Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes: A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left terrorist organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and "she also faces trial for alleged involvement in three attacks in 1990 and 1994: a failed bombing in front of a bank, a shooting at the US embassy in Bonn and a 1993 bombing at a prison.".] She had remained hidden for decades, and the German police hadn't deployed facial recognition software to catch her. But according to the article a journalist did, to good effect. Is the ban on the police using it a good thing? Is it good that a journalist was able to track her down using it?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In an era where Silicon Valley's conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it's strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today's tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X's openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a small group of very powerful, very conservative people. But does it have to be this way? Can LLMs and AI agents find a place in the toolkit of progressive activist groups? The conviction that they can is the idea behind a new app called Outcry, which provides a chatbot designed specifically as a "private, on-device AI mentor for activists, organizers and movement builders." (There's also a web version, although it obviously lacks the privacy benefits of being entirely offline.) It's the brainchild of Occupy Wall Street co-creator Micah White, who recently wrote a blog post about the thinking behind the project. [...] Outcry's other distinguishing feature is that its dataset is entirely offline -- it's included with the download. According to the readme, the entire dataset is downloaded to your device at first launch, and stored in your library's Application Support directory. So, how effectively does Outcry serve as a guide for collective action? "I'd say that its information is pretty high-level and general, not least because its offline nature prevents it from accessing specific details not contained in its database," writes Gizmodo's Tom Hawking. He continued: "This app has the potential to be a really valuable resource, especially for people who are just beginning to become involved with activism and genuinely don't know where to begin -- and getting over that first step can be hard."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cybernews: The technology giant Microsoft has been accused of leaking the data of civil servants working for the Netherlands' regulatory agencies to the US House of Representatives. The civil servants affected by the leak work at the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), according to the NL Times. They are involved in implementing the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Union regulation on online services, aimed at combating illegal content and protecting user rights. NL Times reports that Microsoft shared emails, minutes, and invitations sent by the civil servants without redacting their names in the documents. Willemijn Aerdts, Dutch State Secretary for Digital Economy and Sovereignty, said she discussed the allegations with US Ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo. [...] The allegations against Microsoft further strengthen concerns over Europe's dependence on American technologies, which poses major risks to data privacy. Further reading: Netherlands Blocks US Takeover of Vital Digital Supplier

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venmo is testing a major redesign that will make new users' payment posts viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. The Verge reports: It's a notable update for a platform that has struggled with privacy in the past. In 2021, BuzzFeed News tracked down President Joe Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle because Venmo, at the time, had no way to keep your Venmo contacts private. It fixed that soon after. As part of the redesign, if you're a new user and you do want your posts to be public (or private just to you), you'll be able to set that as part of the new onboarding flow. You can also change your preference in settings after the fact; an updated screen for sending money will also show if that post is private, visible just to friends, or is visible publicly before you make the transaction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history. On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon's company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn't responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive. The GitHub repository that Valadon flagged was named "Private-CISA," and it harbored a vast number of internal CISA/DHS credentials and files, including cloud keys, tokens, plaintext passwords, logs and other sensitive CISA assets. Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories. "Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature," Valadon wrote in an email. "I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I've witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual's mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices." "Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident," a CISA spokesperson wrote. "While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences." The GitHub account in question was taken offline shortly after CISA was notified about the exposure. However, according to Caturegli, the exposed AWS keys remained valid for another 48 hours. "What I suspect happened is [the CISA contractor] was using this GitHub to synchronize files between a work laptop and a home computer, because he has regularly committed to this repo since November 2025," Caturegli said. "This would be an embarrassing leak for any company, but it's even more so in this case because it's CISA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

160 miles north of New York City, a man was convicted of manslaughter "with the help of license plate reader technology," reports a local news station. In the small town of Troy (population: 51,000), the mayor described the cameras as "a critical tool" in that investigation. But locals and city officials "have raised concerns about who can access the data collected locally, along with data security, privacy invasions and use by federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reports WNYT: When Troy's contract came up for renewal, Mayor Carmella Mantello wanted to keep paying Flock and the council paused payments. The mayor then issued a public safety emergency declaration to keep the license plate readers active. The council has filed a lawsuit to overturn that..."If this illegal emergency order is left unchallenged, we give this mayor and any future mayor regardless of their political party or ideology, unchecked authority to issue an emergency declaration whenever they disagree with the council on any issue," [said Troy council president Sue Steele]. "The technology that's in