Hatemail News Roundup

It’s a vacation week this week at hatemail HQ, so we will leave you this extended news roundup of weekend reading. Ciao!

Ethical Tech

• [Mozilla] Mozilla introduces Rally, a consensual data-sharing platform that puts users in control of their data by letting them choose to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society.
• [Wall Street Journal] Tech companies Asana and Twilio are committing to list shares on the Long Term Stock Exchange, an alternative stock exchange that has strict requirements for companies to commit to environmental, diversity, and social good goals.
• [MIT Technology Review] [Mada Masr] Senior executives at a French spyware firm Amesys have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents.
• [arsTechnica] Apple and Google both say on-device machine learning offers more privacy and snappier apps… but keeping data on devices aligns with the tech giants' long-term interest in keeping consumers bound into their ecosystems.
• [arsTechnica] OpenAI’s project shows how the tech industry is scrambling to constrain the dark side of a technology that’s shown enormous potential but also can spread disinformation and perpetuate biases.
• [The Verge] Facebook has developed a new method to reverse-engineer deepfakes and track their source.
• [Stanford] Researchers at Stanford have published their research into what Reddit Tells Us About Political Coalitions and Conflicts.
• [New York Times] Ikea France was fined 1 million euros by a French court after it was found guilty of spying on union organizers, employees, job applicants and even disgruntled customers for nearly a decade.
• [Apple][Metz Dowd] At WWDC, Apple released a slew of new accessibility development frameworks for developers to make more inclusive apps. Meanwhile, researchers begin analyzing Apple’s new “privacy VPN”.

Cyber Sexual Abuse

• [LA Times] Former US Rep. Katie Hill is at the forefront of the fight for a national law against non-consensual abuse material.
• [arsTechnica] Pornhub is being sued by 34 women alleging that the site hosted videos without their consent and profited from other nonconsensual content involving rape, child sexual abuse, and human trafficking.
• [The Verge] From Verge Opinion: When does sharing become oversharing?

On our radar…

• [CNBC] [VICE] Affiliates of the cl0p ransomware group got scooped up in a law enforcement takedown. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance claim they helped identify the hackers.
• [DoJ] United States Seizes Websites Used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union and Hezbollah. The justification is for election interference, the jurisdiction is… interesting. HTTPS certs filed in the US means the US has jurisdiction?!
• [Facebook] Facebook scoops up more information operations. Glad how routine this is getting!

• [CFR] Council on Foreign Relations researchers dive into the expansion of Chinese information operations.