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FaceApp and the True Cost of Phishing Highlight this Week's Technology Headlines



"Federal regulators this week began considering ways to update and potentially expand enforcement of the country's online children's privacy law, questioning whether swift advances in technology have outpaced rules meant to protect children younger than 13."


"Two years ago, researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts discovered disturbing vulnerabilities in Medtronic's popular MiniMed and MiniMed Paradigm insulin pump lines. An attacker could remotely target these pumps to withhold insulin from patients, or to trigger a potentially lethal overdose."


"Every couple of months, photos from FaceApp—a face-editing app that uses neural network to make users look younger, older, more feminine, or more masculine—goes viral. Two years ago, it rolled out a racist face-altering feature that made people into racist caricatures of different races. This week, the app’s viral filter was its aging feature, which makes users look like they’re elderly."


"The US Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has run an analysis on suspect transactions in the past year and found that US businesses in 2018 wired around $301 million per month to business email compromise (BEC) scammers."


"The Federal Trade Commission is expected to hit Facebook with a record-setting $5 billion fine for its alleged privacy mishaps, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that commissioners voted this week to approve the settlement with the social network."


"Influencers are publishing more than ever. They published 15 times more editorial posts and eight times more sponsored ads on Instagram in 2018 than they did in 2016. Yet consumers are starting to pay less attention to what they post, according to a new study by social media metrics firm InfluencerDB."


"All of the major U.S. carriers—Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint—are launching 5G across the U.S. WSJ's Joanna Stern embarked on a summer testing tour only to learn that 5G is blazing fast...if you're outside, near a cell tower, with some way to keep the phone cool."


"When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people’s browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head."


"Suspected nation-state hackers from Russia, Iran and elsewhere have launched nearly 800 cyberattacks against political organizations over the past year that have been detected by Microsoft Corp. , with the vast majority of the attempts targeting groups based in the U.S."


"Archived episodes of the station's news and public affairs programming may be lost permanently."


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