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That anonymous internet persona with an anime cartoon avatar in your Discord chat might actually be a contractor sent to spy on you. Enter the world of “threat intelligence.” It’s the term of art for a growing set of surveillance and security firms that create fake online personas to infiltrate and scrape data from private corners of the internet. The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists...

4 ‘African Socialists’ charged with election meddling for Russia after FIB raided their homes Four American socialists have been charged with election meddling and spreading Putin’s propaganda after they were arrested in dramatic FBI raids. The four, are members of the African People’s Socialist Party. Omali Yeshitela, the group’s chairman was one of the 4 Americans indicted Tuesday for “sowing discord, spreading pro-Russia propaganda and interfering in elections within the United States.” The DOJ says that the 81-year-old veteran leader of the far-left group conspired along with three others to help Russian efforts to meddle in elections. Yeshitela has called...

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will tell lawmakers the Chinese-owned short video app with more than 150 million American users has never, and would never, share US user data with the Chinese government amid growing US national security concerns. "TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made," Chew will testify on Thursday (Mar 23), according to written testimony posted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. He added that TikTok's parent company ByteDance is not...

Spotify's (SPOT.N) CEO Daniel Ek renewed his attack on Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday in a series of tweets alleging the iPhone maker "gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting consumers". Ek tagged a number of sympathetic business leaders in his 21-tweet thread, including Musk, Microsoft president Brad Smith, and Proton founder Andy Yen. On Monday, the world's richest person Elon Musk criticized the fee Apple charges software developers - including his Twitter business - for in-app purchases, and posted a meme suggesting he was willing to "go to war" rather than pay it.

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed that Apple threatened to suspend Twitter from its app store, ‘but won’t tell us why.’ Apple suspended most of its advertising on Twitter, according to the blue bird app’s new CEO Elon Musk on Monday. Now, Twitter’s chief is asking questions about Apple’s censorship practices to his more than 119 million followers. “Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter,” Must wrote. “Do they hate free speech in America?” LBRY, a publisher that describes itself as the “bitcoin” of publishing, outlined the company’s own experience with Apple censorship in a response to Musk’s post. “During...

On November 13th, Portland, Oregon was visited by representatives from the Uhuru Movement including: the African People’s Socialist Party, APSP, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, USM, and the African People’s Solidarity Committee, APSC.

But shortly after the Ionov indictment was announced, the FBI in Tampa confirmed to local media it had raided headquarters of the Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida, in connection with the alleged conspiracy. "The Uhuru Movement is a worldwide organization, under the leadership of African People’s Socialist Party, uniting African people as one people for liberation, social justice, self-reliance and economic development," the group said on its website...Four of the “unindicted co-conspirators” listed but not named in the indictment are U.S. citizens living in St. Petersburg, while the others live in Atlanta and California.

The age of mask and vaccine mandates has sparked important conversations about what employers, businesses and our government can ask about our personal health decisions. These discussions often reveal widespread misconceptions about who is responsible for keeping that information confidential and secure. Clarity on this issue is of utmost importance for consumers, especially with the rise of smartphone apps hungry for health data. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 created national standards for protecting individuals’ health information. Many people assume the law applies to any entity that might request or handle health information. In fact, the...

LONDON — British supermarkets said on Thursday that some products were in short supply and petrol stations had been forced to close after the official health app told hundreds of thousands of workers to isolate following contact with someone with COVID-19. British newspapers carried front-page pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets, declaring a “pingdemic.” Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Sky News the government was “very concerned” about the situation but that he did not recognize the network’s characterization of “bare” supermarket shelves. With cases rising to nearly 50,000 day in the United Kingdom, hundreds of thousands of people have been...

President Joe Biden has signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s ban on Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. The Verge reports that President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that revokes former President Trump’s ban on the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. Biden will instead be instructing the commerce secretary to investigate apps with ties to foreign adversaries that may pose a risk to American data privacy or national security.

If you're experiencing a bunch of apps suddenly crashing on your recent Samsung phone, you're not alone. This afternoon US time, reports from dozens, then hundreds of users on the Samsung subreddit started coming in, complaining of apps crashing on their phones, constantly and seemingly at random. It's causing some major headaches.

Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data. In 2019, a source came to us with a digital file containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017. The data is supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans. It became clear that this data — collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem — was a liability to national security, to free assembly and to citizens living mundane lives. It...

Eric Trump sounded the alarm on the Democrat National Convention and accused the left of blocking citizens’ ability to report voting irregularities. In a tweet shared Friday, the President’s son accused the DNC of attempting to hijack the Trump campaign’s “voter fraud hotline,” and said they may have something to hide. The @DNC is spamming our voter fraud hotline to bog down the thousands of complaints we are receiving! Wonder what they have to hide. — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) November 7, 2020 He added the spam calls were blocking thousands of complaints the Trump campaign has been receiving. This came...

The Chinese communist empire has weaponized social media, telecommunications and cloud computing to expand the reach of its infiltration and surveillance capabilities way beyond its borders. Americans’ personal data and intellectual property are prime targets for the regime’s malign activities, which have gone on for decades without any blowbacks of consequence. In fact, globalists have encouraged the integration of China into the world economy, falling prey to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s stratagem that “All warfare is based on deception.” But the time has finally arrived for China to pay the piper, thanks to President Trump. The Trump...

Evina, a French cybersecurity firm, disclosed this news in recent weeks, with its report that a single threat group developed the batch of apps that were made to look like everything from wallpaper and flashlight apps to mobile games. However, all the apps had the same goal, as Evina explains in its report of the fraud. “When an application is launched on your phone, the malware queries the application name,” the company explains. “If it is a Facebook application, the malware will launch a browser that loads Facebook at the same time. The browser is displayed in the foreground which...

NEW DELHI—India has ordered telecom companies and other internet providers to stop access to 59 banned Chinese-origin apps, according to notices seen by Reuters, intensifying efforts to crack down on such businesses following a border clash between the nations. The Department of Telecommunications (DOT) said internet operators should “immediately block” access to such apps and their websites, warning of legal action if they fail to do so, according to notices issued late on June 30. The department’s order came after India’s government this week banned several Chinese apps, including ByteDance’s TikTok, Alibaba’s UC News, and Tencent’s WeChat, citing “threat to...

New Delhi: The Centre has blocked 59 apps with Chinese links that included the hugely popular TikTok, WeChat and UC Browser, amid a huge economic backlash against China following the June 15 clashes at Ladakh in which 20 Indian soldiers died in action. Sources said inputs from intelligence agencies suggested that the apps have been violating the terms of usage, compromising users privacy, and being used as spyware or malware. Within minutes of the announcement, the Indian government's TikTok account MyGov, which had 1.1 milliorn followers, was disabled. The move comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India...

Google has removed a popular Indian-developed app from its Play Store that promised to find and remove Chinese apps from smartphones. The search giant confirmed to Gadgets 360 that the app, which was called “Remove Chinese Apps,” was removed for violating its Deceptive Behavior Policy, which prohibits software from encouraging or misleading users into “removing or disabling third-party apps.” Remove Chinese Apps had grown popular in India. Reuters reports that it had amassed over five million downloads since late May, and was the top trending free app in the country. The app worked by scanning phones for Chinese apps like...

While I’m thankful for how hard school administrators and teachers are working to continue education, I’m just not sure e-learning will benefit our youngest learners. The Washington Post recently published an education expert’s opinion with this dramatic headline, “Homeschooling during the coronavirus will set back a generation of children.” Despite the click-bait-worthy headline, the piece was actually about how erratic and disruptive online or e-learning can be for students.As a mom of four school-age children, I too have noticed how difficult e-learning is, ever since schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While I applaud the teachers and school administrators...

In this excessively digital age, it’s become harder than ever to get a good night’s sleep. Most of us spend our days staring at a computer screen, only to go home and scroll through our phones and catch up on our favorite shows (both of which involve staring at, you guessed it — more screens). All that blue light seriously messes with our circadian rhythm, making it difficult for us to achieve the quality, deep sleep we so desperately need to function. Relax Melodies wants to help change that. This sleep and meditation sound generator uses a variety of different...