Company says it made a loss last year due to investment and the competitive market
Amazon received €294m (£258m) in tax credits last year that it can deduct from future bills for its European business, as revenues at the online retailer rose significantly to €32bn.
The company said it received the tax credits because it made a loss last year due to its investment programme and the highly competitive retail environment across Europe and the UK.
Continue reading...Restrictions on frequently forwarded messages intended to disrupt false Covid-19 claims
WhatsApp is to impose a strict new limit on message forwarding as the Facebook-owned chat app seeks to slow the dissemination of fake news, the company has announced.
If a user receives a frequently forwarded message – one which has been forwarded more than five times – under the new curbs, they will only be able to send it on to a single chat at a time. That is one fifth the previous limit of five chats, imposed in 2019.
Continue reading...Site will reduce recommendations of videos promoting misinformation
YouTube will reduce the amount of content spreading conspiracy theories about links between 5G technology and the coronavirus that it recommends to users and actively remove videos that breach its policies, the company has said.
Content that is simply conspiratorial about 5G mobile communications networks, without mentioning coronavirus, is still allowed on the site. YouTube said those videos may be considered “borderline content” and subjected to suppression, including loss of advertising revenue and being removed from search results on the platform.
Continue reading...Video app has seen a surge in popularity for both work and private use during lockdown
Zoom, the hit video conferencing platform, will freeze new feature development and shift all engineering resources on to security and safety issues, its founder has said..
The move comes as the company battles the damage caused by a string of minor scandals ultimately related to the same scrappy approach that enabled it to capitalise on the wave of global lockdowns in the first place.
Continue reading...‘Zoombombers’ broadcast explicit imagery or abuse other users in video hangouts
Working and socialising from home has brought new risks to everyday life, as webcam meetings and chatroom cocktail hours contend with privacy invasions, phishing attacks and “zoombombings” – uninvited guests abusing the popular video service to broadcast shocking imagery to all.
Public Zoom hangouts have become a popular way to spend time for isolated remote workers, who are joining calls with names such as “WFH Happy Hour” to spend time in the company of others.
Continue reading...Change of official line is first admission that Kremlin may have distorted UK elections
Ministers have been told they can no longer say there have been “no successful examples” of Russian disinformation affecting UK elections, after the apparent hacking of an NHS dossier seized on by Labour during the last campaign.
The dropping of the old line is the first official admission of the impact of Kremlin efforts to distort Britain’s political processes, and comes after three years of the government’s refusal to engage publicly with the threat.
Continue reading...Fake Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts seemed to aim to inflame divides in US
A newly discovered Russian-led network of professional trolls was being outsourced to Ghanaian and Nigerian operatives, according to Facebook and Twitter, who removed the network’s accounts on Thursday.
The network was small: just 49 Facebook accounts, 85 Instagram accounts and 71 Twitter accounts in question. But it marks the first time that a Russian information operation targeting the US has been found to be run from Africa.
Continue reading...Freedom of expression group names and shames alleged offenders on online censorship and orchestrated repression
A freedom of expression group has launched a list of “digital predators”, ranking what it says are 20 of the world’s worst offenders for cyber-censorship and orchestrated online repression.
Published on Thursday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to coincide with World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, the list names and shames entities around the globe whose activities it regards as “tantamount to preying on journalism”.
Continue reading...IICSA report calls for social media firms to be made to act, as police struggle to keep up
Social media companies should be forced to pre-screen all uploaded material to help law enforcement agencies cope with the “explosion” in online child sexual abuse in the UK, a critical report says.
The UK is identified as the third-biggest consumer in the world of the livestreaming of abuse in the 114-page study by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA).
Continue reading...Controls on the ‘online information content ecosystem’ bring heightened concern about freedom of speech
Sweeping new internet censorship rules have gone into effect in China, prompting concerns that authorities will further control information and online debate as the country reels from the coronavirus outbreak.
China’s cybersecurity administration has since Saturday implemented a set of new regulations on the governance of the “online information content ecosystem” that encourage “positive” content while barring material deemed “negative” or illegal.
