Facebook’s ‘supreme court’ says company got it wrong on removing content | GameStop? Reddit? Explaining what's happening in the stock market | ACCC vows to pursue Google's ad dominance
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An independent group tasked with evaluating how Facebook handles online content on Thursday reversed the social media giant's decision to delete content in four out of five test cases that it had reviewed. The cases dealt with hate speech, COVID-19 disinformation and other content — including a post quoting Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels — that may have broken the tech giant's digital rules. Politico
The internet has been used to prognosticate about stocks for decades, but there's never been anything quite like the Reddit community called r/wallstreetbets, also known as WSB. WSB takes something of an internet extremist's approach to investing. Its slogan is "Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal," alluding to the fringe message board and the Bloomberg computer system that is nearly ubiquitous in finance. NBC News
The ACCC has vowed to pursue Google's potential misuse of market power, after a new report raised fresh concerns about its dominance in the digital advertising space. It follows a high-stakes push by the Federal Government to force tech giants to pay for news content. While some argue the tech giants should pay for their market power, critics are concerned it could endanger a free and open internet. ABC News
ASPI ICPC
China pushes conspiracy theories on COVID origin, vaccines
ABC News
@huizhong_wu
The Communist Party sees the WHO investigation as a political risk because it focuses attention on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Australia
ACCC vows to pursue Google's ad dominance, as tech giant threatens to remove its search engine from Australia
ABC News
@HanSinclair @RaveenHunjan
The ACCC has vowed to pursue Google's potential misuse of market power, after a new report raised fresh concerns about its dominance in the digital advertising space. It follows a high-stakes push by the Federal Government to force tech giants to pay for news content. While some argue the tech giants should pay for their market power, critics are concerned it could endanger a free and open internet.
Aussie govts urged to adopt global cyber security standards for cloud
iTnews
@justinrhendry
A NSW government-sponsored taskforce of industry leaders has called on federal, state and local governments across Australia to adopt internationally recognised cyber security standards for cloud services.
OAIC finds 'multiple' Australian companies downplaying data breaches
iTnews
@rycrozier
Australia’s privacy watchdog has taken aim at a growing number of organisations that it says take too long to assess data breaches or that downplay the significance in customer notifications. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner issued multiple warnings in its latest report on notifiable data breaches.
519 data breach notifications include 33 from Australian government entities
ZDNet
@ashabeeeee
Australian entities covered by the Privacy Act reported 519 instances of data breaches in the six months to December 2020, a 5% increase from the first half of the year.
NSW running Data61 de-identification tool across COVID data prior to public release
ZDNet
@dobes
The New South Wales government has been using a tool to help de-identify data related to COVID-19 prior to the release of that data to the public, the CSIRO said on Thursday. The tool, dubbed Personal Information Factor (PIF), has been created by Data61, the NSW government, the Australian Computer Society, Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC), and "several other groups".
China
Jack Ma’s Ant Plans Major Revamp in Response to Chinese Pressure
The Wall Street Journal
@jingyanghk
Ant Group Co. is planning to turn itself into a financial holding company overseen by China’s central bank, responding to pressure to fall fully in line with financial regulations, according to people familiar with the matter.
From Daddy Ma to 'evil capitalist', how did China's richest man Jack Ma fall from grace?
ABC News
@samuelyang_
It's hard to imagine Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, vanishing from the public eye for nearly three months. But it happened to one of his fiercest competitors, Alibaba's Jack Ma, who briefly resurfaced recently after a controversial speech in late October.
A World Divided: The Conflict with Chinese Techno-Nationalism Isn’t Coming – It’s Already Here
War on the Rocks
@jmulvenon
The bottom line is that long-term competition with China is here to stay and the best defense is a good offense. Of course, the United States needs to invest in innovation, workforce, and supply chains, and the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” innovation plans are an excellent move in that direction.
