The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine. From a report: Yahoo's owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath's presentations as well as current and former employees of the company. Oath said the practice extends to AOL Mail, which it also owns. Together, they constitute the only major U.S. email provider that scans user inboxes for marketing purposes.

18-year-old high school student Sean Small was arrested in Indiana on Tuesday and charged with a misdemeanor for posting a videogame clip to social media. An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Lifestyle: The clip in question is Sean playing The Walking Dead: Our World, which is an augmented reality game that animates characters into a real-world setting. In this case, players kill zombies. Along with Sean's video he wrote, "Finally something better than Pokemon Go," which is also an augmented reality game....

Sean, who is a member of the Indiana National Guard, pleaded not guilty to an intimidation charge. He was released on $1,000, and his school expulsion hearing is set for next week. The video featured other students walking through the halls as Sean allegedly attempted to kill the zombies the game placed among them.
Realistic footage of shootings in the high school's hallways apparently alarmed the off-duty sheriff's deputy hired to work at the high school -- who then filed the misdemeanor intimidation charge with the county prosecutor.

Google appears to have quietly purged its own user-generated review content from its search results. From a report: This is significant, critics of Google say, because it obscures the fact that Google's search engine judges the company's own reviews poorly. Google's search engine ranks content by relevance and quality, and Google's review content previously showed up deep into the search results, far from the first page of links that takes most of the clicks. A Google spokesperson disagreed that the review content was "de-indexed," simply noting that because Google reviews don't currently live on a web page, they are not displayed as web results.

Given that reviews once showed up in regular Google search results and now do not, it follows that the reviews were moved from a web page to the Maps platform, whose code prevents search engines from crawling it. What was once searchable is now not searchable, something Google did not explain. As a result, Google reviews do not have to rank highly in search engines. Instead, the Google snippet -- the map and reviews box above the standard search result -- allows the company to capture clicks that would otherwise flow off the platform to whatever website had the best result in the algorithm made by the search team down the hall at Mountain View deemed as the best.

According to Nikkei, Japan's Fair Trade Commission is looking into whether Apple improperly pressured Yahoo Japan to shut down a game streaming platform that competed with the iOS App Store. "Yahoo Japan's Game Plus service allowed people to stream full games made for other platforms and to play HTML5 games on mobile phones, which would have allowed iPhone owners to get games without going through the App Store," reports The Verge. From the report: Nikkei reports that Yahoo Japan slashed the program's budget last fall, just months after it launched, and told partners that it was due to pressure from Apple. It's said to have begun filing complaints with Japan's FTC around the same time. Developers essentially have no good alternative to the App Store on iOS. Their only other option is the web, which is a wonderful place for websites, but the web is rarely as fast or flashy as a native app. There are a great number of features that only native apps can take advantage of, which requires going through the App Store and giving Apple a 30 percent cut of most sales. Yahoo Japan's service was meant, in part, to be an alternative to that, offering better terms to developers, according to Nikkei, and fewer restrictions around how games were updated and sold. Final Fantasy creator Square Enix had even signed on and produced an exclusive game for the platform, which has since been pulled.

An anonymous reader quotes CryptoCoinsNews: Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has recorded a loss of $18 billion, as major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether, EOS, and Bitcoin Cash dropped by 4 to 13 percent. While Bitcoin ended the day with a 4 percent decline in its value, Ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, plummeted by 13 percent against the US dollar, becoming one of the worst performing major cryptocurrencies alongside NEO. Tokens recorded the steepest drop in their value on August 11, as most Ethereum-based tokens such as Theta Token, Aion, Pundi X, Aelf, DigixDAO, WanChain, and VeChain recorded a drop of around 14 to 18 percent

For the first time in 2018, Bitcoin, the most dominant cryptocurrency in the global market, has obtained 50 percent of the market share, securing its year-to-date (YTD) high on the dominance index. The sudden increase in the dominance index of Bitcoin which coincided with the spike in the volume of Tether have demonstrated that investors have become reluctant towards taking high-risk and high-return trades, mostly due to the lack of confidence in the short-term trend of the market. Over the past few weeks, tokens have lost over 50 percent of their value against Bitcoin, which has also fallen by more than 20 percent since late July.
"During this 13-day stretch, the total market cap for all cryptocurrencies has fallen $70 billion," reports MarketPlace, in an article headlined "Bitcoin looks 'very sick' and the pain is not over, says analyst."

