Telegram founder: U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe us to weaken encryption

Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of the popular secure messaging app Telegram has revealed in a series of tweets that U.S. intelligence agencies tried twice to bribe the company's developers to weaken encryption in the app, presumably so it would be easier for the agencies to obtain communications sent via its users. Durov also says he was pressured by the FBI to do so.

And that was just 1 week. It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the US.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) June 11, 2017

Ahead of the special election next Tuesday, the Associated Press has reported that Georgia's electronic voting systems may be compromised and Georgian officials don't seem to think that's a problem. Two computer researchers had discovered in August of last year that a misconfigured server had left the 6.7 million of the state's voter records exposed to hackers and freely available on the internet. 

After reporting the issue to Georgian authorities, the vulnerability remained only half-fixed, and the state's election supervisors seemed to be unconvinced the leak of voter data represented a problem. As a result, the researchers last week decided to go public with their findings, after originally being asked to keep them secret by Georgian officials last year, and reported the issue to the FBI, which is now investigating. MG

The Amazon CEO and billionaire issued a tweet asking for ideas on what charities and causes he could donate his money to to help tackle problems in the short-term:

Request for ideas… pic.twitter.com/j6D68mhseL

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) June 15, 2017

His request got over 16,000 replies. Here were some of the best ideas (but by no means all of the best):

These things are mostly fought by small and sometimes local charities, and they never have the funding they need to make a big impact

— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) June 15, 2017

Repurpose the skills of military veterans to b immediate responders to natural disasters. Aka @TeamRubicon

— Jake Wood (@JakeWoodTR) June 15, 2017

Help pay off student loans. They keep so many from raising their credit score: getting a better job, buying a home or car. Instant impact.

— April (@ReignOfApril) June 16, 2017

Lifeline grants. If you've got 0 savings and car breaks down/you get sick / etc – a few hundred $ lets you keep home/car and therefore job.

— Angela Morabito (@Bear2theRight) June 16, 2017

Buy private debt on the cheap, cancel it. Like what @StrikeDebt did: https://t.co/92y6jR8pfx

— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) June 15, 2017

Buy forest lands to stop deforestation happening right now. Forests are the best carbon capturing tech we have

— Diego Saez Gil (@dsaezgil) June 15, 2017

Relocation expenses so non-affluent people can move from depressed areas to places they can find work, e.g., Detroit to Atlanta, ME to TX.

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) June 15, 2017

Repurpose shipping containers to provide micro-homes for the homeless. Give them a safe, dry place to sleep, then work on further needs.

— John Koetsier (@johnkoetsier) June 15, 2017

How about funding @NPR for the next 20 years. @washingtonpost has great reporting, but we need more than 1 reliable news source.

— Half-Blind Trust (@rkfatheree) June 16, 2017

From the "it would be funny if it weren't so horrifying" news desk: A Canadian team of scientists have had to cancel their planned study on the effects of climate change on Arctic marine and coastal ecosystems because ongoing climate change in the area had made their trip extremely dangerous, reports University of Manitoba Today News. Due to the warming temperatures in the Arctic, large chunks of hazardous sea ice have broken free from ice shelves and been put into motion, which at best would cause the research team to miss their expedition's time window by six days and at worst could damage their vessel and potentially put their lives at risk. MG

Facebook said earlier today that it plans on tackling the "hard questions" it faces every day as the world's largest social network. One of those is how to keep terrorism off the social media platform.

In a separate post today, the company went into much more detail about how it plans on utilizing a combination of artificial intelligence, human expertise–the Facebook community, terrorism experts, and an internal team that responds to requests from law enforcement–and partnerships with governments, other companies, NGOs, and community groups to keep terrorists from leveraging Facebook to organize their horrific acts. 

On the AI front, the company said it will use image matching; language understanding; the removal of clusters of terrorists' pages, posts, and profiles; the ongoing shutting down of accounts started by people already banned for suspected terrorist affiliation; and collaboration across all of Facebook's properties–Instagram and WhatsApp–to frustrate those people's efforts.  DT

Spotify keeps blowing up. The music-streaming leader now boasts 140 million listeners (far more than any of its competitors) and saw its revenue grow 50% last year, to $3.3 billion. But profitability is another story. The company, which is expected to go public later this year, is still losing money as it doles out the majority of its income to record labels and rights holders, as Recode reports. That math may be starting to change as it renegotiates its deals with the major labels, trading concessions (like the option to temporarily hold new music from Spotify's free tier) to the music industry in exchange for friendlier rates.  JPT

In a scathing complaint, a woman raped by an Uber driver in India says the company violated her right to privacy and defamed her. The lawsuit, which names CEO Travis Kalanick, former SVP of business Emil Michael, and former head of business in Asia Eric Alexander, alleges that Alexander went to the New Delhi police to obtain a private medical record of the victim following her rape. Alexander then used the document to support his idea that the victim had colluded with one of Uber's main competitors in order to create a false rape claim, according to the complaint. The suit comes as an investigation into Uber's corporate culture is prompting a number of changes at the company. Last week reports surfaced that Alexander had allegedly been carrying around the victim's medical record for months. Alexander has since been dismissed.  RR

Facebook is unquestionably the largest social network the world has ever seen. Every month, 1.94 billion people use the service. Every day, 1.28 billion people–about one in seven on the entire planet–use it. With that scale comes all kinds of responsibilities.

