Search results for "us government"

Russian to be deported after failed Tesla ransomware plot

A Russian man was sentenced Monday to what amounted to time already served and will be deported after pleading guilty to trying to pay a Tesla employee $500,000 to install computer malware at the company’s Nevada electric battery plant in a bid to steal company secrets for ransom. Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, appearing by videoconference from […]

ByteDance CEO steps down, raising questions over government involvement

Shock and surprise were the predominant emotions bustling through ByteDance employees when their softly spoken founder Zhang Yiming announced that he will be stepping down as CEO of what has been described to be the world’s biggest unicorn. Zhang – a 38-year-old billionaire estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of $35.6 billion – […]

Hackers targeted SolarWinds earlier than previously known

The hackers who carried out the massive SolarWinds intrusion were in the software company’s system as early as January 2019, months earlier than previously known, the company’s top official said Wednesday. SolarWinds had previously traced the origins of the hack to the fall of 2019 but now believes that hackers were doing “very early recon […]

Amazon to extend pause on police use of facial recognition

Amazon said Tuesday that it will extend its ban on police use of its face-recognition technology beyond the one-year pause it announced last year. Amazon and other technology companies have been under pressure from civil rights activists and their own workers to halt the sale of face-recognition systems to law enforcement agencies. One concern is […]

Russia won't block Twitter, but partial slowdown to continue

Russian authorities on Monday backed away from threats to block Twitter, saying that the social media platform deleted most of the banned content identified by Moscow and expressed “readiness and interest in building a constructive dialogue.” Russia’s state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said it decided not to block Twitter in light of these developments, an announcement […]

US joins global push against violent extremism online

Two years after a white supremacist in New Zealand livestreamed the slaughter of 51 Muslim worshippers on Facebook, French President Emmanuel Macron says the internet continues to be be used by terrorists as a weapon to propagate hate. Macron and other leaders from tech giants and governments around the world — including the U.S. for […]

Microsoft pledges to let EU users keep data inside bloc

Microsoft is pledging to let business and public sector customers in the European Union keep cloud computing data inside the 27-nation bloc to avert concerns about U.S. government access to sensitive information. Microsoft “will go beyond our existing data storage commitments and enable you to process and store all your data in the EU,” said […]

States push back against use of facial recognition by police

Law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have used facial recognition technology to solve homicides and bust human traffickers, but concern about its accuracy and the growing pervasiveness of video surveillance is leading some state lawmakers to hit the pause button. At least seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of the […]

Biden pushes for diversity in transition to clean energy

As the nation pushes to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and use cleaner energy sources, President Joe Biden’s administration says it wants to ensure diversity among the communities that benefit from the transition and the people who are hired to do the work. The administration says it wants more solar arrays erected in communities […]

US takes new aim at ransomware after costly year for attacks

The Justice Department is taking new aim at ransomware after a year that officials say was the costliest on record for the crippling cyberattacks. Formation of a task force of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors is an acknowledgment of the growing threat posed by ransomware attacks, in which hackers lock up computer data and […]