The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that it has found Verizon Wireless to have deliberately violated the privacy of its users by using a supercookie. Verizon Wireless is the largest US carrier with over 100m subscribers, but failed to disclose the practice of using supercookies in order to violate their users privacy from late 2012 until 2014, violating a 2010 FCC regulation on Internet transparency. Supercookies...
Put down your coffee gently. Microsoft has today released a homegrown open-source operating system, based on Debian GNU/Linux, that runs on network switches. The software is dubbed SONiC, aka Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. It’s a toolkit of code to bend switch hardware to your will, so you can dictate how it works and what it can do, rather than relying on...
In the grab bag of Google/Alphabet’s big projects for 2016 is Project Abacus. It’s basically the company’s plot to kill the password in cold blood, by replacing it with smartphone user authentication via an uncrackable collection of biometric readings. Abacus would lock or unlock devices and apps based on a cumulative “trust score” — as your phone continually monitors and recognizes your location patterns,...
Popular ad blocker Adblock Plus claims that it was uninvited from the US Interactive Advertising Bureau’s big conference. The IAB represents the biggest names in the digital-advertising industry: Google, Facebook, Twitter, online publishers, and ad-tech companies. Each year it holds its annual leadership meeting in Palm Desert, California. It’s where the biggest names in the online-advertising industry network and thrash out their ideas on the...
In the video game industry, it doesn’t take a lot to piss off your entire fan base. And Sony is about to re-learn this lesson with one trademark request. San Mateo, California-based Sony Computer Entertainment of America is trying to trademark the term “Let’s Play” to represent “electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual,...
The past several years have done wonders for Facebook’s once-murky public reputation. After a series of privacy-related controversies and a rocky debut in the stock market, the company embraced and quickly came to dominate the time we spend on mobile devices. More than a billion of us use its apps every day, and they have come to serve as a vital connection between family...
As of yesterday, North America is out of IPv4 addresses. Getting that feeling of déjà vu all over again? In July, we reported that ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, was activating its waitlist policy, wherein organizations that qualify for a block of IPv4 addresses larger than the largest block in ARIN’s available pool of addresses could opt to wait for that larger block...
Security firm AVG can sell search and browser history data to advertisers in order to “make money” from its free antivirus software, a change to its privacy policy has confirmed. The updated policy explained that AVG was allowed to collect “non-personal data”, which could then be sold to third parties. The new privacy policy comes into effect on 15 October, but AVG explained that...
Your prayers have been finally answered – that is, if you asked for Google to come to New York City with free Wi-Fi for all. Because that’s totally happening this year, and it’s all part of Google’s grandiose plan to bring free Wi-Fi to the world. According to Bloomberg, Google has already set up a company that’ll handle the free Wi-Fi job in the Big Apple. Sidewalk Labs is...
As SourceForge continues to take over projects in order to inject them with malware/adware to line their pockets, the latest victim is none other than Firefox. A bug report has been started by a redditor named TannerMoz to get the attention of Mozilla’s legal team. With luck this will help stop SourceForge from doing these kinds of negative actions to the Firefox project and...
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