Plex's Upcoming App Redesign is a Big Swing at Going Legit
An anonymous reader shares a report: Plex is beginning to test its "newly reimagined Plex experience," which will be available first on mobile and is coming to TV platforms "very soon." Plex says the new experience has been in development for almost two years and is "designed to bring everything you love into one seamless interface." But don't worry -- while the new version of the app is currently missing some features, Plex says it will be "closing those gaps" and will keep the current app available during the preview, which will hopefully prevent a Sonos-like debacle.
A big change for the new app is redesigned navigation that more clearly delineates between media you might have on your Plex server and the company's streaming and on-demand offerings. The bottom bar has dedicated tabs for your media libraries, live TV, and on-demand movies and shows. The Watchlist, which lets you make a list of things you want to watch, has a spot at the top of the app. And artwork is shown more prominently.
at Slashdot.
ChatGPT-4 Beat Doctors at Diagnosing Illness, Study Finds
Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot.
"And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors."
[ChatGPT-4] scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.
The study showed more than just the chatbot's superior performance. It unveiled doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one.
And the study illustrated that while doctors are being exposed to the tools of artificial intelligence for their work, few know how to exploit the abilities of chatbots. As a result, they failed to take advantage of A.I. systems' ability to solve complex diagnostic problems and offer explanations for their diagnoses. A.I. systems should be "doctor extenders," Dr. Rodman said, offering valuable second opinions on diagnoses.
"The results were similar across subgroups of different training levels and experience with the chatbot," the study concludes. "These results suggest that access alone to LLMs will not improve overall physician diagnostic reasoning in practice.
"These findings are particularly relevant now that many health systems offer Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant chatbots that physicians can use in clinical settings, often with no to minimal training on how to use these tools."
at Slashdot.
On 15th Anniversary, Go Programming Languages Rises in Popularity
The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises...
By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a single rank. Toward the top of the list, C actually fell from the #2 spot over the last 12 months to the #4 spot.
And Go just reached the #7 rank on the TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity — "an all time high for Go," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. In this month's note, he explains what he thinks is unusual about this — starting by saying that Go programs are both fast, and easy in many ways — easy to deploy, easy to learn, and easy to understand.
Python for instance is easy to learn but not fast, and deployment for larger Python programs is fragile due to dependencies on all kind of versioned libraries in the environment.
If compared to Rust for instance (another contender for a top position), Go is a tiny bit slower, but the Go programs are much easier to understand.
The next hurdle for Go in the TIOBE index is JavaScript at position #6. That will be a tough one to pass. JavaScript is ubiquitous in software development, although for larger JavaScript systems we see a shift to TypeScript nowadays.
"If annual trends continue this way, Go will bypass JavaScript within 3 years," TIOBE's CEO predicts. (Adding "Let's see what the future has in store for Go...") Although the Go team actually has specific plans for the future, according to a blog post this week celebrating Go's 15th anniversary:
We're working on making Go better for AI — and AI better for Go — by enhancing Go's capabilities in AI infrastructure, applications, and developer assistance. Go is a great language for building production systems, and we want it to be a great language for building production AI systems, too... For AI applications, we will continue building out first-class support for Go in popular AI SDKs, including LangChainGo and Genkit. And from its very beginning, Go aimed to improve the end-to-end software engineering process, so naturally we're looking at bringing the latest tools and techniques from AI to bear on reducing developer toil, leaving more time for the fun stuff — like actually programming!
TIOBE's top 10 programming language rankings for the month of November:
Python
C++
Java
C
C#
JavaScript
Go
Fortran
Visual Basic
SQL
at Slashdot.
