Category Archives: Internet

Biden article row shows how US election is testing Facebook and Twitter

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Online giants felt forced to take unprecedented action as they struggle with role during divisive presidential battle

Mere hours after the publication of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, both Twitter and Facebook took unprecedented action to restrict distribution of the post.

Facebook, a company spokesman revealed, had immediately begun to “reduce its distribution on our platform”, altering how the company’s recommendation algorithm would normally react to such a viral story in order to buy its third-party fact checkers time to come to a conclusion about its veracity.

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Most girls and young women have experienced abuse online, report finds

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Cyberstalking, body shaming and being sent explicit content among issues highlighted by Plan International

Most girls and young women using social media have experienced abuse that has driven them offline and left them traumatised, according to a new global survey.

More than half of the 14,000 15- to 25-year-olds interviewed by Plan International said they had been cyberstalked, sent explicit messages and images, or abused online.

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Tweets wishing for Trump’s death violate Twitter policy, company says

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Platform says abusive tweets about the president, who was diagnosed with Covid-19 this week, could result in suspension

Twitter has said that tweets wishing for Donald Trump’s death in the wake of the president’s diagnosis with Covid-19 violate its policies and could result in suspension.

As Trump made his way to Walter Reed medical center for treatment on Friday, many people on Twitter, including his opponent Joe Biden, wished him a speedy recovery. However many others did the opposite, saying they hope he dies from the virus, which has killed more than 200,000 people in the United States under his leadership while he repeatedly downplayed the severity of the disease.

Related: Trump taken to hospital by helicopter after Covid diagnosis

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Russia spreading lies about Covid vaccines, says UK military chief

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Head of armed forces says both China and Russia trying to undermine cohesion in west

Russia is seeking to destabilise countries around the world by sowing disinformation about coronavirus vaccines that is shared rapidly across social media, the head of the armed forces has warned.

Gen Sir Nick Carter, the chief of defence staff, said the propaganda tactic reflected a strategy of “political warfare” aggressively undertaken by Beijing as well as Moscow “designed to undermine cohesion” across the west.

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Facebook merges Messenger chat service with Instagram

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Users will be able to send chats, photos and videos between the two platforms for first time

Facebook Messenger and Instagram have merged, more than 18 months after the Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his intention to integrate the two platforms.

Instagram’s old direct messaging service, Instagram Direct, has been replaced by Messenger, allowing users to send chats, photos and videos between the two platforms for the first time.

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What is QAnon and why is it so dangerous? – video explainer

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Donald Trump has referred to QAnon followers as 'people who love our country' - while to the FBI considers them a potential domestic terror threat. The Guardian US technology reporter Julia Carrie Wong explains the roots - and rise - of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that emerged in the US in 2017, and is now spreading across the world

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Global Microsoft outage brings down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook

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Microsoft says a recent update has affected the processing of authentication requests, making cloud-based services inaccessible

Microsoft has said it is investigating an outage that brought down Microsoft’s cloud-based office services including the meetings software, Teams, worldwide.

Microsoft reported issues with authentication for its cloud services at around 9.25pm UTC, meaning people were having issues logging into the online services Teams, Outlook and Office.

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Wealth of US billionaires rises by nearly a third during pandemic

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Report includes Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune has risen by 65% since 18 March

The already vast fortunes of America’s 643 billionaires have soared by an average of 29% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which has at the same time laid waste to tens of millions of jobs around the world.

The richest of the superrich have benefited by $845bn , according to a report by a US progressive thinktank, the Institute for Policy Studies.

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‘The only way to stop violence’: why protesters are unmasking Belarus police

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Pulling off balaclavas and publishing names is new tactic to stem harassment and assaults

During the past month’s uprising against Alexander Lukashenko, riot police and assorted thugs loyal to his regime have been given carte blanche by the Belarusian president to harass, assault and arrest peaceful protesters.

In recent days, however, protesters have found out that for all Lukashenko’s men’s ruthlessness and impunity, they have a vulnerable point: their faces. Grab at the mask of a policeman and he will run for cover.

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Twitter and Google join Facebook in tightening rules on US election claims

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Platforms will target unverified claims of election rigging and premature results declarations

Premature claims of victory will be blocked from Twitter and Google in the run-up to November’s US presidential election, as both companies follow Facebook in trying to fight the prospect of a stolen vote.

