echelon pushed a firmware update to its exercise equipment that forces its machines to connect to the company’s servers in order to work properly. Echelon was popular in part because it was possible to connect Echelon bikes, treadmills, and rowing machines to free or cheap third-party apps and collect information like pedaling power, distance traveled, and other basic functionality that one might want from a piece of exercise equipment. With the new firmware update, the machines work only with constant internet access and getting anything beyond extremely basic functionality requires an Echelon subscription, which can cost hundreds of dollars a year.

Submission + - How Tea's Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook.

“We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea — Women’s Dating Community’, that could be a perfect transition for the ‘Are we dating the same guy’ facebook groups since it sounds like those are on their way under Tea has all the safety measures that Facebook lacked and more to ensure that only women are in the group,” Burns said. “We are looking for a face and founder of the app and because of your experience, we think YOU will be the perfect person! This can be your thing and we are happy to take a step back and let you lead all operations of the product.”

The Tea app, much like the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, invites women to join and share red flags about men to help other women avoid them. In order to verify that every person who joined the Tea app was a woman, Tea asked users to upload a picture of their ID or their face. Tea was founded in 2022 but largely flew under the radar until July this year, when it reached the top of the Apple App Store chart, earned glowing coverage in the media, and claimed it had more than 1.6 million users.

Burns’ offer to make Sanchez the “face” of Tea wasn't the first time she had reached out to her, but Sanchez never replied to Burns, despite multiple attempts to recruit her. As it turned out, Tea did not have all the “safety measures” it needed to keep women safe. As 404 Media first reported, Tea users’ images, identifying information, and more than a million private conversations, including some about cheating partners and abortions, were compromised in two separate security breaches in late July. The first of these breaches was immediately abused by a community of misogynists on 4chan to humiliate women whose information was compromised.

A 404 Media investigation now reveals that after Tea failed to recruit Sanchez as the face of the app and adopt the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, Tea shifted tactics to raid those Facebook groups for users. Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app.

404 Media’s investigation also discovered a third security breach which exposed the personal data of women who were paid to promote the app.

Submission + - This 'College Protester' Isn't Real. It's an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops (404media.co) 3

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications ,a href="https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops/">404 Media obtained via public records requests.

Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.

Submission + - 404 Media Objects to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Subpoena to Access Our (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subpoenaed 404 Media, demanding that it hand over confidential information about its reporting and an anonymous source to help the state of Texas in a wholly unrelated case it is pursuing against Google. This subpoena undermines the free and independent press. It also highlights the fact that the alarm bells that have been raised about legal attacks on journalists in a second Trump administration are not theoretical; politicians already feel emboldened to use the legal system to target journalists.

Paxton's subpoena seeks to turn 404 Media into an arm of law enforcement, which is not its role and which it has no interest in doing or becoming. And so Friday, its lawyers vociferously objected to Paxton’s subpoena.

Paxton is seeking 404 Media reporting materials and documents related to an internal Google privacy incident database that 404 Media reported on in June. He has demanded these documents as part of a broader lawsuit against Google that claims the company has violated a Texas biometric privacy law that has nothing to do with 404 Media.

Submission + - Leaked Training Shows Doctors in New York's Biggest Hospital System Using AI (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Northwell Health, New York State’s largest healthcare provider, recently launched a large language model tool that it is encouraging doctors and clinicians to use for translation, sensitive patient data, and has suggested it can be used for diagnostic purposes, 404 Media has learned. Northwell Health has more than 85,000 employees.

An internal presentation and employee chats obtained by 404 Media shows how healthcare professionals are using LLMs and chatbots to edit writing, make hiring decisions, do administrative tasks, and handle patient data.

In the presentation given in August, Rebecca Kaul, senior vice president and chief of digital innovation and transformation at Northwell, along with a senior engineer, discussed the launch of the tool, called AI Hub, and gave a demonstration of how clinicians and researchers—or anyone with a Northwell email address—can use it. AI Hub can be used for "clinical or clinical adjacent" tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients’ personally identifying and protected health information. The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included “detect pancreas cancer,” and “parse HL7,” a health data standard used to share electronic health records.

The leaked presentation shows that hospitals are increasingly using AI and LLMs to streamlining administrative tasks, and shows that some are experimenting with or at least considering how LLMs would be used in clinical settings or in interactions with patients.

Submission + - It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: It is now legal to hack or otherwise bypass technical protection measures on McFlurry machines and other commercial food preparation machines in order to repair them thanks to a new rule issued by the Federal government. After a challenge it has also remained legal to circumvent manufacturer locks that prevent the repair of medical equipment. This is good news in several long-running yet somehow related sagas that has resulted in both a huge number of McDonald’s ice cream machines and a large number of medical devices being broken at any given moment and which often cannot be fixed without the help of their manufacturer due to arbitrary software locks that prevent McDonald’s stores and also hospitals from fixing the devices they own.

The new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows for the circumvention of DRM and software locks, which are often called “TPMs” or technical protection measures, on equipment made for “commercial food preparation when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device.” The exemption that allows for the circumvention of software locks on “a lawfully acquired medical device or system, and related data files, when circumvention is a necessary step to allow the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of such a device or system,” was also renewed, as were exemptions for farm equipment and a host of other devices.

Submission + - Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.

An investigation into tracking tool Locate X shows in the starkest terms yet how it and others — based on smartphone location data sold to various U.S. government law enforcement agencies, including state entities — could be used to monitor abortion clinic patients. This comes as more states contemplate stricter or outright bans on abortion. Alabama wants to prosecute people who help others get abortions out of state, Idaho and Tennessee have passed “abortion trafficking” laws that have been blocked by courts from going into effect but which anti-abortion politicians want revived, and cities in Texas have considered an unconstitutional law that would ban people from using city roads for traveling to get an abortion. Last month, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sued to block federal privacy rules that stop investigators from accessing the medical records of people who travel out of the state to seek an abortion.

