John Lister

Two of Apple's big investors want the company to tackle 'smartphone addiction' among younger users. They say failing to address the problem now could hurt the company's value in the long term. The call comes from investment management company Jana ... Partners, along with the managers of retirement plans for teachers in California. Between them they hold around $2 billion of Apple Stock, though that is only around one fifth of one percent of the entire company. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) They cited research that says using smartphones too much can mean students don't get enough sleep and pay less ... (view more)

A politician says online companies that don't do enough to help fight terrorism should be punished through the tax system. Ben Wallace's argument is based on the idea that one-off fines don't make enough difference to hugely profitable companies. ... Ben Wallace, a British government politician responsible for security issues, called technology companies "ruthless profiteers" in an interview with the Sunday Times. He complained about some companies refusing to hand over details of users alleged to have encouraged or incited terrorism, saying the companies "will ruthlessly sell our ... (view more)

An Internet provider has warned customers that "pirating online content could affect thermostats and security cameras." But the explanation is something of a stretch. The warning comes from Armstrong Zoom, an Internet Provider that serves several ... states from Ohio over to the Washington DC area. It's written to customers whose connections have reportedly been used to infringe copyright. The letter says customers won't face immediate action but will face sanctions for repeat offenses. That's similar of an industry-wide effort that tried to cut down on piracy (including a 'six strike' ... (view more)

Social media sites could face fines of almost $60 million if they don't remove hate speech and other illegal posts within 24 hours of receiving a report. The new German law has prompted Facebook to recruit hundreds of staff. It's the result of the ... Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz law, which is known as NetzDG for short, and literally translates as Network Enforcement Act. (Source: BBC.com ) Libel And Hate Speech Both Covered The law doesn't change what content is allowed and not allowed. Instead, it says that sites must remove any content that is "obviously illegal." A prime example is ... (view more)

The Library of Congress has abandoned a project to archive every post made on Twitter. It blames the sheer number of "tweets" now being made, along with an increasing reliance on images and videos. The library is the world's largest and collects all ... manner of documents from newspapers to government forms. As a general rule it, doesn't aim to collect all possible data from a source but made an exception for Twitter in 2010. At that point it reached an agreement with Twitter to get a copy of its complete archive of posts, then dating back to 2006. The idea was to "document the emergence of ... (view more)

Apple has admitted it deliberately slowed down older iPhones, saying the move improved performance. It's ended years of speculation, but sparked a flurry of lawsuits. Every time a new iPhone comes out, a conspiracy theory emerges that older iPhones ... suddenly started getting slower. Critics claimed Apple was deliberately slowing down the models so that people would be more tempted to upgrade to the new model in the hope of regaining their former performance. Apple has always denied this and a study a couple of months ago found no clear pattern of processor performance and speed slowing down, ... (view more)

A European court has ruled that Uber is a transport company rather than a tech business. It may not make an immediate difference to its operations, but could be a big step in the way online companies are regulated. Uber, which describes itself as a ... ride-hailing firm, lets users hire a cab through a smartphone app, then pairs them with self-employed drivers in the area. The ruling by the European Court of Justice stemmed from attempts by city officials in Barcelona, Spain to hold Uber to the same local regulations as traditional taxi services. The legal principle determined by the case now ... (view more)

A security company has released its list of the worst passwords of 2017. As always with this annual survey, it tells us more about culture than security practices. The list comes from SplashData, which compiles the rankings based on how many times ... particular passwords appears in leaked lists of user databases (mainly among English language users). The survey this year totaled more than five million passwords, though it's worth noting the company deliberately excluded leaks of passwords from adult sites. (Source: cnet.com ) The most common are hardly any surprise with "123456" beating out " ... (view more)

Facebook says it's cracking down on posts that unreasonably encourage users to share content or tag friends. It's also offering a way to temporarily stop seeing posts from a particular user. The move is designed to deal with people and organizations ... who take unfair advantage of the way Facebook decides what most users see on the site (with the default settings). The order posts appear for a particular user is heavily influenced by how many other people the user knows have "liked", shared or commented on. Meanwhile tagging somebody in a post (which is done by writing their name in a reply to a ... (view more)

Three Americans have plead guilty to hijacking more than 100,000 internet-connected devices. The group of infected machines (known as a "botnet") was then used to attack websites using a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) to make websites ... unavailable. While most DDoS attacks are carried out on PCs, this attack in particular targeted weaknesses in smaller devices that use the Internet. This included routers, digital video recorders and wireless cameras. That's a significant point, as the tech security community has generally treated security flaws in such devices as a lower ... (view more)