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A federal appeals court has given the go-ahead to a class action lawsuit that claims Facebook face recognition for photos is illegal in Illinois… Facebook applies face recognition to uploaded photos in order to suggest friends to tag. When you tag someone in one or more photos, Facebook will attempt to recognize that face in other photos to offer tag suggestions. A group of Facebook users from Illinois claimed as long ago as 2015 that this was illegal in the state, violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act....

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg] TechUnwrapped is reporting that famous jailbreaker George Hotz, known as Geohot, is now working at Facebook. You may know Geohot for getting in a lawsuit by Sony for his Playstation hack and his jailbreaking tools like purplera1n, blackra1n, and limera1n. In recent months Geohot has been off the map after the Sony ordeal, but it appears now he is back (unfortunately not as a rapper). Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera did some digging on Geohot’s Facebook to confirm TechUnwrapped’s story....

Users and experts on Slashdot and reddit strongly disagree with Genachowski’s stance, stating that it is only a ploy to increase telecom profits. It was also said internet service providers lack the necessary competition to be kept from gauging customers. Among other arguments were that such usage-based billing would change how the web operates as a whole. Cloud-storage companies like Dropbox wouldn’t be sensible under a metered bandwidth plan. Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services would also be severely affected....

I’m a big fan of Apple Store workshops. A couple of Final Cut Pro X workshops were really helpful, one of them so much so I did it twice. But reserving a space on one isn’t always easy … There’s a Catch-22 with video editing. There’s a huge amount to learn when you’re new to it, meaning that everything takes an age. The solution is to practice: the more videos you edit, the faster you become....

Here’s your chance to check out an exclusive look at Marques Brownlee and Bill Nye evaluating some old tech on YouTube. Marques Brownlee, also known as MKBHD, launched a new “Retro Tech” series on December 2nd. As the name suggests, the series is designed to highlight “iconic” tech from the past. The YouTube Originals documentary series includes six episodes with each taking a closer look at different vintage tech. In addition, each episode sees Brownlee joined by a variety of guests, including celebrities, experts, and other YouTubers....

Both Facebook and Instagram are down for many users this morning. While neither social network has yet acknowledged the outage, a slew of user have taken to Twitter to complain while Down Dector also shows a massive spike in complaints as of this morning… Facebook’s status page shows that the platform is currently “healthy,” but that’s obviously not the case. When trying to access the social network, many users are either being told that their account is inaccessible or that there are no stories to view:...

Facebook.com is currently the 3rd most visited site on the web, but how many of us have read the policies or “contracts” we “signed” by using their service? In this fast pace rapidly changing world of Internet Technology, being an informed consumer is not the first thing that people usually consider. Legal jargon, contracts.. blah blah; it’s too much to read! But what it comes down to is how much control would you like to have – control of your private data, your blogs, your instant messaging, your status, your personal information, and your photos or videos?...

The Facts of Life cast will reunite for a Lifetime Christmas movie special. Starring Charlotte Rae, Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields, Mindy Cohn, and Nancy McKeon, The Facts of Life was a groundbreaking spinoff of Diff’rent Strokes. Premiering in 1979, The Facts of Life became one of the longest-running series in the 1980s, airing in a golden age of television with sitcoms like Cheers, Happy Days, Family Ties, and The Golden Girls....

A fan has given The Mandalorian a Spaghetti Western trailer. Disney+’s new Star Wars series follows a wandering bounty hunter comparable to the gunslinger from Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. That character, portrayed by Clint Eastwood, has, of course, no name. The Mandalorian’s Dyn Jarren (whose name hasn’t officially be released) has no face because Mandalorians are known for never removing their helmets. This only adds to the show’s mysterious atmosphere equatable to Leone’s famous films....

Fantastic Beasts 3 will start filming in February 2020, according to actor Dan Fogler. The third entry in the Harry Potter prequel series was originally set to begin filming this past summer, with a November 2020 release date in mind. However, after last year’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald failed to impress critics (making it the first Wizarding World film to do so) and under-performed at the box office, Warner Bros....

