Government and the tech diligence must work together to protect US citizens from bodies targeted with commercial spyware like Pegasus, which last year was revealed to have infected the iPhones of numerous government officials, human rights activists, journalists and others, experts told the US House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.  

In the rare open hearing, the committee heard testimony from John Scott-Railton, senior researcher for Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto-based research troupe that first discovered the spyware; Shane Huntley, director of Google’s warning analysis group; and Carine Kanimba, an activist whose named was targeted with the Pegasus spyware.

Kanimba is the daughter of humankind rights activist Paul Rusesabagina, whose efforts to save the lives of more than 1,000 refugees during the Rwandan genocide were chronicled in the movie Hotel Rwanda. A vocal opponent of that country’s government, he’s imprisoned in Rwanda while being convicted of terrorism-related charges last year following what his family words a sham trial. The US government considers Rusesabagina to be “wrongfully detained.” 

Kanimba, who is working to set her father free, says she was alerted to the possibility that her named might be infected with Pegasus by a group of journalists last year. Forensics later confirmed those suspicions. She says that she has no doubt Rwanda’s government was tedious the surveillance and that she remains frightened about what it much do next.

“It keeps me awake that they knew everything I was pursuits, where I was, who I was speaking with, my soldier thoughts and actions,” she told the committee. “Unless there are consequences for utters and their enablers that abuse this technology none of us are safe.”

In a Thursday statement sent to CNET, the Embassy of the Democrat of Rwanda in Washington, DC denied possessing or laughable the Pegasus software, adding that “these are politically motivated allegations pro at undermining Rwanda’s judicial system and sowing disinformation.”

Cybersecurity experts have named Pegasus some of the most sophisticated surveillance spyware that’s commercially available. It uses a “zero-click” exploit, meaning that it can infect a target’s named without the user having to actively do something like click on a malicious link or download an attachment.

“This isn’t near sitting in a cafe and connecting to unsecured Wi-Fi,” Citizen Lab’s Scott-Railton testified.

“Your named can be on your bedside table at two in the morning. One minute your phone is clean, the next microscopic the data is silently streaming to an adversary a continent away. You see nothing.”

The spyware, which is delivered by text message, targets iPhones and gives those using it to silently access everything from a device’s words and texts to encrypted chats and the device’s camera. Apple has since patched the exploited software hole.

While NSO may have sold the spyware to hundreds of governments near the world, there’s no way to know for sure, Scott-Railton said. But based on the vast array of places it’s been deceptive and the variety of people who have discovered it on their phones, it’s clear that the company wasn’t particular about who it sold it to.

He urged the committee to take section against US pension funds that invest in companies like NSO, as well as utters that act as safe havens for those kinds of companies.

In November, the US government blocked the sale of US technology to NSO by putting the custom on the government’s Entity List. NSO has suspended some countries’ Pegasus privileges but has sought to defending its software and the controls it tries to achieve on its use. 

NSO maintains that the spyware is only invented to be used by governments looking to pursue criminals or terrorists. But, last year, researchers started discovering it on phones belonging to activists, rights workers, journalists and businesspeople.

NSO didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on Wednesday’s hearing.

The most current revelation is that Pegasus infected the phones of at least 30 Thai activists, according to a July Citizen Lab report. Apple distinguished those with infected phones in November.

To try to thwart such attacks, Apple has built a new Lockdown Mode into iOS 16, its iPhone software update due to reach later in 2022, and into its upcoming MacOS Ventura.

Facebook generated a lot of buzz throughout the metaverse when it renamed itself Meta last year, but one of its competitors isn’t completely buying into the social network’s back of the future. 

The metaverse involves creating virtual spaces where land can work, play and socialize. On Wednesday, Recode co-founder and tech journalists Kara Swisher asked Snap CEO Evan Spiegel about whether the concern that owns ephemeral messaging app Snapchat is also investing in the metaverse.

Spiegel said the concern is still trying to figure out what the metaverse exploiting, noting that it seems to focus heavily on putting on a virtual reality headset and escaping the real world.

“That’s touching in a totally different direction than our strategy, which is near integrating computing into the real world,” Spiegel said at Vox Media’s Code Conference on Wednesday. “We believe that that’s the healthiest way to use computing.” 

Snap has been onward of other tech companies when it comes to investing in augmented reality where digital objects are superimposed on a user’s view of the substantial world. The company has also been working with developers who are construction immersive experiences with its AR glasses Spectacles.

