New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily.Google announced Tuesday a slew of new ways to help those with a wide range of disabilities use its products.

The company added a new business attribute icon to its Maps and Search products allowing businesses to self-identify as disabled-owned. The icon adds to Google’s growing list of business attributes, including Black-owned, Asian-owned and LGBTQ+ frienly.

Google also released Magnifier, a camera-based app designed to use the Pixel’s camera like a magnifying glass, allowing users to zoom in and add color filters. The app was designed alongside the Royal National Institute of Blind People and the National Federation of the Blind, and it’s helpful for low-vision people to see small details in the world around them. The filters can enhance the contrast, brightness and color of small text and other subtleties that people with low vision may struggle with. The feature will be available on the Pixel 5 and up, excluding the Pixel Fold.

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Some other Google Accessibility articles: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/

The General Services Administration is changing its digital identity service to allow users to authenticate themselves by matching against a previously submitted government ID. The General Services Administration will add facial recognition technology to Login.gov, a single sign-on service for Americans to get government benefits and services online, the agency announced Wednesday.

The agency said in its Wednesday announcement it will be rolling out the technology next year. GSA says it will also add another new digital identity verification option for those who don’t want to use facial recognition technology. This method is still to be determined but it could involve real-time identity verification via live video chat or other platform.

Both the facial recognition and video chat options are part of GSA’s push to bring the service in line with government digital identity standards established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. GSA’s Inspector General lambasted officials for misleading other federal agencies using the service about its level of compliance in a report earlier this year. Using facial recognition technology is the easiest way to meet those standards online.

Login.gov’s in-person option offered at U.S. Postal Service locations is the third way to meet NIST standards for identity proofing, called identity assurance level two. In online situations, Login.gov currently uses data checks of government ID’s and phone numbers or addresses to verify people’s identities, relying at least in part on data vendor LexisNexis.

A major question the agency says it’s studying — one that is of urgent interest to advocates opposed to facial recognition technology as well — is whether or not facial recognition systems have bias in terms of skin tone and demographics.

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RSS feed: https://www.nextgov.com/rss/digital-government/

[from the “AI will fix all of this” dept. ]

Vaughn and other recipients didn’t ask for the covid money. The checks, known as economic impact or stimulus payments, landed automatically in their mailboxes or bank accounts in three installments in 2020 and 2021. The payments, which were based on the recipient’s income, totaled as much as $3,200 per person.

The payments pushed some beneficiaries’ bank balances above the $2,000 asset limit for individuals on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a program for people with little or no income or assets who are blind, disabled, or 65 or over. The limit, which hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in decades, can discourage people from working or saving more than a perilously small amount of money.

In some cases, when the Social Security Administration belatedly noticed the higher bank balances, it concluded the beneficiaries no longer qualified for SSI, according to people affected. Then the agency set out to recapture years of SSI benefits it alleged they shouldn’t have received.

Even as recipients appealed the actions, the agency stopped sending monthly benefit checks.

Actions Defy Agency’s Own Policy

The covid stimulus payments aren’t supposed to trigger Social Security clawbacks. Early in the pandemic, the Social Security Administration said that, when assessing people’s eligibility for SSI, it would exclude the payments for 12 months. Later, it said it would exclude them indefinitely. But what the agency says and what it does — indeed, what it is capable of doing — are often very different, people who study the agency said.

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Related Topics:

• Aging
• Health Care Costs
• Biden Administration
• Colorado
• Disabilities
• Investigation
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• Trump Administration
• U.S. Congress

Google-verified advertiser + legit-looking URL + valid TLS cert = convincing look-alike.Google has been caught hosting a malicious ad so convincing that there’s a decent chance it has managed to trick some of the more security-savvy users who encountered it.

Looking at the ad, which masquerades as a pitch for the open source password manager Keepass, there’s no way to know that it’s fake. It’s on Google, after all, which claims to vet the ads it carries. Making the ruse all the more convincing, clicking on it leads to ķeepass[.]info, which, when viewed in an address bar, appears to be the genuine Keepass site.

“Users are first deceived via the Google ad that looks entirely legitimate and then again via a lookalike domain,” Jérôme Segura, head of threat intelligence at security provider Malwarebytes, wrote in a post Wednesday that revealed the scam.

Information available through Google’s Ad Transparency Center shows that the ads have been running since Saturday and last appeared on Wednesday. The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google.

The sleight of hand that allowed the imposter site xn--eepass-vbb[.]info to appear as ķeepass[.]info is an encoding scheme known as punycode. It allows unicode characters to be represented in standard ASCII text. Looking carefully, it’s easy to spot the small comma-like figure immediately below the k. When it appears in an address bar, the figure is equally easy to miss, especially when the URL is backed by a valid TLS certificate, as is the case here.