Amazon disables IS propaganda website
Amazon late Friday disabled a website used by a propaganda arm of the Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed at least 170 people in Kabul on Thursday after The Washington Post reported the extremists relied on the company’s technology to promote extremism.
Nida-e-Haqq, an Islamic State media group that distributes Islamist content in the Urdu language, had been using the company’s dominant cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, to host its content, despite company policies against working with terror groups.
Some of that content included messages about the Islamic State-Khorasan offshoot that claimed responsibility for the lethal attack, said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism and discovered the link with Amazon Web Services. Urdu is widely spoken in neighboring Pakistan and occasionally in Afghanistan itself.
The Nida-e-Haqq app on Thursday carried what it claimed was an image of the bomber wrapped in a suicide vest ahead of a blast whose victims included 13 U.S. service members, further marring the American pullout from the nation after nearly 20 years of war.
”[F]ollowing an investigation, we have disabled a website that was linked to this app as it was in violation of the AWS Acceptable Use Policy,” Amazon spokesman Casey McGee said in an emailed statement sent late Friday after The Post reported on SITE’s findings.
Theranos’ co-founder Holmes alleges abuse
Days before Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is to go on trial for alleged felony fraud in San Jose, Calif., the judge on Saturday released redacted documents showing she will claim her former lover and the company’s president Sunny Balwani abused and coerced her.
“For over a decade, Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani had an abusive intimatepartner relationship, in which Mr. Balwani exercised psychological, emotional, and (redacted) over Ms. Holmes,” a filing from Ms. Holmes’ legal team claims. “This pattern of abuse and coercive control continued … during the period of the charged conspiracies.”
Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani, charged with a dozen fraud counts in connection with the now-defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup she founded in 2003 as a Stanford University dropout, are to be tried separately in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Jury selection is set to start Tuesday.
Partially automated Tesla hits police car
A Tesla using its partially automated driving system slammed into a Florida Highway Patrol cruiser Saturday on an interstate near downtown Orlando and narrowly missed its driver, who had pulled over to assist a disabled vehicle.
Earlier this month, the U.S. government opened a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot driving system after a series of similar collisions with parked emergency vehicles.
The trooper whose cruiser was hit shortly before 5 a.m. Saturday had activated his emergency lights and was near the disabled vehicle when the Tesla hit the cruiser’s side and then collided with the other vehicle, highway patrol spokeswoman Lt. Kim Montes told The Orlando Sentinel.
The report said the 27year-old man in the Tesla and the driver of the disabled vehicle suffered minor injuries, and the trooper was unhurt.