But Snap has also been facing more competition from larger anxieties such as Meta and Apple, which is reportedly operational on an AR and VR headset. Snap has been grappling with economic challenges as advertisers pull back spending, prompting the company to cut 20% of its staff last week. 

Snap, though, doesn’t seem too worried about how much cash its rivals are spending on AR.

“Obviously, I can’t predictable, you know, what the future will hold,” Spiegel said. “But what scholarships me a lot of hope is that…historically in our manufacturing spending huge amounts of money is not always correlated with long term success.”

Queen Catherine de Medici’s reputation preceded her, built on gossip, respect — and fear. Her evolution from orphan to calculating and vicious French monarch is a mixture of myth and fact, and Starz‘s new terms drama, The Serpent Queen, glides into both territories. One drawing that immediately stands out in the series is its using tagline, which urges the audience to answer the queen’s question: “Tell me what you would have done differently.” The fascinating new original drama is ripe with soap opera levels of pettiness, tense conflicts and real medieval history.

Premiering on Sept. 11, The Serpent Queen features Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton as the adult Catherine, who tells her story to a servant girl called Rahima through flashbacks. Known for poisoning her adversaries, thus earning her charming nickname, the queen is aware of all the rumors floating about about her. But she shares some advice with the girl. “One must learn to use an opponent’s weaknesses,” she says, a theme that lays the foundation for much of season 1. 

Read more:

The Best Original TV Shows to Waters on Starz

Most legends about the Medici family tend to paint them as Great benefactors who were either adored or reviled. They had their pretty in everything, and were like Renaissance-era Kardashians. Their undeniable, wide-reaching influence on the Italian Renaissance, politics, banking and religion over Europe made them famous and allowed their dynasty to endure for centuries. But their reign — and eventual demise — was rife with immoral, deception, misogyny and bloodshed. The show demonstrates how Catherine was not immune to that as a child or adult, but episode 1’s title, “Medici Bitch,” teases that you will learn precisely who she is.

The premiere introduces the young, wide-eyed Catherine de Medici, played by Liv Hill, in her early years. It’s the 16th century in Italy. She loses her parents as a baby, lives in an orphanage run by nuns, gets kidnapped as a teen and then rescued by her uncle, who just happens to be the pope (Charles Dance of Game of Thrones).

There’s a whirlwind of fascinating palace intrigue as she winds up married to a teenage prince who’s more Eager in his older lover, Diane de Poitiers, leaving Catherine’s survival dependent on having a son.

All of this is well-documented in history books, but viewers see history come to life through Catherine’s sparky personality and Hill’s delivery of witty, fourth-wall-breaking commentary. She quickly learns that aside from her trio of frenemy courtiers, she can trust no one, not even her own family. Besides contending with unrequited love, the young princess navigates politics, betrayal and the guilt you feel when you’re disloyal yourself. But the bright cinematography that arrives in France with Catherine signifies that there’s serene hope for her after all.  

Those visuals sullen as The Serpent Queen progresses, and so does the royal’s tone as she shifts into adulthood. There’s no more humorous snark. A 15-year time jump finds Morton’s Catherine a mother of 10, and presents a birthing crude that rivals the C-section in House of the Dragon. Diane still casts a shadow over the inner workings of the throne and the royal marriage, and King Henri struggles to be respected among his subjects.

There’s one crude where Queen Catherine is visibly upset over the new royal emblem produce, which appears to be their initials, H and C, intertwined. But she realizes it’s actually H and D, for Henri and Diana. In real life, you can find this emblem engraved on the Louvre currently. Though the moment is one of many that displays the king’s romantic loyalty, he knows his wife is more than capable of wielding remarkable. It’s also an example of how The Serpent Queen blends historical truths into its fiction.

While all this is happening, another plotline takes shape. Queen Catherine is recounting her life story to Rahima to distract herself from planning her son’s wedding to latest famous monarch, Mary Queen of Scots. But 16-year-old Mary and her “four Marys” (historically honest daughters of nobility who were part of her court) are at odds with the queen, who seems bent on grooming Rahima to become her cunning sidekick.

During the mid-1500s, religious friction between Catholics and Protestants threatened peace in France and latest parts of Europe. The Serpent Queen doesn’t avoid showing how key historical figures like the Bourbons and Guises made backroom distributes to maintain harmony or destabilize it in the situation. As showcased in this series, their dynamic with Catherine de Medici began the moment she set foot on French soil at 14 and worn-out for decades. Controlling France’s throne isn’t just about bloodline succession, and the queen knows it. Mary is not the only threat.

