Last weekend, a set of databases that contain personal data from 533 million Facebook users was listed on a well-known data marketplace. First reported by Alon Gal, the Co-Founder and CTO of a cybersecurity company called Hudson Rock, around 11.6 million of those users were from Malaysia.
If you are wondering whether your details are included in the leak or otherwise, you can now use the popular online tool Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to verify it. In case you are not familiar with HIBP, it was launched in December 2013 and is the brainchild of Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt.
For Malaysians, they may remember that Troy had added the Jobstreet database into HIBP after the massive national-scale data breach of 2017. In the case of Facebook though, you can verify the involvement of your personal data by providing your phone number to HIBP’s search engine as each of the records within the leaked database contained a phone number.
Do note that you need to include the country code in your phone number to perform the search. As an example, if your phone number is 012-3456789, the search term that you should use would be 6012345789.
If your phone number is part of the leak, the result would be shown as per the image above. Else, it would look like this:
Regardless of that, users are facing the risk of being phished or scammed since their Facebook’s personal data is now out there in the open. Hence, we would like to once again remind you to take the necessary action to protect yourself against such attempts.
Under frequent criticism for exploiting artists, Spotify has launched a new website called Loud & Clear to better explain how it pays musicians – or in fact, how it doesn’t, not directly anyway.
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek said the website is intended to “increase transparency and shed light on the complicated economics of music streaming.”
He claimed that, last year alone, Spotify paid over US$5 billion (~RM20.5 billion) in royalties and makes up about 20% of global recorded music industry revenue – more than any other streaming service.
Where does all that money go?
The website and nifty accompanying video makes it very clear that Spotify doesn’t hand money directly to artists, but rather to rights holders like record labels, distributors, aggregators, and collecting societies.
Spotify explained that it makes agreements with those right holders and pays them roughly two-thirds of the revenue it gets from subscriptions and advertising. Then the right holders will pay artists according to their contracts.
It sure looks like Spotify is saying, don’t blame us, go blame greedy record companies instead – an argument that has so far failed to convince many irate artists.
On Monday, artists and other music workers protested at Spotify offices around the world under a campaign organised by the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), Pitchfork reported.
Spotify was recently in the news due to a brief licensing breakdown with Korean music distributor Kakao, which caused K-pop songs to be temporarily yanked from the platform. Whether that confirms the case made by Spotify or its critics is hard to say.
Who hasn’t heard of Clubhouse by now? The trendy social network for voice messaging is gaining unprecedented momentum, and competitors such as Twitter and Facebook promise to present their analogues as soon as possible.
But right now only owners of iOS devices have official access to this platform, just like when Instagram was first launched. However, if you like a challenge and don’t lack command line skills, you have the opportunity to join the Clubhouse right now.
How? Let’s figure it out
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to create an account without an iPhone. It’s easier to ask for an invite, and, having received a text message to your number, register online using a friend’s iOS app. Then you can exit the app and leave your friend in peace.
If this is problematic, you can use a service for testing iOS applications that provide a “virtual” iPhone for your needs, like BrowserStack, but such services aren’t usually free. For example, BrowserStack’s Desktop & Mobile package costs $39/month. Too much to our needs.
It is based on the hacked Clubhouse protocol and the author promises to remove the app after the official version for Android is released. For it to work, you need Python version 3.7 or higher. The application works on Windows and macOS.
First, as of February 19, 2021, the agora-python-sdk library compilation for Windows is broken, so instead of installing via pip, it’s better to build the project by hand. The tutorial is available here.
Secondly, for macOS, you need to give Terminal and Python access to Microphone and Accessibility. And also, you will probably need to change the key combination for the “raise your hands” command, since in macOS the module for binding hotkeys will not work properly. To do this, open cli.py in any editor and change:
if not channel_speaker_permission:
print("[*] Press [Ctrl+Shift+H] to raise your hands for the speaker permission.")
keyboard.add_hotkey(
"ctrl+shift+h",
_request_speaker_permission,
args=(client, channel_name, user_id)
)
to
if not channel_speaker_permission:
print("[*] Press [3] to raise your hands for the speaker permission.")
keyboard.add_hotkey(
"3",
_request_speaker_permission,
args=(client, channel_name, user_id)
)
Thirdly, on macOS, you will have to run apps via sudo:
sudo python3 cli.py
After launching, the app will ask you to specify the phone number and enter the authentication code, after which it will save the received token in settings.ini
This is how the program window looks like:
And here is a small video demonstrating the working app:
If 20 channels and 20 users in rooms is not enough for you, you can increase the limit by making changes to cli.py
