An Islamic State terrorist group has been reported to have hacked into United States government-owned websites, leaving the message “You will be held accountable Trump, you and all your people for every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries” on the websites.
The message ended with “I love the Islamic state”.
Many websites, including the website of Republican Ohio governor, John Kasich, the website for Howard County, Maryland and the websites of Ohio’s first lady, Karen Kasich, Medicaid, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and the Casino Control Commission were affected.
Chief communications officer for Ohio’s Department of Administrative Services, Tom Hoyt, confirming the hack said, “All affected servers have been taken offline and we are investigating how these hackers were able to deface these websites”.
Team System DZ has been poked to be behind the hack, and according to NDTV, authors of the website, Cryptosphere, which tracks hackers worldwide, have detailed dozens, if not hundreds, of similar hacks in recent years by the terrorist group Team System DZ, which they called a “pro-ISIS hacker crew” and claim are based in Algeria.
Other websites gravely impacted by the hack include those for a synagogue in Florida, the student union at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, for UK Rugby and a number of websites on WordPress.
The websites, which were downed yesterday, authorities hope would be up and running sometime today.
Facebook Inc on Thursday offered additional insight on its efforts to remove terrorism content, a response to political pressure in Europe to terrorists groups using the social network for propaganda and recruiting.
Facebook has ramped up use of artificial intelligence such as image matching and language understanding to identify and remove content quickly, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s director of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, counter-terrorism policy manager, explained in a blog post.
The world’s largest social media network, with 1.9 billion users, Facebook has not always been so open about its operations, and its statement was met with scepticism by some who have criticised US technology companies for moving slowly.
“We’ve known that extremist groups have been weaponising the Internet for years,” said Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College computer scientist who studies ways to stem extremist material online.
“So why, for years, have they been understaffing their moderation? Why, for years, have they been behind on innovation?” Farid asked. He called Facebook’s statement a public relations move in response to European governments.
Britain’s interior ministry welcomed Facebook’s efforts but said technology companies needed to go further.
“This includes the use of technical solutions so that terrorist content can be identified and removed before it is widely disseminated, and ultimately prevented from being uploaded in the first place,” a ministry spokesman said on Thursday.
Germany, France and Britain, countries where civilians have been killed and wounded in bombings and shootings by Islamist militants in recent years, have pressed Facebook and other providers of social media such as Google and Twitter to do more to remove militant content and hate speech.
Government officials have threatened to fine Facebook and strip the broad legal protections it enjoys against liability for the content posted by its users.
Facebook uses artificial intelligence for image matching that allows the company to see if a photo or video being uploaded matches a known photo or video from groups it has defined as terrorist, such as Islamic State, Al Qaeda and their affiliates, the company said in the blog post.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft last year created a common database of digital fingerprints automatically assigned to videos or photos of militant content to help each other identify the same content on their platforms.
Similarly, Facebook now analyses text that has already been removed for praising or supporting militant organisations to develop text-based signals for such propaganda.
“More than half the accounts we remove for terrorism are accounts we find ourselves; that is something that we want to let our community know so they understand we are really committed to making Facebook a hostile environment for terrorists,” Bickert said in a telephone interview.
Asked why Facebook was opening up now about policies that it had long declined to discuss, Bickert said recent attacks were naturally starting conversations among people about what they could do to stand up to militancy.
In addition, she said, “We’re talking about this because we are seeing this technology really start to become an important part of how we try to find this content.”
Facebook’s blog post on Thursday was the first in a planned series of announcements to address “hard questions” facing the company, Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy and communications, said in a statement. Other questions, he said, include: “Is social media good for democracy?”
On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron launched a joint campaign to go after “terrorists and criminals” on the Internet and to root out radicalising material.
“Crucially, our campaign will also include exploring creating a legal liability for tech companies if they fail to take the necessary action to remove unacceptable content,” May said at a joint news conference.
Macron’s office declined to comment on Facebook’s statement on Thursday.
Verizon has taken over Yahoo, completing a $4.5 billion deal that will usher in a new management team to attempt to wring more advertising revenue from one of the Internet’s best-known brands.
Tuesday’s closure of the sale ends Yahoo’s 21-year history as a publicly traded company.
It also ends the nearly five-year reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who isn’t joining Verizon. She will walk away from Yahoo with a compensation package currently worth about $125 million, including her severance pay and stock awards that will be fully vested with the deal’s completion.
