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Episode 211: Scrapin’ ain’t Hackin’. Or is it?

Is scraping the same as hacking or just an example of “zealous” use of a social media platform? And if it isn’t considered hacking…should it be? As more and more online platforms open their doors to API-based access, do we need more rules and oversight of how APIs are used to prevent wanton abuse?

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Book argues for New Laws to break Social Media Monopolies

The US economy hasn’t simply allowed tech giants to ignore the social harms of their platforms; it has incentivized it. In his new book, Terms of Disservice, Dipayan Ghosh says regulation may be the only solution.

Israeli Group Exploited WhatsApp to Spy on Users

An Israeli firm has exploited a flaw in the popular messaging mobile app WhatsApp to plant spyware on iPhones and Android. One phone call is all it takes for software developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group to install itself on a vulnerable iPhone or Android device, according to a published report in the FT Times. The publication broke the news, saying it potentially affects 1.5 billion users of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging application, on Monday. WhatsApp quickly issued a fix for the exploit, described in an alert on the Facebook website as “a buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack” that allows for “remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number.” “WhatsApp encourages people to upgrade to the latest version of our app, as well as keep their mobile operating system up to date, to protect against potential targeted exploits designed […]

Podcast Episode 141: Massive Data Breaches Just Keep Happening. We Talk about Why.

Countless Congressional hearings, 48 state data privacy laws and GDPR and mega breaches like the discovery of data on 500 million Facebook users just keep happening. Why? In this episode of the podcast, Paul is joined by experts from the firm BitSight and BigID to discuss why we can’t seem to stop the breaches.

Report: China, Like Russia, Uses Social Media to Sway U.S. Public Opinion

Russia isn’t the only nation using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to spread its political message across in the United States; China also is using social media–albeit in different ways–to sway public opinion and make the Communist country look favorable to the American public, research has found. China’s state-sponsored media is using English-language social-media operations–including targeted advertisements on Facebook–to push positive propaganda about the country to American users, according to a new assessment from security intelligence firm Recorded Future. It’s already well known that Russia has used U.S. social media to sway not just public opinion but also results in the 2006 U.S. presidential election. Now the research takes a deeper dive into how China is doing something similar, although to support a different political agenda, according to a blog post outlining the findings by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. “These differences in technique are driven by dissimilar […]