That's why Facebook has decided to formally address what it calls the "hard questions," the things that it feels will most govern what it does, and how it should be governed, going forward.

In a blog post, Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president for public policy and communications, wrote that the company wants to talk "openly" about these "complex subjects:"

* How should platforms approach keeping terrorists from spreading propaganda online?

* After a person dies, what should happen to their online identity?

* How aggressively should social media companies monitor and remove controversial posts and images from their platforms? Who gets to decide what's controversial, especially in a global community with a multitude of cultural norms?

* Who gets to define what's false news — and what's simply controversial political speech?

* Is social media good for democracy?

* How can we use data for everyone's benefit, without undermining people's trust?

* How should young internet users be introduced to new ways to express themselves in a safe environment?

Facebook recognizes that not everyone will be in lock-step with it on how it addresses those questions, and it knows people will think there are other hard questions that need to be looked at as well. So the company is inviting users to suggest additional questions at hardquestions@fb.com.

Meanwhile, the folks at TechCrunch have annotated Facebook's list with their thoughts on the context behind each of the seven initial questions.   DT

Derek Rotondo, a father who's worked as a fraud investigator at J.P. Morgan since 2010, claims the financial services company discriminated against him and other fathers by denying them paid parental leave on the same terms they give mothers. The EEOE class action case was filed by the ACLU this week, the civil rights group said in a blog post. 

Rotondo alleges that J.P. Morgan designates biological mothers as the default primary caregivers, and offers them 16 weeks of paid parental leave. Dads are assumed to be non-primary caretakers and only eligible for just two weeks of paid parental leave. Rotondo asked for PTO after the birth of his second child as the newborn's primary caregiver. He is the father of two. LD

In today's installment of Least Shocking Tech News, a new survey reveals that tech companies founded by women hire more women. The survey from Funders Club, an online venture capital firm, shows that U.S. technology startups with at least one female founder have teams that are, on average, 48% women. That's twice the average reported by U.S. technology startups with no female founders. Companies with female founders had executive leadership teams that are on average 38% women (2.4x more than the average percentage reported by U.S. technology startups with no female founders) and engineering teams that were on average 23% women (2.3x the average percentage reported by U.S. technology startups with no female founders). 

That's a staggering result, which shows that having women in leadership positions is a crucial step for the advancement of other women. Of course, relying on women-led startups to lead the charge in diversifying the tech workforce isn't particularly effective, because only 17% of startups in 2017 have a female founder, according to a recent CrunchBase study, and that number hasn't grown in nearly five years. Unless women start founding more tech companies (and getting the funding to do it), male-led startups are going to have to, I dunno, actually start hiring and funding women. It's good business sense, too, because female founders make startups grow more quickly. According to one recent study, the fastest growing companies were 75% more likely to have a female founder. 

[via USA Today] ML

Does it ever, ahem, drive you crazy, that your computer files can only be backed up if they are inside the Google Drive folder? That will change soon as Google plans to tweak its backup system with a new app that will make it easier to be able to do what J. Lo says and back it up.

The backup feature will roll out on June 28 in the form of a new app called Backup and Sync, which kind of sounds like a job description for J. Lo's backup band. Instead of requiring files be moved to Google Drive, users can simply point on, say, their entire music collection folder to back it up, the Verge reports. In a blog post announcing the product, Google says the app is designed primarily for average consumers and suggests that businesses stick with Drive until they unveil Drive File Stream (currently in the Early Adopter Program), which is designed with corporations and their J. Lo-size assets and data sets in mind. It is a helpful change, but could also be a sneaky way of making Google users upgrade from free accounts. As the Verge notes, if you're backing up every single file on your computer, you could hit the 15 GB cap on free accounts pretty darn quickly.  ML

While Uber is preoccupied with its internal work culture, the Federal Trade Commission is looking into its handling of consumer data, according to Recode. The FTC regularly checks in on companies to make sure they're providing appropriate consumer protections. What may concern the FTC is Uber's use of "heaven," the tool it uses to view all its rides in real time. It is not the first time the FTC has looked into Uber's practices. In January, Uber agreed to pay $20 million for misrepresenting how much drivers could earn in its marketing materials. The Department of Justice is currently looking into a program called "greyball" that Uber used to evade law enforcement in certain cities.  RR

Lufthansa, Germany's largest airline, wants you to book a "Lufthansa Surprise" and, no, that is not in Urban Dictionary (we checked).  The surprise feature lets open-minded travelers skip the burden of choosing a specific destination for a vacation. Instead, wannabe passengers pick dates and flight preferences, and then choose from nine travel themes, like sand and sun, partying, nature, and even "bromance," if you're into that sort of thing.

From there the airline takes over, designing a trip based on travelers' stated interests (or, you know, whatever random seats they have available on their flights). The Lufthansa site gives passengers a list of possible destinations based on themes, but travelers won't know their actual destination until they purchase the ticket. Since round-trip flights start at a mere €89 ($99) travelers are willing to take a chance. Flights currently depart only from Munich and Frankfurt airports, so fliers will have to get to Germany before taking part in a Lufthansa Surprise. [via Elle Decor]

[Photo: Flickr user Priit Tammets] ML