prevention

Comics that support social causes are one of my favorite things. Combine comics for a cause with Animal Cruelty Prevention Month, which takes place each April, and you have publishers raising funds to support U.S. animal rescue organizations and awareness about the plight of abused and neglected animals. As an animal lover, I believe raising awareness this April about how comic book fans can use the medium to save fur babies’ lives is important. “Our (mostly) silent global roommates add vibrance, variety, and wonder to…

Clearview AI, the shady US facial recognition firm whose surveillance tech is used by at least 2,400 law enforcement agencies, says police have run nearly a million searches using its service. The company’s database of images scraped from social media sites now reportedly numbers around 30 billion, a staggering 50% increase from figures reported just last year. Despite repeated fines and years of pushback from civil liberties organizations, the figures suggest business is still booming for Clearview.Should Facial…

Apple AirTags can be useful for things like finding your keys or keeping tabs on luggage. But it’s also well-established that the small quarter-sized tracking devices, can be employed in some less-than-savory ways. People have sued over AirTags being used to enable stalking. Police have claimed the devices have even popped up in murder cases.Yet a new report suggests that federal law enforcement might be applying AirTags for their own ends. The Drug Enforcement Agency used an Apple tracker to conduct suspect surveillance…

Last fall, NASA’s DART spacecraft smashed into Dimorphos, a small asteroid some 7 million miles away, in an unprecedented attempt to change the orbit of a natural body in space. Now, two teams of astronomers have released images of the collision’s aftermath taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.The researchers found that the ejected cloud of debris from the asteroid appeared more blue than the space rock itself, indicating that Dimorphos is composed of fine particles. But as time passed after…

A former executive on Meta’s security policy team was hacked by the Greek government using sophisticated spyware known as “Predator,” which tracked her for a whole year. Artemis Seaford, who formerly worked as a trust and safety manager on Meta’s security policy team, had her phone digitally infected by malware in September of 2021, the New York Times reported Monday. Seaford was secretly under surveillance at the behest of the Greek national intelligence service, which deployed tracking software widely. “Predator” was…

The ransomware gang known as ALPHV has claimed a successful attack on Amazon-owned home security company Ring. A cybercriminal group known for its despicable tactics, the gang is now threatening to publish the company’s sensitive data if its financial demands are not met. Ring is denying the gang’s claims.On Monday, the malware research organization VX-underground tweeted screenshots of the ransomware gang’s claims, which had been published to its website in the digital underworld. Like other groups of its kind, ALPHV…

Photo: Stefan Zaklin / Stringer (Getty Images)In a classic “whoopsie” situation, a health data breach affecting members of the US House of Representatives and their staff exposed social security numbers, names of family members, emails, phone numbers, and home addresses, which are nowfor sale on the dark web. Senators and their staff were also affected, but reports say only their names and the names of family members were released.Congress was informed of the breach this week, which apparently stemmed from a security…

Photo: Steffi Loos (Getty Images)Senate Democrats introduced new legislation Tuesday attempting to, once again, outright ban facial recognition use by federal agencies and officials, particularly law enforcement. If passed, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act would cut the feds off from a variety of other sensitive biometrics identifiers, like voice and gait recognition, and limit federal grant funding only to states with their own “substantially similar” facial recognition or biometric…

Say cheese.Photo: BrandonKleinPhoto / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)A customer service agent for Ring, Amazon’s home-surveillance company, told a concerned user that a Politico article about the company’s privacy problems was a “hoax” perpetrated by one of its competitors.“Always remember that your privacy is a priority,” the company representative said in an email responding to the user’s question about the article. “It was indeed a ‘Hoax’ for Ring company provided by our competitors.”The Politico article detailed how…

Image shows a face being detected outside a subway. Screenshot: ACLUNew documents revealed by the ACLU and shared with Gizmodo show the lengths FBI and Pentagon officials went to develop “truly unconstrained” facial recognition capable of being deployed in public street cameras, mobile drones, and cops’ body cameras.The goal of the project, code-named “Janus” after the Roman god with two opposing faces, was to develop highly advanced facial scanning tech capable of scanning people’s faces across a vast swath of public…