Apple’s legal battle over encryption dominated headlines earlier this year, but another tech giant is fighting a quieter legal war over user privacy: Microsoft. It won a major victory last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit sided with the company, ruling that a U.S. warrant could not be used to force Microsoft to turn over email data stored in an Irish...
uBlock Origin is a lightweight ad blocker that consumes fewer system resources than the likes of Adblock Plus (never tested on Firefox where the addon started). The open-source ad blocker is officially available as an extension for Chromium and Firefox, but a New Zealand-based web developer has ported the extension for Microsoft Edge. Nik Rolls has forked the project on GitHub, and a working...
If you don’t already have iOS 9.3.3, you better download and install it — quick. Cisco Talos, a security and research group, recently discovered a bug in Mac and iPhones that allows hackers to steal passwords with a single text message. The researchers at Cisco Talos alerted Apple, and the tech company immediately worked on a patch, which was released this week. “This is...
Redbox is officially venturing back into streaming — on a trial basis, anyway. A Redbox spokesperson told Variety Thursday that the company has started to test its new streaming service, dubbed Redbox Digital, with some customers. Variety first reported in April about Redbox’s plans to launch a new streaming service. “We are testing a potential new transactional digital VOD and EST offering, with a small subset...
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,...
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