Privacy

Google this week unveiled Smart Reply for Gmail on iOS and Android. It uses machine intelligence and neural networks to suggest up to three possible responses for incoming email, based on the content of those emails. The system learns from users' responses to suggestions to fine-tune its offerings.

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted 74-21 to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, in the face of strong opposition from legal and cybersecurity experts, the high-tech industry, privacy and civil liberties organizations, and members of the public. The Act calls for the United States ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Google Pushes Transparency for SSL Certificates

The padlock on a browser's address bar is supposed to give Net travelers some security in insecure virtual space, but that's not always the case. Some dangerous flaws lurk behind the padlock. They can weaken the effectiveness of encrypted Internet connections and compromise TLS/SSL processes, includ...

TalkTalk on Thursday announced that it received a ransom demand following a cyberattack that may have compromised the credit card and bank details of millions of its customers. The cyberbreach may have compromised customer data including names, addresses, birth dates, email addresses and account inf...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Global Attacks on Mobile Networks Jeopardize Privacy, Profits

Bad actors are exploiting an obscure technology found in telecommunications networks around the world to track mobile users and engage in fraud, and they could be costing carriers millions of dollars in lost revenues. The technology, called "SS7," is a signal protocol developed in the 1970s for sett...

Siri and other smartphone digital assistants may do your bidding -- but they may do a hijacker's as well. That's what two researchers discovered when they began to tinker with the effects of radio waves on smartphones. They could use the waves to issue commands to any Android or iOS phone running Go...

I don't enjoy playing complex games on a smartphone. Using the screen as both input and output device makes matters complicated, so I tend to steer clear of any game that requires more than single taps or simple swipes. There are a number of game controllers around for smartphones, however, and the ...

Yahoo has announced a password-free email app that can manage accounts from Outlook.com, Hotmail and AOL Mail. There was no mention of syncing with Gmail or Apple's iCloud Mail. Yahoo has been working to improve email security in the wake of repeated hacks of the service over the years, the most pro...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

EU Court Decision Threatens US Cloud Dominance

Edward Snowden's legacy gained another chapter last week when the European Court of Justice rejected an agreement that created a Safe Harbor for U.S. companies handling personal data of overseas citizens. In essence, the agreement provided that a U.S. company's word that it had adequate safeguards i...

HP and 3M have entered a collaboration to build 3M privacy screens into HP notebook PCs. The technology's aim is to keep cyberspies from gathering information by doing nothing more sophisticated than looking over a user's shoulder -- what the companies call "visual hacking." "3M is developing an inn...

Apple last week revealed that it had removed from its App Store several apps with root certificates that could allow data monitoring. The monitoring could compromise SSL and TLS protocols, the company said. It suggested users delete the apps and their associated configuration profiles. However, it d...

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