According to a new study from market research firm SimilarWeb, Facebook may cede its runner-up position to YouTube in the next two to three months. Currently, the top five most-visited websites in the U.S. are Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook's monthly page visits are declining rapidly, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, which could shake up that order. CNBC reports: YouTube, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, has seen increased traffic, the study said. The app has also experienced in increase in viewership. Yahoo is also poised to lose its position in the ranking. Amazon has already surpassed Yahoo during big spending months, including December 2017 and July 2018, when the e-commerce giant held its annual Prime Day. The study projects that Amazon will take over Yahoo's ranking in the next two to three months. However, none of the bottom four of the top five comes close to Google. Although it has seen some decline in website traffic thanks to app use and voice search, it saw approximately 15 billion visits in July 2018, the study said. The others were all below 5 billion, according to the report.

hackingbear writes: Qualcomm officially terminated the deal to buy Dutch semiconductor giant NXP after failing to get a decision from regulators in China by its deadline. It must now shell out a previously agreed upon $2 billion termination fee. The Chinese market accounts for 30% of Qualcomm's revenue. China's refusal of the approval can also be a retaliation against an $1.4 billion penalty against ZTE imposed by the U.S. Department of Commerce over technicalities of ZTE's violation of Iran sanctions, a move viewed by China as a U.S. excuse to launch a trade war. "It's a reminder that trade wars are maybe not that easy to win," says Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley. "And China has a lot of ammunition up its sleeve." Roach urged the Trump administration to understand that the U.S. and China "need each other," saying low-price Chinese imports are needed to "make ends meet" for cash-strapped Americans. Separately, in a hearing at the Office of United States Trade Representative for imposing additional tariffs on Chinese imports due to the alleged intellectual property theft by China, an accusation that the U.S. itself had committed, out of some 61 figures from the country's chemical, electronics, and solar energy sectors, only six expressed their support for the move.

Los Angeles startups Arrivo and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies have reportedly secured financing from Chinese state-backed companies. "Lining up potential funding helps solve one of the biggest obstacles for hyperloop systems: They will be extremely expensive to build," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Arrivo, founded by a former senior engineer at Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said it secured a $1 billion credit line with Genertec America Inc., a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned entity based in Beijing that has helped finance and build high-speed rail and other infrastructure projects in Iran, Turkey and elsewhere. The credit line will go to backers of a future project using Arrivo technology, not to the startup itself. [The Genertec debt could be used to construct a project using the company's technology anywhere in the world, not necessarily in China.] Separately, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies said it plans to work on a 10-kilometer test track in Tongren, part of China's Guizhou province, at an initial cost of about $300 million. State entity Tongren Transportation & Tourism Investment Group will provide half the funds and seek private investors for the other half, HyperloopTT said. The precise route is yet to be determined.

eBay is planning to slash nearly 300 jobs from Bay Area locations by July 20, calling the cuts a "mass layoff." Those being laid off were informed at the end of June, reports The Mercury News. The San Jose-based company estimated that it would eliminate 224 jobs in San Jose, 41 in San Francisco, and five in Brisbane. From the report: "This action is expected to be permanent," eBay stated in the Employment Development Department filing. "No affected employee has any bumping rights." Over the one-year period that ended in March, eBay lost $1.64 billion on revenues of $9.84 billion, according to information posted on the Yahoo Finance site. During the first quarter that ended March 31, eBay earned $407 million on revenues of $2.58 billion. Compared to the year-ago first quarter, profits were down 60.7 percent and revenue rose 12 percent.

Hackers account for 90% of of e-commerce sites' global login traffic, according to a report by cyber security firm Shape Security. They reportedly use programs to apply stolen data acquired on the dark web -- all in an effort to login to websites and grab something of value like cash, airline points, or merchandise. Quartz reports: These attacks are successful as often as 3% of the time, and the costs quickly add up for businesses, Shape says. This type of fraud costs the e-commerce sector about $6 billion a year, while the consumer banking industry loses out on about $1.7 billion annually. The hotel and airline businesses are also major targets -- the theft of loyalty points is a thing -- costing a combined $700 million every year.

