Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (credit: Sean P. Anderson / Wikimedia Commons)

Spotify has removed episodes of InfoWars host Alex Jones' podcast from its streaming service, according to multiple reports. The music streaming company deleted an unspecified number of The Alex Jones Show episodes for violating its hate content policy.

"We take reports of hate content seriously and review any podcast episode or song that is flagged by our community," Spotify said in a statement to Billboard. "Spotify can confirm it has removed specific episodes of The Alex Jones Show podcast for violating our hate content policy."

It's unclear what speech specifically got those episodes removed from Spotify, and it's unclear which episodes were deleted. Nevertheless, The Alex Jones Show still appears on Spotify with more than one year's worth of episodes still available for streaming.

Sony

Spider-Man is headed to the PlayStation 4 (PS4) on September 7, and the game is coming from one of the industry's most accomplished studios for action-adventures. I played the first several hours of Spider-Man, uncovering the roots of its storyline and wandering freely in Manhattan.

The developer of this new game, Insomniac Games, is famous for making one of my most personally beloved franchises, Ratchet & Clank. The studio's two most recent triple-A games—a 2016 ground-up remake of the original Ratchet & Clank for PS4 and 2014 Xbox One exclusive Sunset Overdrive—were two of the best I've played lately.

Enlarge / The Disclose.io project: open source contracts to keep white-hat hackers and developers out of legal trouble. (credit: Disclose.io)

Not a week goes by without another major business or Internet service announcing a data breach. And while many companies have begun to adopt bug bounty programs to encourage the reporting of vulnerabilities by outside security researchers, they've done so largely inconsistently. That's the reason for Disclose.io, a collaborative and open source effort to create an open source standard for bug bounty and vulnerability-disclosure programs that protects well-intentioned hackers.

The lack of consistency in companies' bug-disclosure programs—and the absence of "safe harbor" language that protects well-intended hackers from legal action in many of them—can discourage anyone who discovers a security bug from reporting it. And vague language in a disclosure program can not only discourage cooperation but can also lead to public-relations disasters and a damaged reputation with the security community, as happened with drone maker DJI last November.

Dropbox moved to fix its own vulnerability disclosure terms and was motivated to change its own legal policies following a certain lawsuit against a reporter over a vulnerability disclosure. Companies that manage bug bounties for large organizations, including HackerOne and Bugcrowd, have made their own efforts to get customers to standardize security terms.