Tag: internet

World Economic Forum makes censorship pledge to “tackle harmful content and conduct online”

The World Economic Forum, an international group that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” has formed a new “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” that’s made up of Big Tech executives and government officials and intends to come up with new “innovations” to police “harmful content and conduct online.”

The scope of so-called “harmful” content that will be targeted by this Global Coalition for Digital Safety is far-reaching and encompasses both legal content (such as “health misinformation” and “anti-vaccine content”) and illegal content (such as child exploitation and abuse and violent extremism).

Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts under their far-reaching rules that prohibit harmful content and misinformation. They also publish detailed quarterly reports about this censorship.

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How to turn off Amazon’s ability to track your movements via dormant network inside Echo and Ring security cameras

Amazon has flipped a switch that automatically enrolled millions of its users in a program that will share Internet bandwidth between neighbors – expanding the company’s ability to track devices. 

Dubbed Amazon Sidewalk, the internet-sharing program links nearby devices via Bluetooth and radio frequencies so they can stay connected to the internet via other Sidewalk-enabled devices even when disconnected from home WiFi networks. 

The program already existed inside Echo and Ring security cameras dating back to 2018 and remained dormant until Tuesday.   

While users do have the option to turn Sidewalk off, it has drawn scrutiny from critics concerned about the amount of data that will pass through devices to and from neighbors connected to it. 

There are also concerns that the program will enable Amazon to track more users outside of their individual homes.  

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CNN, New York Times, British government, and myriad other websites go dark amid massive worldwide outage

A massive worldwide internet outage has impacted major websites including Amazon, the New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch.

The sites’ content delivery network, U.S.-based Fastly, announced that the issue has been identified and a “fix is being implemented,” and many of the sites initially impacted by the outage appeared to have been restored within an hour’s time.

What are the details?

The company confirmed a “global disruption,” according to Engadget, and began investigating the issue in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Other affected sites, the outlet reported, included Al Jazeera Media Network, GitHub, Gov.uk, HBO Max, Hulu, PayPal, Shopify, Stack Overflow, Quora, Vimeo, and more.

Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, reported that other sites such as Etsy and Reddit were also impacted by the issue.

Reuters reported that Fastly’s website stated that most of its coverage areas faced “Degraded Performance,” and myriad error messages across impacted websites pointed to Fastly’s CDN as the issue.

“News publishers came up with inventive workarounds to report about the widespread outage when their websites failed to load up,” Reuters noted. “Popular tech website The Verge took to Google Docs to report news, while [a] U.K. Technology Editor at The Guardian started a Twitter thread to report on the problems.”

After its website returned to a functioning level, CNN reported that the outage impacted “dozens of countries” across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, as well as South Africa.

Many websites, CNN reported, continued to be unavailable for users as of 7 a.m. ET while the company worked to improve load times for its apps, platforms, and websites.

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Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors

If you use Alexa, Echo, or any other Amazon device, you have only 10 days to opt out of an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.

On June 8, the merchant, Web host, and entertainment behemoth will automatically enroll the devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors who don’t have connectivity and help you to their bandwidth when you don’t have a connection.

By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not. The Amazon webpage linked above says Sidewalk “is currently only available in the US.”

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Biden administration considers chat app surveillance

The Biden administration is reportedly considering partnering with private companies to track “extremist chatter by Americans online” as part of a plan that would allow federal agencies to circumvent the current legal limits on data collection.

According to CNN’s sources inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the plans would target private and encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram and involve “using outside entities who can legally access these private groups to gather large amounts of information that could help DHS identify key narratives as they emerge.”

Under existing law, the DHS is barred from assuming false identities to gain access to private groups and apps.

But according to CNN, some of the outside entities that are being considered by the DHS include researchers and non-profits that use covert identities to access private groups on platforms such as Telegram.

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ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy: This Time Over BLM

Whatever one’s views are on this particular censorship controversy, there is no doubt that it is part of the highly consequential debate over online free speech and the ability of monopolies like Facebook to control the dissemination of news and the boundaries of political discourse and debate. That is why Smith devoted his weekly column to it. And yet, when Smith approached the standard free speech advocacy groups for comment on this story, virtually none was willing to speak up. “Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls,” he wrote.

Among those groups which insisted that it would not comment on Facebook’s censorship of the Post‘s BLM story was the vaunted, brave and deeply principled free speech organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time,” emailed Aaron Madrid Aksoz, an ACLU spokesman. Smith said “the only criticism he could obtain came from the News Media Alliance, the old newspaper lobby, whose chief executive, David Chavern, called blocking The Post’s link ‘completely arbitrary’ and noted that ‘Facebook and Google stand between publishers and their audiences and determine how and whether news content is seen.’”

How is it possible that the ACLU is all but invisible on one of the central free speech debates of our time: namely, how much censorship should Silicon Valley tech monopolists be imposing on our political speech? As someone who intensively reports on these controversies, I can barely remember any time when the ACLU spoke up loudly on any of these censorship debates, let alone assumed the central role that any civil liberties group with any integrity would, by definition, assume on this growing controversy.

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‘It’s the biggest thing in the history of the internet’: Pentagon quietly transfers 175 million internet addresses worth $4BILLION to mysterious firm at shared workspace in Florida

A very strange thing happened on the internet the day President Joe Biden was sworn in. 

A shadowy company residing at a shared workspace above a Florida bank announced to the world´s computer networks that it was now managing a colossal, previously idle chunk of the internet owned by the U.S. Department of Defense.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses – about 4 percent the size of the entire current internet. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

‘It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,’ said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company.

The sell off of Internet space sparked theories the Pentagon could be eventually responding to repeated demands to monitise its collections of millions of dormant web pages. 

But it now seems officials hope to place the pages on the open market in order to allow them to gather huge amounts of intelligence data about Internet users, including hostile actors.   

The military hopes to ‘assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,’ said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. 

But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.

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Canada’s Heritage Minister says internet censorship bill is imminent

Canada’s Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, a Liberal Party member, said a new internet censorship bill will be tabled within two weeks. To Liberals, the bill will protect Canadians from online abuse – but to those concerned about freedom and civil liberties, it is a law that will have a chilling effect on free speech.

We previously reported details about its inception here.

“My job is to ensure the safety and security of the Canadian population. That’s what I am here for,” said Guilbeault.

He reiterated his previous remarks that the bill would help limit hurtful content online, beyond the current hate speech laws outlined in the Criminal Code. However, he did not provide examples of the hurtful content to be outlawed in the new bill, Blacklock’s Reporter stated.

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