Tag Archive for: report

US legislation requiring tech industry to report terrorist activity dropped

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The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has dropped a provision that would have required Internet companies to report on vaguely-defined terrorist activity on their platforms, a move that was strongly opposed by the industry and civil rights groups.

The controversial section 603 was included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 but Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, had put a hold on the bill, stating that he wanted to work with colleagues to revise or remove the provision so that the rest of the bill could move forward.

On Monday, Wyden said that the “vague & dangerous” provision had been removed from the bill and he would now be lifting the hold on it.

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Network World Security

Human Rights Watch Submission: World Development Report on Internet for … – Human Rights Watch

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Human Rights Watch Submission: World Development Report on Internet for …
Human Rights Watch
[xv]; Citizen Lab's research has also uncovered evidence that two such commercially available products, Hacking Team's Remote Control System and FinFisher's FinSpy, may have been in use in over 20 countries in recent years, including Ethiopia,[xvi] …

finspy – read more

Are wearables dead? This report says consumer interest is declining fast

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A report released today shows that consumer demand for wearables in the U.S. has declined steeply and steadily since the 2014 holiday shopping season, and is now lower than it was at the beginning of last year.

Argus Insights based its report based on more than 327,000 consumer reviews to determine interest in the market over time. The research found that the wearables market was briefly captivated by the Apple Watch in September 2014, but instead gravitated toward the less-expensive Fitbit fitness band for the 2015 holiday season. Since then, however, consumers have generally lost interest in wearable devices, as this chart shows.

082615 argus insights chart Argus Insights

The report acknowledged a similar dip in interest in wearables in early 2014, following a spike during the preceding holiday season, but pointed out that demand eventually rebounded, ultimately peaking by the end of the year. This year, the market for wearable devices has largely failed to recapture consumer interest.

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Network World Colin Neagle

NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years

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NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of “every single successful computer intrusion” by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. More than 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period.

The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed “intelligence source,” who said the briefing “highlighted China’s interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems… [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated,” the network reported.

The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the “exploitations and attacks,” NBC reported.

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