US Indicts 26-Year-Old Gotbit Founder For Market Manipulation
The feds have indicted Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national and founder of Gotbit, on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation. Crypto News reports: According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the indictment alleges that Andriunin and his firm participated in a long-running scheme to artificially boost trading volumes for various cryptocurrency companies, including some based in the United States, to make them appear more popular and increase their trading value. Andriunin allegedly led these activities between 2018 and 2024 as Gotbit's CEO. He could face up to 20 years in prison, additional fines, and asset forfeiture if convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Prosecutors say the scheme involved "wash trading," where the firm used its software to make fake trades that inflated a cryptocurrency's trading volume. This practice, called market manipulation, can mislead investors by giving the impression that demand for a particular cryptocurrency is higher than it actually is. Wash trades are illegal in traditional finance and are considered fraudulent because they deceive investors and manipulate market behavior.
Court documents also identify Gotbit's two directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, as co-conspirators. The indictment claims Gotbit documented these activities in detailed records, tracking differences between genuine and artificial trading volumes. The firm allegedly pitched these services to prospective clients, explaining how Gotbit's tactics would bypass detection on public blockchains, where transactions are recorded transparently. The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it seized over $25 million worth of cryptocurrency assets connected to these schemes and made four arrests across multiple firms. If you've been following the crypto industry, you're probably familiar with "pump-and-dump" schemes that have popped up throughout the years. Although it's a form of market manipulation, it's not quite the same as "wash trading."
In a pump-and-dump scheme, the perpetrator artificially inflates the price of a security (often a low-priced or thinly traded stock) by spreading misleading or exaggerated information to attract other buyers, who then drive up the price. Once the price has risen due to increased demand, the manipulators "dump" their shares at the inflated price, selling to the new buyers and pocketing the profits. The price typically crashes after the dump, leaving unsuspecting investors with overvalued shares and significant losses.
Wash trading, on the other hand, involves simultaneously buying and selling of the same asset to create the illusion of higher trading volume and activity. The purpose is to mislead other investors about the asset's liquidity and demand, often giving the impression that it is more popular or actively traded than it actually is. Wash trades usually occur without real changes in ownership or price movement, as the buyer and seller may even be the same person or entity. This tactic can manipulate prices indirectly by creating a perception of interest, but it does not involve a direct inflation followed by a sell-off, like a pump-and-dump scheme.
at Slashdot.
California Passes Law To Protect Consumer 'Brain Data'
On September 28, California amended the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 to recognize the importance of mental privacy. "The law marks the second such legal protection for data produced from invasive neurotechnology, following Colorado, which incorporated neural data into its state data privacy statute, the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA) in April," notes Law.com. GovTech reports: The new bill amends the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which grants consumers rights over personal information that is collected by businesses. The term "personal information" already included biometric data (such as your face, voice, or fingerprints). Now it also explicitly includes neural data. The bill defines neural data as "information that is generated by measuring the activity of a consumer's central or peripheral nervous system, and that is not inferred from nonneural information." In other words, data collected from a person's brain or nerves.
The law prevents companies from selling or sharing a person's data and requires them to make efforts to deidentify the data. It also gives consumers the right to know what information is collected and the right to delete it. "This new law in California will make the lives of consumers safer while sending a clear signal to the fast-growing neurotechnology industry there are high expectations that companies will provide robust protections for mental privacy of consumers," Jared Genser, general counsel to the Neurorights Foundation, which cosponsored the bill, said in a statement. "That said, there is much more work ahead."
at Slashdot.
Project Analyzing Human Language Usage Shuts Down Because 'Generative AI Has Polluted the Data'
The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility. 404 Media: Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project's GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project "will not be updated anymore."
"Generative AI has polluted the data," she wrote. "I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." She said that open web scraping was an important part of the project's data sources and "now the web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies." While there has always been spam on the internet and in the datasets that Wordfreq used, "it was manageable and often identifiable. Large language models generate text that masquerades as real language with intention behind it, even though there is none, and their output crops up everywhere," she wrote.
at Slashdot.