The process starts when hackers break into databases and steal login information. Some of the best known "data spills" took place at Equifax and Yahoo, but they happen fairly regularly -- there were 51 reported breaches last year, compromising 2.3 billion credentials, according to Shape. Taking over bank accounts is one way to monetize stolen login information -- in the US, community banks are attacked far more than any other industry group. According to Shape's data, that sector is attacked more than 200 million times each day. Shape says the number of reported credential breaches was roughly stable at 51 last year, compared with 52 in 2016. The best way consumers can minimize these attacks is by changing their passwords.

The 2nd Circuit denies an immediate appeal in a case that challenges how news organizations used embedded photos of Tom Brady. The Hollywood Reporter: Back in February, a New York judge caused a bit of a freakout by issuing a copyright decision regarding the embedding of a copyrighted photo of NFL superstar Tom Brady. Now comes another surprise with potentially big ramifications to the future of embedding and in-line linking: The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has denied an interlocutory appeal. Justin Goldman is the plaintiff in the lawsuit after finding the photo of the New England Patriots quarterback he shot and uploaded to Snapchat go viral. Many news organizations embedded social media posts that took Goldman's photo in stories about whether the Boston Celtics would recruit NBA star Kevin Durant with Brady's assistance. Breitbart, Heavy, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media, Gannett Company, Herald Media, Boston Globe Media Partners and New England Sports Network were defendants in the lawsuit, but many of these companies have since settled.

Heavy has not, and in February, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest shocked many legal observers with a decision that refused to apply the "Server Test," where the direct liability of a website publisher for copyright infringement turns on whether the image is hosted on the publisher's own server or is embedded or linked from a third-party server. Although the Server Test has been adopted in other jurisdictions, Forrest wrote, "The plain language of the Copyright Act, the legislative history undergirding its enactment, and subsequent Supreme Court jurisprudence provide no basis for a rule that allows the physical location or possession of an image to determine who may or may not have 'displayed' a work within the meaning of the Copyright Act." She added, "Nowhere does the Copyright Act suggest that possession of an image is necessary in order to display it. Indeed, the purpose and language of the Act support the opposite view."

The blockchain gaming company Lucid Sight is partnering with Major League Baseball to launch MLB Crypto Baseball. Engadget's Daniel Roberts explains: Ethereum, launched in 2015, is a decentralized platform for "smart contracts," which are automated agreements for an exchange of value. It runs on a blockchain, the same peer-to-peer, immutable, public ledger technology that bitcoin runs on. The cryptocurrency of Ethereum is ether. Because of Ethereum's usefulness for smart contracts, it has become a proving ground for blockchain-based games, where users collect and trade one-of-a-kind items that no one can duplicate or steal. On a blockchain, each digital item (or contract) is verified and tamper-proof.

In MLB Crypto Baseball, users will pay in ether to buy digital avatars tied to specific moments in recent games. They can then sell the items, or in some cases, earn rewards and stickers. The game is a decentralized app, or "dApp." [...] To play the game at launch, users must own some amount of ether and must transfer it to a web plug-in called MetaMask. (CryptoKitties works the same way.) Lucid Sight hopes to have an easy mobile app ready shortly after launch. "We are not building this just for tech savvy people," says Lucid Sight cofounder Octavio Herrera. "That said, the game will roll out in stages. So yes, for version 1 you will need ether, you will need MetaMask, it will be a little bit difficult to get into. But I do think people will open up Coinbase accounts, buy some ether, and transfer it to MetaMask, in order to collect these things they'll enjoy so much."

schwit1 shares a report from Yahoo News: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom suffered a major setback in his epic legal battle against online piracy charges Thursday when New Zealand's Court of Appeal ruled he was eligible for extradition to the United States. The German national, who is accused of netting millions from his file sharing Megaupload empire faces charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering in the U.S., carrying jail terms of up to 20 years. Dotcom had asked the court to overturn two previous rulings that the Internet mogul and his three co-accused be sent to America to face charges. Instead, a panel of three judges backed the FBI-led case, which began with a raid on Dotcom's Auckland mansion in January 2012 and has dragged on for more than six years. His lawyer tweeted he would appeal to the NZ Supreme Court.