Yahoo’s email and other digital services such as sports, finance and news will be run by Tim Armstrong, who has been running AOL since Verizon bought that company for $4.4 billion two years ago. Armstrong will now be CEO of a new Verizon subsidiary called Oath, which will consist of Yahoo and various AOL services.
About 2,000 Yahoo and AOL workers are expected to lose their jobs as Verizon trims expenses and eliminates overlapping positions.
“Now that the deal is closed, we are excited to set our focus on being the best company for consumer media, and the best partner to our advertising, content and publisher partners,” Armstrong said.
Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab has filed antitrust complaints against Microsoft with the European Commission and the German federal cartel office, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
Kaspersky contends that Microsoft is abusing its market dominance to crowd out independent anti-virus software makers, pushing Windows 10 users towards its own Windows Defender software, and creating obstacles to others entering the market.
“These actions by Microsoft lead to a lower level of protection for users, a limitation on their right to choose, and financial losses both for users and security solutions manufacturers,” Kaspersky said.
The European Commission said it had received Kaspersky’s complaint without giving further details.
Microsoft was not available for immediate comment.
In 1996, I was in primary two; fast forward 6 years, in 2001, I came in contact with computers and its attendant technology, where else than in Lagos of Nigeria. This marks a tech revolution in my world. Since then I have never been the same; I practically became a gadget freak.
Between 2001 and 2016, bearing in mind that tech revolution began to take its toll in the year 2000 in Nigeria, technology has changed the world in diverse ways. Looking back into time is a stark reminder of just how much the awareness of technology has advanced barely two decades in our clime, occasioned by accelerations in the telecoms sector.
Author as a Computer Desktop Publisher at the Odunayo CyberHub in 2002
It is easy to forget that this was a time before many people had even a dial-up modem to access the World Wide Web and send Electronic mail, let alone a dedicated broadband connection that did not prevent anyone else in the house using the phone for actual calls.
When I was entering primary school, Windows 95 was about to launch. Windows 95 certainly did make PCs more popular, and was followed by the massive success of Windows XP, which, despite being unsupported by its maker, is still being used by millions around the globe.
Counting Windows 10, there have been eight versions of Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system in the last two decades: 98, Me, Vista, 2000, XP, 7, 8, and now 10. Make that seven if you do not count Windows 2000 as a consumer OS.
Wait a minute; if you played Dangerous Dave, Shadow Knight and Prince of Persia or even the DOS version of Mortal Combat, then you are on the other side.
The import of the Internet and its attendant impact cannot be exhaustively discussed. It speaks volume more than 20 editions of encyclopaedia can hold. These days there is not much you can do with a Smartphone in Flight mode. Virtually every app relies on its connection to the ‘information superhighway’, the Internet. And, what is the use of an offline PC?
How technology has changed the world in 20 years!
The recommendation back then in 2002 was to buy a machine with a 200MB hard drive, 8MB of RAM and a 75MHz or 100MHz processor. Getting online was an expensive business. Your bargain basement PC cost a fortune, and that didn’t even include a modem, CD-ROM drive or sound card. If you had those you had a “multimedia” PC, and it means you are top notch.
Today, even basic Smartphones have a CPU that is at least 10x more powerful than a 2002 PC and costs roughly one-tenth as much. In the budget laptops group, today, you will find models with 8GB of RAM, 1TB hard drives and processors that run at over 3GHz, and you can have all that after a little hustle.
We look back 20 years and smile at the paltry figures, no doubt, but right now these machines are veritable bargains. Of course, we now know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
In fact, the Internet has changed more than just technology: it has changed the way we communicate, the way we work, do our homework, listen to music… in short; it has changed the way we live.
The future of computing, and that of technology, is even brighter. 3D printing technology is with us already; the Internet of things is here with us, and I am expecting when I will start downloading houses, cars and what have you in the actual sense of it.
Smarthomes — where you can dial your kitchen from the office and you get your dinner made before you are home, where you can have a robot doing house chores and drones running errands for you — are here with us. Self-driving and smokeless cars are here with us.
Air-conditioned clothing, gadgets that measure the performance of athletes, and the ones you are counting up in your mind now, are all here with us – all thanks to the advancement of technology, and as LG puts it, life’s good!
Who wouldn’t want to pimp their existence!? Who wouldn’t want to be sophisticated in this era!?
With the current drive for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), the future of the world with technology will be like some sci-fi movies.
