Censorship comes after bans on Washington Post, NBC, HuffPost and Wikipedia
The Guardian’s website has been blocked in China, amid a crackdown by the country’s authorities on international news websites to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Chinese government has regularly restricted coverage of the incident, where the military turned on protesters in Beijing who were taking part in nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations.
Continue reading...Idan Ofer allegedly hired Black Cube in 2014 but firm denies meeting and is suing TV show
An Israeli investigative TV show has claimed that one of the country’s richest men hired the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube to dig up dirt on a cabinet minister. Black Cube denied the allegations.
Idan Ofer allegedly hired the firm in 2014 to investigate the then-finance minister Yair Lapid and other top officials, Uvda reported, as part of his efforts to influence tax policy on natural gas finds at the time.
Ofer, a billionaire with vast holdings in the shipping, drilling and mining industries, paid Black Cube to help him undermine an advisory panel appointed by Lapid that was aiming to raise taxes on his lucrative natural resources company, according to the TV investigation. The idea was to smear Lapid and the arbitrators in order to continue evading high taxes on his profits after Israel discovered a large offshore natural gas field.
Black Cube, a company of former Israeli intelligence agents, has drawn international attention for allegedly working to discredit officials within the former US president Barack Obama’s administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, as well as to protect the reputation of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Thursday’s investigation also explored Black Cube’s ties to former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo Joseph Kabila, who reportedly used the company’s services to suppress opposition activists.
Black Cube denied the allegations, saying it never met with Ofer or targeted politicians, judges or regulators. The company said it was suing the TV show and its anchor in a British court for £15m. A clerk at Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice confirmed that a lawsuit had been filed but said he was barred from providing further details.
A spokesman for Ofer confirmed he had contracted the agency for a brief period, but said Ofer ended up not using Black Cube’s intelligence. He stressed the company gathered evidence only from public sources.
Lapid, now co-leader of the opposition Blue and White party, said nothing influences his decisions and he would “keep working without fearing anyone”.
Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of the cosmos’
Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky, astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.
The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space down to Earth.
Continue reading...In 2017, I started getting regular messages from an anonymous Twitter user telling me my religion was ‘evil’. Eventually I responded – and he agreed to meet face to face. By Hussein Kesvani
In 2017, I started to receive messages from a Twitter user who called themself True Brit, telling me that my religion was “Satanic”, “barbaric” and “evil”. Bearing a profile image of the St George’s cross and a biography that simply read “Anti-Islam, stop Islamic immigration now”, True Brit often spammed me with pictures taken from anti-Muslim websites, blogs and Facebook groups. Sometimes they would be cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant. Other times, I would be sent memes I had seen circulating in rightwing communities online, depicting groups of south Asian men who had been arrested for child sexual grooming, or alleged Syrian refugees who were, supposedly, secret members of Isis. One meme showed a man with a long beard, in battle camouflage, brandishing a pistol in one hand and holding the hand of a woman wearing niqab. In bold white writing below the image were the words “EUROPE IN 2020”.
True Brit never said anything directly to me to begin with. I had seen social media profiles like this one, and much worse, for years. Like those accounts, True Brit had few followers – 65 in total. Their activity on Twitter predominantly consisted of retweets from rightwing news sites such as Breitbart and Fox News. They frequently posted videos of online celebrities who were popular on anti-Muslim forums and Facebook groups, including Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing “provocateur” who has referred to Islam as “the real rape culture”, and Paul Joseph Watson, a UK-based YouTuber and editor of the conspiracy-theory website Infowars.com, who produces weekly videos about the “dangers of Islam” in the west, with titles such as The Truth About Islamophobia and Dear Gays: The Left Betrayed You For Islam. True Brit was also a fan of the British rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, who in 2015 likened Syrian refugees to cockroaches, and who until recently produced anti-Islam videos for Canadian far-right outlet The Rebel Media.
Continue reading...Chinese firm says ban on tech from ‘foreign adversaries’ will harm US consumers
Huawei has hit back at Donald Trump’s administration after it declared a national emergency to ban technology from “foreign adversaries” and subjected the Chinese telecommunications company to strict export controls.
An executive order issued by the US president on Wednesday declared a national economic emergency that empowers the government to ban the technology and services of “foreign adversaries” deemed to pose “unacceptable risks” to national security, including from cyber-espionage and sabotage.
Continue reading...Arrests in Germany, Brazil and US relate to sale of drugs, stolen data and malicious software
German police have shut down one of the world’s largest illegal online markets in the so-called dark web and arrested the three men allegedly running it, prosecutors said on Friday.
The “Wall Street Market” (WSM) site enabled trade in cocaine, heroin, cannabis and amphetamines as well as stolen data, fake documents and malicious software.
Continue reading...Mother alarmed after anti-vaccination propaganda found inside book bought for son, who is about to receive the HPV jab
Concerns have been raised that the anti-vaccination movement is targeting children via Amazon warehouses, after a Hampshire mother found a leaflet condemning the HPV vaccine tucked inside a children’s book she had purchased from the online retailer.
Lucy Boyle bought Ali Sparkes’ Night Speakers along with several other novels as a birthday present for her 12-year-old son at the start of April. He began reading the novel last week, “got a few pages in, turned over the page and there was the leaflet,” she told the Guardian.
Continue reading...One of the world’s foremost authorities on child mental health today warns that technology is threatening child development by disrupting the crucial learning relationship between adults and children.
