 A draft executive order from the White House could put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of shaping how Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and other large tech companies curate what appears on their websites, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The draft order, a summary of which was obtained by CNN, calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration's draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies. Politico first reported the existence of the draft. If put into effect, the order would reflect a significant escalation by President Trump in his frequent attacks against social media companies over an alleged but unproven systemic bias against conservatives by technology platforms. And it could lead to a significant reinterpretation of a law that, its authors have insisted, was meant to give tech companies broad freedom to handle content as they see fit. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the draft order but referred CNN to Trump's remarks at a recent meeting with right-wing social media activists. During the meeting, Trump vowed to "explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech." According to the summary seen by CNN, the draft executive order currently carries the title "Protecting Americans from Online Censorship." It claims that the White House has received more than 15,000 anecdotal complaints of social media platforms censoring American political discourse, the summary indicates. The Trump administration, in the draft order, will offer to share the complaints it's received with the FTC. Follow this very important thread on OUR FORUM.  After demoing the Tracking Prevention feature at build 2019, Microsoft launched an experimental preview of the feature in Edge Preview builds. The feature was first made available behind a flag, today we noticed Tracking Prevention is enabled by default in Edge Dev and Canary builds and set to “Balanced” Setting, this means you no longer need to visit Edge flags page to enable the feature. Microsoft says the feature is “designed to protect you from being tracked by websites that you aren’t accessing directly”. We can simply say the Edge with the Tracking Prevention enabled, blocks trackers and third-party tracking cookies, so you’ll see fewer ads targeted at you. Microsoft’s Tracking Prevention feature works like Tracking Protection in Firefox, but the former relies on ” Trust Protection Lists”. According to Microsoft Eric Lawrance, the Trusted Protection List contains a list of known trackers and organizational lists and is derived from Mozilla’s Content blocking list, which is also obtained from Disconnected.me’s lists. So can we say both Firefox Tracking Protection and Edge Tracking Prevention same? Maybe not, there could be implementation differences. The feature is available in three modes in Microsoft Edge browser: Basic, Balanced and Strict. Basic TP prevents malicious trackers but allows some that can show relevant ads to you based on browsing history. Balanced TP is recommended and default setting blocks malicious and third-party trackers so you may see less relevant ads. Strict TP setting, when enabled, blocks most of the trackers, but there is a downside also, some websites may break. Visit OUR FORUM to learn more.  The popular Steam game client for Windows has a zero-day privilege escalation vulnerability that can allow an attacker with limited permissions to run a program as an administrator. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are bugs that enable a user with limited rights to launch an executable with elevated, or administrative privileges. As Steam has over 100 million registered users and millions of them playing at a time, this is a serious risk that could be abused by malware to perform a variety of unwanted activities. Two researchers publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability for the Steam client after Valve determined that the flaw was "Not Applicable." The company chose not to award a bug bounty or give an indication that they would fix it and told the researchers that they were not allowed to disclose it. In a report published yesterday, security researcher Felix was analyzing a Windows service associated with the Steam called "Steam Client Service" that launched its executable with SYSTEM privileges on Windows. The researcher also noticed that the service could be started and stopped by the "User" group, which is pretty much anyone logged on the computer. The registry key for this service, though, was not writable by the "User" group, so it could not be modified to launch a different executable and elevate its privileges to an administrator. The researcher then tried configuring a symlink from one of these subkeys to another key for which he did not have sufficient permissions and saw that it was possible to modify that key as well. Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM. |
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