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The SEC has blocked third-party messaging apps and texts from employees' work phones, "bringing its own practices closer to the standards it's enforcing for the industry," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The SEC's decision to block disappearing-messaging apps will help improve record-keeping and address potential security vulnerabilities at the agency, which saw one of its social-media accounts compromised earlier this year. It follows about...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company's $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office in Sunnyvale and...

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's initial set of AI-related features in iOS 18 "will work entirely on device," and won't connect to cloud services. AppleInsider reports: In practice, these AI features would be able to function without an internet connection or any form of cloud-based processing. AppleInsider has received information from individuals familiar with the matter that suggest the report's claims are accurate....

Richard Currie reports via The Register: A simple misclick at a London law firm led to a surprise divorce for an unsuspecting couple. An employee at Vardags, self-described specialists in high-net-worth marital breakdowns, opened the wrong file when applying for a divorce in His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) online portal. With a click more potent than Cupid's arrow, the solicitor "issued a...

The United States Senate is poised to vote on legislation this week that, for the next two years at least, could dramatically expand the number of businesses that the US government can force to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant. From a report: Some of the nation's top legal experts on a controversial US spy program argue that the legislation, known as the Reforming...

The Justice Department is preparing to sue Live Nation as soon as next month [non-paywalled link], an antitrust challenge that could spur major changes at the biggest name in concert promotion and ticketing. WSJ: The agency is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Ticketmaster parent in the coming weeks that would allege the nation's biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot,...

Roku has made two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for all users following two credential stuffing attacks that compromised approximately 591,000 customer accounts and led to unauthorized purchases in fewer than 400 cases. The Register reports: Credential stuffing and password spraying are both fairly similar types of brute force attacks, but the former uses known pairs of credentials (usernames and passwords). The latter simply spams common...

A business columnist at the Los Angeles Times notes Sam Bankman-Fried's judge issued another ruling "that may have a more far-reaching effect on the crypto business. U.S. Judge Failla "cleared the Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its lawsuit alleging that the giant crypto broker and exchange Coinbase has been dealing in securities without a license." What's important about Failla's ruling is that...

America's FCC votes on net neutrality April 25th. And the director of Stanford Law School's "Center for Internet and Society" (also a law professor) says mostly there's "much to celebrate" in the draft rules released earlier this month. Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop. The FCC kept in place state...

DOJ-Collected Information Exposed In Data Breach Affecting 340,000 Information Collected An anonymous reader shared this report from Security Week: Economic analysis and litigation support firm Greylock McKinnon Associates, Inc. (GMA) is notifying over 340,000 individuals that their personal and medical information was compromised in a year-old data breach. The incident was detected on May 30, 2023, but it took the firm roughly eight months...

From the Washington Post: The U.S. government said Thursday that Russian government hackers who recently stole Microsoft corporate emails had obtained passwords and other secret material that might allow them to breach multiple U.S. agencies. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday issued a rare binding directive to an undisclosed number of agencies requiring them...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has called on U.S. President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the U.S. automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy." Brown's letter to the president...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized. After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community's spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 (PDF) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today. Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100...

OpenTable's restaurant pages still feature a lot of reviews left by anonymous diners at the moment, but that will not be the case starting next month. From a report: The online restaurant reservation service is changing its policy around reviews so that they're not as anonymous -- and it's even applying the new rule retroactively. As BleepingComputer reports, it told users in an email...

HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant. The Register: Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding in an Illinois court to an earlier HP motion to dismiss a January lawsuit. Among other things, the plaintiffs' filing stated that the printer buyers "never entered into any contractual agreement to buy...

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're -- apparently, one of the few people -- using the VPN service that comes with Google One, we've got bad news for you. In an email you're going to receive from Google if you haven't gotten it yet, it revealed that it's phasing out the perk sometime later this year. The company rolled out Google One's...

A federal jury in Illinois on Wednesday said Amazon Web Services owes tech company Kove $525 million for violating three patents relating to its data-storage technology. From the report: The jury determined (PDF) that AWS infringed three Kove patents covering technology that Kove said had become "essential" to the ability of Amazon's cloud-computing arm to "store and retrieve massive amounts of data." An Amazon...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products. Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amid a flurry of lawsuits over AI models' training data, US Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced (PDF) a bill that would require AI companies to disclose exactly which copyrighted works are included in datasets training AI systems. The Generative AI Disclosure Act "would require a notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights...

Apple is finally making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts. From a report: In an update on Thursday, the company announced that this fall, owners of "select" iPhone models will be able to repair their devices with used, genuine parts while retaining full functionality. When repairing a phone, Apple requires iPhone users to go through a process called parts...

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused web search and browser company, announced on today the launch of its first subscription service, Privacy Pro. The service, priced at $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, includes a browser-based tool that automatically scans data broker websites for users' personal information and requests its removal. The service also includes DuckDuckGo's first VPN and an identity-theft-restoration service. Available initially only in...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Ministers are considering banning the sale of smartphones to children under the age of 16 after a number of polls have shown significant public support for such a curb. The government issued guidance on the use of mobile phones in English schools two months ago, but other curbs are said to have been considered to...