White House pushing for research carveout in GDPR

The White House is hoping to convince European regulators to protect security researchers in their General Data Protection Regulation so they can continue to scrape data that’s relevant for data breach and botnet investigations, according to White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce.

Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign

Facebook is at the center of a dozen controversies, and outrage is peaking. The social network has failed again and again at expanding beyond a handful of core features. Doubts of its usefulness, and assertions of its uselessness, are multiplying. A crisis of confidence at multiple levels threatens the company’s structure and mission. Now is the time for Mark Zuckerberg to spare himself the infamy and resign — for Facebook’s sake and his own.

Zuckerberg makes Cambridge Analytica statement video – CNET

CNET News Video

In a blog post on his profile page, the Facebook CEO explains how the company fumbled with user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and outlines how it plans to make things right with its users.

Look Upon Eyepot, And Weep For Mercy

Hope you weren’t looking forward to a night of sleep untroubled by nightmares. Doing his part to make sure  Lovecraftian mechanized horrors have lease in your subconscious, [Paul-Louis Ageneau] has recently unleashed the horror that is Eyepot upon an unsuspecting world. This Cycloptic four legged robotic teapot takes inspiration from an enemy in the game Alice: Madness Returns, and seems to exist for no reason other than to creep people out.

Facebook Board Voices Support For Zuckerberg And Sandberg In Cambridge Analytica Crisis

Facebook’s suddenly embattled top brass, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, received a full-throated endorsement from the company’s board Wednesday afternoon, after a flat-footed response to revelations that a data mining firm had improperly accessed information about millions of the social network’s users.

Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Out on Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Following days of silence about the political data firm Cambridge Analytica’s alleged misuse of 50 million Facebook users’ data, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is finally speaking out.

Former employee visits cloud and steals company data

Employees aren’t always going to be employees, and therefore you must have in place a mechanism to address what happens when someone is no longer a member of the company team. The circumstances of a person’s departure may affect the manner and means in which you act, but the result needs to be the same: full and complete termination of access to company information. Any employee who departs is no longer a trusted insider.

Warriors GM Gives Injury Updates on Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson

Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

The Golden State Warriors have been extremely cautious with their best players this season, and several injured stars could be returning soon. 

YouTube Bans Firearms Demo Videos, Entering the Gun Control Debate

YouTube has quietly introduced tighter restrictions on videos involving weapons, becoming the latest battleground in the U.S. gun-control debate. “YouTube will ban videos that promote or link to websites selling firearms and accessories, including bump stocks, which allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire faster,” reports Bloomberg. “Additionally, YouTube said it will prohibit videos with instructions on how to assemble firearms.” From the report: “We routinely make updates and adjustments to our enforcement guidelines across all of our policies,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement. “While we’ve long prohibited the sale of firearms, we recently notified creators of updates we will be making around content promoting the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories.” The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry lobbying group, called YouTube’s new policy “worrisome.” “We suspect it will be interpreted to block much more content than the stated goal of firearms and certain accessory sales,” the foundation said in a statement. “We see the real potential for the blocking of educational content that serves instructional, skill-building and even safety purposes. Much like Facebook, YouTube now acts as a virtual public square. The exercise of what amounts to censorship, then, can legitimately be viewed as the stifling of commercial free speech.”

The new YouTube policies will be enforced starting in April, but at least two video bloggers have already been affected. Spike’s Tactical, a firearms company, said in a post on Facebook that it was suspended from YouTube due to “repeated or severe violations” of the video platform’s guidelines.

Wireshark, an Open-Source Forensic Tool

Overview “Today we are at a defining moment in the evolution and growth of the Internet. Large-scale data breaches, uncertainties about the use of our data, cybercrime, surveillance and other…

How to revoke Facebook apps’ access to your data right now – CNET

I know I’ve probably used tons of Facebook apps over the years. You may or may not know that these apps collect data from your Facebook account. After it was recently revealed that Cambridge Analytica obtained misappropriated personal information from 50 million Facebook users, protecting our data seems rather more important.

Soccer Odds Roundup: Germany, Argentina Betting Favorites in Friday Friendlies

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Germany will be looking for its first victory since the conclusion of World Cup qualifying when it hits the pitch against Spain for a friendly on Friday as the +140 betting favorite (wager $100 to win $140) at sportsbooks monitored by OddsShark.

7 much scarier questions for Zuckerberg

Did Cambridge Analytica attain other ill-gotten Facebook data?

Effective data security requires proper IT hardware disposal procedures (TechRepublic)

IT buying trends revealed by the 2018 State of IT report from Spiceworks indicate that many organizations are planning to spend the same or slightly more on hardware in 2018 than they did in 2017. According to the report, 44% expect their IT budgets to grow this year, while 43% expect the IT budget to remain the same.

AT&T Suffers Another Blow In Court Over Throttling of ‘Unlimited’ Data

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge has revived a lawsuit that angry customers filed against AT&T over the company’s throttling of unlimited mobile data plans. The decision comes two years after the same judge decided that customers could only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration instead of in a class-action lawsuit. The 2016 ruling in AT&T’s favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court. But the customers subsequently filed a motion to reconsider the arbitration decision, saying that an April 2017 decision by the California Supreme Court “constitutes a change in law occurring after the Courts arbitration order,” Judge Edward Chen of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said in the new ruling issued last week. The state Supreme Court “held that an arbitration agreement that waives the right to seek the statutory remedy of public injunctive relief in any forum is contrary to California public policy and therefore unenforceable,” Chen wrote.

AT&T argued that the court shouldn’t consider the new argument, saying that plaintiffs raised it too late. The plaintiffs could have made the same argument before the April 2017 Supreme Court ruling, since the ruling was based on California laws that “were enacted decades ago,” according to AT&T. Chen was not persuaded, noting that “there had been no favorable court rulings” the plaintiffs could have cited earlier in the case. “The Court also finds that Plaintiffs acted with reasonable diligence once there was a ruling favorable to them,” Chen wrote. As a result, the plaintiffs can now proceed with their case in U.S. District Court against AT&T. However, AT&T will appeal Chen’s latest decision, presumably in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.