Category: Tech

LONDON – London’s Metropolitan Police force said on Dec 6 that it had used facial recognition technology to make more than 500 arrests in 2024 for offences ranging from shoplifting to rape. The force uses live facial recognition in specific areas of the UK capital, positioning a van equipped with cameras in a pre-agreed location. The cameras capture live footage of passers-by and compare their faces against a pre-approved watchlist, generating an alert if a match is detected. Civil liberties…

Google Cloud said on Wednesday it had partnered with Air France-KLM to deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology on the airline group’s data. Google Cloud said in a statement that the Franco-Dutch airline group’s 551 operating aircraft, 93 million passengers carried in 2023, and its commercial and cargo flights generated large amounts of data, which would be used by Google Cloud’s AI solution in areas such as analyzing passenger preferences and travel patterns, and predicting maintenance of aircraft. Air France-KLM…

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment yesterday charging a Maryland man with major fraud against the United States and making false statements to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for his alleged participation in a scheme to deceive the SEC into thinking his company’s data center was certified at the highest rating level for reliability, availability, and security, when it was not. According to the indictment, Deepak Jain, 49, of Potomac, was the…

The Dutch data protection watchdog on Tuesday issued facial recognition startup Clearview AI with a fine of 30.5 million euros ($45.6 million Cdn) over its creation of what the agency called an “illegal database” of billions of photos of faces. The Netherlands’ Data Protection Agency, or DPA, also warned Dutch companies that using Clearview’s services is also banned. The data agency said that New York-based Clearview “has not objected to this decision and is therefore unable to appeal against the…

The following article is from a Russian news source, Tass, which is controlled by the Russian Government. NEW YORK, August 26. /TASS/. French authorities have ‘crossed a red line’ after they decided to detain Telegram messenger founder Pavel Durov, Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble online video platform, said on Monday. “France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech,” Pavlovski wrote on his X social…

Proton has launched ‘Docs in Proton Drive,’ a free and open-source end-to-end encrypted web-based document editing and collaboration tool. Proton is a Swiss company renowned for its privacy-focused services, including Proton VPN, Proton Mail, Proton Pass, Proton Drive, and now also Proton Docs. Recently, the company announced its transition to becoming a non-profit organization to better align with its mission of prioritizing privacy and societal benefit over profit. Launch of Proton Docs Proton says Docs is a compelling, secure, and…

  Four Vietnamese nationals linked to the international cybercrime group FIN9 have been indicted for their involvement in a series of computer intrusions that caused over $71 million in losses to companies in the U.S. The defendants, identified as Ta Van Tai, Nguyen Viet Quoc, Nguyen Trang Xuyen, and Nguyen Van Truong, carried out their cybercrimes from May 2018 until October 2021, stealing both data and funds directly from U.S. organizations. “The FIN9 defendants were prolific international hackers who, for years, allegedly…

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon said Wednesday it is pouring an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence startup to $4 billion. Amazon will maintain a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, a rival of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian,…

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) has announced that a “cyber incident” forced it to take its corporate systems offline as a precaution. FINTRAC is a government agency in Canada that operates as the country’s financial intelligence unit. It is engaged in money laundering investigations, tracking millions of suspicious transactions annually and making thousands of disclosures about illegal money flows to the police. The agency has published a short press statement on its website stating that…

A former CIA software engineer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday after his convictions for what the government described as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history and for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos. The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017. He has been jailed since 2018. “We will…

Blackbaud has settled with the Federal Trade Commission after being charged with poor security and reckless data retention practices, leading to a May 2020 ransomware attack and a data breach affecting millions of people. Blackbaud is a U.S.-based company listed on NASDAQ with operations in multiple countries and a provider of cloud-based donor data management software catering to nonprofit organizations, like charities, education organizations, and healthcare agencies. The FTC’s complaint alleges that the company “failed to monitor attempts by hackers…

At the height of the online file-sharing boom, the phrase ‘Sharing is Caring’ was a reminder that peer-to-peer file-sharing systems lived or died on the availability of upload bandwidth. Its presentation allowed it to be about much more than that. The ‘give to get’ philosophy forms part of the BitTorrent protocol even today, but Sharing is Caring was a phrase that could influence human behavior, to the benefit of the wider file-sharing movement, with no suggestion of pressure. Sharing is…

A 29-year-old man in Ukraine was arrested this week for using hacked accounts to create 1 million virtual servers used to mine $2 million in cryptocurrency.  As announced today by Europol, the suspect is believed to be the mastermind behind a large-scale cryptojacking scheme that involves hijacking cloud computing resources for crypto-mining. By using the computing resources of others’ servers to mine cryptocurrency, the cybercriminals can profit at the expense of the compromised organizations, whose CPU and GPU performance is degraded…

Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manipulating science to favor specific commercial interests. Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact. The Unmaking of Science The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette…

Adult media giant Aylo has blocked access to many of its websites, including PornHub, to visitors from Montana and North Caroline as new age verifications laws go into effect. This move also impacts other adult sites owned by the company, including Tube8, RedTube, and Brazzers. As of January 1st, new age verification laws went into effect in Montana and North Carolina that require adult websites to verify the age of visitors from those states.  Under these new laws, failure to…

Apple has said it would suffer “irreparable harm” after the White House allowed a ban on imports on some of its watches following a dispute over the devices’ blood oxygen technology. The tech giant is filing an emergency motion asking a court to allow it to sell two of its most popular watches – the Series 9 and Ultra 2 models – until the patent dispute against medical monitoring technology company, Masimo, is resolved. It requested to pause the ban…