Social networking service Parler sued Amazon on Monday, accusing its web hosting service of breaking anti-trust laws in taking off the platform that is popular with many right-leaning social media users. You can read the court document here.

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A hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. From a report: "Your cock is mine now," the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples. In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage -- a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely -- had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard. A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."

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Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

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Mozilla developers plan to remove support for using the Backspace key as a Back button inside Firefox. From a report: The change is currently active in the Firefox Nightly version and is expected to go live in Firefox 86, scheduled to be released next month, in late February 2021. The removal of the Backspace key as a navigational element didn't come out of the blue. It was first proposed back in July 2014, in a bug report opened on Mozilla's bug tracker. At the time, Mozilla engineers argued that many users who press the Backspace key don't always mean to navigate to the previous page (the equivalent of pressing the Back button).

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Joseph Cox, reporting at Vice's Motherboard: One user travelled through a park a few blocks south of an Islamic cultural center. Roughly every two minutes, their phone reported their physical location. Another was next to a bank two streets over from a different mosque. A third person was at a train station, again near a mosque. Perhaps unbeknownst to these people, Salaat First (Prayer Times), an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was recording and selling their granular location information to a data broker, which in turn sells location data to other clients. Motherboard has obtained a large dataset of those raw, precise movements of users of the app from a source. The source who provided the dataset was concerned that such sensitive information, which could potentially track Muslims going about their day including visiting places of worship, could be abused by those who buy and make use of the data. The company collecting the location data, a French firm called Predicio, has previously been linked to a supply chain of data involving a U.S. government contractor that worked with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI. The news about Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, highlights not only the use of religious apps to harvest location data, but also the ease at which this sensitive information is traded in the location data industry. Motherboard is withholding some specifics about the dataset such as its exact size in order to protect the source, but the significance is clear: users of a Muslim-focused app are being tracked likely without their informed consent. "Being tracked all day provides a lot of information, and it shouldn't be usable against you, especially if you are unaware of it," the source said. Motherboard granted them anonymity to avoid repercussions from their employer.

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Twitter shares fell 7% in pre-market trading after the social media platform permanently banned outgoing President Donald Trump. From a report: The company confirmed its decision in a blog post on Friday, saying Trump's tweets breached policies by risking incitement to violence. It cited his posts on the riots in the U.S. capital last week. It's a watershed moment for technology platforms that have faced conflicting pressures on one hand to restrict misinformation and hate speech, and defend free speech on the other. Twitter was Trump's preferred channel for amplifying attacks on his rivals, spreading conspiracies and provoking other nations during his four years in power.

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