Peter Fonagy, professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Developmental Science at UCL, who has published more than 500 scientific papers and 19 books, warns that the digital world is reducing contact time between the generations – a development with potentially damaging consequences.
Continue reading...Company beat sales and profit expectations to join Apple and Amazon in prestigious club
Microsoft has become the third publicly listed US company, after Apple and Amazon, to boast a market value of more than $1tn after bumper quarterly results boosted its share price.
The company beat sales and profits expectations in the three months to 31 March, thanks in part to its cloud computing business, which signed up major corporate clients over the period.
Continue reading...From ‘the cloud’ to invisible beams carrying billions of dollars, our world can often feel like a neverland of terrifying tech. A new radio series is here to help
A couple of years ago, I took a bike ride from Slough, heading east – right through London and out the other side to Basildon. I was looking for two important but hidden locations: a data centre belonging to the London Stock Exchange, and another belonging to the New York Stock Exchange. To find them, I followed the line of microwave dishes that connect them – some perched on pylons, others on water towers or tall buildings. These beams of data carry millions of high-frequency financial transactions – and thus billions of pounds – through the air, above our heads, completely invisibly.
Near Heathrow airport, I looked up to see the microwaves passing through two huge dishes atop Hillingdon hospital, a pioneering 1960s centre now suffering – like much of the NHS – from a shortfall in funding. For a rent of a few thousand pounds a year, the machinery of private finance perches on the crumbling infrastructure of the welfare state: all that money, flowing invisibly just a few metres above the patients inside. This is how a difference in visibility translates into a difference in power: those who can see, can understand – and thus shape the world to their advantage.
Continue reading...Thousands having difficulty accessing social networks, says tracking site
Facebook was inaccessible to some users on Sunday, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors outages.
The site showed there had been more than 7,700 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook at its peak.
Continue reading...Staff review audio in effort to help AI-powered voice assistant respond to commands
When Amazon customers speak to Alexa, the company’s AI-powered voice assistant, they may be heard by more people than they expect, according to a report.
Amazon employees around the world regularly listen to recordings from the company’s smart speakers as part of the development process for new services, Bloomberg News reports.
Continue reading...Critics say measures would be expensive and give vast censorship powers to the government
Russian politicians have approved a controversial bill that would allow Moscow to cut off the country’s internet traffic from foreign servers, in a key second reading that paves the way for the bill to become law on 1 November.
Lawmakers in the State Duma, parliament’s lower house, voted 320 to 15 to pass the proposed bill.
Continue reading...Algorithmic features have sent suggestions to wish happy birthday to those who’ve died
Facebook has promised to use artificial intelligence to stop suggesting users invite their dead friends to parties.
The site’s freshly emotionally intelligent AI is part of a rash of changes to how Facebook handles “memorialised” accounts – pages whose owner has been reported deceased, but that are kept on the social network in their memory.
Continue reading...Not responding to notification could cost companies 4% of their revenue under EU law
Internet companies will be fined up to 4% of their revenue if they fail to remove terrorist content within one hour of being notified by authorities, under legislation approved by MEPs.
The civil liberties committee approved the move by 35 to one, with abstentions, but removed an obligation on companies to monitor uploaded content or use automated tools.
Continue reading...Labor supports legislation in response to Christchurch shooting that threatens jail for executives, despite media companies’ concerns
The Australian parliament has passed legislation to crack down on violent videos on social media, despite furious reaction from the tech industry, media companies and legal experts.
The Labor opposition combined with the ruling Liberal-National Coalition to pass the law on Thursday, despite warning it won’t allow prosecution of social media executives as promised by the government. Tech giants expressed the opposite concern that it may criminalise anyone in their companies for a failure to remove violent material.
Continue reading...After Christchurch many are asking what role the ‘darkest reaches of the internet’ play in radicalisation
No depth goes unplumbed on the far-right forum 8chan. Its threads reveal a seething, toxic mass of rabid antisemitism, neo-Nazism, Islamophobia, gratuitous violence, coded inside jokes and conspiratorial ravings published by anonymous users.
Nothing has changed in the days after the Australian alleged gunman Brenton Tarrant, 28, came to 8chan boasting of the imminent massacre in Christchurch. Posts have since praised Tarrant as a “hero” and called for copycat attacks, or, alternatively, denounced him as a pawn in a false flag conspiracy.
Continue reading...Faulty server migration blamed for mass deletion of songs, photos and video
Myspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet.
The company is blaming a faulty server migration for the mass deletion, which appears to have happened more than a year ago, when the first reports appeared of users unable to access older content. The company has confirmed to online archivists that music has been lost permanently, dashing hopes that a backup could be used to permanently protect the collection for future generations.
Continue reading...The most terrible livestream in history suggests online fascism is the most dangerous political current in the world today
Before the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people were murdered at Friday prayers at two mosques, a man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant posted notice of his intention to live-stream an “attack” on 8chan, the notorious online messageboard.
It opened with jokey, ironic lingo. “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post … It’s been a long ride and despite all your rampant faggotry, fecklessness and degeneracy, you are all top blokes and the best bunch of cobbers a man could ask for.”
Continue reading...The titans of the new Gilded Age must be busted and the idea has bipartisan support. It’s time big tech was brought to heel
The presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced on Friday she wants to bust up giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
America’s first Gilded Age began in the late 19th century with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber barons” like JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, and William H “the public be damned” Vanderbilt.
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