Zoho released a patch for an authentication bypass flaw CVE-2021-44515 on December 3, warning at the time that it had seen “indications of exploitation” and urged customers to update immediately. Zoho didn’t provide further details of the attacks at the time, which occurred after activity this year targeting previously patched flaws in ManageEngine products that are tracked as CVE-2021-40539 and CVE-2021-44077. However, the FBI says in the new alert that advanced persistent threat (APT) actors have been exploiting CVE-2021-44515 since at least October 2021....

If you’d like to add tracked text to Final Cut Pro X, there are many ways to go about doing so. For instance, I used to faux-track objects manually by using keyframes. Needless to say that was quite the tedious endeavor. Tracking text is easier and much more accurate when using a plugin like MotionVFX’s mCallouts, which is powered by the excellent Mocha Tracking Technology from Imagineer Systems. There are several packages in the mCallouts series, but each of them contain a heaping helping of callout styles that you can use to add tracked text to the objects in your Final Cut Pro X projects....

Facebook announced this morning that over 500 million people are now using its Messenger app per month. The impressive milestone comes just days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg explained why Facebook Messenger was turned into a standalone app for iOS and Android, a move it made in July after disabling messaging in the main Facebook app. Facebook claims that Messenger is all about providing people with a platform to reach others quickly through not only instant messaging, but also stickers, videos, selfies, group chats and audio calls....

The BBC suggests that yesterday’s Facebook outage – which also impacted Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram – was the most severe one ever experienced by the company. There have been conflicting reports on the reason for the failure … Facebook appears to be recovering from a more than 14-hour disruption to all of its products that left them mostly inaccessible across the world. The company’s main social network, its two messaging apps and image-sharing site Instagram were all affected […]...

Update: Facebook has confirmed to us that it is testing ways to improve the messaging experience but has no further details to share at this stage. Facebook has taken the next step in its plans to unify its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram messaging apps into a single, unified messaging service. The result would be something likely to rival iMessage as an ultra-convenient one-stop messaging option … We first heard back in January that Facebook was planning to combine its own messaging service with those of the apps it acquired: WhatsApp and Instagram....

During its F8 Developer Conference today, Facebook announced a new Facebook Messenger Platform that will allow third-party apps to integrate with its popular Messenger app. The platform will allow users to launch and install other apps from the Facebook Messenger app itself that add additional features to the experience and allow users to easily share directly from Messenger, as pictured in the screenshots below. The new platform will launch with 40 supported apps initially, but Facebook is releasing an SDK today that will let any developers integrate with Messenger....

Facebook Watch continues to push forward with its plans for the social media behemoth to deliver original shows to its legions of users worldwide, with the latest being The Birch. The upcoming horror series is the one of two brand new shows premiering in October on the little site that Zuckerberg built. They follow in the footsteps of Strangers, Queen America, Five Points, Sacred Lies, and the critically acclaimed Sorry For Your Loss, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Kelly Marie Tran....

A talented Witcher fan has developed a VR experience based on the original game that lets the player explore the Witcher school of Kaer Morhen. The franchise’s recent boom in popularity has led to renewed interest in mods for The Witcher games, as well as standalone works inspired by them. In the world of The Witcher, Kaer Morhen is the ancient headquarters of the School of the Wolf and the only true home for Geralt of Rivia....

A case can be made for Don Cheadle’s new Wall Street comedy Black Monday but the two TV shows that currently bring out the best of the world of cutthroat business dealings and wealth are HBO’s Succession and Showtime’s Billions. The two TV shows share plenty of similar themes but a couple of things set them apart. In Succession, family drama blends with corporate setbacks. Media tycoon Logan Roy’s health declines and his four children all try to win his favor in order to take over the empire when daddy is no longer around....

Jon Oberheide is the CTO of Duo Security, an Ann Arbor-based startup developing kick-ass two-factor authentication. In his free time, Jon dabbles in kernel exploitation, mobile security, and beer brewing. Dan Rosenberg is a security consultant at Virtual Security Research. In his free time, Dan mercilessly crushes both userspace and kernel targets and does his best to make Linux just a little bit more secure. Your talk at Immunity was titled “Stackjacking your way to GRSEC/PAX Bypass....