Newsletter Archives

• Forces shaping the future: The courts at work

  Posted on September 23, 2024 at 02:43 CDT by Max Stul Oppenheimer • Comment in the Forums

  LEGAL BRIEF

  

  By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq.

  Three social factors shape the path of future development of technology: government rules, litigation, and consumer actions.

  In last month’s Legal Brief, we reviewed how government rules and enforcement actions are being used to attempt to influence how technology will develop.

  This time, we’ll look at how litigation — both private and governmental — is being used in attempts to influence the path of technological development.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.39.0, 2024-09-23).

  Legal Brief AI, ByteDance, Consumers, Copyright, Facebook, Fair Use, GARM, Google, Legal, Litigation, Meta, Newsletters, NFT, TikTok

• Will Threads be the real Twitter killer?

  Posted on July 24, 2023 at 02:44 CDT by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The parent company of Facebook and Instagram — Meta Platforms — launched this month Threads, a Twitter-like social network. It looks like the first serious contender to knock Twitter off its perch.

  Unlike other Twitter competitors — Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, and many more — Threads has already attracted a gigantic audience. The Threads app for iOS and Android surpassed 100 million users in just its first five days. That makes it the fastest-growing app ever, besting ChatGPT, which required two months to hit the same mark.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.30.0, 2023-07-24).

  Public Defender Facebook, Instagram, Newsletters, Social networks, Threads, Twitter

• Will the last tech worker who is fired please turn off the server

  Posted on December 19, 2022 at 02:44 CST by B. Livingston • Comment in the Forums

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  A wave of layoffs by the world’s largest technology companies is causing widespread fears. People are afraid that the growth spurt in online commerce that occurred during the coronavirus pandemic may be over — and opportunities for tech employment may never be the same again.

  Firings and separations are certainly ripping through the Internet at a rapid pace. But the impact of all this downsizing may not be exactly what you might expect.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.51.0, 2022-12-19).

  Public Defender Amazon, Facebook, Financial, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Newsletters, Tesla, Twitter

• The new privacy policy’s here! The new privacy policy’s here!

  Posted on August 8, 2022 at 02:45 CDT by Max Stul Oppenheimer • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 19.32 • 2022-08-08

  LEGAL BRIEF

  

  By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq.

  On July 26, Meta (aka Facebook) changed its privacy policy.

  So this is a good time to ask two questions: what’s in the new policy, and what should you do about it?

  You can find the new privacy policy here. Settle in — it’s enormous.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.32.0, 2022-08-08).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Legal Brief Facebook, Legal Brief, Meta, Newsletters, Privacy Policy

• Are your iPhone apps crashing this morning?

  Posted on July 10, 2020 at 08:19 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Looks like there’s a(nother) bug in the Facebook logon sequence.

  Spotify, Pinterest, Tinder and others may freeze – even if you don’t have the Facebook app installed. Why? Because those apps, and many others, use the Facebook logon code.

  There’s a solution – install a VPN, specifically Lockdown Apps.

  Details from Tom Warren at The Verge.

  The Facebook status report is here.

  Office Facebook, iOS

• Changing my mind about Facebook

  Posted on September 23, 2019 at 01:00 CDT by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  SECURITY

  Amy Babinchak

  Undoubtedly, you’ve seen the invitation to sign in to a website with your Facebook account. And you ask yourself: “How can that be safe?”

  Using one account sign-in for everything goes against a basic tenet of password security. And you’re trusting Facebook to keep your credentials secure — and not share them. (Sharing is core to Facebook.) And yet you watch as all your friends get hacked and cloned while using conventional sign-ins.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 16.34.0 (2019-09-23).

  On Security AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Facebook, Passwords, Sign-in security

• Facebook admits, one hour before the Mueller report press conference, that oh golly “millions” of Instagram users had plain-text passwords exposed

  Posted on April 18, 2019 at 14:38 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Talk about Friday night news dumps…

  Iain Thomson, writing for The Reg, wasn’t distracted by today’s news. Previously, Facebook said that “tens of thousands of Instagram users” had their plain text passwords stored on company servers.

  Now the tech goliath has decided to revise that figure, and, well, let’s just say it massively underestimated that number.

  “Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the amendmentreads today.

  “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users.”

  Other Facebook, Instagram

• Catalin Cimpanu: Over 540 million Facebook records found on exposed Amazon Web Service servers

  Posted on April 3, 2019 at 13:38 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Catalin Cimpanu has (another) amazing scoop, on ZDNet:

  The first server contained most of the data, and belonged to Cultura Colectiva, a Mexico-based online media platform operating across Spanish-speaking Latin America countries.

  At a size of 146GB, this AWS server stored over 540 million records detailing user account names, Facebook IDs, comments, likes, reactions, and other data used for analyzing social media feeds and user interactions.

  The second AWS server stored data recorded by the “At the Pool” Facebook game. This included details such as the Facebook user ID, a list of Facebook friends, likes, photos, groups, checkins, and user preferences like movies, music, books, interests, and other, along with 22,000 passwords.

  Facebook sells data to third parties, who don’t take care of it.

  Other Facebook

• Lincoln Spector: Hate Facebook? There are alternatives

  Posted on February 4, 2019 at 04:09 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  My name is Lincoln, and I’m a Facebook addict.

  Lincoln Spector is back with a Facebook takedown that’s different — there are problems, yes, but there are also alternatives. You aren’t stuck in the Zuckerberg rut. Get going with a site that doesn’t sell you out to Cambridge Analytica or Russian poll trolls.

  Out this morning to all AskWoody Plus members in Newsletter 16.4.0.

  Other Facebook, Lincoln Spector, MeWe

• Facebook blocks 90 million accounts, 50 million have stolen user info

  Posted on September 28, 2018 at 13:36 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  This is just breaking, but the best report I’ve seen is from the Washington Post.

  The company said as many as 90 million Facebook users — out of a total of 2.2 billion — will have to log back into their accounts as a result of the breach. Notifications will appear at the top of the Facebook news feed for the 50 million who were directly affected, executives said on a call with reporters.

  Sure to be a big topic over the weekend.

  UPDATE: Facebook’s official notification.

  UPDATE: From Brian Krebs:

  The company said it was just beginning its investigation, and that it doesn’t yet know some basic facts about the incident, such as whether these accounts were misused, if any private information was accessed, or who might be responsible for these attacks.

  Other Facebook

• Petition: Facebook should tell users how they were exposed to Russian propaganda

  Posted on October 15, 2017 at 07:45 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I just signed it. Suggest you do, too.

  Facebook enabled Russian interference in the United States election in 2016, but refuses to provide a full account to the public. In fact, it has recently removed data that allowed independent researchers to understand the nature and scale of the problem.

  American citizens that use Facebook deserve to know how they were exposed to Russian disinformation and propaganda. Facebook should provide this data to users in an application that makes it easy to understand.

  Users should be able to see how content and advertising messages from identified Russian sources appeared in their timeline, whether they interacted with such media, and basic metrics that quantify their exposure.

  Other Facebook

• The scale of tech winners

  Posted on October 14, 2017 at 16:01 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Fascinating piece from Ben Evans:

  Microsoft was working on smartphones and mobile devices 20 years ago, and now it’s killed Windows Mobile, acknowledged that the PC is going the way of the mainframe and, like IBM, has to make its way in a market shaped by other companies. There probably won’t be a technology that has 10x greater scale than smartphones, as mobile was 10x bigger than PCs and PCs were bigger than mainframes, simply because 5bn people will have smartphones and that’s all the (adult) people.

  Check it out.

   

  Other Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google
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