Fortinet Confirms Data Breach After Hacker Claims To Steal 440GB of Files
Cybersecurity giant Fortinet has confirmed it suffered a data breach after a threat actor claimed to steal 440GB of files from the company's Microsoft Sharepoint server. From a report: Fortinet is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world, selling secure networking products like firewalls, routers, and VPN devices. The company also offers SIEM, network management, and EDR/XDR solutions, as well as consulting services.
Early this morning, a threat actor posted to a hacking forum that they had stolen 440GB of data from Fortinet's Azure Sharepoint instance. The threat actor then shared credentials to an alleged S3 bucket where the stolen data is stored for other threat actors to download. The threat actor, known as "Fortibitch," claims to have tried to extort Fortinet into paying a ransom, likely to prevent the publishing of data, but the company refused to pay. In response to our questions about incident, Fortinet confirmed that customer data was stolen from a "third-party cloud-based shared file drive."
at Slashdot.
GM and EVgo To Build 400 Ultra-Fast EV Chargers Across the US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from InsideEVs: General Motors is joining forces with EVgo, one of the biggest electric vehicle charging operators in the United States, to build 400 ultra-fast DC chargers nationwide to support the growing number of battery-powered cars hitting U.S. roads. To be clear, these are individual stalls, not charging stations. However, the two companies describe the new locations as "flagship destinations" which will feature 350-kilowatt DC chargers, ample lighting, canopies, pull-through spots and security cameras. Most locations will feature up to 20 ultra-fast charging stalls, but some will have even more -- good news for those crowded holiday road trips. GM and EVgo said the fancy new stations would be located near shopping areas offering dining, coffee shops and other amenities.
We don't know exactly where the new stations will be built, but EVgo mentioned that the "flagship destinations" will be deployed coast to coast, including in metropolitan areas in states like Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York and Texas. The stalls will be co-branded EVgo and GM Energy -- the automaker's charging and energy management division. The first new "flagship station" is expected to open next year. The new stalls will make use of EVgo's prefabrication approach which can reduce the total cost of a new station by 15% and the deployment time by 50%. Similar to Tesla's prefabricated Supercharger stalls, EVgo's ready-made structures come with stalls and accompanying equipment already mounted on a metal base plate which is transported from the factory to the charging site.
at Slashdot.
NIST Finalizes Trio of Post-Quantum Encryption Standards
"NIST has formally accepted three algorithms for post-quantum cryptography," writes ancient Slashdot reader jd. "Two more backup algorithms are being worked on. The idea is to have backup algorithms using very different maths, just in case a flaw in the original approach is discovered later." The Register reports: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today released the long-awaited post-quantum encryption standards, designed to protect electronic information long into the future -- when quantum computers are expected to break existing cryptographic algorithms. One -- ML-KEM (PDF) (based on CRYSTALS-Kyber) -- is intended for general encryption, which protects data as it moves across public networks. The other two -- ML-DSA (PDF) (originally known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium) and SLH-DSA (PDF) (initially submitted as Sphincs+) -- secure digital signatures, which are used to authenticate online identity. A fourth algorithm -- FN-DSA (PDF) (originally called FALCON) -- is slated for finalization later this year and is also designed for digital signatures.
NIST continued to evaluate two other sets of algorithms that could potentially serve as backup standards in the future. One of the sets includes three algorithms designed for general encryption -- but the technology is based on a different type of math problem than the ML-KEM general-purpose algorithm in today's finalized standards. NIST plans to select one or two of these algorithms by the end of 2024. Despite the new ones on the horizon, NIST mathematician Dustin Moody encouraged system administrators to start transitioning to the new standards ASAP, because full integration takes some time. "There is no need to wait for future standards," Moody advised in a statement. "Go ahead and start using these three. We need to be prepared in case of an attack that defeats the algorithms in these three standards, and we will continue working on backup plans to keep our data safe. But for most applications, these new standards are the main event."
From the NIST: This notice announces the Secretary of Commerce's approval of three Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS):
- FIPS 203, Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard
- FIPS 204, Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard
- FIPS 205, Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Standard
These standards specify key establishment and digital signature schemes that are designed to resist future attacks by quantum computers, which threaten the security of current standards. The three algorithms specified in these standards are each derived from different submissions in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project.
at Slashdot.