place today is not the technology of six years ago," council president Steele told another local news station. "We have AI, we have rapidly changing and advancing technology. So that begs the need for regulations to protect certain data." The American Civil Liberties Union warns that Flock will use AI to let law enforcement search its trove of videos. But "Listen, if it was infringing on people's rights, people's liberties, we'd be the first to get rid of it. We have safeguards in place," [mayor] Mantello responded. Mantello noted that data captured by Troy's Flock cameras is only being shared with other local municipalities. Steele said the data had been shared nationally until she and other elected officials raised concerns. "As far as sharing with local law enforcement, that's necessary in the normal course of investigations. The concern is what Flock does with this data: sharing it with ICE, for instance, and other nefarious outlets," Steele said. As the debate continues over the small city's 26 Flock cameras, a columnist in Albany wrote that "it's a good thing. We should be asking questions about the growing surveillance state. We should be debating whether this is the future we want." As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, [Flock] has quietly built a broad mass-surveillance infrastructure, with cameras installed in 5,000 communities around the country, and is continually expanding how that network is used. Did we ask for that? Did we vote for it? Not really. The cameras have been installed in municipality after municipality, mostly with little discussion or controversy, which makes us like the proverbial frogs who didn't notice the water getting warmer until it was boiling. Suddenly, surveillance cameras are everywhere; we're always being watched... [T]he City Council's Democratic majority is considering legislation that, among other steps, would require that data collected by the cameras be generally deleted after 48 hours and that the city be more transparent about how the cameras are used. The controversy and pushback continues to draw local coverage. The mayor complains the proposed rules restricts the cameras "almost exclusively to cases involving individuals with outstanding felony arrest warrants or situations where officers can determine in advance that an incident will result in a felony charge... This is beyond reckless." But the Albany columnist still argues many of America's Flock cameras are unnecessary and are "being installed just because... It's worth considering where this might lead and whether the future we're installing is the future we want."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"General Motors sold the data of California drivers without their knowledge or consent," says California's attorney general, "and despite numerous statements reassuring drivers that it would not do so." In 2024, The New York Times "reported that automakers including GM were sharing information about their customers' driving behavior with insurance companies," remembers TechCrunch, "and that some customers were concerned that their insurance rates had gone up as a result." Now General Motors "has reached a privacy-related settlement with a group of law enforcement agencies led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta..." The settlement announcement from Bonta's office similarly alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which are both data brokers. Bonta's office further alleges that this data was collected through GM's OnStar program, and that the company made roughly $20 million from data sales. However, Bonta's office also said the data did not lead to increased insurance prices in California, "likely because under California's insurance laws, insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates." As part of the settlement, GM has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties and to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, Bonta's office said. GM has also agreed to delete any driver data that it still retains within 180 days (unless it obtains consent from customers), and to request that Lexis and Verisk delete that data. "This trove of information included precise and personal location data that could identify the everyday habits and movements of Californians," according to the attorney general's announcement. The settlement "requires General Motors to abandon these illegal practices, and underscores the importance of the data minimization in California's privacy law — companies can't just hold on to data and use it later for another purpose." "Modern cars are rolling data collection machines," said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. "Californians must have confidence that they know what data is being collected, how it is being used, and what their opt-out rights are... This case sends a strong message that law enforcement will take action when California privacy laws are not scrupulously followed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Freely available artificial intelligence (AI) software turned the fiber optic data into intelligible, real-time transcripts. "Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves," says Jack Lee Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh who presented the result. "We show that in almost every case where you use these fibers, this could be a privacy concern." Fiber optics can pick up on sound through a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Using a machine called an interrogator, researchers fire laser pulses down a cable and record the pattern of reflections coming back from tiny glass defects along the length of the fiber optic. When an earthquake's seismic wave crosses a section of the fiber, it stretches and squeezes the defects, leading to shifts in the reflected light that researchers can use to build a picture of an earthquake. DAS essentially turns a fiber cable into a long chain of seismometers that can detect not only earthquakes, but also the rumblings of volcanoes, cars, and college marching bands. And although scientists set up dedicated fiber lines specifically for research, DAS can also be performed on "dark fiber" -- unused strands in the web of fiber optics that runs through cities and across oceans, carrying the world's internet traffic. DAS can also be used to eavesdrop, the work of Smith and his colleagues shows. They conducted a field test using an existing DAS setup used to study coastal erosion. They set a speaker next to the cable and played pure tones, music, and speech. Human speech contains frequencies ranging from a few hundred to several thousand hertz. The low end of the range could be pulled out of the data "even without any preprocessing," Smith says. "You can easily see acoustic waves." Getting higher frequency speech took a bit of postprocessing, but it was possible. Dumping the data directly into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, provided accurate real-time transcription. However, this technique