Continue reading...The Texas senator tried to pick a fight after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out Mike Pence’s coronavirus credentials
If you were in search of a scientifically minded, steadying presence to guide the country through the potential fallout of the coronavirus, you could not do much worse than Vice-President Mike Pence. This being the Donald Trump administration, however, where qualifications and expertise are often seen as prohibitive factors for top jobs, that’s exactly who we’ve been given.
Cutting to the heart of the matter with her characteristic bluntness, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez this week pointed out the absurdity of placing Pence in charge of a potentially looming health crisis.
Continue reading...Figures obtained by GMB show safety at its UK warehouses could be worsening
More than 600 Amazon workers have been seriously injured or narrowly escaped an accident in the past three years, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into safety at the online retailer’s vast UK warehouses.
Amazon, whose largest shareholder is the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos, recently launched an advertising campaign fronted by contented staff members, after a string of embarrassing revelations about working conditions.
Continue reading...Co-founder says site sits between telephone company and newspaper as content provider
Facebook must accept some form of state regulation, acknowledging its status as a content provider somewhere between a newspaper and a telephone company, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said.
He also claimed an era of clean democratic elections, free of interference by foreign governments, is closer due to Facebook now employing 35,000 staff working on monitoring content and security.
Continue reading...President reasserts his right to tweet on judicial issues following William Barr’s warning the posts ‘make it impossible for me to do my job’
Donald Trump has ignored a plea from his attorney general, William Barr, to not tweet about ongoing legal cases, by using his Twitter account to say he has a “legal right” to do so.
Barr delivered a remarkable public rebuke of the president just hours earlier, saying that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job” and that he would not be “bullied or influenced” over justice department decisions.
Continue reading...Amazon founder purchases nine-acre estate once owned by Warner Bros president, Wall Street Journal says
Jeff Bezos has set a new property price record in Los Angeles with the purchase of a $165m Beverly Hills estate, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Amazon founder’s purchase of the home from the media mogul David Geffen is the largest amount paid for a single-family Los Angeles-area home. The nine-acre estate originally belonged to Jack Warner, the late former president of Warner Bros Studios. Warner built up the estate’s 13,600-sq-ft Georgian-style mansion in the 1930s, reportedly with the wood floor that Napoleon was standing on when he proposed to Josephine.
Continue reading...Eric Eoin Marques, citizen of US and Ireland, faces up to 30 years in prison over web hosting service
A man once described by an FBI agent as the world’s largest “facilitator” of child abuse websites pleaded guilty on Thursday to operating a web hosting service that allowed users to anonymously access hundreds of thousands of images and videos depicting child abuse.
Eric Eoin Marques, 34, faces a mandatory minimum of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 30 years after his guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to advertise child abuse images. A plea agreement will ask the US district judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland to sentence Marques to 15 to 21 years in prison, but the judge is not bound by the recommendation.
Continue reading...Apparent targeting of Amazon billionaire’s phone fits into broader pattern of behaviour by Saudi Arabia
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, had no reason to be suspicious when he received a WhatsApp message from the account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia in May 2018.
Bezos and Mohammed bin Salman had attended a dinner together in Hollywood a few weeks earlier hosted by Brian Grazer, the Oscar-winning producer, and Ari Emanuel, the powerful talent agent, as part of the young crown prince’s tour of America, which was hailed by some observers as an effort to rebrand the kingdom and set it on a new course.
Continue reading...Jeff Bezos pledges funds to help digitise small businesses as anti-Amazon protests spread
Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has pledged to invest $1bn (£776m) in small businesses in India, despite a growing backlash against the online retailer by the country’s powerful local traders.
During a three-day visit to India, where Amazon has its sights set on dominating the burgeoning e-commerce market, Bezos laid out his ambitious plans for Amazon’s investment in India over the next five years, including helping to digitise millions of small businesses.
Continue reading...Social media claims of an arson epidemic and obstructive environmentalists have infected mainstream reporting of the bushfire crisis
Lies have spread faster than grassfire during Australia’s unprecedented national emergency.
They’ve ranged from the exaggerated to the outrageous.
Continue reading...Exclusive: former Microsoft contractor says he was emailed login after minimal vetting
A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures”, according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company.
The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google’s Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor.
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