Tech Digest daily roundup: Banksy warned of website security weakness

Artist Banksy’s team was warned his website had a security weakness seven days before a hacker scammed a fan out of $336,000 (£242,000). On Tuesday a piece of art was advertised on Banksy’s official website as the world-renowned graffiti artist’s first NFT (non-fungible token). A British collector won the auction to buy it, before realising it was a fake. A cyber-security expert warned Banksy that the website could be hacked, but was ignored. With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. BBC

Apple has announced that it is delaying the rollout of controversial child safety features which it had planned to launch later this year. The length of the delay is not clear, but the company faced significant criticism following the announcement in August of its CSAM (child sexual abuse material) detection system, which involved automatically scanning iPhone pictures before they are uploaded to iCloud. Chief among the fears of academics and security experts was that the system could be modified to search for non-CSAM images that may be of interest to government authorities. Sky News 

WhatsApp has added the ability for users to migrate their chat history when switching from iOS to Samsung Android devices, the company said in a blog post. Samsung announced the feature was coming during its August Unpacked event, and addresses one of the more frustrating features — or lack of— of WhatsApp on mobile devices. Previously, if users selected WhatsApp’s cloud backup feature, then iOS chat histories were stored in iCloud, while Android’s histories backed up to Google Drive, making it almost impossible to transfer chats between phones that weren’t running the same operating system. The Verge

Facebook on Friday said it disabled its topic recommendation feature after it mistook black men for “primates” in video at the social network. A Facebook spokesperson called it a “clearly unacceptable error” and said the recommendation software involved was taken offline.”We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations,” Facebook said. “We disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as we realised this was happening so we could investigate the cause and prevent this from happening again.” Telegraph

The U.S. government’s road safety agency has added another fatality involving a Tesla to the list of crashes it is probing due to the use of partially automated driving systems. A special crash investigation team was dispatched to a July 26 crash on the Long Island Expressway in New York in which a man was killed by a Tesla Model Y SUV, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday. The death brings to 10 the number of fatal crashes to which the agency has sent a team, nine of which involved Teslas. A total of 12 people were killed. The only fatal crash in which a Tesla wasn’t involved was in March of 2018, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle ran down a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. AP News 

Apple (AAPL) is expected to launch its new iPhone, likely called the iPhone 13, later this month. Like football, the autumnal equinox, and pumpkin spice lattes, it’s all but a guarantee this fall. So what can you expect from Apple’s next-generation flagship? Rumors abound that Apple CEO Tim Cook & Co. will equip the iPhone 13 with everything from satellite communication functionality to screens with improved refresh rates for better scrolling to slick new cameras. Yahoo!