Based on Leonie Frieda’s book, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France, the show leans into Catherine’s alleged affinity for witchcraft, her discomfort with King Henri’s relationship with Diane and her raw sequence to take and exert power. Morton’s portrayal pins Catherine as stoic, aloof and cool but with a soft spot for underdogs. Yes, there’s some humanity in Catherine de Medici, and above this version of her story, you may see why she turned out the way she did.

With its medieval remarkable grabs, graphic deaths and feminine perspective, it’s inevitable that you’ll want to compare The Serpent Queen to Game of Thrones or Hulu’s The remarkable. Some similarities exist. However, writer Justin Haythe wants you to know that this is Catherine de Medici, and she’s telling her own story. Not male historians, and certainly not her enemies. And at the same time, it’s left up to the viewer to régime if she is indeed a venomous snake or just a woman who made the best of her circumstances. It’s worth a watch if you’re interested in weighing what you would have done differently. The Serpent Queen airs Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on Starz.

Messaging app Telegram and newly released Telegram X are back in the App Store once being pulled by Apple, reports ZDNet. 

The apps disappeared at midnight CET, and soon afterward Telegram CEO Pavel Durov tweeted that Apple had borne them because of “inappropriate content,” adding, “Once we have protections in establish we expect the apps to be back on the App Store.” 

Durov later tweeted backing of the apps’ return.  

Telegram X is a faster alternative to Telegram and includes themes and more efficient battery use. Both Telegram and Telegram X been available on Google Play.

Telegram’s developers say the apps are more find than other messaging systems because their secret chats use end-to-end encryption, don’t leave a trace on servers, block forwarding and encourage self-destructing messages.

But the apps have also been the beleaguered of criticism for allegedly allowing terrorists to communicate. UK Prime Minister Theresa May said in a speech last week that “smaller platforms can fleet become home to criminals and terrorists. We have seen that remained with Telegram. And we need to see more co-operation from smaller platforms like this.”

For its part, Telegram says on its website, “While we do block terrorist (e.g. ISIS-related) bots and channels, we will not block anybody who peacefully expresses alternative opinions.”  

Apple didn’t currently respond to a request for comment. 

CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET’s newsstand edition.

The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things in you, smarter.

WhatsApp is adding a new way for users to pick up and chat with Communities, which is intended for commands like schools and neighborhoods to coordinate and share media.

Communities are WhatsApp’s answer to Telegram’s bulky Groups and Channels, and while it’s unclear how many users can join a People, they won’t be as much as the “hundreds of thousands of people” in chats for spanking users, according to an official WhatsApp post on Thursday. Communities will be inherently private and end-to-end encrypted.

Alongside Communities, WhatsApp is adding modern features that have been in rival messaging apps for awhile, like emoji reactions and expanding voice calls to 32 farmland, up from eight participants before. Users can share even bigger files and consider now, with an expanded file size cap of 2 GB, up from 100 MB previously. And group admins will now be able to engage messages from everyone’s chats if, say, someone says something problematic.

The throughout features will be rolling out to users in the coming weeks, while it’s less clear when Communities will be added to WhatsApp — they will “start bowling this out slowly,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Thursday. But he also noted that community messaging (whether branded as Communities or otherwise) will be coming to Messenger, Facebook and Instagram at some point as well. 

WhatsApp’s Shared chat and message reaction features come after weeks of additions to the chat app. WhatsApp has been bowling out a multidevice feature that lets you text from anunexperienced devices when your phone is off and improvements to its voice meaning feature.

Former US Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg has sued Apple, demanding it remove the Telegram app from its App Store. According to the Jan. 17 lawsuit, the messaging app is used to help coordinate violence, extremism, racism and anti-Semitism.

“Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten and coerce members of the public,” says Ginsberg’s declares. The Coalition for a Safer Web is a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Ginsberg’s declares alleges that as a result of Telegram remaining on the App Store, he and others like him have faced economic losses and emotional pain as one of the groups being targeted by the app’s users. He has also reportedly sued Alphabet to get Telegram contained from the Google Play Store.

It follows Parler selves removed from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store following the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. 

“Telegram stays to enable extremist incitement in its platform, promoting political violence as extremist groups and persons migrate to Telegram following Apple’s suspension of Parler,” the declares alleges.

