Facebook’s top secret ‘Project Ghostbusters’ spied on Snapchat, documents reveal

The operation, known internally as "Project Ghostbusters", was initiated by Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 after he became frustrated with the privacy measures of Snapchat.

The wiretapping tool involved the company’s Onavo Virtual Private Network (VPN), acquired by Facebook. Owning Onavo allowed Facebook to monitor rival social media apps by "intercepting and decrypting" network traffic sent between the apps and its servers.

Onavo engineers developed kits to carry out 'man-in-the-middle' monitoring that allowed them to "measure detailed in-app activity". This spying technique was later used on Amazon and YouTube.

The newly unsealed court documents come from a class action lawsuit in California taken up by consumers against Facebook’s parent company Meta.

🔗 Independent
🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Unpatchable Vulnerability in Apple MacBooks is Leaking Secret Encryption Keys

Apple MacBooks have been powered by in-house Apple silicon Arm-based M-series chips since 2020

A newly discovered vulnerability called as GoFetch flaw in Apple’s M1, M2, and M3 chips in MacBooks allows attackers to extract secret security keys from Macs, thus breaking encryption

GoFetch is a “microarchitectural side-channel attack” and affects a part of Apple’s chips called the Data Memory-dependent Prefetcher (DMP), which is used to speed up operations.

The flaw CANNOT be fixed as it relates to the actual hardware design of these chips.

Apple was notified of the flaw in December 2023 & it will need to make hardware changes to future M-series chips to fix the vulnerability.

Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake chips also have a DMP but “its activation criteria are more restrictive, making it robust to our attacks.”

🔗 Ars Technica
ℹ️ Credits: @TechLeaksZone

🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Urgent: Secret Backdoor Found in XZ Utils Library, Impacts Major Linux Distros

RedHat on Friday released an "urgent security alert" warning that two versions of a popular data compression library called XZ Utils (previously LZMA Utils) have been backdoored with malicious code designed to allow unauthorized remote access.

The software supply chain compromise, tracked as CVE-2024-3094, has a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor.

TL;DR: Upgrade your systems and container images now!

🔗 The Hacker News
ℹ️ More Information

🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

sorry for another post, but here's a detailed explanation of whatever has happened: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

Added it in the main post as well.

🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Telegram will now share revenue with Channel Owners!

The owners of public channels with at least 1000 subscribers can be rewarded with 50% of the revenue from ads displayed in their channels. Channel owners can withdraw their rewards with no fees – or reinvest them into Telegram ads, collectable usernames or Premium giveaways. To withdraw the money, you need to have an account on Fragment.com.

In addition to this, anyone can now promote their bot or channel – with budgets as low as a handful of Toncoins. When creating a Telegram ad, you choose the exact channels where you'd like it to appear, so you have full control over their context.

🔗 Telegram Blog
👨‍💻 @agamtechtricks

iQOO Announces Exit From Indian Smartphone Market After Facing Tough Competition

Facing stiff competition from other Chinese and South Korean companies, Sub-brand of the Vivo group, iQOO has announced to quit the Indian smartphone market. The company assured that it would continue its customer support operations including after sales support and software updates for existing customers in India. Even though iQOO is quitting the Indian market, Vivo will continue to operate in India.

The India smartphone market is currently dominated by other Chinese players like Xiaomi, OPPO, and OnePlus among others, besides South Korean tech giant Samsung and United States' Apple.

🔗 Read more
👨‍💻 @agamtechtricks

ChatGPT is now available to use without an account

ChatGPT from OpenAI is now available to use without an account, which means no information needs to be shared with the parent company if you don’t choose to. The downside is that users won’t be able to save chats, nor will they be able to share them. Other settings that accompany having an account are forfeit, leaving you to instanced interactions. OpenAI will still allow account-free users to opt out of data gathering, found at the bottom of the page in the settings.

ChatGPT will still offer registration for basic free accounts as well as a couple of paid tiers, which offer access to GPT-4 and DALL-E for image generation. Those tiers range from $20 to $25/month.

🔗 9to5Google
🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Google agrees to destroy browsing data collected in Incognito mode

The proposed settlement in Brown v. Google will mandate greater disclosure from the company about how it collects information in Incognito mode and put limits on future data collection. If approved by a California federal judge, the settlement could apply to 136 million Google users. The 2020 lawsuit was brought by Google account holders who accused the company of illegally tracking their behavior through the private browsing feature.

The proposal is valued at $5 billion, according to Monday’s court filing, calculated by determining the value of data Google has stored and would be forced to destroy and the data it would be prevented from collecting. Google would need to address data collected in private browsing mode in December 2023 and earlier. Any data that is not outright deleted must be de-identified.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said:

Pleased to settle this lawsuit, which we always believed was meritless. We never associate data with users when they use Incognito mode. We are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization.

🔗 Read more
👨‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Yahoo announces the acquisition of Artifact, the news discovery platform created by Instagram cofounders

Artifact will no longer operate as a standalone app, but the proprietary AI-powered personalization technology and other features will be integrated across Yahoo, including the Yahoo News app, in the months to come. The technology Artifact has created will be even more impactful with the scale of the Yahoo News network.

Artifact has become a beloved product and we’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow that technology and further our mission of becoming the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them.

said Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and General Manager of Yahoo News.

🔗 Yahoo Press | Artifact
👨‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Apple reveals ReALM — new AI model could make Siri way faster and smarter

Apple has unveiled a new small language model called ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling) that is designed to run on a phone and make voice assistants like Siri smarter by helping it to understand context and ambiguous references. Details were released in a new open research paper from Apple published on Friday. The company claims it even outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 on certain tasks.

ReALM is a visual model that reconstructs the screen and labels each on-screen entity and its location. This creates a text-based representation of the visual layout which can be passed on to the voice assistant to provide it context clues for user requests.

If ReALM is deployed to Siri, it will have a better understanding of what user means when they tell it to open this app, or can you tell me what this word means in an image. It would also give Siri more conversational abilities without having to fully deploy a large language model on the scale of Gemini.

🔗 Tom's Guide
👨‍💻 @agamtechtricks

X's Community Notes: Musk's Anti-Disinformation Tool Arrives in India

Elon Musk's fact-checking platform, 'Community Notes', has become available in India—a welcome relief for the country battling against disinformation and fake news due to unathorised sharing.

It enables users to provide context for posts on the social media platform and is an effort to stop the spread of misleading information. Since its first release in the US, the feature has been made available in 69 more countries.

🔗 NDTV
🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks

Greetings, everyone!

We are organizing a panel discussion related to BharOS with Mr. Karthik Ayyar. It'll be hosted by Tech Karan, Miguel, and Isaiah. Our panelists, Techyminati, Gian, Pranav Talmale, Coderastic, and Adeveloper79, will discuss about the technical merits of BharOS and its indigenous nature. Below are the event details:

Date: 6th April, 2024

Time:
• 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM GMT +5:30
• 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM GMT.

The event will be simultaneously livestreamed on various Telegram channels like Xiaomeme, my channel (Agam's Tech Tricks), Droid Den, RVX lite, while also being livestreamed on YouTube (courtesy of Tech Karan).

Have any questions? Send them over to @bharos_panelbot! Our questionnaire @not_ayan99 will be asking them directly to Mr Karthik.

Note: If you send a question and you edited it, the edit won't be visible. Please send a new message instead.

🧑‍💻 @agamtechtricks