worked only for coiled cables, exposed at the surface, at distances of up to 5 meters from the speaker. Burying the cable under just 20 centimeters of dirt was enough to muddy the speech. And straight cables -- even exposed ones right next to the speaker -- did not record speech well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In honor of World Password Day, Kaspersky researchers revisited their study on the crackability of real-world passwords and found that 60% of MD5-hashed passwords could be cracked in under an hour with a single Nvidia RTX 5090, and 48% could be cracked in under a minute. "The bottom line is that passwords protected only by fast hashing algorithms such as MD5 are no longer safe if attackers obtain them in a data breach," reports The Register. From the report: Much of the reason password hashes have become so easy to crack is password predictability. Per Kaspersky, its analysis of more than 200 million exposed passwords revealed common patterns that attackers can use to optimize cracking algorithms, significantly reducing the time needed to guess the character combinations that grant access to target accounts. In case you're wondering whether there's a trend to compare this to, Kaspersky ran a prior iteration of this study in 2024, and bad news: Passwords are actually a bit easier to crack in 2026 than they were a couple of years ago. Not by much, mind you -- only a few percent -- but it's still a move in the wrong direction. "Attackers owe this boost in speed to graphics processors, which grow more powerful every year," Kaspersky explained. "Unfortunately, passwords remain as weak as ever." "This World Password Day, the main message ought not to be to the users, who often have no choice but to use passwords anyway, but to the sites and providers that are requiring them to do so," said senior IEEE member and University of Nottingham cybersecurity professor Steven Furnell. His advice is that providers need to modernize their login systems and enforce stronger protections, because users are often stuck with whatever security options they're given.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Security researcher Tom Joran Sonstebyseter Ronning has found that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in plaintext in RAM. After creating a password and storing it using Edge's password manager, Ronning found that he could dump the RAM and recover his password which was stored in plaintext. Part of the issue is Edge loads all passwords to all sites upon a single verification check, even if the user was not visiting a specific site. This is very different from Chrome, which only loads passwords for specific websites when challenged for the site's password. Also, Chrome will delete the password from memory once the password has been filled. Edge does not delete the passwords from memory once they are used. Microsoft downplayed the risk noting access would require control over a user's PC like a malware infection: "Access to browser data as described in the reported scenario would require the device to already be compromised," Microsoft said. Ronning countered that it was possible to dump passwords for multiple users using administrative privileges for one user to view the passwords for other logged-on users. "Design choices in this area involve balancing performance, usability, and security, and we continue to review it against evolving threats," Microsoft said. "Browsers access password data in memory to help users sign in quickly and securely -- this is an expected feature of the application. We recommend users install the latest security updates and antivirus software to help protect against security threats."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has fixed a bug that could cause parts of Signal notifications to remain stored on iPhones even after messages disappeared and the app was deleted. "Affected users concerned about push notifications can update their devices to stop what Apple characterized as 'notifications marked for deletion' that 'could be unexpectedly retained on the device,'" reports Ars Technica. "According to Apple, the push notifications should never have been stored, but a 'logging issue' failed to redact data." From the report: Vulnerable users hoping to evade law enforcement surveillance often use encrypted apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. That's why users felt blindsided when 404 Media reported that Apple was unexpectedly storing push notifications displaying parts of encrypted messages for up to a month. This occurred even after the message was set to disappear and the app itself was deleted from the device. 404 Media flagged the issue after speaking to multiple people who attended a hearing where the FBI testified that it "was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database." The shocking revelation came in a case that 404 Media noted was "the first time authorities charged people for alleged 'Antifa' activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization." "We're grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue," Signal's post said. "It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication." In their post, Signal confirmed that after users update their devices, "no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday the U.S. Congress approved "a short-term extension" of a FISA law that allows wiretaps without a warrant for surveilling foreign targets, reports CNN — but only until April 30. Republican congressional leaders had sought an 18-month extension, but "failed to secure" the votes after "clamoring from some of their members for reforms to protect Americans' privacy." The warrantless surveillance law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was set to expire on Monday night. Members are hoping the additional time will allow them to come to agreement without ending authorization for the intelligence gathering program, which permits US officials to monitor phone calls and text messages from foreign targets... There was an hour of suspense in the Senate Friday morning when it appeared possible that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of FISA 702, might block the House-passed extension. But ultimately, he said his House colleagues had assured him "this short-term extension makes reform more likely, and expiration makes reform less likely," and so he chose not to object.... House Republican leaders believed Thursday night they had struck a deal with conservative holdouts who harbor deep and longstanding concerns that a key piece of the law infringes on Americans' privacy rights. But in a pair of after-midnight votes, more than a dozen rank-and-file Republicans rejected the long-term reauthorization plan on the floor, which was the result of days of tense negotiations among leadership, lawmakers and the White House. The law allows authorized US officials to gather phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but they can also incidentally collect the