According to The Wall Street Journal, hundreds of app developers have access to millions of inboxes belonging to Gmail users (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The developers reportedly receive access to messages from Gmail users who signed up for things like price-comparison services or automated travel-itinerary planners. Some of these companies train software to scan the email, while others enable their workers to pore over private messages. INSIDER reports: It's not news that Google and many top email providers enable outside developers to access users' inboxes. In most cases, the people who signed up for the price-comparison deals or other programs agreed to provide access to their inboxes as part of the opt-in process. In Google's case, outside developers must pass a vetting process, and as part of that, Google ensures they have an acceptable privacy agreement, The Journal reported, citing a Google representative.

What is unclear is how closely these outside developers adhere to their agreements and whether Google does anything to ensure they do, as well as whether Gmail users are fully aware that individual employees may be reading their emails, as opposed to an automated system, the report says. It's interesting to note that, judging from The Journal's story, very little indicates that Google is doing anything different from Microsoft or other top email providers. According to the newspaper, nothing in Microsoft or Yahoo's policy agreements explicitly allows people to read others' emails.

There are cyberheists, and then there's Carbanak, a cybercriminal gang that has stolen about $1.2 billion from more than 100 banks in 40 nations. The suspected 34-year-old ringleader is under arrest, but the whopping $1.2 billion amount remains missing. And to add insult to the injury, the malware attacks live on. Bloomberg Businessweek has an insightful story on this, which includes comments from none other than Europol itself, on the chase to catch Carabanak which has lasted for three years. Some excerpts from the story: Before WannaCry, before the Sony Pictures hack, and before the breaches that opened up Equifax and Yahoo!, there was a nasty bit of malware known as Carbanak. Unlike those spectacular attacks, this malware wasn't created by people interested in paralyzing institutions for ransom, publishing embarrassing emails, or taking personal data. The Carbanak guys just wanted loot, and lots of it.

Since late 2013, this band of cybercriminals has penetrated the digital inner sanctums of more than 100 banks in 40 nations, including Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., and stolen about $1.2 billion, according to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency. The string of thefts, collectively dubbed Carbanak -- a mashup of a hacking program and the word "bank" -- is believed to be the biggest digital bank heist ever. In a series of exclusive interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, law enforcement officials and computer-crime experts provided revelations about their three-year pursuit of the gang and the mechanics of a caper that's become the stuff of legend in the digital underworld.

Besides forcing ATMs to cough up money, the thieves inflated account balances and shuttled millions of dollars around the globe. Deploying the same espionage methods used by intelligence agencies, they appropriated the identities of network administrators and executives and plumbed files for sensitive information about security and account management practices. The gang operated through remotely accessed computers and hid their tracks in a sea of internet addresses.

An anonymous reader writes: A survey conducted among the tech workers, including many employees of Silicon Valley's elite tech companies, has revealed that over 57% of respondents are suffering from job burnout. The survey was carried out by the makers of an app that allows employees to review workplaces and have anonymous conversations at work, behind their employers' backs. Over 11K employees answered one question -- if they suffer from job burnout, and 57.16% said "Yes."

The company with the highest employee burnout rate was Credit Karma, with a whopping 70.73%, followed by Twitch (68.75%), Nvidia (65.38%), Expedia (65.00%), and Oath (63.03% -- Oath being the former Yahoo company Verizon bought in July 2017). On the other end of the spectrum, Netflix ranked with the lowest burnout rate of only 38.89%, followed by PayPal (41.82%), Twitter (43.90%), Facebook (48.97%), and Uber (49.52%).

America's Department of Defense "has quietly empowered the United States Cyber Command to take a far more aggressive approach to defending the nation against cyberattacks, a shift in strategy that could increase the risk of conflict with the foreign states that sponsor malicious hacking groups," reports the New York Times. Long-time Slashdot reader TheSauce shares their report: In the spring, as the Pentagon elevated the command's status, it opened the door to nearly daily raids on foreign networks, seeking to disable cyberweapons before they can be unleashed, according to strategy documents and military and intelligence officials... The new strategy envisions constant, disruptive "short of war" activities in foreign computer networks... "Continuous engagement imposes tactical friction and strategic costs on our adversaries, compelling them to shift resources to defense and reduce attacks"...

