Disney+ will come to more parts of the world this summer. On Wednesday, Disney announced the streaming service will expand to 42 additional countries and 11 new territories in the second half of the year. The full list is below, but some of the more notable places where the platform will arrive include South Africa and Poland. Disney didn’t say exactly when it plans to launch the service in each country and territory, nor did it share details on regional pricing. Expect those to come at a later date. 

Disney+ is currently available in 64 countries globally, including the US, UK and Canada. The announcement of an imminent expansion comes after Disney added fewer than expected subscribers during its final fiscal quarter of 2021. Some analysts had predicted the company would add as many as 9.4 million new paying users before the end of the year, but the company instead managed to attract a more modest 2.1 million subscribers. Despite missing Wall Street estimates, Disney said at the time it was still confident it could secure 230 million users before the end of 2024. At the end of 2021, the service had 118 million subscribers globally. 

Here’s the full list of countries where the service is expanding to this summer: Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Oman, Palestine, Poland, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vatican City and Yemen.

As for territories, the list is as follows: Faroe Islands, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, St. Pierre and Miquelon Overseas Collective, Åland Islands, Sint Maarten, Svalbard & Jan Mayen, British Indian Ocean Territory, Gibraltar, Pitcairn Islands and St. Helena.

Source: Engadget – Disney+ will expand to 42 countries this summer

Fox News host Dan Bongino is no longer welcome on YouTube. The company confirmed to The Hillthat Bongino is now permanently banned from its video platform, after he attempted to evade a prior suspension related to COVID-19 misinformation. The conservative commentator apparently published a video on his main channel while another channel was suspended, thereby violating YouTube’s Terms of Service. Bongino’s two channels have been removed from the service, and he won’t be able to make any future channels, YouTube representatives told The Hill.

Last September, YouTube announced that it would ban all content related to vaccine misinformation, which was an expansion on its previous ban against COVID-19 misinformation. At the time, YouTube also banned prominent anti-vax proponents like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola.

Bongino, and many other conservative commentators, have moved over to the alternative video platform Rumble (where he also holds an equity stake). He currently has over 2 million subscribers there, whereas his primary channel had 900,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

Source: Engadget – YouTube bans Fox News host Dan Bongino for evading suspension

The CEO of ID.me, a service used by dozens of states to verify unemployment benefits claimants as well as several federal agencies, has walked back previous claims that the company does not use a more powerful method of facial recognition.

“ID.me uses a specific ‘1 to Many’ check on selfies tied to government programs targeted by organized crime to prevent prolific identity thieves and members of organized crime from stealing the identities of innocent victims en masse,” Blake Hall said in a statement. “This step is internal to ID.me and does not involve any external or government database.”

That contrasts with comments Hall made earlier this week. “Our 1:1 face match is comparable to taking a selfie to unlock a smartphone,” he said. “ID.me does not use 1:many facial recognition, which is more complex and problematic.”

The 1:many approach involves matching images against those in a database, whereas 1:1 is a case of ensuring someone matches their own photo. For 1:1 matching, ID.me compares a user’s selfie against a piece of government ID that they upload.

Privacy advocates have criticized both approaches. Research has indicated that some facial recognition systems struggle to identify people with darker skin tones, and concerns have been raised about the security risks of storing biometric data.

Hall said ID.me’s 1:many check “occurs once during enrollment, and exists to make sure a single attacker is not registering multiple identities. This step is not tied to identity verification. It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft.”

He claimed data shows that dropping the 1:many check “would immediately lead to significant identity theft and organized crime. The 1:1 Face Match step is the only step used to verify identity as explained in our earlier reports.”

According to Cyberscoop, some ID.me workers expressed concern that the company’s public statements didn’t align with what it was actually doing. “We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer is said to have posted to an ID.me Slack channel this week. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

“If companies and the government have to lie about facial recognition in an effort to avoid public scrutiny, they shouldn’t be using it,” Fight for the Future campaign director Caitlin Seeley George said in a statement. “We already know this company is willing to say anything in order to get more government contracts. The CEO of ID.me has been peddling erroneous numbers about unemployment benefit fraud, but the fact that the IRS knew about this discrepancy is a big problem. The only responsible thing for the IRS and any other state or federal agency using ID.me to do is to stop these contracts immediately.”

ID.me came back under the spotlight recently after cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs tried to set up an account, which will be required to log into the Internal Revenue Service’s online portal by this summer. Krebs ran into difficulties during the verification process, and ID.me placed him in a queue to join a video call with a live agent. The system gave Krebs an estimated wait time of three hours and 27 minutes.

Hall said ID.me works with 10 federal agencies, 30 states and 540 companies. Last year, some users reported having to wait months to receive their benefits after the system failed to verify their identity. In some cases, folks said they had no success with the video chat system either.

Source: Engadget – ID.me says it uses more powerful facial recognition than previously claimed