FTC Finalizes Rule Banning Fake Reviews, Including Those Made With AI
TechCrunch's Lauren Forristal reports: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated reviews, censoring honest negative reviews and compensating third parties for positive reviews. The decision was the result of a 5-to-0 vote. The new rule will start being enforced 60 days after it's published in the official government publication called Federal Register. [...]
According to the final rule, the maximum civil penalty for fake reviews is $51,744 per violation. However, the courts could impose lower penalties depending on the specific case. "Ultimately, courts will also decide how to calculate the number of violations in a given case," the Commission wrote. [...] The FTC initially proposed the rule on June 30, 2023, following an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking issued in November 2022. You can read the finalized rule here (PDF), but we also included a summary of it below:
- No fake or disingenuous reviews. This includes AI-generated reviews and reviews from anyone who doesn't have experience with the actual product.
- Businesses can't sell or buy reviews, whether negative or positive.
- Company insiders writing reviews need to clearly disclose their connection to the business. Officers or managers are prohibited from giving testimonials and can't ask employees to solicit reviews from relatives.
- Company-controlled review websites that claim to be independent aren't allowed.
- No using legal threats, physical threats or intimidation to forcefully delete or prevent negative reviews. Businesses also can't misrepresent that the review portion of their website comprises all or most of the reviews when it's suppressing the negative ones.
- No selling or buying fake engagement like social media followers, likes or views obtained through bots or hacked accounts.
at Slashdot.
'Gemini Is Replacing Google Assistant On Pixel Phones, and It's a Trainwreck'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company's Jared Newman: With its new Pixel 9 phones, Google Assistant is getting a demotion. In its place, Google's will ship Gemini as the default voice assistant on its flagship phones. Gemini uses large language models to interpret questions and generate answers, which means it can respond in a more conversational way. But while Google is eager to showcase Gemini as an answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT, tossing out Assistant is a mistake. Too often, Gemini fails at performing basic tasks, and it's going to cause lots of frustration for folks who depend on their phone's voice control features. Although Google says Gemini can now handle many of the same instructions as Assistant, that hasn't been my experience at all. As evidence, I submit a list of useful Google Assistant actions that either aren't possible or don't work properly with Gemini. Here is a summary of the challenges Gemini faces, as documented by Newman:
1. Local results are worse: Gemini provides less useful information for local business queries compared to Google Assistant, lacking context and formatting.
2. Gemini can't take notes: Unlike Google Assistant, Gemini cannot take voice notes or save them in an app like Google Keep.
3. No-can-do on to-do lists: Gemini does not support adding items to to-do lists, a feature that Google Assistant handles efficiently.
4. Weather doesn't work right: Gemini struggles with weather forecasts, often giving incorrect locations, unlike Google Assistant which works reliably.
5. Turn-by-turn directions don't load: Gemini fails to provide direct turn-by-turn navigation, only offering a preview, whereas Google Assistant launches navigation immediately.
6. Music and podcast requests are YouTube-only: Gemini only supports YouTube Music, unlike Google Assistant which supports multiple streaming services.
7. Video (in)capabilities: Gemini cannot directly access streaming apps for movies or shows, only suggesting content with no direct links.
8. No photo search: Gemini cannot search for photos in Google Photos, a task that Google Assistant can easily handle.
9. Bye-bye to a useful news feature: Gemini fails to play or provide recent news effectively, unlike Google Assistant's useful daily news briefing feature.
10. No Routines: Gemini does not support the automation of multiple actions through Routines, a feature present in Google Assistant.
11. So much for Shortcuts: Gemini lacks the Shortcuts feature available in Google Assistant, offering no replacement for quick actions in third-party apps.
12. A slower experience: Responses from Gemini are slower by a second or two compared to Google Assistant when answering queries.
at Slashdot.
