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In November 2018 The Guardian reported on group of Google employees published an open letter on Tuesday calling on their employer to cancel its plans to build a censored search engine for China, the latest expression of worker unrest at a company that earlier this month saw thousands stage walkouts over its handling of sexual misconduct cases. The Google employees were very upset that Google’s Project Dragonfly would allow the Chinese government to blacklist certain search terms. The employees said, “Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind… After a year of disappointments … we...

Your smart lightbulb is probably storing your wifi password in the clear, ready to be recovered by wily dumpster-divers; Limited Results discovered the security worst-practice during a teardown of a Lifx bulb; and that's just for starters: the bulbs also store their RSA private key and root passwords in the clear and have no security measures to prevent malicious reflashings of their ROMs with exploits, network probes and other nasties.

Full tile: Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else IF BEZOS WERE the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with...

WELCOME 2019 ENDING 2018THE WEEK THAT WAS THE GOOD, THE BAD THE UGLY A LITTLE DIFFERENT THIS WEEK. See post number one! Welcome all you Deplorables to this week's edition of the Dose! This is EVERYTHING TRUMP. Administration, family, frustrations, joys, winning! We welcome your research, your commentary, your personal OT sharing and your presence. Even if you do not share a lot, just check in and say hi. Lurkers are welcome to become posters! THIS N THAT from the prior week We LOVE our Melania!!!!--CLICK POTUS 18 DAY WorkCation at Mar-a-Lago was deep-sixed and he ended up all...

Facebook's massive, secret rulebook for policing speech reveals inconsistencies, gaps and biases... A Message from Yahoo Search What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more The rulebook's details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he "feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes."

The Times reported late Tuesday that it obtained internal Facebook (FB) documents that show how the social media arranged to share data with more than 150 companies. The deals helped Facebook gain more users, according to the report, and its partners were able to add new features to their products while effectively avoiding Facebook’s usual privacy rules. Many of the partnerships ended years ago, but the details reported by the Times are striking. Amazon (AMZN) got access Facebook users’ names and contact information through their friends on the social network, according to the report, while Microsoft’s (MSFT) search engine Bing...

Facebook has hired one of the top antitrust lawyers in Silicon Valley in a sign that the company could be preparing for war with Donald Trump's administration. Kate Patchen, the chief of the Department of Justice's antitrust division in San Francisco, has joined Facebook as director and associate general counsel of litigation. Patchen's hire comes during the same month that US President Donald Trump said his administration was "looking at" antitrust proceedings against tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Walmart has plenty of haters. But for many consumers, Walmart's prices just can't be beat. You can't afford to be choosy when you're on a tight budget. If price is not so much of a concern for you, what if you discovered that Walmart wants your personal data? And not just data about your shopping behavior, which we already give hand over fist to Amazon in the name of fast shipping. Walmart is interested in what's going on in your body while you shop. The company wants to collect this data is a particularly creepy way: through the handles of...

The FBI has asked Facebook not to reveal who was behind the recent data breach that saw hackers steal contact information of 30 million users, according to a Facebook security update Friday.

Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for Friday to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes thinks the government should give cash handouts to people with the lowest incomes in order to fight income inequality. And he thinks the money should come from higher taxes on wealthy individuals and even big tech companies, like Facebook. Hughes, 34, was one of Facebook’s co-founders, along with Mark Zuckerberg and three of their Harvard classmates, in 2004. He was Facebook’s spokesperson for the company’s first three years, before leaving to finish his Harvard degree and then to work on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign as a media strategist. He says he's made "half a billion...

Facebook is asking British users to send naked photos of themselves to the social network, to try to stop revenge porn. If you're worried an intimate photo of you could be shared by someone else, the idea is to get it blocked before it appears online. Similar technology is used to try to stop the spread of child abuse images. Facebook's been testing the system in Australia and is extending the trial to the UK, the USA and Canada. A spokesman told Newsbeat the idea is open to people in the UK now. Facebook hasn't revealed any details about how...

Nigel Farage put Mark Zuckerberg on blast during the Facebook CEO’s testimony to the European Parliament, accusing him of “willful discrimination” against conservatives on the platform, and positing the creation of a “Social Media Bill of Rights” to protect free speech. “Perhaps you’re horrified by this creation of yours and what it’s led to, I don’t know. But what is absolutely true is that since January of this year, you’ve changed your modus operandi, you’ve changed your algorithms, and it has led directly to a very substantial drop in views and engagements for those who have got right-of-center political opinions.”...

A mysterious, cone-shaped device, shown in a demo Monday at Microsoft's Build event in Seattle, hinted at a big leap in capability for the company's digital assistant: the ability to see and identify people. In the ruthless war among Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant, this is a feature we haven't yet seen from the competition. What we don't know is what this prototype is, and whether it will ever come out. Microsoft’s official, overshadowed demonstration showed us the conference room of the future. Microsoft incorporated Cortana, the Surface Hub, and Skype’s translation and transcription features, together with PowerBI...

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christoper Wylie, appearing before a committee of British MPs on Tuesday, said that Facebook has the ability to spy on users in their homes and offices. The British parliament is investigating Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the Brexit election. MP Damian Collins, who chaired the committee, asked Wyle whether Facebook has the ability to listen to what people are talking about in order to better target them with ads. "There's been various speculation about the fact that Facebook can, through the Facebook app on your smartphone, listen in to what people are talking about and discussing and using...

In an interview with Wired magazine, Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s political agenda — he wants to curb free speech and free expression on the platform in exchange for “safety.” From the Wired interview: I think at the heart of a lot of these issues we face are tradeoffs between real values that people care about. You know, when you think about issues like fake news or hate speech, right, it’s a tradeoff between free speech and free expression and safety and having an informed community. These are all the challenging situations that I think we are working to try to...

Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.

MENLO PARK, CA—Giving his arms and legs a nice little stretch while reclining in his office chair Friday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, confirmed that he had successfully completed another long day of deciding what people around the world should believe. The tech titan, worth $71 billion, went on to describe the weight that comes along with being the arbiter of moral fitness and objective truth, able to make or break nearly any website on the internet by lowering the organic reach of their posts or outright banning them, based upon Facebook’s opinion of the views expressed in their...

Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn. There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo. (“Protect” shows up in the iOS app. Gizmodo looked for it on an Android device...

Project Veritas set Twitter ablaze last week with back to back bombshell undercover videos exposing the social media giant for their ‘big brother’ practices and censorship of Trump supporters.