Month: January 2016

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat/Flickr)

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld a 2013 settlement between Facebook and a number of advocacy groups representing minors whose images were used in "Sponsored Stories." That agreement resulted in Facebook paying each member of the class $15 and imposed some changes to the social media giant's disclosure policies.

"It is not clear whether Facebook’s use of minors’ names and likenesses in Sponsored Stories violated California law," the court wrote. "It is also not clear whether the settlement at issue—which provides more protection for minors from Facebook’s advertising practices than existed before—violates state law. The district court did not abuse its discretion in approving the settlement in the face of this uncertainty."

The original case, known as Fraley v. Facebook, was brought against Facebook in 2011, citing violations of both federal and California state law. The case alleged that when Facebook took a "like" of a user under the age of 18 and then used that data, name, and image in a Sponsored Story without the parents’ permission, the company was doing so illegally.

(credit: Art Writ)

Let's get something straight from the start: vaccines are good. Let's be completely clear about that. But sometimes some people have adverse reactions to them—no, not autism, but things like diarrhea, nausea, fatigue, maybe a sore arm. And when the vaccinated (or their parents) complain to their friends about it, their friends might be tempted to skip their own vaccinations.

It would be nice to know in advance who might respond negatively to a vaccine so they could be warned and treated. A recent paper out of London harnesses advances in high-throughput analytical technologies, informatics, and biostatistics to begin to do just that.

Researchers treated 178 healthy adult volunteers with a vaccine against the H1N1 "swine flu" that circulated in 2009. They took blood and urine from the volunteers one week before their shots, the day of their shots, and then one day, one week, two weeks, and again 63 days afterward.

Mozilla has warned Firefox users that its decision to reject SHA-1 certificates has caused an unfortunate side effect: some man-in-the-middle devices, such as security scanners and antivirus products, are failing to connect to HTTPS sites.

The browser maker advised any netizens affected by the interference to install the latest version of Firefox, which reinstates support for SHA-1.

Indeed, 'tis the season for browser upgrades. As Ars reported on Tuesday, Microsoft has been furiously nudging Internet Explorer holdouts over to the latest versions of its browser.

(credit: Comcast)

Time Warner Cable is warning that login credentials for 320,000 customers may have been stolen. The TV cable and Internet service provider told Reuters that e-mail passwords may have been harvested by malware installed on customers' computers or that the potentially compromised passcodes may have been the result of data breaches of other companies that stored Time Warner Cable customer information. The company is still investigating how the data was obtained, but so far has found no indications that its systems were breached.

A Time Warner spokesman told the news agency that the company issued the warning after receiving notification from the FBI that some customer e-mail addresses and passwords "may have been compromised." As a precaution, company officials are sending e-mails and direct mail correspondence advising customers to update their passwords.

The Time Warner advisory comes a day after Web host provider Linode said it was resetting user passwords following signs of a breach. The reset came after an investigation of "the unauthorized login of three accounts [that] has led us to the discovery of two Linode.com user credentials on an external machine. This implies user credentials could have been read from our database, either offline or on, at some point." The database contains usernames, e-mail addresses, "securely hashed" passwords, and encrypted two-factor seeds.