On Friday, Tim Cook will mark the seventh anniversary of his ascension as Apple Inc.’s seventh chief executive officer. At 57, he’s in his prime, and all signs point to a durable tenure. When Apple’s board named Cook CEO back in 2011, the directors signed him on for a decade with massive stock awards that finish vesting in the summer of 2021. (On his anniversary, Cook is set to collect stock worth about $120 million thanks to a run-up in Apple shares.)
This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their loved ones.
A company that markets cell phone spyware to parents and employers left the data of thousands of its customers—and the information of the people they were monitoring—unprotected online.
The data exposed included selfies, text messages, audio recordings, contacts, location, hashed passwords and logins, Facebook messages, among others, according to a security researcher who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal repercussions.
Källa: Spyware Company Leaves ‘Terabytes’ of Selfies, Text Messages, and Location Data Exposed Online
When Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs that the Apple Lisa computer was not named after her, it was not a cruel lie to a little girl, she insists — he was teaching her “not to ride on his coattails.”
When Mr. Jobs refused to install heat in her bedroom, he was not being callous, she says — he was instilling in her a “value system.”
When a dying Mr. Jobs told Ms. Brennan-Jobs that she smelled “like a toilet,” it was not a hateful snipe, she maintains — he was merely showing her “honesty.”
It’s a strange thing to write a devastating memoir with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. Yet that’s exactly what Ms. Brennan-Jobs has done in a new memoir, “Small Fry,” and in a series of interviews conducted over the last few weeks.
Källa: In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?
ALTENA, Germany — When you ask locals why Dirk Denkhaus, a young firefighter trainee who had been considered neither dangerous nor political, broke into the attic of a refugee group house and tried to set it on fire, they will list the familiar issues.
This small riverside town is shrinking and its economy declining, they say, leaving young people bored and disillusioned. Though most here supported the mayor’s decision to accept an extra allotment of refugees, some found the influx disorienting. Fringe politics are on the rise.
But they’ll often mention another factor not typically associated with Germany’s spate of anti-refugee violence: Facebook.
Källa: Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests
From Cloudflare’s headline-making takedown of the Daily Stormer last autumn to YouTube’s summer restrictions on LGBTQ content, there’s been a surge in “voluntary” platform censorship. Companies—under pressure from lawmakers, shareholders, and the public alike—have ramped up restrictions on speech, adding new rules, adjusting their still-hidden algorithms and hiring more staff to moderate content. They have banned ads from certain sources and removed “offensive” but legal content.
These moves come in the midst of a fierce public debate about what responsibilities platform companies that directly host our speech have to take down—or protect—certain types of expression. And this debate is occurring at a time in whoch only a few large companies host most of our online speech. Under the First Amendment, intermediaries generally have a right to decide what kinds of expression they will carry. But just because companies can act as judge and jury doesn’t mean they should.
This new class of attacks was dubbed MadIoT (Manipulation of demand via IoT) by researchers from Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering. Instead of directly attacking the supply side of the power grid, attackers could enslave high-wattage IoT devices in a botnet to manipulate the demand side of the grid.
Källa: Botnet of smart air conditioners and water heaters could bring down the power grid
