Category: x.tech

  LinkedIn is cutting 716 jobs and will begin phasing out its local jobs app in China. In a letter today, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslanky said the decision to shutter the standalone China app, called InCareer, was because of “fierce competition and a challenging macroeconomic climate.” While reducing some roles, LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft and has 20,000 employees, also plans to open about 250 new jobs in some segments of its operations, and new business and accounting management…

Content moderators under Sama, Meta’s content review sub-contractor in Africa, earlier today picketed at the company’s headquarters in Kenya demanding April salary, while urging it to observe the court orders that barred it from conducting mass layoffs. The demonstrations came after Sama, in an email, instructed moderators to clear with the company by May 11, a move the employees say is against the existing court orders. The 184 moderators sued Sama for allegedly laying them off unlawfully, after it wound down…

E2EE is a widely used technology that protects everyone’s privacy and security by encoding the contents of digital communications and files so that they’re decipherable only by the sender and intended recipients. Not even the provider of the E2EE service can read or hear its users’ conversations. E2EE is built in by default to popular apps such as WhatsApp, iMessage, FaceTime, and Signal, thereby securing billions of people’s messages and calls for free. Default E2EE is also set to expand to Meta’s Messenger app and Instagram direct messages later this year. 

E2EE’s growing ubiquity seems like a clear win for personal privacy, security, and safety, as well as national security and the economy. And yet E2EE’s popularity has its critics – including, unfortunately, Sen. Durbin. Because it’s harder for providers and law enforcement to detect malicious activity in encrypted environments than unencrypted ones (albeit not impossible, as I’ll discuss), law enforcement officials and lawmakers often demonize E2EE. But E2EE is a vital protection against crime and abuse, because it helps to protect people (children included) from the harms that happen when their personal information and private conversations fall into the wrong hands: data breaches, hacking, cybercrime, snooping by hostile foreign governments, stalkers and domestic abusers, and so on.

That’s why it’s so important that national policy promote rather than dissuade the use of E2EE – and why it’s so disappointing that STOP CSAM has turned out to be just the opposite: yet another misguided effort by lawmakers in the name of online safety that would only make us all less safe. 

First, STOP CSAM’s new criminal and civil liability provisions could be used to hold E2EE services liable for CSAM and other child sex offenses that happen in encrypted environments. Second, the reporting requirements look like a sneaky attempt to tee up future legislation to ban E2EE outright.

Lordstown Motors is at risk of failing — again.

The EV startup that went public via a SPAC merger cautioned investors Monday that it may be forced to file for bankruptcy because Foxconn may pull out of a critical funding deal, according to a regulatory filing.

Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn sent a letter April 21 to Lordstown stating the automaker was in breach of the investment agreement because its stock price fell below $1 for 30 days and was at risk of being delisted on the Nasdaq exchange. Foxconn warned it would terminate the investment agreement if the breach is not resolved within 30 days.

While Lordstown disagreed with Foxconn’s assertion and said it intended to enforce its rights, the company also warned that withholding key funding would be detrimental to the company.

First Republic Bank, on the brink of collapse in the weeks after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, has finally fallen over, but with a relatively quick resolution into its next chapter: today the FDIC announced that it was being closed by the the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, that the FDIC was appointed as receiver, and that the FDIC would be selling the assets to JPMorgan.

Its assets and deposits total just over $330 billion together.

Specifically, “to protect depositors, the FDIC is entering into a purchase and assumption agreement with JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, Columbus, Ohio, to assume all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank,” it said.

The FDIC also confirmed deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC at an estimated cost of about $13 billion to its insurance fund.

In February, Hong Kong proposed a set of welcoming rules to regulate crypto-related activities. Under the new legal regime, retail investors will be allowed to trade certain digital assets on licensed exchanges, replacing a 2018 framework that restricted trading to only accredited investors.

The city is also paving the way to legalize stablecoins. One startup, which is backed by popular exchange KuCoin and USDC issuer Circle, recently launched an offshore Chinese yuan (CNH)-pegged stablecoin, the first of its kind in Greater China.

