scraping
Latest
Meta fined €265 million over Facebook data scraping in the EU
Meta has been hit with a €265 million ($277 million) fine for failing to prevent millions of Facebook users' data from being scraped.
Clearview AI fined £7.5 million and told to delete all UK facial recognition data
Clearview AI has been fined £7.55 million by the UK's privacy watchdog for illegally scraping the facial images of UK residents.
France orders Google to pay news companies for showing article extracts
France’s competition authority has ordered Google to negotiate payments with publishers and news agencies to display extracts on its news, search and discovery pages. The interim ruling comes after France implemented the EU’s “Copyright Directive” law that forced Google to pay publishers to use snippets of articles in searches.
Over 267 million Facebook users reportedly had data exposed online
More than 267 million Facebook users allegedly had their user IDs, phone numbers and names exposed online, according to a report from Comparitech and security researcher Bob Diachenko. That info was found in a database that could be accessed without a password or any other authentication, and the researchers believe it was gathered as part of an illegal scraping operation or Facebook API abuse.
Visa warns that hackers are scraping card details from gas pumps
Cybercrime groups are actively exploiting a weakness in gas station point-of-sale (POS) networks to steal credit card data, Visa has revealed. The company's fraud disruption teams are investigating several incidents in which a hacking group known as Fin8 defrauded fuel dispenser merchants. In each case, the attackers gained access to the POS networks via malicious emails and other unknown means. They then installed POS scraping software that exploited the lack of security with old-school mag stripes in card readers that can't read chips.
Google will continue to let sites opt out of showing in search results
Google swears it won't start scraping websites that previously opted out of web crawling just because it can now legally go back to its old ways. Back in 2012, the tech titan promised to change its practices in several areas to settle an antitrust investigation by the FTC. Those changes include removing AdWords restrictions that made it difficult for advertisers to launch multi-platform campaigns, as well as providing websites a mechanism to opt out of having their content crawled and displayed on search results. Both commitments expired on December 27th, 2017, but in a letter to the FTC, the company says it intends to continue honoring them.
Maniacally cuckoo for Mountain Lion: App Store checker shell script
In the spirit of Tim Cook's maniacal excitement about upcoming Apple products, I bring to you the shell script you can run repeatedly from the command line to check the App Store to see if Mountain Lion is ready for purchase. This is what I used last year to check for Lion; it worked. This year, I update the search string to "Mountain Lion" instead. As presented, it employs a 10-minute time-out, so you can run a repeat command with it. #! /bin/csh curl -silent -A "iMacAppStore/1.0.1 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6.7; en) AppleWebKit/533.20.25" 'http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMultiRoom?fcId=489264329&mt=12' | grep -i "mountain lion" > /dev/null if ($? == 0) then echo "Available" say "MOUNTAIN LION MAY BE AVAILABLE" else echo "Nada" endif sleep 600 Ready to improve the script? Have at it, campers! Update: Looks like the URL changed from last year. Updated via Mark (mcackay).
Ask Massively: Thieving on the fast track edition
One of our readers was kind enough to point us to two sites that, once again, were stealing our posts without crediting our authors or anything like that. (I don't mean "this post looks suspiciously similar"; I mean abusing copy and paste.) Unfortunately, while we're aware of these things, there's not a whole lot we can do other than request that the sites get taken down. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but it's all we can do. I guess it's nice to be good enough that your work is worth stealing without credit? That's something. This week's installment of Ask Massively isn't going to focus on that, however. Instead, we're going to focus on the recent spate of MMO litigation and the potential for a boxed RIFT expansion. If you have a question you'd like to see answered in a future installment of Ask Massively, mail it along to ask@massively.com or leave a comment in the field below. Questions may be edited slightly for clarity and/or brevity.
