Personal Tech

• Facebook sues scraper who sold 178 million phone numbers and user IDs

  Apparently The Social Network^TM is the only one allowed to do nasty things with users' data
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 08:01 UTC

  Facebook has sued a Ukrainian national for allegedly harvesting and selling personal data describing 178 million of the Social Network^TM's users – actions it says violates the service's terms of service.

  The suit alleges that Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko created millions of virtual Android devices, each with a different phone number, and used them to deliver automated requests to Facebook systems using the Messenger app.

  Over 21 months between January 2018 and September 2019, Solonchenko purportedly took advantage of Facebook Messenger's now-defunct Contact Importer feature. The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had an account with The Social Network^TM, presumably so they could contact them on Messenger rather than through other means.

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• Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie

  Some of those punch cards may still be lying at the bottom of a lift shaft
  Richard Speed Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 07:33 UTC 4

  Who, Me? Punch cards are the order of the day in a reader confession that takes us back to an unfortunate incident with a trolley. Welcome to Who, Me?

  To be fair, punch cards were on the wane at the time of our story in the early 1980s, but our reader (Regomised as "Ivor") was gainfully employed at an international manufacturer still keen on the things.

  After all, if a system wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing, right?

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• Asia's 'superapps' bundle ride-share, food delivery, even financial services – and they're beating big tech

  China backed the concept of tools users perceive as an extension of the OS, not just an app
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 07:03 UTC 3

  Catch a ride, pay your utility bills, order your dinner, top up your insurance, chat with friends – how many apps did you need to get that lot done? In much of the world North America and Europe your answer could involve a fistful of apps, but in Asia you could do it all in one, thanks to rise of the "superapp".

  Superapps are, for now, largely an Asian phenomenon, although the concept is more than a decade old. Blackberry founder Mike Lazaridis coined the term in 2010 to mean "a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience".

  Academic and researcher of digital business models and ecosystems at Singapore's ESSEC Business School Dr Jan Ondrus thinks a better definition for a superapp is essentially "an operating system".

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• Electronic Frontier Foundation ousts co-founder John Gilmore from its board

  He's free of governance duties now, but still an emeritus member
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 05:58 UTC 3

  Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gilmore has been removed from any active role on the digital rights organisation's board but will continue to serve as emeritus member.

  "Since he helped found EFF 31 years ago, John Gilmore has provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today," wrote EFF executive director Cindy Cohn.

  If your instincts tell you that's the kind of prose that presages a "but", your instincts were correct.

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• Cleanup on aisle C: Tesco app back online after attack led to shopping app outages

  With an average 1.27 million orders a week, many customers left hacked off
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 05:03 UTC 3

  The UK's largest retailer, supermarket titan Tesco, has restored its online operations after an attack hack left its customers unable to order, amend, or cancel deliveries for two days.

  A Tesco statement acknowledges disruption to the giant's grocery website and app, claiming "an attempt was made to interfere with our systems, which has caused problems with the search function on the site."

  The gigantic grocer has also said there's no reason to believe customer data is or was at risk.

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• Here comes the blob: Asia's top 'net boffin thinks 'shapeless services' could replace the Internet

  Common network services are less important when we've moved to apps hosted at the edge
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 03:58 UTC 3

  What will the internet look like in the year 2071? Geoff Huston, chief scientist the regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), thinks there may not be an internet – or at least not as we know it today.

  Huston's thinking is outlined in a presentation he made to a recent IBM Research event on the Future of Computer Communications Networks.

  The talk opened by pondering what predictions one would have made in 1921 – a time when Huston reckoned forecasting huge growth in voice telephony would have been a logical conclusion, but faxes and digital technology would not. He then repeated the exercise with 1971 as his starting point, and concluded that predicting computers would become a consumer product would have been hard to do at a time when the dominant personal electronics product was a pocket calculator.

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• NASA sets a date to begin lunar tuning

  First Artemis mission is stacked on a rocket – now for five punishing sets of tests before liftoff
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 00:18 UTC 2

  NASA has set a date for the test of the technologies it hopes will see it return to the Moon and explore Mars: February 2022.

  The agency on Saturday announced that its Orion spacecraft has been stacked atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and if all tests go well is expected to make an uncrewed test flight around the Moon.

  The mission – the first in the Artemis program – is billed as "the first integrated test of NASA's deep space exploration systems". NASA's plan is to send the SLS into space, whereupon the Orion capsule will head for the Moon.

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• Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

  Plus: Explore the limits of language models in bizarre research experiment, and more
  Katyanna Quach Sat 23 Oct 2021 // 03:30 UTC 38

  In brief A man was detained in Japan for selling uncensored pornographic content that he had, in a way, depixelated using machine-learning tools.

  Masayuki Nakamoto, 43, was said to have made about 11 million yen ($96,000) from peddling over 10,000 processed porn clips, and was formally accused of selling ten hardcore photos for 2,300 yen ($20). He pleaded guilty to violating Japan's copyright and obscenity laws, NHK reported this month.

  Explicit images of genitalia are forbidden in Japan, and as such its porn is partially pixelated. Don't pretend you don't know what we're talking about. Nakamato flouted these rules by downloading smutty photos and videos, and reportedly used deepfake technology to generate fake private parts in place of the pixelation.

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• Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon's open-source license with botched social network launch

  Golf enthusiast given 30 days to cough up code
  Chris Williams, Editor in Chief Sat 23 Oct 2021 // 00:38 UTC 45

  A Florida man has been accused of breaking the copyleft license of Mastodon by running an online instance of the software without providing its source code as required.

  And not only that, the real-estate baron and wannabe tech tycoon has been told he has a month to fall in line with the fine print or put himself potentially at risk of further action.

  Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging service that you host yourself. Servers running this software can form a larger, decentralized social network.

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• Antitrust battle latest: Google, Facebook 'colluded' to smash Apple's privacy protections

  Amended Texas complaint alleges backroom efforts to maintain ad dominance and more
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Fri 22 Oct 2021 // 22:51 UTC 27

  Several years ago, to deal with the competitive threat of header bidding – a way for multiple ad exchanges to get a fair shot at winning an automated auction for ad space – Google allegedly hatched a plan called "Jedi" to ensure that its ad exchange always won.

  And in 2017, after Facebook announced plans to support header bidding, Google, it's claimed, struck a deal with Facebook – dubbed "Jedi Blue" – in which the two internet behemoths would "work together to identify users using Apple products," and set up "quotas for how often Facebook would win publishers’ auctions."

  The Jedi project is described in an amended complaint, filed Friday, that expands the December 2020 antitrust claim against Google, brought by Texas, 14 other US states, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

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• Microsoft under fire again from open-source .NET devs: Hot Reload feature pulled for sake of Visual Studio sales

  Windows giant has a funny way of 'loving' Free software
  Tim Anderson Fri 22 Oct 2021 // 20:58 UTC 24

  Updated Microsoft has enraged the open-source .NET community by removing flagship functionality from open-source .NET to bolster the appeal of Visual Studio, not least against its cross-platform cousin Visual Studio Code.

  The two key pieces in this latest unrest are this pull request in the open-source .NET SDK repository on GitHub, in which 2,500 lines of code implementing a feature called Hot Reload are removed from a tool called dotnet watch; and this blog post in which Principal Program Manager Dmitry Lyalin revealed "we’ve decided that starting with the upcoming .NET 6 GA release, we will enable Hot Reload functionality only through Visual Studio 2022."

  Hot Reload is a feature whereby developers can modify source code while an application is running, apply the changes, and see the results in the running application. It speeds the development process because it is quicker than rebuilding the code, stopping the application, applying the changes, and then firing it up again.

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