Emerging reports reveal a contractor doing maintenance work at a British Airways data centre inadvertently switched off the power supply, knocking out the airline’s computer systems leaving 75,000 people stranded last weekend.
The Times newspaper, reporting this on Friday and quoting a BA source, the newspaper said the power supply unit that sparked the IT failure was working perfectly but was accidentally shut down by a worker.
An investigation into the power outage is likely to focus on human error rather than any equipment failure, it said.
BA had to cancel all flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports last Saturday.
It blamed a power surge that knocked out its computer system, disrupting flight operations, call centres and its website.
Earlier this week, the board of British Airways was said to be set to demand an independent inquiry into a power outage which left 75,000 passengers stranded last weekend, the BBC reported on Thursday, citing sources.
BA suffered a public relations disaster over the holiday weekend when it had to cancel hundreds of flights from London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
It blamed the incident on a power failure at a data centre near Heathrow and subsequent power surge which knocked out its computer system, disrupting flight operations, call centres and its website.
Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have stepped up both the speed and number of removals of hate speech on their platforms in response to pressure from the European Union to do more to tackle the issue, according to the results of an EU evaluation.
Facebook won particular praise for reviewing most complaints within a 24-hour target timeframe set down in a code of conduct agreed in December by the European Commission, Facebook, Microsoft , Twitter and YouTube.
Calling the results “encouraging” for the Commission’s push for self-regulation, Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said the proportion of offending items taken down had doubled and action was being taken more quickly than when the EU checked six months ago.
“This … shows that a self-regulatory approach can work, if all actors do their part. At the same time, companies … need to make further progress to deliver on all the commitments,” Jourova said in a statement, adding that firms should provide more feedback to people who brought abuses to their attention.
Facebook scored highly on this, Twitter and YouTube less so.
The voluntary code of conduct obliges firms to take action in Europe within 24 hours, following rising concerns about the proliferation of racist and xenophobic content on social media triggered by the refugee crisis and attacks in Western Europe.
This included removing or disabling access to the content if necessary, better cooperation with civil society organizations and the promotion of “counter-narratives” to hate speech.
Facebook assessed notifications of hateful content in less than 24 hours in 58 percent of cases, up from 50 percent in December, according to the report.
Twitter also sped up its dealing with notifications, reviewing 39 percent of them in less than 24 hours, as opposed to 23.5 percent in December, when the Commission first reviewed the companies’ progress and warned them they were being too slow.
YouTube, on the other hand, slowed down, reviewing 42.6 percent of notifications in less than 24 hours, down from 60.8 percent in December, the results showed.
“IT companies have all been improving time and response to notifications on manifest illegal hate speech,” Jourova said at a meeting of the EU High Level Group on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance on Wednesday.
“There are differences among the companies … but we can objectively say that all have improved.”
All the companies significantly increased the number of removals. Overall, content was removed in 59.2 percent of cases, more than double the rate in December which was 28.2 percent.
The proliferation of hate speech on social media has increased pressure on the companies to remove the content swiftly as they face the prospect of legislation at both EU and national level.
Last week EU ministers approved plans to force social networks to take measures to block videos with hateful content while the German government approved a plan in April to fine companies up to EUR 50 million if they fail to remove hateful postings quickly.
The most common ground of hate speech the Commission identified was xenophobia, including expressions of hatred against migrants and refugees, together with anti-Muslim hatred, followed by ethnic origin.
The spread of fake news and racist content has taken on more urgency in Germany after the arrival of about a million migrants over the last two years.
The European Union has decided to offer free Internet connection in public spaces throughout the entire bloc to its citizens and visitors, the European Commission said on Tuesday.
Members of the EU reached an informal agreement with the European Parliament to install free wireless Internet access points in public places such as town halls, hospitals and parks by the end of 2017, Efe news reported.
“The European Commission wishes to promote free Wi-Fi connectivity for citizens and visitors in public spaces such as parks, squares, public building, libraries, health centres, and museums everywhere in Europe through WiFi4EU,” a commission statement said.
The political agreement – which is yet to be ratified by the bloc’s Council of Ministers and the EP’s plenary – defines the guidelines for the establishment of public Wi-Fi hotspots, although it does not specify the exact funding that is to be earmarked for the project.
“The funding will be allocated in a geographically-balanced manner across the EU countries and, in principle, on a first-come, first-served basis,” read a statement by the Council.
It added that the scheme’s budget would be finalised following the ongoing mid-term review of the EU’s multi-annual financial framework.
