The attackers who carried out the mass hack that Facebook disclosed two weeks ago obtained user account data belonging to as many as 30 million users, the social network said on Friday. Some of that data—including phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, searches, location check-ins, and the types of devices used to access the site—came from private accounts or was supposed to be restricted only to friends. Read full story here: Here’s How To See If You’re Among The 30 Million Compromised Facebook Users | Ars Technica
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Google+ To Shut Down After Coverup Of Data-Exposing Bug | TechCrunch
Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public profile data, the bug also let those developers pull their and their friends’ non-public profile fields. Indeed, 496,951 users’ full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation and relationship status were potentially exposed, though Google says it…
Read MoreFacebook Says At Least 50 million Users Affected By Account Takeover Bug | TechCrunch
Facebook has said 50 million user accounts may be at risk after hackers exploited a security vulnerability on the site. The company said in a blog post Friday that it discovered the bug earlier in the week. The bug is part of the site’s “View As” feature that lets a user see their profile as someone else. Facebook has switched off the “View As” feature in the meantime while it investigates the bug further. The bug allowed hackers to obtain account access tokens, which are used to keep users logged in…
Read MoreClimate Change Is Causing Earth To Wobble On Its Axis, NASA Says | The Weather Channel
Climate change is impacting how Earth spins on its axis, NASA says. Over the past century, Earth’s axis – the imaginary line that passes through the North and South Poles – has drifted about 4 inches, and a decrease in Greenland’s ice mass is the main contributor to the wobble, the space agency has announced. As temperatures increased throughout the 20th century because of humans, Greenland’s ice mass decreased. Rad full story here: Climate Change Is Causing Earth To Wobble On Its Axis, NASA Says | The Weather Channel
Read MoreSmall Nudges Add Up To Big Electric Savings | Ars Technica
Not all electricity is created equal. Utilities prioritize getting power from the cheapest sources available. That means that, as use rises to what’s typically a mid-afternoon peak, utilities end up sourcing ever more expensive supplies of electricity. By the time we reach the use typical of a late afternoon during a heat wave, the utilities have to call in the most expensive forms of power around—typically, the oldest, least-efficient, and most-polluting plants. So cutting down on energy use during these peak demand events is in a utility’s interests. And, since…
Read MoreIf A.I. Doesn’t Replace Your Job, It May Make It Much More Pleasant | Digital Trends
From The Matrix to Wargames and iRobot to Metropolis, movies and novels have threatened us with a revolution of AI and robots for decades, whether that’s through a violent uprising or just replacing us at our jobs. Today, those theoretical dystopian futures seem more realistic than ever. With the growth of smart assistants and advanced machine learning, there is a growing concern that in the decades to come, there may be very little work for humans to do. But for just a moment, let’s set aside our apocalyptic tendencies and…
Read MoreWill Self-Driving Cars Kill Parking? | TechCrunch
Some people have postulated that autonomous ridesharing cars will never need to park and cities of the future will not need street parking, parking lots or parking garages. But parking is far from dead. In fact, the $100 billion market may be poised to grow. We’ve heard from parking startup founders that many Silicon Valley investors have rejected parking as a thing of the past, rallying around alternatives — for example, investing more than $100 million in valet parking startups that didn’t pan out. Even these parking investments are a drop in the bucket…
Read MoreStudy Calls Out ‘Dark Patterns’ In Facebook And Google That Push Users Toward Less Privacy | TechCrunch
More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy. It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe’s GDPR, which has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data…
Read MoreIs The Loonie The ‘Most Hated Currency’ In Markets Right Now? | CBC News
The Canadian dollar has seen its share of volatility this year as trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada reached a fever pitch over the weekend. The currency is down more than five per cent against the U.S. dollar since hitting its highest point this year at the end of January. Even as it moved higher on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates, Mark McCormick, head of North American foreign exchange strategy at TD Securities, said the loonie “is probably the market’s most hated currency now,” based on his discussions with investors.…
Read MoreVPNFilter Malware Infecting 500,000 Devices Is Worse Than We Thought | Ars Technica
Two weeks ago, officials in the private and public sectors warned that hackers working for the Russian government infected more than 500,000 consumer-grade routers in 54 countries with malware that could be used for a range of nefarious purposes. Now, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team say additional analysis shows that the malware is more powerful than originally thought and runs on a much broader base of models, many from previously unaffected manufacturers. Besides covertly manipulating traffic delivered to endpoints inside an infected network, ssler is also designed to steal…
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