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Nvidia on Tuesday unveiled Shield, an Android TV console that in addition to playing content locally, can stream video games, movies, music, apps and more. Yes, it can play Crysis. That claim, a measure of a gaming PC's power a few years ago, is how Nvidia is marketing the Shield console. Nvidia's S...

Twitter last week announced actions to further protect users of its network -- but it left them vague. The company is rolling out unspecified improvements to its reporting process for content issues including impersonation, self-harm, and the sharing of private and confidential information, aka "dox...

Google will place a privacy curtain around sexually explicit images and video on its Blogger platform if users fail to remove the content of their own volition. Google has begun notifying Blogger subscribers about the policy change affecting adult content. The ban targets images and video that are s...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Encryption Can Create Stormy Weather in the Cloud

Encryption has received a lot of attention lately as a solution to the growing data breach problem, but one of the hang-ups dogging the technology has been its ability to play nice in the cloud. That's especially true if an organization wants to control the keys by which its data is scrambled and us...

I recently revisited Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's decision not to hire Academy Award winner and successful lifestyle author and blogger Gwyneth Paltrow for a lifestyle editing position...because she didn't have a college degree. In doing so, I ran into a comment by Martha Stewart, the 'queen of lifesty...

Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, this week issued a stern warning at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, held in San Jose. "Old formats that contain documents, photos and other data may not be readable with the ...

Facebook this week announced ThreatExchange, an API-based platform for technology companies to share information on security threats. It had been working on the platform for about a year in a joint project with other prominent Internet firms. Facebook layered APIs on top of its existing platform inf...

Facebook on Thursday announced a new feature for members who want to plan for their passing into the digital beyond. Initially rolled out in the United States, the feature allows Facebook members to appoint a "legacy contact" to administer their account when they die. Legacy contacts will, among oth...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bug Bounties Entice Researchers to Don White Hats

Bug bounty programs are used by individual software makers to improve the quality of their products, but they can have incidental benefits for all software makers, too. One of those is to encourage bug hunters to wear a white hat instead of a black one. That's particularly true for researchers attra...

Motorists in the United States are increasingly at risk of cyberattacks and violations of privacy, as more and more technology is added to their cars. A report released on Sunday by the office of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) listed a number of key findings that are based on responses from 16 auto makers...

Owners of Samsung smart TVs need to watch what they say if they've activated the voice recognition feature on these devices. The feature may transmit some voice commands, together with information about the device, to a third-party service that converts speech to text, Samsung's global privacy polic...

There were 9 billion Internet of Things (IoT) units installed at the end of 2013 by IDC's count, and its analysts expect the figure to hit 28 billion by 2020. That's going to make life difficult for IT security administrators. A Tripwire survey found that employed consumers who took work home had an...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Is the FTC Jumping the Gun on IoT Security?

The security community has been waving a red flag about how the Internet of Things could become a cybercriminal's paradise. Last week, those admonitions were given some credence when the Federal Trade Commission recommended that the makers of IoT gadgets adopt some "best practices" to protect consum...

JoyWing's Wishbone is a fancier thermometer than what you or I will have seen on any trip to the doctor. It's a smartphone attachment that gives temperature readouts within a couple of seconds without even having to touch the person or material it's examining, thanks to an infrared sensor. It's inex...

The Gamergate controversy, which centers on sexism and sexual violence in the video game industry, has made things hot for Wikipedia, whose arbitration committee has taken punitive action against some of the people involved in the debate. The committee decided to impose a complete site-wide ban on o...

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