How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

There were hundreds of them, racking up tens of thousands of engagements and hundreds of thousands of views. As of early November, MIT Technology Review found dozens of duplicate fake Live videos from this time frame still up. One duplicate pair with over 200,000 and 160,000 views, respectively, proclaimed in Burmese, “I am the only […]

A grim milestone: I maxed out the number of spammy addresses Gmail can block

Getty Images reader comments 27 with 22 posters participating Share this story A few months ago, my G Suite-enabled Gmail account reached a grim milestone: with no warning, the “block [email address]” feature—available from the menu with the three vertical dots in the upper left of the Gmail screen—stopped working because I had maxed out […]

Locked out of “God mode,” runners are hacking their treadmills

Enlarge / NordicTrack owners aren’t giving up the fight just yet. Sam Whitney | Getty Images reader comments 30 with 21 posters participating Share this story JD Howard just wanted to watch cloud security tutorials. Howard, a construction industry worker on sabbatical, spent $4,000 on a NordicTrack X32i treadmill, lured in by its 32-inch HD […]

DuckDuckGo wants to stop apps tracking you on Android

Enlarge / Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo. Washington Post | Getty Images reader comments 12 with 9 posters participating Share this story At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their […]

Malware downloaded from PyPI 41,000 times was surprisingly stealthy

reader comments 16 with 14 posters participating Share this story PyPI—the open source repository that both large and small organizations use to download code libraries—was hosting 11 malicious packages that were downloaded more than 41,000 times in one of the latest reported such incidents threatening the software supply chain. JFrog, a security firm that monitors […]

Griffin on Tech: A win for the right-to-repair movement

Peter Griffin, Editor. 19 November 2021, 11:42 am After years of trying to keep its customers as far away from the insides of its devices as possible, Apple has relented, with plans to introduce Self Service Repair. Form next year and starting in its home market, the US, Apple will allow customers to buy a […]

Government action on accessibility to ramp up next year

by Dr Chandra Harrison, Contributor. 19 November 2021, 8:08 am Last month brought some exciting news for those of us interested in accessibility issues, with disabilities issues minister Carmel Sepuloni announcing the formation of a new Ministry for Disabled People. This should give us hope for a more equitable digital experience for all. In a […]

Ford and chipmaker announce noncommittal “partnership” to alleviate shortages

Bloomberg | Getty Images reader comments 35 with 23 posters participating Share this story In an effort to combat the ongoing global chip shortage, chipmaker GlobalFoundries and the Ford Motor Company have announced a “strategic collaboration” today, both via press release and coverage in The Wall Street Journal. The “non-binding agreement,” according to the release, […]

Engineering the future of mobility

From cars to planes, the future of transportation is already here—and is changing rapidly. Software engineering is increasingly central to both the development and maintenance of all kinds of vehicles. That means more people need to start thinking like systems engineers. Dale Tutt, vice president of aerospace and defense industry for Siemens Software, says this […]