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WASHINGTON - The Islamic State (IS) terror group is still capable of finding ways to avoid detection on social media platforms such as Facebook, a new report said. A pro-IS network on Facebook consisting of several hundred accounts and reaching thousands of people managed to remain on the social media giant and spread its propaganda, according to a report released Monday by the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). The ISD report said its researchers tracked, analyzed and dissected the behaviors of this pro-IS network of Facebook accounts through ethnographic monitoring. This analysis taps into the study of individual cultures through the interpretation of behaviors and social interactions. “ISIS supporters appear to be exploiting a major loophole on Facebook to hijack accounts from other users, using two applications that facilitate the intercepting of password reset text messages sent by the platform,” the ISD said in its report, using another acronym for IS. It said several Facebook accounts “produced and shared tutorial videos in order to teach their fellow e-jihadists across the platform how to exploit this weakness in Facebook’s account security protocols.” Bolstering IS narrative Moustafa Ayad, the report’s author, said the main objective of these Facebook accounts is to bolster and sustain IS narratives online. “They need to hold that territory and gain follower bases, before they can commence recruitment,” he told VOA. “These networks are there for spreading the message, and in their parlance, to ‘remain and expand.’ ” “Remain and expand” was a motto that IS militants adopted when they once controlled large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. ‘No tolerance for terrorist propaganda’ Facebook says it has “no tolerance for terrorist propaganda on our platform,” adding that it removes content and accounts that violate its policy as soon as they are identified. “We had already…

News Business Top EU court ditches transatlantic data transfer deal Wednesday, July 15, 2020 7:01 p.m. EDT by Thomson Reuters FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo By Foo Yun Chee and Marine Strauss LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - Europe's highest court ruled on Thursday that a transatlantic data transfer deal is invalid because of concerns about U.S. surveillance in a decision that could disrupt thousands of companies that rely on the agreement. The ruling, which cannot be appealed, effectively ends the privileged access companies in the United States had to personal data from Europe and puts the country on a similar footing to other nations outside the 27-country bloc. The so-called Privacy Shield was set up in 2016 by Washington and Brussels to protect personal data when it is sent to the United States for commercial use after a previous agreement known as Safe Harbour was ruled invalid in 2015. More than 5,000 companies have signed up to use the Privacy Shield. The case was triggered by a long-running dispute between Facebook and Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems who shot to fame for his role in overturning Safe Harbour. Facebook had no immediate comment. "In respect of certain surveillance programmes, those provisions do not indicate any limitations on the power they confer to implement those programmes, or the existence of guarantees for potentially targeted non-U.S. persons," the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg said. "It looks perfect," Schrems said. "One of the biggest takeaways is that we would need fundamental reform in U.S. surveillance laws if U.S. companies still want to have any kind of decent access to the European market," he told Reuters TV. The U.S. Department of Commerce said it…

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Law360, San Francisco (July 15, 2020, 6:29 PM EDT) -- A California judge appeared skeptical Wednesday of American Facebook users' arguments that their counterparts in the United Kingdom should be allowed to join U.S. multidistrict litigation over the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said he didn't understand why California law, as opposed to U.K. law, would apply to questions surrounding whether Facebook's updated user agreement, which includes a forum-selection clause, prohibits U.K. users from bringing claims stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal against Facebook in U.S. courts.Judge Chhabria wondered aloud whether he should deny the Facebook users' motion for leave to amend their complaint on futility... Stay ahead of the curve In the legal profession, information is the key to success. You have to know what’s happening with clients, competitors, practice areas, and industries. Law360 provides the intelligence you need to remain an expert and beat the competition. Access to case data within articles (numbers, filings, courts, nature of suit, and more.) Access to attached documents such as briefs, petitions, complaints, decisions, motions, etc. Create custom alerts for specific article and case topics and so much more! TRY LAW360 FREE FOR SEVEN DAYS

LEE COUNTY The Lee County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a post made by its official Facebook account recently — a reply to another Facebook user that used a controversial emoji. The official LCSO Facebook page is accused of replying to a Facebook commenter with an eggplant emoji, which is often used as the meaning for male genitalia or an ethnic slur. The sheriff’s office posted a video about a new initiative. In the comments of the post, a user commented, “Best sheriff in a very long time,” referring to Sheriff Carmine Marceno. Facebook user Amanda Canington replied to that comment, calling the sheriff’s supporter clueless. That prompted a response to the comment by the official LCSO Facebook page, tagging Canington and saying, “Amanda Regnier Canington You’re a ”. “The taxpayers, I’m sure, don’t appreciate it,” said Melina Brady, who grew up in Lee County. Brady saw the post and knew what the eggplant meant in this context, a lewd reference to a male’s body part. “With all the things coming to light about the way women have been treated the past couple years, and especially on top of that is not professional is not okay, would he have said that to a guy?” Brady said. In an interview with The News-Press, Marceno said his office does not have a firm social media policy. Attorney Pam Seay, an FGCU professor of justice studies, told us that’s the first problem. “I found that to be a little troubling,” Seay said. “There needs to be some kind of control as to what is and is not on your official page.” The next problem is what the LCSO account represents. The sheriff’s office is a taxpayer-funded law enforcement agency, so is its Facebook page. “Once you allow the comments on that page, you…

