hatemail 2023-03-06

FTC to Ban BetterHelp from Revealing Consumers’ Data, Including Sensitive Mental Health Information, to Facebook and Others for Targeted Advertising

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a proposed order banning online counseling service BetterHelp, Inc. [FTC]

The Spooky, Loosely Regulated World of Online Therapy

Like many of the businesses offering therapy online, the service promotes itself as a seamless way to access mental health services. [Jezebel]

Data & Society's Jenna Burrell thinks we're worrying about the wrong things about chatbots | Semafor

Jenna Burrell wants us to stop attributing human-like qualities to chatbots and think of them as tools — with strength, weakness and limitations. [Semaphor]

Airbnb Is Banning People Who Are ‘Closely Associated’ With Already-Banned Users

As a safety precaution, the tech company sometimes bans users because the company has discovered that they “are likely to travel” with another person who has already been banned. [VICE]

Dirt: The future of search

TikTok vs. chatbots. [Dirt]

A Native Son of Palo Alto Thinks His Hometown Will Kill Us All

Author Malcolm Harris argues that the economic and technological ills of society can all be traced back to one city in the heart of Silicon Valley. [Wired]

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon. [MIT Technology Review]

Top Kickboxers Advertised Encrypted Phones Used by Organized Crime

Dutch police hacked and shutdown Exclu, a phone network used by alleged criminals. A promotional video shows professional fighters promoting the phones. [VICE]

Keep your AI claims in check

The FTC warns tech companies not to overstate their use of AI to consumers. [FTC]

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Data Brokers and the Sale of Americans’ Mental Health Data

This report finds that the industry appears to lack a set of best practices for handling individuals’ mental health data, particularly in the areas of privacy and buyer vetting. It finds that there are data brokers which advertise and are willing and able to sell data concerning Americans’ highly sensitive mental health information. [Duke University]

The Camera Shy Hoodie — Mac Pierce

A DIY wearable for avoiding recognition on IR security cameras. [Mac Pierce]

DensePose from WiFi

“Using wifi signals to detect human movement/behavior. Imaging like a radar. No need to install a camera in the building to see what's going on inside.” – @lukolejnik [DensePose paper by CMU researchers]

Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers

Investigations 'at risk' from sloppy surveillance uncovered by audit probe. [The Register]

BitTorrent Seedbox Provider Handed Criminal Conviction Over Users' Piracy * TorrentFreak

A man who rented out servers configured for BitTorrent file-sharing use has been handed a three-month suspended sentence in Denmark. [TorrentFreak]

Artemis vulnerability scanner is now open source

Artemis is a tool developed by the CERT Polska team and initiated by the KN Cyber science club of Warsaw University of Technology. The tool is built to find website misconfigurations and vulnerabilities on a large scale. [CERT PL]

Apple’s iPhone Passcode Problem: Thieves Can Ruin Your Entire Digital Life in Minutes | WSJ

iPhone thieves across the country are locking people out of their Apple and iCloud accounts and gaining access to Apple Pay and bank apps, draining them of thousands of dollars—sometimes before victims even know what happened. [WSJ on YouTube]

Conservative News Corp. empire says hackers were inside its network for 2 years

News Corp. disclosed the breach last year. Now, company says it lasted 23 months. [ArsTechnica]

Russian State Hackers Use Britney Spears Instagram Posts to Control Malware

A cyber-espionage group known as Turla — believed to be the cyber-arm of Russian intelligence — has been playing around with a backdoor trojan disguised as a Firefox extension that uses comments on Britney Spears Instagram photos to store the location of its command and control (C&C) server. [BleepingComputer]

Hackers Breach U.S. Marshals System With Sensitive Personal Data

The compromised computer system includes information on both investigative targets and agency employees. [NYTimes]

Gamers are fixing a video game ‘taken over’ by hackers

Hackers are targeting Activision's first person shooter Black Ops III exploiting significant vulnerabilities. These two gamers are fighting back. [TechCrunch]

Barricaded Siblings Turn to TikTok While Defying Court Order to Return to Father They Say Abused Them

A judge concluded the children were victims of “parental alienation,” which continues to influence family courts despite being rejected by mainstream scientific groups, and authorized police to use “reasonable force” to remove them from their mother. [ProPublica]

Take It Down

This service is one step you can take to help remove online nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit photos and videos taken before you were 18. Developed by NCMEC, it has some serious backing from tech companies like Meta. [NCMEC]

Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse | StopNCII.org

StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that all should benefit from technology, free from harm. [StopNCII]

Event: The Rights of Sex Workers in the Digital Age

March 9, 2023. Panelists Sinnamon Love (BIPOC-AIC), N'Jaila Rhee (NJRUA), Nosipho Vidima, and Beyonce Karungi. Discussion will showcase sex worker leadership from across the globe to discuss digital technologies, online spaces and rights questions pertaining to access for women. [EventBrite]

Networks of pro-Kremlin Telegram channels spread disinformation at a global scale

Three networks comprising fifty-six channels targeted Telegram users in twenty countries and ten languages. [DFRLab]

This week’s Who Hosts Hate? is LeaseWeb Netherlands B.V. LeaseWeb is a Dutch cloud services provider with datacenters located Europe, Asia, and North America. White nationalist sites like ironmarch[.]org rely on LeaseWeb’s hosting services; Iron March’s most recent IP resolutions on IPInfo: https://ipinfo.io/82.192.82.226, https://ipinfo.io/37.48.65.143.

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