Fascists love to surveil and harass… 😕

"The Italian founder of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, who has been a vocal critic of Italy’s alleged complicity in abuses suffered by migrants in Libya, has revealed WhatsApp informed him his mobile phone was targeted by military-grade spyware made by the Israel-based company Paragon Solutions.

Luca Casarini, an activist whose organisation is estimated to have saved 2,000 people crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, is the most high profile person to come forward since WhatsApp announced last week that 90 journalists and other members of civil society had probably had their phones compromised by a government client using Paragon’s spyware.

The work of the three alleged targets to have come forward so far – Casarini, the journalist Francesco Cancellato, and the Sweden-based Libyan activist Husam El Gomati – have one thing in common: each has been critical of the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The Italian government has not responded to a request for comment on whether it is a client of Paragon."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/05/activists-critical-of-italian-pm-may-have-had-their-phones-targeted-by-paragon-spyware-says-whatsapp

"Paragon’s spyware was allegedly delivered to targets who were placed on group chats without their permission, and sent malware through PDFs in the group chat. Paragon makes no-click spyware, which means users do not have to click on any link or attachment to be infected; it is simply delivered to the phone.

It is not clear how long Cancellato may have been compromised. But the editor published a high-profile investigative story last year that exposed how members of Meloni’s far-right party’s youth wing had engaged in fascist chants, Nazi salutes and antisemitic rants.

Fanpage’s undercover reporters – although not Cancellato personally – had infiltrated groups and chat forums used by members of the National Youth, a wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. The outlet published clips of National Youth members chanting “Duce” – a reference to Benito Mussolini – and “sieg Heil”, and boasting about their familial connections to historical figures linked to neo-fascist terrorism. The stories were published in May."

"An Italian investigative journalist who is known for exposing young fascists within prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party was targeted with spyware made by Israel-based Paragon Solutions, according to a WhatsApp notification received by the journalist.

Francesco Cancellato, the editor-in-chief of the Italian investigative news outlet Fanpage, was the first person to come forward publicly after WhatsApp announced on Friday that 90 journalists and other members of civil society had been targeted by the spyware.

The journalist, like dozens of others whose identities are not yet known, said he received a notification from the messaging app on Friday afternoon.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, has not identified the targets or their precise locations, but said they were based in more than two dozen countries, including in Europe.

WhatsApp said it had discovered that Paragon was targeting its users in December and shut down the vector used to “possibly compromise” the individuals. Like other spyware makers, Paragon sells use of its spyware, known as Graphite, to government agencies, who are supposed to use it to fight and prevent crime."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/31/italian-journalist-whatsapp-israeli-spyware

"Whitaker was only a year into the job when he announced his intention to step down. He had several years left in his term. His resignation clears the way for President Donald Trump to name his own replacement to run the agency. Later Thursday morning, Trump said he was tapping Chris Rocheleau, a top executive for an aviation business association, as acting FAA administrator, but provided no details about a permanent replacement.

Musk, a major donor to Trump, is reportedly helping the administration vet candidates to certain positions and is directing an effort to purge thousands of federal workers from all levels of the government. And while its unclear whether Musk has been directly involved in picking a new FAA administrator, the billionaire mogul has reportedly been involved in overseeing Boeing’s development of the next Air Force One jets.

But Musk’s efforts to get Whitaker were well known even before Trump’s victory in November. He has complained many times about the FAA, lashing out in September after the agency levied a $633,000 fine for launching missions with unapproved changes. (Musk is worth over $400 billion, making him the richest man in the world.)"

https://www.theverge.com/news/603113/faa-chief-musk-dc-plane-crash-crisis

"The Federal Aviation Administration’s leader stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit.

The move by Michael Whitaker means the FAA has no Senate-confirmed leader for one of the biggest crises in its history because he quit before Donald Trump took office.

Whitaker ran the FAA for just a year but announced in December that he would step down on Jan. 20, as the new president was sworn in.