on July 15, 2020 at 4:30 pm Facebook researchers have created an AI model that can distinguish between five voices speaking at the same time on one microphone better than any existing system. The new method could improve audio technology in noisy spaces including hearing aids and voice assistants. Voice in the Crowd The researchers explain their model in a paper titled Voice Separation with an Unknown Number of Multiple Speakers and will present it at the 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning. The scientists taught the AI how to tell different voices apart using a new variant on recurrent neural networks to simulate memory and analyze the audio to determine how many people are speaking before an encoder network organizes the voice appropriately. Models trained on between two and five simultaneous speakers, all with just one microphone. “The ability to separate a single voice from the multiple conversations occurring concurrently forms a challenging perceptual task,” the researchers explain in the paper. “The ability of humans to do so has inspired many computational attempts, with much of the earlier work focusing on multiple microphones and unsupervised learning, e.g., the independent component analysis approach. In this work, we focus on the problem of supervised voice separation from a single microphone, which has seen a great leap in performance following the advent of deep neural networks.” Listen Up Facebook’s researchers point to a couple of different areas where their model could enhance existing audio technology, such as hearing aids. While hearing aids today have advanced beyond simply making sound louder, people using them can still struggle to hear the person they are speaking with when it’s noisy. Isolating different voices and removing extraneous sound would be ideal for people using a hearing aid at a party or when it’s windy. The same…

Members of the Facebook group participate with short reports and longer descriptions of where people are and aren't wearing masks KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A local couple noticed different businesses had different levels of compliance with wearing masks. They would post what they saw on social media but it seemed like that information needed a broader reach.  Three weeks ago they started the Facebook page called Mask Up Knoxville. It has almost 6,000 followers.  Think of it as a heads up on safety. "It's really awkward if you go to a business and you walk in and you realize, oh, no one is wearing masks, no one is taking any precautions, I don't want to be here. So it's better to know ahead of time where we can go," Robin Nichols said.  She is one of the admins for Mask Up Knoxville.  She says posts on the Facebook page must be a first-hand report of a visit to a local business.  "We try to emphasize the positives and the good places to go." The page has a search function and recommendations by category.  "There are some people that have been doing really well, right from the start. I'm very impressed. Publix has been doing very well. Trader Joe's right on top of it. Markham Jewelers also on top of it," she said.  Scrolling through the comments reveals both short reports and long descriptions.  "We've seen some real benefits for Knoxville because we have people coming in from Lenoir City and people coming up from Maryville because they know the conditions of the stores here are going to be good," she said. Reviews also point out stores not following Knox mask rules. Sometimes it's workers, sometimes it's customers, sometimes it's management.  "I was really hopeful that the group would become obsolete after the mandate.…

The percentage of Black workers in non-technical roles at Facebook Inc. has quadrupled in the last six years, but Black employees still hold just 1.7% ...

The Floyd County Fair is set to go today – with the horse show taking place first. This event, like every event this week, will be closed entirely to the public. Back on June 1st the fair Facebook page posted what many thought was inevitable: “Floyd County Fair Board has made the difficult decision to cancel all ground entertainment and grandstand attractions for the 2020 Floyd County Fair scheduled for July 15-19.” Since all the events would be closed to the public, the fair board pledged to Facebook live each event. https://kchanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/horse-1.mp3 Facebook Live Schedule: Wednesday, July 15th at 10am – Horse Show Thursday, July 16th at 10am – Sheep Show followed by the Meat Goat Show Friday, July 17th at 10am – Poultry Show Friday, July 17th at 1pm – Rabbit Show Saturday, July 18th at 9am – Beef Show Sunday, July 19th at 10am – Bucket/Bottle Calf Show Sunday, July 19 at 4pm – Dog & Pet Show Monday, July 20th at 10am – Swine Show The board says each show will consist of the exhibitor showing their animal and then returning it home after. Each exhibitor will also get two plus-ones to be distributed to family or friends they would like to be there. The board is hoping to reschedule some of the missed events for this upcoming Fall. To watch the events live: https://www.facebook.com/floydcountyfair/?__tn__=%2CdkC-R&eid=ARDwrDccrvBatATp8wuIXenEPQUFNTjq7g01xbz9Zrx8LDtZvWL6xMW50qBj_FFNVoJ1NENazlwvv-I5&hc_ref=ARRZBG6F4EW8b0bJBOh4QtIVQQCvaCKzCLer8bjt9A4_AlrvkFMiPuE94AHRp8TY7Ck

FACEBOOK GAVE itself a test, and the results are in: The company’s recent record on nondiscrimination, according to an expert civil rights audit it commissioned, has been marked by pitfalls as much as progress.Facebook’s audit began two years ago at the encouragment of advocacy groups concerned that the company’s commitment to free speech above all else had allowed toxicity to seep throughout the platform, giving bad actors an excuse to harass and to spread hate, and even leading to real-world violence, as seen in Charlottesville. Now, the top-level takeaway from the detailed assessment is that Facebook wrongly prioritizes free expression — yet that’s a too-simple reading of the complicated world of platform governance.Facebook was created to give people a place to speak and be spoken to; free expression will always be a lodestar. The question is to what extent the company allows other values to guide it, too. The civil rights report reveals how Facebook has struggled to weave a commitment to nondiscrimination and protection for minorities into a system that didn’t put its focus there to start with.Facebook clearly recognizes that harms such as incitement of violence, voter suppression or mere intimidation into silence can outweigh the benefits of unfettered expression. But it’s a constant challenge to figure out when. The audit is useful in spelling out the various levels where that challenge takes place, from policy formulation to enforcement to platform design, including algorithmic bias.The auditors recognize improvements in all these areas. Facebook has, for instance, instituted more robust bans on voter suppression and barred explicit support for white nationalism. The site has launched a pilot to guard against a too-common enforcement error of punishing those who complain about hate speech. It is going after census interference with tough policy and tough enforcement alike. And Facebook has overhauled…