The project, named “WiFi4EU,” aims to set up a multilingual portal that will provide users with a free and secure high-speed Internet connection, as well as easy access to the digital services of the public body offering the connection.
Municipalities, libraries, hospitals and other public bodies will be able to apply for funding for the installation of local wireless access points using simple administrative procedures, according to the Council.
However, the public body itself would be responsible for maintaining the connection for at least three years, although vouchers are expected to be available to cover up to 100 per cent of the eligible costs.
Apple has on Wednesday announced plans for a $1 billion expansion of its massive data centre east of Reno, doubling its investment and roughly tripling its workforce at the technology campus where company officials expect to hire 100 additional workers.
The announcement came as the Reno City Council approved Apple’s plans to build a $4 million shipping and receiving warehouse on a vacant lot in downtown Reno that will make it eligible for millions of dollars in tax breaks.
“We’re excited to be increasing our contributions to the local economy with an additional $1 billion investment to expand our data centre and supporting facilities,” Apple spokesman John Rosenstock said in an email to The Associated Press.
“As part of our growth, we plan to hire 100 employees and expect construction will support an additional 300 jobs,” he further stated.
Last week, Apple announced a new $1 billion fund aimed at creating more US manufacturing jobs, but provided few details.
As part of a strategy emphasizing its role in the US economy, it also released a state-by-state breakdown of where its 80,000 US employees work – more than half in California’s Silicon Valley.
Apple currently has more than 700 workers in Nevada, which Rosentock said is home to the company’s largest solar investment, “powering our data centre with clean energy”.
The 5-year-old $1 billion data centre is located in the Reno Technology Centre near the Tracy generating station along U.S. Interstate 80. It’s between Reno and the Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre where Tesla’s giant battery factory is based about 15 miles (24 km) east of Reno-Sparks.
Apple was awarded $89 million in state property and sales tax abatements when it committed to the data centre in 2012.
Gov. Brian Sandoval said it was “the first major economic development success in northern Nevada and helped place this region on the technology and innovation map”.
“Apple’s decision to increase their local investment by $1 billion is a testament to our successful partnership and a demonstration that the best companies in the world are coming to Nevada, creating hundreds of jobs, investing in our communities and making our state their permanent home,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
The Reno Gazette-Journal reported City Councilwoman Jenny Brekhus voted against the downtown land deal Wednesday, calling for an end to unfair tax deals for “some powerful, well-connected corporations and not the rest of us”.
Mayor Hillary Schieve and Councilman Paul McKenzie said the whole city will benefit from the developments.
“Apple doesn’t just pay, they offer a living wage,” McKenzie said.
Google has launched its servers in Cuba, meaning the country will now store Google contents locally, which will see Cubans who use Google services in the country notice contents load much faster.
Google and the state-run telecom company Etecsa inked a deal in December to provide Cuban users access to the Google Global Cache (GGC). This network caches popular Google content, like YouTube videos and Google searches, for faster delivery to people’s phones and computers.
According to a CNNtech report, When someone in Cuba watches a YouTube video for the first time, that content has to travel through undersea cables from servers in another country. But once it gets to Cuba, it will now be stored on local servers, and the next person who wants to watch it will have a noticeably faster load time.
According to the report, Internet access in Cuba is limited and expensive, and some estimates say as little as 5% of people have internet at home. In order to surf the web, Cubans often congregate at cafes, hotels, and other public areas that have WiFi.
According to a 2016 report from Freedom House, outdated infrastructure, government regulation, and the cost prevent widespread access. “Despite modest steps to increase internet access, Cuba remains one of the world’s most repressive environments for information and communication technologies,” the report said.
However, it is slowly becoming more accessible.
Emily Parker wrote the book “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are,” about internet activism in Cuba and other countries. She says the internet could pose a threat to the Cuban government’s control over information.
“Google’s entry signals the Cuban government’s understanding that the Internet is necessary for economic development,” Parker said.
Last year, Google partnered with a local artist known as Kcho to open a technology centre that provides free, faster internet to the public.
Google’s servers won’t bring internet to more people, but those who already have the internet will see faster load times for Google services.
Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at internet performance company Dyn, noticed the GGC nodes activate on Wednesday for Google Search. He said some people are reporting that they aren’t yet being directed to the Cuban GGC for YouTube, but it should happen soon.
“It is a milestone, as this is the first time an outside internet company has hosted anything in Cuba,” Madory said.
