Bleeping Computer: Flash Used on 5% of All Websites, Down From 28.5% Seven Years Ago. YAAAAAAAY! “Only 4.9 percent of today’s websites utilize Flash code, a number that has plummeted from a 28.5 percent market share recorded at the start of 2011. The number, courtesy of web technology survey site W3Techs, confirms Flash’s decline, and a reason why Adobe has decided to retire the technology at the end of 2020.”
Security & Legal Issues
Security & Legal issues and news. May be about patches, hacks, or court decisions.
New York Times: How Looming Privacy Regulations May Strengthen Facebook and Google
New York Times: How Looming Privacy Regulations May Strengthen Facebook and Google. “In Europe and the United States, the conventional wisdom is that regulation is needed to force Silicon Valley’s digital giants to respect people’s online privacy. But new rules may instead serve to strengthen Facebook’s and Google’s hegemony and extend their lead on the internet.”
CNET: Company formerly known as Yahoo to pay $35M over massive breach
CNET: Company formerly known as Yahoo to pay $35M over massive breach. “Yahoo’s cybersecurity failures continue to haunt the company — now to the tune of $35 million. The US Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that Altaba, the company formed from the ashes of Yahoo’s sale to Verizon, has agreed to pay a penalty of that amount to settle charges that Yahoo failed to disclose a massive data breach from December 2014.”
Bloomberg Quint: Google Aims at Privacy Law After Facebook Lobbying Failed
Bloomberg Quint: Google Aims at Privacy Law After Facebook Lobbying Failed. “While Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were publicly apologizing this month for failing to protect users’ information, Google’s lobbyists were drafting measures to de-fang an Illinois law recognized as the most rigorous consumer privacy statute in the country. Their ambition: to strip language from a decade-old policy that regulates the use of fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition technology, and insert a loophole for companies embracing the use of biometrics.”
IoT Inspector: Princeton releases a tool to snoop on home IoT devices and figure out what they’re doing (Boing Boing)
Boing Boing: IoT Inspector: Princeton releases a tool to snoop on home IoT devices and figure out what they’re doing. “IoT Inspector is a new tool from Princeton’s computer science department; it snoops on the traffic from home IoT devices and performs analysis to determine who they phone home to, whether they use encryption, and what kinds of data they may be leaking…. The first 50 devices are basically a security/privacy dumpster fire.”
TechCrunch: German Supreme Court dismisses Axel Springer lawsuit, says ad blocking is legal
TechCrunch: German Supreme Court dismisses Axel Springer lawsuit, says ad blocking is legal . “Germany’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit yesterday from Axel Springer against Eyeo, the company behind AdBlock Plus. The European publishing giant (which acquired Business Insider in 2015) argued that ad blocking, as well as the business model where advertisers pay to be added to circumvent the white list, violated Germany’s competition law. Axel Springer won a partial victory in 2016, when a lower court ruled that it shouldn’t have to pay for white listing.”
Krebs on Security: A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews
Krebs on Security: A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews. “In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews disappeared from the Web. Over the past few months, however, the same prolific purveyor of these phantom sites and reviews appears to be back at it again, enlisting the help of Internet users and paying people $25-$35 for each fake listing.”
