Twitter dissolves its Trust and Safety Council
Three members of the council resigned last week, stating that the safety and wellbeing of Twitter users is on the decline, ‘contrary to claims by Elon Musk’.
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Three members of the council resigned last week, stating that the safety and wellbeing of Twitter users is on the decline, ‘contrary to claims by Elon Musk’.
Three members of the council resigned last week, stating that the safety and wellbeing of Twitter users is on the decline, ‘contrary to claims by Elon Musk’.
TikTok is now facing its first state lawsuit over data security. Indiana’s Attorney General has sued TikTok for allegedly misleading users about China’s data access and violating child safety. The social media service supposedly broke state consumer law by failing to warn that the Chinese government could theoretically obtain sensitive data. The ByteDance-owned firm also supposedly tricked customers by giving its app a “12+” age rating on the App Store and Google Play, even though kids could readily find drug- and sex-related content.
Indiana wants fines of up to $5,000 for every violation. It’s also asking a state Superior Court to order an end to the purportedly deceptive claims about data handling, and to stop marketing the app toward young teens.
We’ve asked TikTok for comment. The social network has repeatedly denied sharing US user data with the Chinese government and has taken steps to reassure politicians and critics, such as storing American account data stateside by default. It also says there are “robust” approval processes and controls for ByteDance workers who might access data outside the US. TikTok has also limited teens’ access to more mature content, including age gates for some videos.
The lawsuit compounds problems that have emerged for TikTok in recent weeks. Maryland’s governor banned use of the app on state government devices over security concerns, echoing a similar move by South Dakota in late November. The Wall Street Journalsources also claim a potential national security deal with the Biden administration has stalled yet again. While TikTok had a tentative agreement this summer, some officials are concerned the deal didn’t go far enough to limit China’s access.
The lawsuit’s chances are uncertain. Potential access to data doesn’t mean TikTok is being lax, and it’s notable that apps like Facebook and Instagram are also rated 12+ despite the potential to see more adult-oriented material (Twitter is rated 17+). However, the Indiana case puts further pressure on TikTok to explain and potentially modify its practices.
Three years and four prime ministers after the UK government first published its Online Harms white paper—the basis for the current Online Safety Bill—the Conservative Party’s ambitious attempt at internet regulation has found its way back to Parliament after multiple amendments.
If the bill becomes law, it will apply to any service or site that has users in the UK, or targets the UK as a market, even if it is not based in the country. Failure to comply with the proposed rules will place organizations at risk of fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover or £18 million (US$22 million), whichever is higher.
A somewhat bloated and confused version of its former self, the bill, which was dropped from the legislative agenda when Boris Johnson was ousted in July, has now passed its final report stage, meaning the House of Commons now has one last chance to debate its contents and vote on whether to approve it.
That count is for “vulnerabilities reported in the Android security bulletin, which includes critical/high severity vulnerabilities reported through our vulnerability rewards program (VRP) and vulnerabilities reported internally.” During that period, the amount of new memory-unsafe code entering Android has decreased: “Android 13 is the first Android release where a majority of new code added to the release is in a memory safe language. ”
Rust makes up 21% of all new native code in Android 13, including the Ultra-wideband (UWB) stack, DNS-over-HTTP3, Keystore2, Android’s Virtualization framework (AVF), and “various other components and their open source dependencies.” Google considers it significant that there have been “zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code” so far across Android 12 and 13. Google’s blog post today also talks about non-memory-safety vulnerabilities, and its future plans: “… We’re implementing userspace HALs in Rust. We’re adding support for Rust in Trusted Applications. We’ve migrated VM firmware in the Android Virtualization Framework to Rust. With support for Rust landing in Linux 6.1 we’re excited to bring memory-safety to the kernel, starting with kernel drivers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.