Under its new rules, Twitter will treat as harmful misinformation any tweet which makes false claims about election rigging, or prematurely claims to announce the election results.

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Amazon removes shirts with derogatory slogan about Kamala Harris

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The removal of the items followed pressure from Twitter users who urged people to complain to the retail giant

Amazon has removed a clothing line emblazoned with an offensive slogan referring to Kamala Harris from its website after complaints from Twitter users who branded it “unacceptable”.

The T-shirts, tank tops and hoodies which had the words “Joe and the hoe” written in red, white and blue in the style of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Harris’s campaign logo, were on sale for between $24.99 and $42.99.

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Will knocking Belarus offline save president from protests?

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Alexander Lukashenko has cut off entire population’s internet to try to stifle election dissent

As he fights for his political survival, Alexander Lukashenko has taken a big gamble by cutting off the internet across most of Belarus.

Belarusians seeking to protest against his government have been mostly cut off from the outside world: mobile internet has been throttled and popular messaging apps have been disabled, leaving demonstrators scrambling to find wifi connections and working VPNs or proxies to get online and then sharing what news they can find.

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Twitter hack: US and UK teens arrested over breach of celebrity accounts

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Three men charged in hack that saw accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk compromised in bitcoin scam

Authorities have charged three men in a major Twitter breach this month that hacked the accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in bitcoin.

The suspects include a 19-year-old British man from Bognor Regis, a 22-year-old man from Orlando, Florida, and a teenager from Tampa, Florida.

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Ransomware attack on Garmin thought to be the work of ‘Evil Corp’

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Russian cybercrime gang is believed to be responsible for taking Garmin services offline

A ransomware attack that took the GPS and smartwatch business Garmin entirely offline for more than three days is believed to have been carried out by a Russian cybercriminal gang which calls itself “Evil Corp”.

Garmin began to restore services to customers on Monday morning, after being held hostage for a reported ransom of $10m, although some services were still operating with limited functionality.

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China’s Great Firewall descends on Hong Kong internet users

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Residents rush to erase digital footprints as law gives police powers over online activity

At midnight on Tuesday, the Great Firewall of China, the vast apparatus that limits the country’s internet, appeared to descend on Hong Kong.

Unveiling expanded police powers as part of a contentious new national security law, the Hong Kong government enabled police to censor online speech and force internet service providers to hand over user information and shut down platforms.

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Australia is under cyber-attack from ‘state-based actor’, Scott Morrison says

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Australian prime minister says widespread assault on political and private sector organisations has been going on for months but is increasing in frequency and scale

A wide range of political and private sector organisations in Australia have come under cyber-attack carried out by a “sophisticated state-based cyber actor”, the Australian government has revealed.

Scott Morrison disclosed the far-reaching attacks at a media conference in Canberra on Friday, while his defence minister declared that malicious cyber activity was “increasing in frequency, scale, in sophistication and in its impact”.

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Apple removes two podcast apps from China store after censorship demands

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Pocket Casts says it refuses to restrict its content at request of Chinese authorities

Apple has removed two podcast apps from its Chinese app store, following government pressure to censor content.

Pocket Casts and Castro were both pulled from distribution in China after the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) demanded that the apps stop allowing content that breached the country’s restrictive speech laws.

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Twitter deletes 170,000 accounts linked to China influence campaign

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Content focused on Covid-19 and the protests in Hong Kong and over George Floyd in the US

Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.

The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.

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Twitter aims to limit people sharing articles they have not read

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Test to promote informed discussion will ask users if they want to retweet unread links

Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will “promote informed discussion” on social media.

In the test, pushed to some users on Android devices, the company is introducing a prompt asking people if they really want to retweet a link that they have not tapped on.

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2,500 rare texts from Islamic world to go online for free

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National Library of Israel is digitising collection of manuscripts and books dating back to ninth century

More than 2,500 rare manuscripts and books from the Islamic world covering a period of more than a thousand years are to be made freely available online.

The National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem is digitising its world-class collection of items in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, dating from the ninth to the 20th centuries, including spectacularly beautiful Qur’ans and literary works decorated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli.

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