White House vows to protect U.S. telecoms network from Huawei security threat
Reuters
The Biden administration will work to safeguard American telecoms networks from “untrusted vendors” like Huawei Technologies Co Ltd that threaten national security, the White House said on Wednesday, offering some insight into its plans for China’s top telecoms equipment company, long in Washington’s crosshairs.
USA
GameStop? Reddit? Explaining what's happening in the stock market
NBC News
@David_Ingram @lbayly_nbc
The internet has been used to prognosticate about stocks for decades, but there's never been anything quite like the Reddit community called r/wallstreetbets, also known as WSB. WSB takes something of an internet extremist's approach to investing. Its slogan is "Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal," alluding to the fringe message board and the Bloomberg computer system that is nearly ubiquitous in finance.
Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server
The Verge
@jaypeters
Discord has banned the r/WallStreetBets server, the company confirmed to The Verge. Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit is the driver of an unprecedented rally of GameStop stock, and has received a great deal of attention in the press as the stock continues to soar. Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Robinhood Stops Users From Trading GameStop Stocks, Other Reddit YOLO Picks
VICE
@neuwaves
Robinhood, the fee-free investment app that has helped Redditors and other retail investors pump dark horse stocks like GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, and Nokia, has stopped allowing users to buy those stocks and other YOLO picks.Robinhood Hit with Class Action After Blocking GameStop Trades
VICE
@josephfcox
"Robinhood purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock 'GME' from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock thereby deprived retail investors."
The GameStop Reckoning Was a Long Time Coming
The New York Times
@kevinroose
This week, the biggest story in the financial markets is the absurdist, pretty-sure-I-hallucinated-it drama involving GameStop, a struggling video-game retailer that became the rope in a high-stakes tug of war between Wall Street suits and a crusading internet mob.
WallStreetBets Founder Reckons With Legacy Amid Stock-Market Frenzy
The Wall Street Journal
@akaneotani
The man who created Reddit’s WallStreetBets isn’t who you think he is. He is 39 years old. He lives in Mexico City with his wife, a physician, and spends his weeks chasing after their 3-year-old twins and tending to his day job as a consultant—hardly the sort of character one might associate with the roiling investing forum.
Merrick Garland Wants Former Facebook Lawyer to Top Antitrust Division
The American Prospect
@ryangrim @ddayen
As the fight over the direction of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy intensifies, a new figure has entered the fray, scrambling the calculus: Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland. The battle so far has largely been fought out between lobbyists for Big Tech and their allies on the one hand and skeptics of monopoly power on the other.
Facebook Ad Services Let Anyone Target US Military Personnel
WIRED
@lilyhnewman
Despite warnings from researchers, Facebook’s ad system still lets anyone target a massive array of populations and groups—including campaigns directed at United States military personnel. Currently categories for major branches include “Army,” “Air Force,” and “National Guard,” along with much narrower categories like “United States Air Force Security Forces.”
Police Say They Can Use Facial Recognition, Despite Bans
The Markup
@alfredwkng
More than a dozen cities have passed facial recognition bans in the past couple of years, but police say there are loopholes
Most Tools Failed to Detect the SolarWinds Malware. Those That Did Failed Too
Council on Foreign Relations
@robknake
The SolarWinds breach shows that even the best-intentioned companies that have pledged to work cooperatively are not doing so in practice, at least when it counts.
North Asia
Push back on China, urges new Japan envoy
Financial Review
@andrewtillett
Mr Yamagami, who was a former director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry’s intelligence and analysis service, said strengthening intelligence sharing with Australia was one of his priorities but was coy about whether this would involve Japan joining the Five Eyes alliance, as some Japanese policymakers have expressed their eagerness to do.
Europe
Why Ericsson took on its own government to defend rival Huawei
Financial Times
@rmilneNordic
A company acting under pressure from China, or one standing up for free trade and a global internet? The extraordinary sight of Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms equipment maker, squaring up to its own government in support of its Chinese arch-rival Huawei has laid bare the intense geopolitical tensions facing some businesses.