It also comes before a U.S. election in which access to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states, including Florida, and is one of the most important issues in the presidential election.

Submission + - Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

Earlier this month, Mullenweg posed an “Alignment Offer” to all of his employees: Stand with him through a messy legal drama that’s still unfolding, or leave.

“It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions,” he wrote on his personal blog on Oct. 3, referring to the ongoing dispute between himself and website hosting platform WP Engine, which Mullenweg called a “cancer to WordPress” and accusing WP Engine of “strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem. In the last month, he and WP Engine have volleyed cease and desist letters, and WP Engine is now suing Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of extortion and abuse of power.

“I'm certain that Matt hasn't eliminated all dissenters, because I'm still there, but I expect that within the next six to twelve months, everyone who didn't leave but wasn't ‘aligned’ will have found a new job and left on their own terms,” a current employee told 404 Media. “My personal morale has never been lower at this job, and I know that I'm not alone.”

Mullenweg himself, in internal screenshots viewed by 404 Media, acknowledged that his first “Alignment Offer” did not make everyone who disagreed with him leave the company.

On Wednesday Mullenweg posted another ultimatum in Automattic’s Slack: a new offer that would include nine months of compensation (up from the previous offer of six months).

“We have technical means to identify the leaker as well, that I obviously can't disclose,” he continued. “So this is their opportunity to exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance and probably a big legal case for violating confidentiality agreement.”

Submission + - 'She Turned Ghost White:' How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Traff (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.

Pratt fled the U.S. in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019—where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million—and just before being charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. (Today, there are more than 100 women who’ve come forward in lawsuits as victims of Girls Do Porn.) Facing life in prison, Pratt was a fugitive, but investigators hadn’t been able to apprehend him. He’d been wanted by the FBI for two years when the small team of open-source and human intelligence experts—who called themselves OP Phoenix Fury, after DeBarber’s investigative firm—decided to try to find Pratt themselves. They had traced Pratt to Barcelona, Spain.

Submission + - Microsoft and Reddit Are Fighting About Why Bing's Crawler Is Blocked on Reddit (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Microsoft and Reddit are offering conflicting explanations for why Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is currently blocked from crawling Reddit and offering links from the site in its search results.

Reddit, which now demands payment from anyone crawling the site and using its data to train AI products, claims that Bing’s crawler is being used to power AI products. Microsoft claims it has made it easy for any site to block its crawler that’s used for AI products, while still allowing a crawler that is only used for search results, and that Reddit’s decision to block Bing is “impacting competition” in the search engine space.

The conflicting reasonings behind the block are further proof that the massive, indiscriminate scraping of the internet to create AI training data in a way that violates long-respected norms about how to access information on the web are eroding trust, making the internet less open, and causing tech companies to beef about this issue in public.

Submission + - AI Video Generator Runway Trained on 1000s of YouTube Videos Without Permission (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort at generative AI company Runway, where employees collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data for its Gen-3 Alpha model.

The model—initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3—drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The spreadsheet of training data viewed by 404 Media and our testing of the model indicates that part of its training data is popular content from the YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many others. It also includes links to channels and individual videos belonging to popular influencers and content creators, including Casey Neistat, Sam Kolder, Benjamin Hardman, Marques Brownlee, and numerous others.

Submission + - Leaked Contract Shows Samsung Forces Repair Shop to Snitch on Customers (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

"Company shall immediately disassemble all products that are created or assembled out of, comprised of, or that contain any Service Parts not purchased from Samsung,” a section of the agreement reads. “And shall immediately notify Samsung in writing of the details and circumstances of any unauthorized use or misappropriation of any Service Part for any purpose other than pursuant to this Agreement. Samsung may terminate this Agreement if these terms are violated."

The contract also requires the “daily” uploading of details of each and every repair that an independent company does into a Samsung database called G-SPN “at the time of each repair,” which includes the customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier. 404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source. No provisions have been changed.

The use of aftermarket parts in repair is relatively common. This provision requires independent repair shops to destroy the devices of their own customers, and then to snitch on them to Samsung.

Submission + - The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere's Tractor Repair Monopoly (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equipment. Farmers have resorted to pirating John Deere’s software and firmware on underground forums and torrent sites, and have used software cracked by Ukrainian pirates in order to simply fix the things they own. Farmers often have to wait days or weeks for an “authorized” John Deere dealership to come to their farms to repair their equipment, meanwhile their crops die on the vine.

For years, very little happened to slow down John Deere’s march toward total control of the repair market. But interviews with farmers, activists, and lawyers, and a review of court records reveal a turn in the story: There is increased scrutiny on Deere’s repair practices not just in this class action lawsuit, but from state legislators, the White House, and a series of federal agencies. The walls on Deere’s repair monopoly may finally be closing in.

Submission + - An Open Database Leaked Submissions to Utah's Bathroom Bill Snitch Form (404media.co) 1

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state’s recently-enacted transphobic “bathroom bill.” The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public—without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people’s submissions.

After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication.

The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles.

Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission—a photo of the yelling table cat meme—appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven’t seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.

Submission + - Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet (404media.co)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: In Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah, age verification laws require sites with more than one third adult content to force users to upload their driver’s license, passport, or other government-issued ID. Indiana and Idaho’s age verification laws will take effect on July 1, and bills are progressing in several more states.

The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what’s actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not “harmful to minors.”

The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.

Slashdot Top Deals

Prof: So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with ... Student: EBCDIC!"

Close