Category Archives: Technology

Tech companies in spotlight as US abortion ruling sparks privacy threat

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Google has acted amid fears police could use location and other data to prosecute those seeking care

In the wake of the US supreme court’s decision to end women’s constitutional right to abortion, some tech companies are moving to close loopholes that allow personal data brokers to monitor and sell information amid fears that mobile apps could be used by US states to police abortion restrictions.

Google said on Friday it would automatically delete records of user visits to sensitive locations, including abortion clinics. Privacy researchers as well as women’s rights groups welcomed the move, having warned that apps used for period tracking, pregnancy and family planning could be used to prosecute those seeking reproductive care.

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Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits

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The company said that sensitive places including fertility centers, clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be erased

Alphabet will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

As state laws limiting abortions set in after the US supreme court decided last month that they are no longer guaranteed by the constitution, the technology industry has fretted police could obtain warrants for customers’ search history, geolocation and other information revealing pregnancy plans.

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EU moves to rein in ‘wild west’ of crypto assets with new rules

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MiCA law contains measures to guard against market abuse and manipulation

The EU has moved to rein in the “wild west” of crypto assets by agreeing a groundbreaking set of rules for the sector.

Representatives from the European parliament and EU states thrashed out an agreement on Thursday that contains measures to guard against market abuse and manipulation, as well as requiring that crypto firms provide details of the environmental impact of their assets.

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Nottingham named worst UK city for broadband outages

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Internet downtime for the city averages 70 hours a year, with 11m Britons losing almost two days a year

Almost 11 million consumers have suffered a broadband blackout lasting more than three hours over the last year, with Nottingham named Britain’s “outage capital”.

The average UK household lost a total of almost two days of internet time as a result of loss of service, power cuts and maintenance, figures show.

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Why US women are deleting their period tracking apps

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Even before the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the trend to ditch the apps began amid fears of prosecution

Many American women in recent days have deleted period tracking apps from their cellphones, amid fears the data collected by the apps could be used against them in future criminal cases in states where abortion has become illegal.

The trend already started last month when a draft supreme court opinion that suggested the court was set to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked, and has only intensified since the court on Friday revoked the federal right to abortion

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Israel and Saudi Arabia ‘in talks over joint defence against Iran’

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US-brokered summit discusses shared threat of Tehran’s growing missile and drone capabilities

Top military officials from Israel and Saudi Arabia have met in secret US-brokered talks to discuss defence coordination against Iran, according to a report.

Delegations from Riyadh, as well as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt, met the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief of staff in the Egyptian town of Sharm el-Sheikh in March, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday, citing US and regional officials.

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Tech firms under pressure to safeguard user data as abortion prosecutions loom

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Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providers

After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on Friday, calls increased for tech companies to take a stand about the use of online data to incriminate individuals seeking or providing abortion services.

Abortion and civil rights advocates have warned that there are few federal regulations on what information is collected and retained by tech firms, making it easy for law enforcement officials to access incriminating data on location, internet searches and communication history.

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Two killed after Chinese electric car falls from third floor of company’s offices

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Nio criticised over statement that said accident at Shanghai HQ was ‘not caused by the vehicle’

A leading Chinese electric car company has said two people were killed when one of its vehicles fell from the third floor of its Shanghai headquarters.

Nio, a homegrown brand sometimes seen as a potential rival to Tesla, said the incident happened at about 5.20pm on Wednesday. One of the victims was its employee, and the other from a partner company. They were both inside the vehicle when it fell.

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PRGuy unmasks himself in video with Friendlyjordies after legal threat by Avi Yemini

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Jeremy Maluta reveals he is behind pro-Labor Twitter account PRGuy17 but says he has no media experience or connection to Daniel Andrews

The man behind the formerly anonymous pro-Labor Twitter account PRGuy17 has unmasked himself, after far-right figure Avi Yemini attempted to use the courts to reveal whether the account had ties to the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews.

Jeremy Maluta told YouTuber Friendlyjordies in a video released on Friday that he has no PR or social media experience, works in an industry completely unrelated to politics or the media, and has no connections to Andrews.

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Microsoft limits access to facial recognition tool in AI ethics overhaul

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Company also restricts use of custom neural voice technology owing to deepfake concerns

Microsoft is overhauling its artificial intelligence ethics policies and will no longer let companies use its technology to do things such as infer emotion, gender or age using facial recognition technology, the company has said.

As part of its new “responsible AI standard”, Microsoft says it intends to keep “people and their goals at the centre of system design decisions”. The high-level principles will lead to real changes in practice, the company says, with some features being tweaked and others withdrawn from sale.

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Wrist-worn trackers can detect Covid before symptoms, study finds

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Sensor tech can alert wearer to Covid early, helping to prevent onward transmission

Health trackers worn on the wrist could be used to spot Covid-19 days before any symptoms appear, according to researchers.

Growing numbers of people worldwide use the devices to monitor changes in skin temperature, heart and breathing rates. Now a new study shows that this data could be combined with artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose Covid-19 even before the first tell-tale signs of the disease appear.