Americas
CSIS warns Canadian universities about Alibaba’s online platform
The Globe and Mail
@RobertFife @stevenchase
Canada’s spy agency warned Canadian universities in August to be wary of using Chinese technology, including a service offered by e-commerce company Alibaba to help students based in China take online Zoom classes in this country.
Gender and Women in Cyber
Online Harassment Toward Women Is Getting Even More Insidious
WIRED
@wiczipedia
From coded memes to deepfake porn, abusive disinformation campaigns are sliding past moderation tools. Platforms, Congress, and employers need to help women fight back.
Misc
Facebook’s ‘supreme court’ says company got it wrong on removing content
Politico
@markscott82
An independent group tasked with evaluating how Facebook handles online content on Thursday reversed the social media giant's decision to delete content in four out of five test cases that it had reviewed. The cases dealt with hate speech, COVID-19 disinformation and other content — including a post quoting Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels — that may have broken the tech giant's digital rules.
Announcing the Oversight Board’s first case decisions
Oversight Board
Today, the Oversight Board is announcing its first decisions. In the five case decisions published today, the Board overturned four of Facebook’s decisions, upheld one and issued nine policy recommendations to the company. The cases covered four continents: Asia, Europe, North America and South America.Responding to the Oversight Board’s First Decisions
Facebook
Today, the Oversight Board published their decisions on the first set of cases they chose to review. We will implement these binding decisions in accordance with the bylaws and have already restored the content in three of the cases as mandated by the Oversight Board.
Facebook Preps Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple
The Information
@alexeheath @joshua_sisco
A long-simmering public dispute between Facebook and Apple has neared a boiling point. With the aid of outside legal counsel, Facebook for months has been preparing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple that would allege the iPhone-maker abused its power in the smartphone market by forcing app developers to abide by App Store rules that Apple’s own apps don’t have to follow, according to two people with direct knowledge of Facebook’s efforts.
Verified tweeters smashed records sharing deceptive content
Axios
@axios
Verified accounts on Twitter shared more content from deceptive websites than ever in 2020, according to new research from the German Marshall Fund shared exclusively with Axios.
Big Tech is trying to take governments’ policy role
Financial Times
@MarietjeSchaake
Both events demonstrate an ever-growing trend: technology companies think they should be deciding public policy, not governments. It is not just social media platforms, either. These days, all kinds of businesses set rules for how technology affects people’s lives. Encryption standards, for example, determine the extent of national security. Facial recognition systems deny the right to privacy.
Mark Zuckerberg is creating a new criminal justice reform group in an overhaul of his political operation
Vox
@teddyschleifer
The Facebook founder and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are making the largest structural change to their philanthropy since they launched it five years ago.
We Spoke to a Guy Who Got His Dick Locked in a Cage by a Hacker
VICE
@lorenzofb
Sam Summers was sitting at home with his penis wrapped in an internet-connected chastity cage when he got a weird message on the app that connects to the device. Someone told him they had taken control and they wanted around $1,000 in Bitcoin to give control back to Summers.
Research
Protecting Democracy in an Age of Disinformation: Lessons from Taiwan
Center for Strategic & International Studies
@CSIS
While CCP disinformation campaigns pose a clearly identifiable threat to the United States and Taiwan, they are only one part of a larger disinformation problem facing democracies in this era of instant and omnipresent communication technologies.
Myths and Realities of China’s Military-Civil Fusion Strategy
Center for a New American Security
@ebkania @lorandlaskai
MCF aims to promote deeper integration of China’s civilian and defense economies and their respective technological ecosystems. This effort is intended to create and leverage synergies between economic development and military modernization, allowing the defense and commercial enterprises to collaborate and synchronize their efforts through the sharing of talent, resources, and innovations. MCF is startlingly expansive in scope, including everything from efforts in big data and infrastructure to logistics and national defense mobilization.
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