Most Facebook users have no idea that the ad biz compiles data profiles of their online activities and interests, according to research conducted by the non-profit Pew Research Center. That's not altogether surprising given that Facebook appeals to people disinclined to concern themselves with the minutiae of digital …

The campaign against Uncle Sam's use of facial recognition stepped up a notch this week: scores of rights-warriors have urged Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to cease selling the panopticon tech to the US government. "Companies can't continue to pretend that the 'break then fix' approach works,” said Nicole Ozer, Technology and …

A US judge last week denied police a warrant to unlock a number of devices using biometrics identifiers like fingerprints and faces, extending more privacy to device owners than previous recent cases. The order comes from Northern California Federal District Judge Kandis Westmore in response to a request by the government to …

AnalysisImagine a store where you go in, pay money, and sometimes leave empty-handed. That's digital advertising on social media in a nutshell because it's seemingly full of fraud. Simon Arthur, founder of custom parts maker Big Blue Saw, believes he had more or less that experience buying Facebook ads. In a blog post on Friday, …

The IT impact of the ongoing partial US federal government shutdown has begun to show up in the form of degraded computer security. According to internet services biz Netcraft, more than 80 TLS certificates used on .gov websites have expired and have not been renewed. That's caused a bunch of HTTPS-protected .gov sites to …

Security biz Qualys has revealed three vulnerabilities in a component of systemd, a system and service manager used in most major Linux distributions. Patches for the three flaws – CVE-2018-16864, CVE-2018-16865, and CVE-2018-16866 – should appear in distro repos soon as a result of coordinated disclosure. However, Linux …

A Google cryptoboffin is close to releasing a tool that will hopefully make all of us more secure online. Now that most web traffic travels over HTTPS and browser features increasingly expect security, developers really should be creating and testing apps in an HTTPS environment. Doing so requires installing a TLS/SSL …

PromoAs data thieves and hackers become more numerous, more inventive and more destructive, learning to protect themselves against cybercrime is ever higher on the list of companies' priorities. SANS London 2019 from 8-13 April promises to provide the training that security professionals at all levels need to defend their …

AnalysisResearchers have demonstrated yet again that location metadata from Twitter posts can be used to infer private information like users' home addresses, workplaces, and sensitive locations they've visited. Computer science boffins Kostas Drakonakis, Panagiotis Ilia, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Jason Polakis affiliated with The …

Some of the computer security boffins who revealed last year's data-leaking speculative-execution holes have identified yet another side-channel attack that can bypass security protections in modern systems. While side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown exploited chip design flaws to glean privileged information, this …

The Weather Channel app duped users into providing location data that the company then sold for advertising and other commercial purposes, according to a lawsuit brought by Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday, alleges that the mobile application, owned by IBM's …

To help those deploying serverless applications do so without stumbling into vulnerabilities, security biz Protego Labs has released crappy code in the hope there's something to be learned from studying the bugs. The company has developed a slipshod app called the Damn Vulnerable Serverless Application (DVSA) and donated it to …

Following changes in the way it figures out where people are located, US-based Slack informed an undisclosed number of individuals this week that they're no longer welcome on the chat app, due to America's export controls and sanctions. On Thursday, various Slack users took to Twitter to share account closure notices they had …

Two men, linked to the Chinese government, stand accused of hacking cloud giants, aerospace and defense companies, chip designers, US government agencies – including the Navy – and other organizations globally. The duo's goal, according to American prosecutors: stealing blueprints and other secrets from dozens of corporations …

In a case being considered by the European Court of Justice (CJEU), Advocate General Michal Bobek argued on Wednesday that website operators should share some responsibility with providers of embedded web widgets for ensuring that any data collection complies with legal requirements. In other words, if you embed a Facebook ' …

In March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey promised to stem the tide of toxic content that has plagued his antisocial network for years. "We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress," said Dorsey, pining that …

A Kiwibot delivery robot unexpectedly self-immolated last week at the University of California, Berkeley, due a defective battery, the company said over the weekend, attributing the incident to human error. Like competing cargo-bots from Postmates and Starship Technologies, Kiwibots are intended to carry deliveries …

Facebook on Friday apologized for a bug that may have exposed exposed private photos to third-party apps for the 12 day period from September 13 to September 25, 2018. "We're sorry this happened," said Tomer Bar, Facebook engineering director, in a blog post intended for developers, noting that as many as 6.8 million users and …