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Shadowy Strava users spy on Israeli military with fake routes in bases

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Exclusive: Personnel risk identification by running GPS ‘segments’ around top-secret sites

Unidentified operatives have been using the fitness tracking app Strava to spy on members of the Israeli military, tracking their movements across secret bases around the country and potentially observing them as they travel the world on official business.

By placing fake running “segments” inside military bases, the operation – the affiliation of which has not been uncovered – was able to keep tabs on individuals who were exercising on the bases, even those who have applied the strongest possible account privacy settings.

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China says anti-missile test not ‘aimed at any country’ despite rising tensions

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Ballistic missile interception system trial follows North Korean tests and deployment of US THAAD system in South Korea

China has claimed a successful test of a land-based ballistic missile interception system amid heightened tensions in Asia, in a move its defence ministry described as “defensive and not aimed at any country”.

Beijing has in recent years been ramping up research into all sorts of missiles, from those that can destroy satellites in space to advanced nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, as part of a modernisation overseen by President Xi Jinping. It came after North Korea conducted a series of missile tests, which prompted South Korea and the US to warn that Pyongyang could conduct a nuclear test at any time.

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Trillion-dollar crypto collapse sparks flurry of US lawsuits – who’s to blame?

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Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather among those being sued, but prosecuting fraud in the crypto arena is notoriously difficult

With investors worldwide looking at a collective $1.5tn in recent cryptocurrency losses, a blizzard of class-action lawsuits are being prepared. One big question is: who, if anyone, is to blame – and who could be held to account?

With inflation and interest rates rising, the best-known cryptocurrencies have been hit with heavy and continuing losses: Bitcoin has lost more than 50% of its value this year; Ethereum, its largest rival, is down 65%; and the total value of crypto assets has dropped to less than $1tn from its November 2021 peak of $3tn. US federal regulators say 46,000 people have reported losing $1bn in crypto to scams since January 2021.

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TikTok moves to ease fears amid report workers in China accessed US users’ data

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The company has said that Oracle will store all private information and is limiting the number of employees with those privileges

TikTok has said that Oracle will store all the data from its US users, in a bid to allay fears about its safety in the hands of a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

The move comes as a report from BuzzFeed news, citing leaked audio from TikTok in-house meetings, said ByteDance employees in China have repeatedly accessed private information about US TikTok users.

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Jay-Z’s bitcoin school met with skepticism in his former housing project: ‘I don’t have money to be losing’

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The hip-hop mogul loves to rap about his roots in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing projects. But classes in cryptocurrency show the billionaire is out of touch, residents say

Marcy Houses, the 28-acre public housing development in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is best-known as a pillar of rapper-turned-mogul Jay-Z’s New York persona. Built in 1949 as part of a push by the New York City Housing Authority to house the city’s low-income residents, Marcy had fallen into a state of dangerous disrepair by the 1970s when Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, was growing up there.

“Where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice,” he raps in “Where I’m From”. “Marcy me, just the way I am always gonna be,” he declares in 2017’s Marcy Me.

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‘This is another pandemic’: a female survivor of domestic abuse in China speaks out

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Chinese cyberspace is filled with videos showing violence against women and activists say only real social change will stop the abuse

Tang Ping, 31, a mother-of-two in the southern Chinese city of Nanning, says in 2014 when her first child was six months old, her husband – an academic – began routinely beating her. She felt hurt but also ashamed, blaming herself for not being a good enough wife. She did not know what to do.

Five years ago, after another round of violence, she finally summoned the courage to report her husband to the police. “I was told my injuries were not serious, therefore they could not intervene,” she says, as she prepares to legally dissolve the marriage this week.

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Hologram Zelenskiy promises Ukraine will defeat ‘the empire’

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Ukrainian president attends Paris trade show as electronic apparition, urging tech companies to aid ‘digital revolution’ on lend-lease terms

Volodymyr Zelenskiy referenced Star Wars and the second world war as the Ukrainian president appeared as a hologram at a conference in Paris to seek aid from big tech firms.

He told a crowd of hundreds at the VivaTech trade show that he was offering technology firms a unique chance to rebuild Ukraine as a fully digital democracy.

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Claim for £750m against Apple launched alleging battery ‘throttling’

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Consumer champion Justin Gutmann alleges older iPhones made slower to cope with software updates

A consumer champion has launched a more than £750m legal claim against Apple, linked to an incident in 2017 relating to a power management tool on older iPhones.

Justin Gutmann has accused the tech giant of slowing down the performance of iPhone handsets – a process known as “throttling” – by hiding a power management tool in software updates to combat performance issues and stop older devices from shutting down suddenly.

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Encrypted messaging apps should be regulated to tackle extremism, Victorian inquiry hears

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Experts say spread of misinformation and use of encrypted services drives far-right extremists and racism

The federal government needs to take action against encrypted messaging apps like Telegram to curb the rise of far-right extremism, a Victorian inquiry has been told.

Dr Belinda Barnet, a media lecturer at Swinburne University, told a hearing that far-right extremists had initially been sharing hateful content on mainstream sites such as Facebook and Twitter but were increasingly being deplatformed.

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