At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, representatives of the International Game Developer Association (IGDA) warned that the World Health Organization (WHO) decision to treat computer gaming as a disorder on par with gambling and drug addiction represents a threat to free speech protections. Daniel …

AnalysisImagine for a moment the possibility that macOS 10.15, due to arrive later this year, will run only apps signed with a valid Apple developer certificate, with no option to white-list unsigned apps via the company's Gatekeeper security mechanism. That would mean the only application code you could run on macOS 10.15 would be …

Boffins have found a side channel to observe the choices netizens make when viewing interactive streaming videos. In recent years, computer scientists have demonstrated how they can determine the movie titles people watch over HTTPS connections on Netflix and YouTube. At least at one point in history people worried about such …

UpdatedA group of Manhattan residents are suing their landlord after a smart lock was installed on their apartment block front door. They claim they are being forced to use a phone app to get into their homes as a result of the gizmo's installation. While upgrading the building at 517-525 West 45th St with a new elevator, the …

MySpace, the Norma Desmond of social networking platforms, appears to have lost all the music uploaded to the site since its founding in 2003 through 2015, a blunder the company reportedly attributes to a failed server migration. The lost files – said to amount to 50 million songs from 14 million artists – appear to be …

UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ, celebrating its centenary, has released emulators for famed World War II-era cipher machines that can be run within its web-based educational encryption app CyberChef. "We've brought technology from our past into the present by creating emulators for Enigma, Typex and the Bombe in # …

A pair of US Senators from across the aisle on Thursday introduced a bill to limit how facial recognition technology can be used. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) have proposed the Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act of 2019 as a way to provide people with some measure of privacy protection from face-scanning …

Huawei Technologies USA, the Plano, Texas-based arm of the Chinese telecom giant, was sued in Missouri on Thursday over an alleged phone explosion. The lawsuit was filed in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, south of St. Louis, in the name of the father of an unnamed female minor said to be the victim of the accident. "On December 24 …

Special reportQuantum computing has been portrayed as a threat to current encryption schemes, but the ability of finicky vaporware to overthrow the current security regime looks like it's massively overstated. Richard Evers, cryptographer for a Canadian security biz called Kryptera, argues that media coverage and corporate pronouncements …

About two-thirds of USB memory sticks bought secondhand in the US and UK have recoverable and sometimes sensitive data, and in one-fifth of the devices studied, the past owner could be identified. These results come this week from a study conducted by the University of Hertfordshire in the UK and commissioned by Comparitech, a …

AnalysisIn an all-too-rare sign of Congress doing its job, on Wednesday US lawmakers introduced a new law bill aimed at improving the security of the internet-of-things. The legislation has been introduced into both the House and the Senate with politicians from both sides supporting it. What's more, the Internet of Things (IoT) …

Mozilla's Firefox Send, a free encrypted file sharing service, graduated from test to official release on Tuesday after a year and half of refinement. Available on the web at send.firefox.com and soon through an Android app, Send first appeared in August 2017 as a way to encrypt local files and store them on Mozilla's servers …

The Swiss Federal Chancellery (SFC) on Tuesday said security researchers have found an fascinating flaw in the Swiss Post's e-voting system as part of an ongoing penetration test. Said flaw, if successfully exploited by miscreants, would prevent officials from detecting unauthorized changes to citizens' electronically-cast …

An unprotected MongoDB database of 1.8 million women in China has been taken offline after drawing media attention for the inclusion of a data field designating whether the women are "BreedReady." The database was spotted by Victor Gevers, a researcher based in the Netherlands who founded the GDI Foundation, a non-profit …

Freelance developers hired to implement password-based security systems do so about as effectively as computer science students, which is to say not very well at all. Boffins at the University of Bonn in Germany set out to expand on research in 2017 and 2018 that found computer science students asked to implement a user …

UpdatedAn unprotected MongoDB database belonging to a marketing tech company exposed up to 809 million email addresses, phone numbers, business leads, and bits of personal information to the public internet, it emerged yesterday. Today, however, it appears the scope of that security snafu may have been underestimated. According to …

An IT contractor for a US government fraud and abuse watchdog pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing 16 US government computers. According to prosecutors, Andrew Cheveers, 31, served as a techie for the State Department's Office of Inspector General (State OIG), where he held a security clearance and set up PCs for government …

When Gerald Cotten, CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, died late last year, we were told no one at his company knew how to access the offline digital wallets storing his customers' digital dosh. These "cold wallets," the biz said last month, "are highly encrypted and were kept off the QuadrigaCX server for …