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COVID Test Lab Leaks Details of Over a Million Patients Online
A leaked COVID-19 testing database which contains the personal details of an estimated 1.3 million people has been discovered online by a top security researcher.
The database, operated by Coronalab.eu which is owned by Microbe & Lab, an ISO-certified lab based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, was found without password protection and the documents within were all marked with the name and logo of the database owner.
Inside the database, the full names, dates of birth and passport numbers of over a million people were discovered. The owner of the database, Microbe & Lab, is an ISO-certified lab based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The email addresses, test results, prices and locations of many other tests were also found within QR codes and .csv files. This information would be an absolute goldmine for a malicious actor, who could utilize the data to launch highly sophisticated COVID-19-related phishing attacks, commit fraud, or sell the data on.
40 Years Ago, Apple Got Our Current Tech Dystopia Dead Wrong
We are all the sledgehammer, Apple does like to tell its fans. We are all disruptors hurtling toward one great screen, breaking the iron-fisted hold that other tech firms want to impose on us.
The hellscape dystopia world of Apple’s famed “1984” commercial modeled after George Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 never really came to pass. As silly as it is to say, Apple was right. We didn’t win some nebulous liberation, exactly. We won a whole different soup of tech-based dystopia.
Today, tech companies pander to people’s worst impulses to siphon as much money from their users as possible. It’s a model envisioned by Aldous Huxley. His 1932 novel, Brave New World, describes how average folks would seek their own oppression for the simple, mindless pleasures of drugs and technology, reducing their capacity or even desire to fight back against that which took away their autonomy.
Yes, as much as it sounds like doomerism, today’s current tech environment tracks much more closely to Huxley’s crapsack vision than Orwell’s.
Wrongful Arrest Raises (Another) Alarm: Invasive Facial Recognition Technology’s Flaws Exposed in $10M Lawsuit
Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr, a 61-year-old man, is launching a legal battle against Macy’s and EssilorLuxottica, Sunglass Hut’s parent company, alleging a misidentification by facial recognition technology led to his unlawful arrest. Murphy’s lawsuit asserts that owing to a flawed criminal identification by a low-quality camera image, he spent days unjustly incarcerated where he underwent horrific physical and sexual violence.
In January 2022, a robbery at a Houston-based Sunglass Hut led to the theft of merchandise worth thousands. However, Murphy’s legal counsel insists that Murphy was living in California, not Texas, during that time frame.
Murphy’s lawsuit details how an EssilorLuxottica staff member in cooperation with Macy’s used facial recognition software to single out him as the thief. Following the allegation, a team member from EssilorLuxottica claimed to have identified one of two burglars involved in the heist using this technology, directing the Houston police department to halt its ongoing investigation.
According to a Guardian report, after experiencing wrongful imprisonment in the local county jail and later being transferred to the Harris County jail, his charges were dropped as his alibi was certified by his defense attorney and prosecutor. Nevertheless, the alleged horrifying physical and sexual assault he underwent hours before his release from jail left him severely traumatized.
Doomsday Clock at 90 Seconds to Midnight Amid Nuclear and AI Threats
The world remains the closest it has ever been to the symbolic hour of the apocalypse, with the Doomsday Clock set once again to 90 seconds to “midnight” for 2024.
Wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, a spiraling climate crisis and the rise of artificial intelligence are among the threats continuing to put human existence under pressure, according to the people who run the clock.
The clock, which has been used for seven decades, was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 amid Cold War nuclear tensions — and is seen as “a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies,” the group said Tuesday.
The Chicago-based nonprofit focused this year in part on the rise of AI, saying in a statement that sophisticated chatbots such as ChatGPT “led some respected experts to express concern about existential risks arising from further rapid advancements in the field.” It called for greater global governance of what it termed a “disruptive technology.”
GOP Senator Urges SCOTUS to Rein in Big Tech’s Content Censorship That Defies ‘Logic’
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is urging the Supreme Court not to buy into arguments from Big Tech platforms that they should have First Amendment freedom to censor user content while simultaneously demanding legal protection from content posted on their platforms.
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a set of cases that question whether state laws that limit Big Tech companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms curb the companies’ First Amendment liberties.
The Missouri Republican filed a brief in the cases Tuesday, arguing the platforms want to keep liability protections granted by Congress for content on their sites, while simultaneously asking for unfettered ability to censor content, citing their First Amendment liberties.
The court “should not bless the platforms’ contradictory positions, much less constitutionalize them,” Hawley argued, adding that “doing so would effectively immunize the platforms from both civil liability in tort and regulatory oversight by legislators.”
Amazon’s Ring to Stop Letting Police Request Doorbell Video From Users
Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring home doorbell unit says it will stop letting police departments request footage from users’ video doorbells and surveillance cameras, retreating from a practice that was criticized by civil liberties groups and some elected officials.
Next week, the company will disable its Request For Assistance tool, the program that had allowed law enforcement to seek footage from users on a voluntary basis, Eric Kuhn, who runs Ring’s Neighbors app, said in a blog post on Wednesday. Police and fire departments will have to seek a warrant to request footage from users or show the company evidence of an ongoing emergency.
The move marks a course change for Ring, which from its startup days through its years as part of Amazon couched its mission almost exclusively as an effort to improve public safety through surveillance. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon sealed the acquisition of his company in 2018.
Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have long criticized Ring, accusing it of building a residential surveillance network available on demand to law enforcement and highlighting the history of biased policing in the U.S.
Court Rules in Favor of a Web Scraper, Bright Data, Which Meta Had Used and Then Sued
Meta has lost a claim in its legal battle with an Israeli tech firm, Bright Data, which it sued last year for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram via the web. The tech giant, which has a long history of suing data scraping businesses, claimed that Bright Data’s data harvesting was a violation of its terms of service — which Bright Data had agreed to by having accounts on Meta’s platforms.
However, a court has ruled in favor of Bright Data on Meta’s “breach of contract” claim, saying that Meta had not presented sufficient evidence that the firm had scraped anything but public data.
The lawsuit was particularly interesting because it revealed that Meta had earlier paid Bright Data to gather data from e-commerce websites to build brand profiles on its platforms. In other words, Meta was a customer of Bright Data’s web scraping services before it went to sue them, though it used the company’s services for a different purpose.
In a related matter, Bright Data had also been accused of collecting personal information about minors pulled from Facebook and Instagram, Bloomberg reported last year.
Such data scraping operations can put user privacy at risk as data collected by web scrapers has been previously leaked online, such as in the case where the personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts was found to have been leaked.