Nobody has taken his place. Last week, specialist aviation site The Air Current reported that industry veteran Chris Rocheleau had been sworn in as deputy FAA administrator, which would put him in acting charge of the agency. The Wall Street Journal had first reported that he would become deputy."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/faa-chief-michael-whitaker-quit-on-jan-20-after-elon-musk-told-him-to-resign/

"Now it’s become clear that the moat the U.S. built to protect its companies from domestic competition actually created the conditions that allowed them to atrophy. They got fat and happy inside their castles. Their business pivoted from technological innovation to performing alchemy with spreadsheets, turning made-up metrics into dollar valuations detached from reality. Now DeepSeek has exposed the scam. With a tiny fraction of the resources, and without access to the full panoply of U.S. chip technology, the Chinese company DeepSeek has pantsed Silicon Valley. The U.S. company OpenAI began as a nonprofit dedicated to making AI widely available, as its name suggests. Its top guy, Sam Altman, managed to transition it to a for-profit and close it off.

Now DeepSeek is ironically fulfilling OpenAI’s original mission by providing an open-source model that simply performs better than any in the market. We have an FAQ on the details of DeepSeek below.

Meanwhile here in the United States, Trump is celebrating a (possibly exaggerated) $500 billion investment in Texas to fuel AI computer power that appears to be made obsolete—or much less relevant—thanks to DeepSeek’s innovation. And Trump is stacking his administration with crypto bros, tech moguls refusing to divest, and even launched his own scam meme coin. Trump’s senior tech advisers like Elon Musk meanwhile have extensive commercial ties directly with China. You don’t have to squint too hard to see which of these countries is going to win this competition."

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/deepseek-openai-lina-khan-sam-altman

"DeepSeek’s generative AI chatbot, a direct rival to ChatGPT, is able to perform some tasks at the same level as recently released models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, despite claims it cost a fraction of the money and time to develop.

The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model last week and its rise to the top of Apple’s App Store has triggered a tech stock sell-off. Asian tech shares fell on Tuesday in the wake of a Wall Street rout overnight.

The Nasdaq fell 3 per cent and US chipmaker Nvidia, which produces the chips used to train large AI models, slumped 17 per cent, losing $600bn in market capitalisation.

On Monday evening, Altman wrote on X that DeepSeek’s model was “impressive, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price”. He added: “We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”"

https://www.ft.com/content/b98e4903-ac05-4462-8ad1-eda619b6a9c4?accessToken=zwAGLMHzpgkYkdO5jkkDrAVEYtOK0e2mGbapxA.MEYCIQDndb75yim77tKxWK-ODANuiZb8pn9PO56RSF_p2NU6OgIhAIfDrQImLd5Yj8mu9ETfTa5bppZE-K63gAoq1_0aFG1E&amp%3Bsharetype=gift&amp%3Btoken=1f813f75-7e1b-4a0e-878e-cf213b7a82f6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AKG3fiwhXQ&amp%3Bt=1s

“This is why we are currently in the situation where the rules do not exist anymore. They are being treated in an entirely ad hoc manner: a certain set of rules are being used in one country or in one set of countries and other rules are being used in another set of countries. All of this is justified on the grounds of national interest. This is not an illegitimate position to take but one has to be clear about what it implies. It implies the return to mercantilistic policies where the interests of individual countries are paramount. It also means the abandonment of any cosmopolitan and internationalist perspective where the rules are at least in principle universal. We no longer have universal rules and the main culprit for not having universal rules is not Trump, but the view of the world where domestic political interest and the so-called security concerns are above everything else. This is not a world of globalization, but of parceled regionalisms and even nationalism.”

"In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.
This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicised the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it."

https://www.wired.com/story/license-plate-reader-live-video-data-exposed/

@dohpaz42@lemmy.world Yes, because they do worse… :-/

@ointersexo Durante muitos anos não tive celular - só tablet. O problema é que cada vez mais muitos serviço básicos - banco, cartão de refeição, etc. - só funcionam com smartphone porque exigem uma app. Isso aí complica o cenário. Os reguladores para a concorrência deviam obrigar esses provedores a fornecerem uma versão web dessas mesmas app sem necessidade de recorrer a um celular.

@ointersexo Sim, vejo cada vez mais gente a optar por um velho “tijolo”