Paramount Global To Lay Off 15% of US Workforce, Close TV Studio
Paramount Global will lay off 15% of its U.S. workforce, close Paramount Television Studios, and transfer its projects to CBS Studios as part of a massive restructuring plan. According to Reuters, the media company "aims to reduce annual costs by $500 million and return to profitable growth ahead of its merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media." From the report: In an internal memo, Paramount's co-CEOs stated that the company is at an "inflection point" where changes are necessary to strengthen the business. The layoffs, which were announced during a post-earnings call last week, are expected to affect roughly 2,000 people. They will continue through the end of 2024, with 90% of the cuts expected to be completed by the end of September. Paramount Television Studios (PTVS) will also be shut down as part of the company's broader restructuring plans, President Nicole Clemens said in an email to employees.
George Cheeks, Paramount Global's co-CEO, said the move to close down the studio by the end of the week is the result of major shifts in the television and streaming industry and a need to streamline the company. All current PTVS series and development projects will be transferred to CBS Studios, Cheeks said, adding that members of CBS teams will also be leaving the company.
at Slashdot.
Intel Sells $147 Million Stake In Arm
In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, Intel revealed it has sold its entire stake in Arm Holdings, generating an estimated $147 million. "The company also sold its stake in ZeroFox, a cybersecurity company, and reduced stake in Astera Labs, a developer of connectivity platforms for enterprise," adds Tom's Hardware. From the report: Intel's recent regulatory filing revealed that it no longer holds the 1.18 million shares of Arm it owned three months ago, as noticed by Bloomberg. The average price of Arm's stock during this period was $124.34 per share, leading to the estimated $147 million pay-out. The company also reduced stake in Astera Labs (which has always been seen as a strategic investment for Intel to ensure steady supply of things like PCIe retimers) and got rid of its stake in ZeroFox. Despite this, Intel reported a net loss of $120 million on its equity investments for the quarter.
at Slashdot.
Research AI Model Unexpectedly Modified Its Own Code To Extend Runtime
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Tokyo-based AI research firm Sakana AI announced a new AI system called "The AI Scientist" that attempts to conduct scientific research autonomously using AI language models (LLMs) similar to what powers ChatGPT. During testing, Sakana found that its system began unexpectedly modifying its own code to extend the time it had to work on a problem. "In one run, it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself," wrote the researchers on Sakana AI's blog post. "This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too long to complete, hitting our timeout limit. Instead of making its code run faster, it simply tried to modify its own code to extend the timeout period."
Sakana provided two screenshots of example code that the AI model generated, and the 185-page AI Scientist research paper discusses what they call "the issue of safe code execution" in more depth. While the AI Scientist's behavior did not pose immediate risks in the controlled research environment, these instances show the importance of not letting an AI system run autonomously in a system that isn't isolated from the world. AI models do not need to be "AGI" or "self-aware" (both hypothetical concepts at the present) to be dangerous if allowed to write and execute code unsupervised. Such systems could break existing critical infrastructure or potentially create malware, even if accidentally.
at Slashdot.
Gamer Connects 444 Consoles To Single TV, Sets World Record
Ibrahim Al-Nasser, a gaming enthusiast from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has set a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles connected to a single television, with 444 systems hooked up simultaneously.
Al-Nasser's collection spans five decades of gaming history, from the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey to the 2023 PlayStation 5 Slim. It includes mainstream consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, as well as rare items such as the Super A'Can. To manage the complex setup, Al-Nasser employs over 30 RCA switchers and 12 HDMI switchers, along with various converters for older systems. He maintains an Excel spreadsheet detailing the location and activation procedure for each console.
"After a while I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn't play," Al-Nasser said. "By adding more switchers, the idea came to my mind to connect all of the gaming consoles I have to the TV then contact Guinness World Records because this project is unique." Engadget adds: He's even organized his collection so the cables aren't showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television. That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it's far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.
at Slashdot.
