Julian Assange took legal action against Ecuador on Friday for violating his “fundamental rights” and limiting his access to the outside world. The move comes in response to a new policy governing Assange’s stay at the South American nation’s London embassy. Earlier this week, Ecuador threatened Assange with expulsion if he kept “interfering in the […]
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Inside Facebook’s Stormy Debate Over ‘Political Diversity’…
At one point this summer, Brian Amerige seemed destined to become the next James Damore. Like Damore, the Google engineer who wrote a manifesto protesting the company’s “ideological echo-chamber” last year, Amerige also authored a controversial memo accusing his employer, Facebook, of being a “political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.” Like Damore, who argued […]
Alleged Hacker ‘threatens to sell details of 319 million Apple iCloud users, demanded $174G in Bitcoin’…
An alleged hacker threatened to sell the personal details of 319million Apple iCloud users online, a court heard Wednesday. IT analyst Kerem Albayrak, 21, filmed himself accessing accounts and posted the footage on YouTube, it was said. He then allegedly demanded more than $174,000 worth of Bitcoin and $1,100 iTunes vouchers from tech giant Apple […]
The People ‘Stopping Election Interference’ Are the Ones Who Are Actually Rigging the Election…
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made the media rounds to give a rather shady explanation of why Facebook suddenly closed hundreds of incredibly popular pages in what’s being called The Alternative Media Purge. Zuckerberg accused the closed pages, many of which had millions of fans, of spreading “political spam.” Ironically, many of the pages that were […]
Twitter Releases Large Datasets of Troll Farms to Further Research Efforts by Independent Researchers…
Today we are releasing all the accounts and related content associated with potential information operations that we have found on our service since 2016. We had previously disclosed these activities, but are now releasing substantially more information about them to enable independent academic research and investigation. This is the continuation of our overarching mission to […]
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Newly Published Files Confirm Plan to Move Julian Assange to Russia…
Julian Assange: Hacker. Journalist. Diplomat? Newly released Ecuadorean government documents have laid bare an unorthodox attempt to extricate the WikiLeaks founder from his embassy hideaway in London by naming him as a political counselor to the country’s embassy in Moscow. But the 47-year-old Australian’s new career in international affairs was nipped in the bud when […]
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Meet Helm, the Startup Taking on Gmail with a Server That Runs in Your Home…
There’s no doubt that Gmail has changed the way we consume email. It’s free, it gives most of us all the storage we’ll ever need, and it does a better job than most in weeding out spam and malware. But there’s a cost to all of this. The advertising model that makes this cost-free service […]
Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Inflated Video View Statistics to Fool Advertisers…
A lawsuit reported on by the Wall Street Journal alleges that Facebook was aware of issues on how the site measured views of video ads for more than a year before it disclosed the issue in 2016. A group of advertisers brought a lawsuit against the social media firm in 2016 for failing to disclose […]
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Welcome to the NeoLib/Con World Order: EU Internet Censorship Will Censor the Whole World’s Internet…
As the EU advances the new Copyright Directive towards becoming law in its 28 member-states, it’s important to realise that the EU’s plan will end up censoring the Internet for everyone, not just Europeans. A quick refresher: Under Article 13 of the new Copyright Directive, anyone who operates a (sufficiently large) platform where people can […]
Internet Censorship Just Took an Unprecedented Leap Forward, and Hardly Anyone Noticed…
While most indie media was focused on debating the way people talk about Kanye West and the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an unprecedented escalation in internet censorship took place which threatens everything we all care about. It received frighteningly little attention. After a massive purge of hundreds of politically oriented pages and personal […]
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Were You One of the 30 Million Hacked Facebook Users? Here’s How to Check…
On September 28, Facebook announced that as many as 90 million users may have had their “access tokens” – which keep people logged into their account, stolen by hackers. On Friday, the company reduced that figure to 30 million accounts whose phone numbers and email addresses were accessed in the largest security breach in the […]
Facebook, Twitter Purge 800 More Dissident Media Pages in Latest Escalation…
Facebook has purged more dissident political media pages today, this time under the pretense of protecting its users from “inauthentic activity”. In a statement co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher (who also happens to be the former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy), the massive social media platform explained that […]
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Soyuz Rocket Failure: Booster Separation Was to Blame for Botched Launch…
Russia says that a problem with the separation of first and second stage booster rockets was to blame for Thursday’s failed Soyuz launch. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin made a dramatic escape shortly after Thursday’s launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Sergei Krikalyov, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos’ […]
Miracle Escape for Space Station Astronauts As Rocket Fails Mid-Launch…
Two astronauts are alive after dramatically aborting their voyage to the International Space Station when their Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned while it carried them into orbit at 4,970mph. American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksey Ovchinin were forced to abort their mission on the cusp of space, at an altitude of approximately 50km (164,000ft). They landed […]
Class Sues Over Possible Exposure of Google Plus User Data…
In the latest fallout over yet another Silicon Valley privacy scandal, computer users hit Google and its parent company Alphabet with a federal class action Monday night for potentially exposing the data of up to 500,000 users of Google Plus to outside parties. Google announced in a blog post Monday morning that it would discontinue […]
‘THE GOOD CENSOR’: Leaked Google Briefing Admits Abandonment of Free Speech for ‘Safety And Civility’…
Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products. But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other […]
Tech Workers Now Want to Know: What Are We Building This For?…
Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government. While Dr. Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with […]
Leaked Transcript of Private Meeting Contradicts Google’s Official Story on China…
“We have to be focused on what we want to enable,” said Ben Gomes, Google’s search engine chief. “And then when the opening happens, we are ready for it.” It was Wednesday, July 18, and Gomes was addressing a team of Google employees who were working on a secretive project to develop a censored search […]
Google+ Shutting Down After Massive Date Leak…
Google exposed the private details of almost 500,000 Google+ users and then opted not to report the lapse, in part out of concern disclosure would trigger regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing people briefed on the matter and documents that discussed it. Shortly after the article was published, Google […]
Facebook Is Teeming with Fake Accounts Created by Undercover Law Enforcement Officers…
In the summer of 2015, as Memphis exploded with protests over the police killing of a 19-year-old man, activists began hearing on Facebook from someone called Bob Smith. The name was generic, and so was his profile picture: a Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol of anti-government dissent. Smith acted as if he supported the protesters, […]