Category Archives: WhatsApp

NSO – not government clients – operates its spyware, legal documents reveal

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Details of emerge in sworn depositions by employees of Israeli company as part of lawsuit brought by WhatsApp

Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker – and not its government customers – is the party that “installs and extracts” information from mobile phones targeted by the company’s hacking software.

The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, portions of which were published for the first time on Thursday.

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Meta rides AI boom to stellar quarterly earnings, but slightly less than expected

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Company beats financial predictions but does not increase daily users as much as Wall Street thought it might

Meta’s blowout year continues after the company reported another stellar financial quarter on Wednesday. Shares fell in after-hours trading.

Wall Street analysts had high expectations for the Instagram and WhatsApp parent company, projecting an 18% jump in sales year over year. The company reported $40.6bn in sales, a 19% increase year over year that outpaced investor expectations of $40.19bn. Meta, which saw a 25% jump in its share price over the past two months, reported $6.03 in earnings per share (EPS), surpassing Wall Street’s expectations of an EPS of $5.29.

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Zionist Federation leader says Australia-based NYT journalist should be sacked over doxed list

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It was an ‘egregious breach of trust’ that Natasha Frost shared logs of Jewish WhatsApp chat with 600 members, Jeremy Leibler says

The Zionist Federation of Australia president, Jeremy Leibler, says the New York Times should sack a Melbourne-based reporter who downloaded and shared from a private WhatsApp group of Jewish creatives.

The subsequent leaking of the WhatsApp group chat, including members’ contact details, photographs and social media accounts, led to death threats, forced one family into hiding and had a profound effect on the 600-odd members, the partner in law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler alleged.

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BBC wipes Huw Edwards from archive but role in state occasions presents challenge

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Broadcaster removes image and voice from content as Welsh organisations erase disgraced presenter from websites

Huw Edwards’s image and voice are being urgently removed from hours of BBC archive footage, starting with family and entertainment content on iPlayer, the Observer has learned.

Photographs of the disgraced Welsh television news anchor are also being removed by prominent institutions and charities, and from websites throughout Wales, where he was a national figurehead.

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Strong earnings report pushes Meta shares up amid heavy AI spending

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Stock price grew around 5%, which revealed the company outperformed analysts’ expectations for its second quarter

Meta’s shares rose in after-hours trading on Wednesday off the back of a strong earnings report that comes as the company is spending heavily on AI tools.

The company’s stock price grew around 5% following the report, which revealed the company outperformed analysts’ expectations for its second quarter.

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Spain sentences 15 schoolchildren over AI-generated naked images

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Teenagers each given a year’s probation after creating and spreading faked images of female classmates in south-west Spain

A court in south-west Spain has sentenced 15 schoolchildren to a year’s probation for creating and spreading AI-generated images of their female peers in a case that prompted a debate on the harmful and abusive uses of deepfake technology.

Police began investigating the matter last year after parents in the Extremaduran town of Almendralejo reported that faked naked pictures of their daughters were being circulated on WhatsApp groups.

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Labour is already dominating the online general election campaign | Matthew McGregor

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Starmer’s party was quicker out of the digital gate, with slicker, more engaging content than the Tory offering

The video opens with an old clip of Cilla Black singing her classic ‘Surprise, Surprise!’. The caption reads “POV: Rishi Sunak turns up at your 18th birthday to send you to war.”

This appeared on Labour’s TikTok account the day after the Conservatives launched their national service policy. It fitted perfectly with TikTok’s meme-heavy, wry and sarcastic culture and has been watched 4.5 million times. The video racked up almost 700,000 likes, more than double the likes on all the Tories’ TikToks put together.

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Apple removes WhatsApp and Threads from Chinese App Store

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Company says Chinese government ordered it to remove two Meta-owned apps for ‘national security’ reasons

Apple has removed WhatsApp and Threads from its Chinese App Store after the Chinese government ordered it to do so for “national security” reasons.

Apple confirmed it had withdrawn the two apps – both owned by Meta, also the owner of Facebook – under instruction from the Cyberspace Administration of China, which regulates and censors China’s highly restricted internet and online content.

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Sydney church stabbing: social media pages ‘infamous’ for spreading misinformation taken down

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Premier Chris Minns is alarmed at the ‘wildfire’ of rumour and graphic content online after Wakeley and Bondi stabbings

Social media pages “infamous” for spreading misinformation have been taken down after the Wakeley church stabbing attack, the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, said on Thursday, while expressing alarm at the “wildfire” of rumour and graphic content still proliferating on tech platforms.

On Monday night YouTube was live broadcasting Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel’s service at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church. After the stabbing occurred, video clips spread through WhatsApp groups before police had arrived on scene.

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Child sexual abuse content growing online with AI-made images, report says

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More children and families extorted with AI-made photos and videos, says National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Child sexual exploitation is on the rise online and taking new forms such as images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, according to an annual assessment released on Tuesday by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for the reporting of child sexual abuse material.