WHO Declares Mpox Outbreak a Global Health Emergency
The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the ongoing mpox outbreak in Africa a global health emergency. From a report: WHO convened its emergency mpox committee amid concerns that a deadlier strain of the virus, clade Ib, had reached four previously unaffected provinces in Africa. This strain had previously been contained to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Independent experts on the committee met virtually Wednesday to advise WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on the severity of the outbreak. After that consultation, he announced Wednesday that he had declared a public health emergency of international concern -- the highest level of alarm under international health law.
Also known as PHEIC, this is a status given by WHO to "extraordinary events" that pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease. [...] Since the beginning of this year, more than 17,000 cases and more than 500 deaths have been reported in 13 countries in Africa, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which classifies the outbreak as a "very high risk event."
at Slashdot.
Australian Bank Spots Scams via How Users Hold Their Phones
National Australia Bank seems to think that monitoring the angle customers hold their phones will offer extra protection against scammers. "Speaking during the Australian Banking Association Conference in Melbourne Wednesday (June 26), CEO Andrew Irvine said the lender introduced more 'friction' to payments processes and new predictive protection tools to spot scammers," reports PYMNTS.com, citing a (paywalled) Bloomberg report. From the report: "We've added tooling that looks at biometrics and the way you actually interact with your devices and how you think about keystrokes," said Irvine, per the report. "If these things are different to how you've used your phone in the past, our intelligence will kick in." Irvine, who called fraudsters the "scourge of our times," also noted that Australia is one of the few countries where bank fraud has declined, the report said.
Still, he said that as scammers have embraced new technology like artificial intelligence, banks have had to shift from making payments fast and simple to adding more steps to protect against fraudulent transactions, per the report. "These threat actors go where the money is," Irvine said, according to the report. "You want to be the best alarm system in the street and right now Australia's leading the way."
at Slashdot.
Indian Government Moves To Ban ProtonMail After Bomb Threat
Following a hoax bomb threat sent via ProtonMail to schools in Chennai, India, police in the state of Tamil Nadu put in a request to block the encrypted email service in the region since they have been unable to identify the sender. According to Hindustan Times, that request was granted today. From the report: The decision to block Proton Mail was taken at a meeting of the 69A blocking committee on Wednesday afternoon. Under Section 69A of the IT Act, the designated officer, on approval by the IT Secretary and at the recommendation of the 69A blocking committee, can issue orders to any intermediary or a government agency to block any content for national security, public order and allied reasons. HT could not ascertain if a blocking order will be issued to Apple and Google to block the Proton Mail app. The final order to block the website has not yet been sent to the Department of Telecommunications but the MeitY has flagged the issue with the DoT.
During the meeting, the nodal officer representing the Tamil Nadu government submitted that a bomb threat was sent to multiple schools using ProtonMail, HT has learnt. The police attempted to trace the IP address of the sender but to no avail. They also tried to seek help from the Interpol but that did not materialise either, the nodal officer said. During the meeting, HT has learnt, MeitY representatives noted that getting information from Proton Mail, on other criminal matters, not necessarily linked to Section 69A related issues, is a recurrent problem.
Although Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted, which means the content of the emails cannot be intercepted and can only be seen by the sender and recipient if both are using Proton Mail, its privacy policy states that due to the nature of the SMTP protocol, certain email metadata -- including sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times -- is available with the company. "We condemn a potential block as a misguided measure that only serves to harm ordinary people. Blocking access to Proton is an ineffective and inappropriate response to the reported threats. It will not prevent cybercriminals from sending threats with another email service and will not be effective if the perpetrators are located outside of India," said ProtonMail in a statement.
"We are currently working to resolve this situation and are investigating how we can best work together with the Indian authorities to do so. We understand the urgency of the situation and are completely clear that our services are not to be used for illegal purposes. We routinely remove users who are found to be doing so and are willing to cooperate wherever possible within international cooperation agreements."
at Slashdot.