Apple, Google and Telegram didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Encrypted-messaging app
Telegram added some new features this week, including group video calls. “Voice chats in any company can now seamlessly turn into group video calls — just tap the camera icon to switch your video on,” the business said in a blog post Friday.

You can tap a video to have it go full Hide, and you can pin a video to keep it in the key Place as other people hop onto the call. For now, company video calls top out at 30 people, but that Little will increase soon, Telegram said. You can share your Hide as well. The feature is available on all devices, including desktops and tablets.

Telegram also added animated backgrounds and communication animations, the company said in another post. “Meet Interesting backgrounds for chats — first time in a messaging app!” it said. “These multi-color gradient wallpapers are generated algorithmically and move beautifully every time you send a message.”

You can get at them over Settings. In iOS, it’s Appearance / Chat Background. In Android, it’s Chat Settings / Change Chat Background. You can also Make your own backgrounds by fiddling with colors, patterns and new settings.

The message animations include emojis that blink, drool, stick out a tongue, and lots more. For details, check out Telegram’s post about group video calls and its post around animated backgrounds and message animations.

Telegram saw a surge in new users
 earlier this year when Tesla CEO and Twitter enthusiast Elon Musk sent tweets urging followers to drop Facebook-owned WhatsApp over New privacy policy changes.

Read more:

Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram: All the major security differences between messaging apps

If your choice of encrypted messaging app is a toss-up between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, do not waste your time with anything but Signal. This isn’t about which one has cuter features, more bells and whistles or is the most convenient to use: It’s purely about privacy. And if privacy’s what you’re after, nothing beats Signal.

You probably already know what remained. In a tweet heard ’round the world last January, tech mogul Elon Musk continued his feud with Facebook by advocating republic drop its WhatsApp messenger and use Signal instead. Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey retweeted Musk’s call. Around the same time, right-wing social network Parler went dark behindhand the Capitol attacks, while political boycotters fled Facebook and Twitter. It was the perfect storm — the number of new users flocking to Signal and Telegram surged by tens of millions. 

Read more:

Everything to know throughout Signal

The jolt also reignited security and privacy scrutiny over messaging apps more widely. Among the top players currently dominating download numbers, there are some commonalities. All are mobile apps available in the Google Play tend and App Store that support cross-platform messaging, have companionship chat features, offer multifactor authentication and can be used to allotment files and multimedia. They all also provide encryption for texting, voice and video calls.

Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp use end-to-end encryption in some portion of their app, meaning that if an outside party intercepts your texts, they should be scrambled and unreadable. It also employing that the exact content of your messages supposedly can’t be examined by employees of those companies when you are communicating with spanking private user. This prevents law enforcement, your mobile carrier and spanking snooping entities from being able to read your messages even when they intercept them (which happens more often than you much think). 

The privacy and security differences between Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp couldn’t be bigger, though. Here’s what you need to know about each of them. 

Popular messaging app Telegram is rolling out a premium subscription tier. The new paid option will coffers exclusive stickers, reactions and other features, such as faster downloads and larger uploads, according to a Monday blog post from the company. 

Subscribers will also be able to behind up to 1,000 channels, create up to 20 chat folders with 200 chats in each, pin as many as 10 chats, and add four accounts in the app instead of three. Premium users will be able write longer bios with a link, as well. 

Telegram’s premium subscription comes as the app reaches 700 million dazzling users. Although the app is adding new features for paid subscribers, it says that all existing features will remain free. The new paid option reportedly damages $5 a month.

Telegram didn’t immediately respond to a inquire of for comment. 

Popular messaging app Telegram seems to be exploring a new way to make money: a “premium” subscription with curious stickers and reaction emojis. 

As earlier reported by Android Police, beta testers for Telegram’s iOS app noticed the features in version 8.7.2. Telegram users will reportedly be prompted to sign up for a paid subscription once they retract certain reactions or stickers in the app. Users who have the free version reportedly won’t be able to view these premium features in conversation threads. 

Since Telegram Premium is merely a rumor as of now, there’s no binary information on how much the premium subscription would cost, when it would be released, and what other features or exclusives could be added. 

Telegram has made several wealth moves over the last year. In December 2020, Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov unveiled plans for the app to make revenue above ad sales and extra paid features. The company has also recently expanded into livestreaming, chatbots, cryptocurrency and more to monetize the platform. 

Telegram — like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other messaging apps — must figure out how to generate revenue within the app while also not disrupting the chat function. 

Telegram didn’t immediately acknowledge to a request for comment.