Tag: social media

Telegram feature exposes your precise address to hackers

If you’re using an Android device—or in some cases an iPhone—the Telegram messenger app makes it easy for hackers to find your precise location when you enable a feature that allows users who are geographically close to you to connect. The researcher who discovered the disclosure vulnerability and privately reported it to Telegram developers said they have no plans to fix it.

The problem stems from a feature called People Nearby. By default, it’s turned off. When users enable it, their geographic distance is shown to other people who have it turned on and are in (or are spoofing) the same geographic region. When People Nearby is used as designed, it’s a useful feature with few if any privacy concerns. After all, a notification that someone is 1 kilometer or 600 meters away still leaves stalkers guessing where, precisely, you are.

Stalking made simple

Independent researcher Ahmed Hassan, however, has shown how the feature can be abused to divulge exactly where you are. Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, he’s able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By using just three different locations and measuring the corresponding distance reported by People Nearby, he is able to pinpoint a user’s precise location.

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TikTok Is Watching You – Even If You Don’t Have an Account

2020 was TikTok’s year. Although the social media platform was already popular by late-2018, nothing could have boosted its user base faster than our thirst for distraction from the imminent collapse of society. And if all press is good press, TikTok certainly benefited from media attention in 2020, taking centre stage in the geopolitical struggle between China and the US. 

Suddenly, everyone cared about what data was being collected by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. But despite the Trump administration’s claims that China might be spying on you via your favourite entertainment app, there is no evidence that your data is less safe in the hands of a Chinese company than in those of the US-based “usual suspects”, like Facebook and Amazon. In fact, in July of 2020, the European Court of Justice struck down the EU-US privacy agreement known as Privacy Shield, on the grounds that US national security laws endangered EU citizens’ data.Life

In light of all this, I wanted some clarity. Taking advantage of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I asked TikTok to send me all the data they had on me. Anyone in the EU can do this – here is the template I used, and the email address you should send it to.

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Prince Harry demands immediate social media ‘reform’ following Capitol Hill riot

Prince Harry has voiced his opinion of the need for social media reform following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot where thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in protest of the 2020 election results.

“We are losing loved ones to conspiracy theories, losing a sense of self because of the barrage of mistruths, and at the largest scale, losing our democracies,” the duke said.

“The magnitude of this cannot be overstated,” he added.

He further stated that everyone has experienced the negative consequences of social media at some point, The Independent reported.

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MICROSOFT PATENT SHOWS PLANS TO REVIVE DEAD LOVED ONES AS CHATBOTS

Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.  

The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.

“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.

“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.

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If ‘Facebook is Private’ Why are They Feeding Private Messages of Its Users Directly to the FBI?

Despite decrying censorship when it was happening to them last year, when Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook earlier this month, the left praised the move by big tech. “Facebook is a private company and can do what they want,” the pro-censorship hypocritical crowd chanted ad nauseum through the digital ether after bad orange man was silenced. But as we have said time and again, Facebook being private is simply not true. Now, however, Facebook has made an unscrupulous Faustian bargain with the federal government which should eliminate all doubt once and for all. They are now willfully handing over private messages of Trump supporters who talked about the events at the capitol on January 6.

Google, Apple, and Amazon all moved to wipe the pro-Trump social media network Parler from the internet earlier this month because of what users on the platform discussed. It was alleged that the handful of dolts who stormed the capitol on January 6 had solely used Parler to plan their laughable, unarmed, silly, unsuccessful, and pitiful attempt to keep Trump in the White House.

Despite the ragtag group of Trumpians posing for selfies, photo-ops, and hanging from banisters, the only thing they accomplished was having D.C. turned into a scene akin to North Korea for Biden’s inauguration. Most honest experts in the media have acknowledged that though a few members of the mob thought they were part of some historic coup to keep their leader in power, the idea that they had any real chance at an insurrection was misleading at best and sheer propaganda used to further the domestic police and surveillance state at worst.

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This Site Published Every Face From Parler’s Capitol Riot Videos

WHEN HACKERS EXPLOITED a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.

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Twitter Being Sued for Telling Child Porn Victim That Images of Him at 13 Years Old Didn’t Violate Their Terms of Service

Twitter is being sued by a child pornography victim for refusing to remove images of him at 13 years old that were posted by predators who blackmailed him.

Twitter allegedly told the victim that the child pornography did not violate the platform’s terms of service.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in California on Wednesday on behalf of the now 17-year-old from Florida, who is identified only as “John Doe.”

The National File reports that when Doe was 13 through 14, he was targeted by sex traffickers posing as a 16-year-old female classmate, who blackmailed him to share nude content.

“After initially exchanging nude content, the victim was then forced to share more, otherwise the material would be shared with his ‘parents, coach, pastor,’ and others, the traffickers threatened. Doe first complied under duress, the lawsuit notes, but then managed to block the traffickers. However, at some point in 2019, the child porn was then shared to Twitter from two accounts that were known to share this material,” the National File report explains.

Doe’s lawsuit says that he reported the accounts sharing the images to Twitter no less than three times, but Twitter claimed that they had “reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation” of their policies.

The images of the very young Doe racked up over 167,000 views on the platform.

“What do you mean you don’t see a problem?” Doe replied to Twitter. “We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.”

The content was not removed until an agent from the Department of Homeland Security contacted Twitter.

“This is directly in contrast to what their automated reply message and User Agreement state they will do to protect children,” the lawsuit states.

National File reported last  year that Twitter’s Terms of Service explicitly allow people to openly talk about child rape on their platform, despite claiming to have “zero tolerance towards any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation.”

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Texas Instagram Influencer Found Along Road Was Strangled to Death: Medical Examiner

Alexis Sharkey, the Instagram influencer found naked in the bushes near a Houston road in November, was strangled to death, the medical examiner’s office announced Tuesday.

Sharkey, a 26-year-old Texas influencer with over 71,500 Instagram followers, went missing on Nov. 27 after spending Thanksgiving with friends. She was discovered the next morning by a City of Houston public works employee, who had reportedly noticed feet coming out of some bushes just off a road.

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