The risks of escalation -- of U.S. action in foreign networks leading to retaliatory strikes against U.S. banks, dams, financial markets or communications networks -- are considerable, according to current and former officials... The chief risk is that the internet becomes a battleground of all-against-all, as nations not only place "implants" in the networks of their adversaries -- something the United States, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have done with varying levels of sophistication -- but also begin to engage in daily attack and counterattack.
An article shared by schwit1 notes that officials in the Obama administration "were also worried that a vigorous cyber response...could escalate into a full scale cyber war."

Yet the Times reports that this new policy reflects "a widespread view that the United States has mounted an inadequate defense against the rising number of attacks aimed at America."

hackingbear shares a report from Yahoo News: Google will invest $550 million in Chinese e-commerce powerhouse JD.com, part of the U.S. internet giant's efforts to expand its presence in fast-growing Asian markets and battle rivals including Amazon.com. The two companies described the investment announced on Monday as one piece of a broader partnership that will include the promotion of JD.com products on Google's shopping service. This could help JD.com expand beyond its base in China and Southeast Asia and establish a meaningful presence in U.S. and European markets. For JD.com, the Google deal shows its determination to build a set of global alliances as it seeks to counter Alibaba, which has been more focused on forging domestic retail tie-ups.

Slashdot reader grep -v '.*' * shares a surprising story. The Kansas City Star profiles the victim of a three-year con that started with an email to a Yahoo inbox back in 2005. A decade ago, Fred Haines was wandering the Wichita airport looking for a Nigerian man hauling two chests full of cash. After an hour of waiting and asking around, he finally came to the realization that the $65 million Nigerian fortune he thought he was inheriting was not coming after all. What is now coming, though, is the $110,000 he had been scammed out of, thanks to the work of the Kansas Attorney General's Office.

From 2005 to 2008, swindlers hoodwinked Haines, a self-employed handyman in Wichita, into spending thousands in pursuit of an imaginary inheritance from a Nigerian government official -- a con known as the Nigerian Prince Scam. Haines re-mortgaged his house three times in the process. Last year, in a settlement with the Department of Justice, Western Union admitted it knew some of its employees had conspired with scam artists to bilk people out of money and had failed to fix the problem. The company set aside $586 million to create a fund to refund victims across the U.S. and Canada... All victims who'd sent money to hucksters using the service were able to request refunds, but only those who had complained to law enforcement or Western Union were notified directly of the settlement.

"It got to the point where they were showing me that the president of Nigeria had sent me a letter. It had his picture on it and everything," Haines said. "I looked it up on the computer to see what the Nigerian president looked like, and it was him." Once, he received an email claiming to be from Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director. The email was addressed to Haines, code-name "B-DOG," and it was signed with the FBI's address and official seal. "I wish you can remove doubt and suspicious and go ahead I assured you that you will never regret this fund release," the email said in part.
Haines is one of 344 victims who recovered a total of $1,758,988 through the Kansas Attorney General's office -- though when the office sent out 25,000 letters to possible scam victims, many of them were now skeptical of the promise of unclaimed money, and "Some were even angry when employees called to follow up on those who hadn't responded."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Yahoo's U.K. limb has finally been handed a $334,300 (250,000 GBP) fine for the 2014 cyber attack that exposed data of half a million Brit users. Today, the Information Commissioner's Office issued Yahoo U.K. Services Ltd a $334,300 (250,000 GBP) fine following an investigation that focused on the 515,121 U.K. accounts that the London-based branch of the firm had responsibility for. The ICO said "systemic failures" had put user data at risk as the U.K. arm of Yahoo did not take appropriate technical and organizational measures to prevent a data breach of this size.

In particular, the watchdog said there should have been proper monitoring systems in place to protect the credentials of Yahoo employees who could access customer's data, and to ensure that instructions to transfer very large quantities of personal data from Yahoo's servers would be flagged for investigation. It also noted that, as a data controller, Yahoo U.K. services Ltd had a responsibility to ensure its processors -- in this case Yahoo, whose U.S. servers held the data on U.K. users -- complied with data protection standards.