data of Americans in the process. Senior national security officials have for years said the law is critical for thwarting terror attacks, stemming the flow of fentanyl into the US and stopping ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. Civil liberties groups on the left and the right, meanwhile, argue the surveillance authority risks infringing on Americans' privacy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some failed startups are reportedly selling old Slack messages, emails, and other internal records to AI companies as training data, creating a new way to cash out after shutting down. Fast Company reports: Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, internal email, and Jira ticket as training data for "hundreds of thousands of dollars." This isn't a one-off scenario. SimpleClosure, a startup that helps companies like Cielo24 shut down, told Forbes that there's been major interest from AI companies trying to get their hands on workplace data. Because of this, SimpleClosure launched a new tool that allows companies to sell their wealth of internal communications -- from Slack archives to email chains -- to AI labs. The company said it's processed 100 such deals in the past year. Payouts ranged from $10,000 to $100,000. "I think the privacy issues here are quite substantial," Marc Rotenberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes. "Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack. ... It's not generic data. It's identifiable people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sam Altman's iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they're a real human, provided they've already stared into one of World's glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan. [...] In addition to the Tinder global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will receive five free "boosts," typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile by up to 10 times for 30 minutes. The videoconferencing platform Zoom also says that users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a call. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to require World's identity verification technology. Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity's chief product officer, tells WIRED the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity-verification technology. Sada said he's especially interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has started testing World as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people. [...] World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which lets artists reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a pitch aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a verified-humans-only show under his alias DJ Pee .Wee in San Francisco on Friday night. "The idea that World ID is not just private, but it's one of the most private things you've ever used, that's not obvious," says Sada. "We're just not used to this kind of technology. Many people used to tape their [iPhone's sensor used to enable] Face ID when it came out, then we got used to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two years ago, Microsoft launched its first wave of "Copilot+" Windows PCs with a handful of exclusive features that could take advantage of the neural processing unit (NPU) hardware being built into newer laptop processors. These NPUs could enable AI and machine learning features that could run locally rather than in someone's cloud, theoretically enhancing security and privacy. One of the first Copilot+ features was Recall, a feature that promised to track all your PC usage via screenshot to help you remember your past activity. But as originally implemented, Recall was neither private nor secure; the feature stored its screenshots plus a giant database of all user activity in totally unencrypted files on the user's disk, making it trivial for anyone with remote or local access to grab days, weeks, or even months of sensitive data, depending on the age of the user's Recall database. After journalists and security researchers discovered and detailed these flaws, Microsoft delayed the Recall rollout by almost a year and substantially overhauled its security. All locally stored data would now be encrypted and viewable only with Windows Hello authentication; the feature now did a better job detecting and excluding sensitive information, including financial information, from its database; and Recall would be turned off by default, rather than enabled on every PC that supported it. The reconstituted Recall was a big improvement, but having a feature that records the vast majority of your PC usage is still a security and privacy risk. Security researcher Alexander Hagenah was the author of the original "TotalRecall" tool that made it trivially simple to grab the Recall information on any Windows PC, and an updated "TotalRecall Reloaded" version exposes what Hagenah believes are additional vulnerabilities. The problem, as detailed by Hagenah on the TotalRecall GitHub page, isn't with the security around the Recall database, which he calls "rock solid." The problem is that, once the user has authenticated, the system passes Recall data to another system process called AIXHost.exe, and that process doesn't benefit from the same security protections as the rest of Recall. "The vault is solid," Hagenah writes. "The delivery truck is not." The TotalRecall Reloaded tool uses an executable file to inject a DLL file into AIXHost.exe, something that can be done without administrator privileges. It then waits in the background for the user to open Recall and authenticate using Windows Hello. Once this is done, the tool can intercept screenshots, OCR'd text, and other metadata that Recall sends to the AIXHost.exe process, which can continue even after the user closes their Recall session. "The VBS enclave won't decrypt anything without Windows Hello," Hagenah writes. "The tool doesn't bypass that. It makes the user do it, silently rides along when the user does it, or waits for the user to do it." A handful of tasks, including grabbing the most recent Recall screenshot, capturing select metadata about the Recall database, and deleting the user's entire Recall database, can be done with no Windows Hello authentication. Once authenticated, Hagenah says the TotalRecall Reloaded tool can access both new information recorded to the Recall database as well as data Recall has previously recorded. "We appreciate Alexander Hagenah for identifying and responsibly reporting this issue. After careful investigation, we determined that the access patterns demonstrated are consistent with intended protections and existing controls, and do not represent a bypass of a security boundary or unauthorized access to data," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "The authorization period has a timeout and anti-hammering protection that limit the impact of malicious queries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.