Month: March 2018

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Today, the Department of Justice announced charges against nine Iranian nationals connected to the Mabna Institute, a company which an FBI spokesman said was "created in 2013 for the express purpose of illegally gaining access to non-Iranian scientific resources through computer intrusions." The stolen data was largely acquired from universities, but academic journal publishers, tech companies, other private companies, government organizations, and the United Nations were targeted as well.

The hacking campaign was central to a line of business at Mabna Institute, which acts as a sort of pirated JSTOR for the Iranian academic and research community. Mabna, the indictment claims, "was set up in order to assist Iranian universities [and] scientific and research organizations to obtain access to non-Iranian scientific resources." In that capacity, DOJ attorneys claim, "The Mabna Institute contracted with Iranian governmental and private entities to conduct hacking activities on their behalf."

In addition to acquiring research that the US and other countries banned access to in Iran and providing it to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the principals of Mabna also sold both stolen research documents and access to hacked organizations' online libraries through Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir—websites controlled by Abdollah Karima, one of the principals of Mabna Institute. Over a four year period, Manba Institute is alleged to have gained access to computers at over 300 universities—roughly half of them in the United States—while gathering up a total of 31.5 terabytes of research data. Additionally, about 7,996 university accounts were compromised—about 3,768 of them at US universities.

Enlarge / The offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London. Facebook expressed outrage over the misuse of its data as Cambridge Analytica, the British firm at the center of a major scandal rocking the social media giant, suspended its chief executive. (credit: Brais G. Rouco/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

British enforcement officers have entered the London headquarters of Cambridge Analytica, according to The Guardian and the BBC.

The raid appears to have come after Wednesday's formal approval for a search warrant by a local judge.

"We are pleased with the decision of the Judge, and the warrant is now being executed," said an unnamed spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office, the United Kingdom’s data privacy watchdog, in a Friday statement. "This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes. As you will expect, we will now need to collect, assess and consider the evidence before coming to any conclusions."

Enlarge (credit: Aditya Irawan/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On Friday, Tumblr published a list of accounts that it said were linked to "state-sponsored disinformation campaigns."

The list of 84 accounts appeared to have been suspended or deleted, and they are believed to be linked to Russian efforts to influence Americans in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Other tech companies, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google, have previously come forward and even testified before Congress concerning what they experienced on their platforms. However, Tumblr, which is owned by Oath (a Verizon subsidiary), has not.

In February, Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a 37-page indictment against the Internet Research Agency, a well-known Russian bot and troll factory, and named 13 Russians on charges of "conspiracy to defraud the United States," wire fraud, and bank fraud, among others. Tumblr, however, was not specifically named.

Enlarge / Maybe don't rush to throw away that scary death phone quite yet. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Last night, a fellow editor emailed me a link to yet another study purporting to show that cellphone use could be associated with cancer. This one was worth looking at in more detail, however, because it purported to see an increase in a specific cancer—the same type of cancer that was increased in a problematic US government study.

A quick glance at the study identified significant issues with its primary conclusion. Normally, at this point, the decision would be to skip coverage unless the study picked up unwarranted attention from the rest of the media. (See: Scott Kelly's DNA). But in this case, we thought we'd describe how we went about evaluating the paper, since it could help more people identify similar issues in the future.

Background checks

The first step in evaluating a scientific paper is to get ahold of a copy of the paper. Fortunately, this one has been placed online by an organization that consistently promotes the idea that cell phones create health risks. The Environmental Health Trust's involvement shouldn't be seen as a positive or a negative; they've promoted very low-quality material in the past, but the organization would undoubtedly promote higher quality studies if those agreed with its stance.

Enlarge / Judge Alsup, here shown giving a talk about a judge he clerked with. (credit: US Courts)

Earlier this week, we took a crack at answering a federal judge’s questions about climate science for readers who may have asked similar ones. And on Wednesday, Judge William Alsup finally got his answers during a five-hour hearing.

The case was brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland against a handful of oil companies that those cities feel should help pay for the effects of sea-level rise. This claim centers on the idea that internal documents show the companies knew climate change was human-caused even as they publicly campaigned otherwise in the 1980s and 1990s.

Before the case gets rolling, Judge Alsup wanted each side to put their climate science cards on the table, establishing any disagreement on how our knowledge has evolved over time. He also wanted a few questions of his own answered about why we are certain humans are responsible for global warming.

Enlarge / SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the International Astronautical Congress on September 29, 2017 in Adelaide, Australia. (credit: Mark Brake/Getty Images)

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has deleted the companies’ Facebook pages in response to the ongoing Cambridge Analytica brouhaha, joining some now-former Facebook users in their protest of the social media giant’s corporate behavior.

The move comes a week after revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm that contracted with the Donald Trump presidential campaign, retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it.

(credit: Cyrus Farivar)

New reporting on Cambridge Analytica has spurred massive public outcry from users and politicians, with even CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling it a "breach of trust." At least two lawsuits have been filed as a result.

Google is continuing to work to crack down on autoplaying video around the Web. On the one hand, having a new tab unexpectedly start squawking and making a racket is tremendously annoying. But on the other hand, we visit sites like YouTube explicitly to watch video and probably want those videos to play as soon as the page loads. Chrome 66, due for release in mid-April, will include a new heuristic system that will attempt to block noisy autoplaying video when it's unwanted while still permitting it on sites like YouTube and Netflix where the video is the entire purpose of the site.

Shhhh....

Under the new policy, Google is defining four classes of video that will be allowed to autoplay. The first three categories are fairly straightforward. Silent videos with no audio content at all will always be allowed to autoplay. If a user interacts with a site (an action that includes tapping or clicking on a site, not merely scrolling on it), the site will be able to autoplay video during that browser session. Sites that are pinned to the Android home screen are also allowed to autoplay.

The fourth category is more complex. In the desktop browser, sites that are frequently used for media playback will be allowed to autoplay video, provided that the video meets certain criteria. Chrome will track each visit to such sites and make a record of interaction to play the video. To qualify for autoplaying, a user must have made at least five visits to a site and must have elected to play "significant" video on the site on at least 70 percent of those visits. If over time the number of video playbacks drops to below 50 percent, autoplay will be disabled on the site. Video is only deemed to be "significant" if it's larger than 200×140, has an audio track, isn't muted, and is on a visible tab.