Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone. Along with Andrew Huang, his coauthor and fellow hacker, Snowden presented his research on phone “hardware introspection” at MIT, which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency. “This work aims to give journalists...
We reported earlier on France’s demands to Microsoft with regards to bolstering its Windows 10 OS to better protect user data, and ultimately, their privacy. The fact that a watchdog would target Microsoft for collecting too much data probably strikes no one as a surprise, as that very complaint has been one shared by many users since the launch of Microsoft’s latest OS. In...
If you’re a Spotify user, your friends and family aren’t the only ones who are able to check out your playlists. The popular streaming service is now the latest platform that is opening its data to targeted advertising. Everything from your age and gender, to the music genres you like to listen will be available to various third-party companies. Spotify is calling it programmatic...
Windows 10 breaches French law by collecting too much personal information from users and failing to secure it adequately, according to the French National Data Protection Commission (CNIL). Some of the privacy failings identified can be remedied by users willing to delve deep into the Windows 10 settings, but one of the commission’s gripes is that better privacy should be the default setting, not...
If you’ve ever pixelated an email address or blurred a phone number before putting an image onto the internet in order to protect someone’s privacy, I’ve got bad news for you: Researchers at the University of California-San Diego have found that the popular Photoshop redaction techniques are decodable such that the underlying text can be read. The researchers were able to recover text from...
Browser plugins, especially Flash, have enabled some of our favorite experiences on the Web, including videos and interactive content. But plugins often introduce stability, performance, and security issues for browsers. This is not a trade-off users should have to accept. Mozilla and the Web as a whole have been taking steps to reduce the need for Flash content in everyday browsing. Starting in August,...
Poodlecorp (yes, you read that right) has threatened to take the über popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go offline August 1 through a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the game’s already fragile servers. “We take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us,” @xotehpoodle (a member of the Poodlecorp group) said. “We do it...
Yahoo is writing down the value of its Tumblr acquisition by $482 million, citing lower projections for the social network’s future performance, the company announced Monday. This comes after Yahoo took a $230 million similar writedown last quarter on its Tumblr buy. In total, Yahoo has now written down more than half of Tumblr’s value since acquiring it for $1.1 billion in 2013 —...
Seagate today announced a new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of capacity for desktops computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems. The high-capacity drives, dubbed the Guardian Series, represent a 2TB increase over the capacity of previous Seagate hard drives in the consumer and small business category. The Guardian series consists of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS...
A newly disclosed software flaw could allow attackers to seize control of mobile phones and key parts of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure and make it possible to eavesdrop or disrupt entire networks, security experts warned Tuesday. The bug resides in a code library used in a wide range of telecommunication products, including radios in cell towers, routers, and switches, as well as the baseband...
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