To create a favorable environment for web3 businesses, the city is facilitating communication between banks and crypto startups, many of which are scrambling to find alternatives following Silvergate Bank’s meltdown.

These moves are contrasting with Beijing’s heavy-handed crackdown on the crypto industry; they also highlight the degree to which the former British colony enjoys policy exceptions in certain areas, such as finance.

The U.S. government has sounded the alarm about a critical software vulnerability found in genomics giant Illumina’s DNA sequencing devices, which hackers can exploit to modify or steal patients’ sensitive medical data.

In separate advisories released on Thursday, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that the security flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-1968 with the maximum vulnerability severity rating of 10 out of 10 — allows hackers to remotely access an affected device over the internet without needing a password. If exploited, the bug could allow hackers to compromise devices to produce incorrect or altered results, or none at all.

Hackers have stolen email addresses, direct messages, and other personal data from users of two dating websites, according to a data breach expert.

Earlier this week, someone alerted Troy Hunt, the founder and maintainer of the data breach alerting website Have I Been Pwned, that hackers had breached two dating websites, CityJerks and TruckerSucker. Hunt told TechCrunch that he analyzed the stolen data and found usernames, email addresses, passwords, profile pictures, sexual orientation, users’ date of birth, their city and state, their IP addresses, and biographies. The stolen passwords are scrambled with a weak algorithm that could potentially be broken and allow hackers to see the actual passwords.”

Lyft said Thursday it will cut 26% of its workforce, or about 1,072 people, as part of a restructuring plan aimed at rebuilding its core ride-hailing product and boosting profits.

The company also said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it decided to scale back hiring plans and will eliminate 250 open job positions.

Lyft estimates that it will incur a cost of about $41 million to $47 million related to severance and employee benefits in the second quarter of 2023. The ride-hailing company also said it expects additional costs related to stock-based compensation and the corresponding payroll tax expense related to employees who were impacted by this restructuring.

Last week, Lyft’s newly appointed CEO David Risher told employees in an email that the company would significantly reduce its workforce as part of a restructuring effort. Risher said the restructuring would be part of Lyft’s plan to “better meeting the needs of riders and drivers.”

Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re perhaps more thoughtfully done than the moral panic bills of his colleagues, but they’re still destructive. His latest is… just…

Two decades of misconduct records will be now trickling out of the NYSP’s hands. One assumes it will be a very slow drip, one perhaps interrupted by last-minute admissions the NYSP has, say, destroyed records it was required to retain. A lot can happen over twenty years, but hopefully it won’t take twenty years for records requesters to obtain what they’re entitled to possess.

The Superior Court (basically the first level of state courts in New York) decision [PDF] is short and sweet. It not only directs the NYSP to comply with the law, but draws some other helpful legal conclusions along the way, like this one, which says cop shops can’t withhold information about officers who were investigated for misconduct, but later cleared of wrongdoing.

It is clear that the mere fact that the complaint was determined to be unsubstantiated does not categorically exempt the records from disclosure.

  Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted it was just no fun when they couldn’t whine about how victimized they were. Anyway, the site is dead now. You may recall there…

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located.

The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on top of a hunting magazine. I mean, that narrows it down to people who still buy stuff printed on physical media, a number that shrinks exponentially by the day.

On top of that, the entry level for the leaked info — much of it related to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia — was Discord, which no one has considered to be the equivalent of Signal or any other secure site for the dissemination of sensitive material.

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were false but chose to give them airtime anyway.   That led to the recent decision in a Delaware state court where the judge made two…

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still viable.)

The UN has been pushing its own version. But its idea of “crime” seems off-base, especially when it’s dealing with a conglomerate of countries with varying free speech protections. The “Cybercrime Treaty” proposed by the UN focuses on things many would consider ugly, distasteful, abhorrent, or even enraging. But it’s not things most people consider to be the sort of “crimes” a unified world front should be addressing — not when there’s plenty of financially or personally damaging cybercrime being performed on the regular.

In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.

TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.