Reports to the NCMEC of child abuse online rose by more than 12% in 2023 compared with the previous year, surpassing 36.2m reports, the organization said in its annual CyberTipline report. The majority of tips received were related to the circulation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) such as photos and videos, but there was also an increase in reports of financial sexual extortion, when an online predator lures a child into sending nude images or videos and then demands money.

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No 10 tells MPs to be cautious about unsolicited messages after attempted ‘honeytrap’

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Message comes as pressure builds on Tories to take disciplinary action against MP William Wragg

Downing Street has urged MPs to be cautious when responding to unsolicited messages, after the “spear-phishing” attack that targeted more than a dozen MPs, staff and journalists working in Westminster.

Number 10 issued the warning on Monday morning, days after two police forces launched an investigation into what is being described as an attempted “honeytrap”.

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End government by WhatsApp, urges former GCHQ head

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Sir David Omand tells parliamentary inquiry the platform should be restricted to ‘background mood music’

The former head of GCHQ has called for an end to the government handling crises over WhatsApp, saying the platform might suit gossip and informal exchanges but is inappropriate for important decision-making.

Sir David Omand, who ran the UK intelligence service before becoming the permanent secretary of the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, criticised the way government was conducted in the pandemic and said future crises should be handled with “proper process”.

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EU lawyers say plan to scan private messages for child abuse may be unlawful

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Under proposed ‘chat controls’ regulation, any encrypted service provider could be forced to screen for ‘identifiers’

An EU plan under which all WhatsApp, iMessage and Snapchat accounts could be screened for child abuse content has hit a significant obstacle after internal legal advice said it would probably be annulled by the courts for breaching users’ rights.

Under the proposed “chat controls” regulation, any encrypted service provider could be forced to survey billions of messages, videos and photos for “identifiers” of certain types of content where it was suspected a service was being used to disseminate harmful material.

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Crime agencies condemn Facebook and Instagram encryption plans

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Global alliance including NCA and FBI says Meta’s decision to encrypt direct messages could harm children

An alliance of the world’s most powerful law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Interpol and Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) have condemned Meta’s plans to encrypt direct messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, saying that doing so will weaken the ability to keep child users safe.

The Virtual Global Taskforce, made up of 15 agencies, is chaired by the NCA and also includes Europol and the Australian federal police among its membership. The VGT has spoken out, it says, owing to the “impending design choices” by Meta, which it says could cause serious harm.

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Meta-funded online tool lets people remove their explicit images from the internet

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Take It Down allows anyone to anonymously generate a digital fingerprint of the image they want deleted, without uploading it

“Once you send that photo, you can’t take it back,” goes the warning to teenagers, often ignoring the reality that many teens send explicit images of themselves under duress, or without understanding the consequences.

A new online tool aims to give some control back to teens, or people who were once teens, and take down explicit images and videos of themselves from the internet.

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Child abuse image offences in UK have soared, NSPCC report shows

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Charity says police recording has improved but online grooming has risen and tech firms are failing to act

Police have recorded a surge in child abuse image offences in the UK, with more than 30,000 reported in the most recent year, according to a report from the NSPCC.

That is an increase of more than 66% on figures from five years ago, when police forces across the country recorded 18,574 such offences.

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Saudi prosecutors seek death penalty for academic over social media use

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Court documents reveal reasons for Awad Al-Qarni’s arrest – even though rulers are major investors in social media platforms

A prominent pro-reform law professor in Saudi Arabia is facing the death penalty for alleged crimes including having a Twitter account and using WhatsApp to share news considered “hostile” to the kingdom, according to court documents seen by the Guardian.

The arrest of Awad Al-Qarni, 65, in September 2017 represented the start of a crackdown against dissent by the then newly named crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

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Ministers creating ‘wild west’ conditions with use of personal phones

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Unsecured mobiles, email accounts and WhatsApp chats could pose national security risk, intelligence experts warn

Ministers risk creating “wild west” conditions in matters of national security by the increased use of personal email and phones to conduct confidential business, intelligence experts and former officials have warned.

After a week tainted by a row over the use of a personal email account by the home secretary, it was revealed on Sunday that Liz Truss’s mobile is alleged to have been hacked by overseas agents.

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Migrants targeted in Canadian immigration scam on Facebook

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Scammers posing as immigration lawyers targeted Facebook groups with tens of thousands of users, new report reveals

Scammers posing as Canadian immigration lawyers have targeted Facebook groups with tens of thousands of users, a new report reveals.

The posts, documented in a new report by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), the research arm of watchdog group the Campaign for Accountability, have been flagged as potentially fraudulent by Latin American and Canadian authorities but continue to proliferate.

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Iran blocks capital’s internet access as Amini protests grow

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Social media platforms have also been cut off in areas of Tehran and Kurdistan as videos of dissent go viral

Iran has shut off the internet in parts of Tehran and Kurdistan and blocked access to platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp in an attempt to curb a growing protest movement that has relied on social media to document dissent.

The protests, which were sparked on 16 September after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in police custody, show no sign of subsiding. On Thursday, protesters torched police stations and vehicles in several cities.

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