2019 is the year Facebook announced a “pivot to privacy.” At the same time, Google is trying to claim that privacy means letting it exclusively store and data-mine everything you do online. So what better time to sit down with DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg for a chat about what privacy really means. We’re […]
For years, the web has been largely free thanks to online ads. The problem is that nobody likes them. When they’re not obnoxiously taking over your entire screen or autoplaying, they’re tracking you everywhere you go online. Ads can track where you go and which sites you visit and can be used to build up […]
A study carried out by academics at Oxford University to investigate how junk news is being shared on social media in Europe ahead of regional elections this month has found individual stories shared on Facebook’s platform can still hugely outperform the most important and professionally produced news stories, drawing as much as 4x the volume […]
Huawei has finally gone on the record about a ban on its use of Android, but the company’s long-term strategy on mobile still remains unclear. In an effort to appease its worried customer base, the embattled Chinese company said today that it will continue to provide security updates and after-sales support to its existing lineup […]
Google said today that existing users of Huawei Android devices can continue to use Google Play app store, offering some relief to tens of millions of users worldwide even as it remains unclear if the Chinese tech giant will be able to use the fully-functioning version of Android in its future phones. Existing Huawei phone […]
If you thought Uber’s disastrous initial public offering last week would deter fellow venture-backed technology companies from pursuing the public markets in 2019, you thought wrong. CrowdStrike, yet another multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley “unicorn,” has filed to go public. The cloud-based cybersecurity platform valued at $3.3 billion in 2018 revealed its IPO prospectus Tuesday afternoon. The […]
Big tech is stepping in to patch newly disclosed security flaws affecting almost every Intel chip since 2011. Researchers on Tuesday released details of the vulnerability, known as ZombieLoad — or microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) as its technical name — which can leak sensitive data stored in the processor, such as passwords, secret keys and […]
Security researchers have found a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel chips which, if exploited, can be used to steal sensitive information directly from the processor., The bugs are reminiscent of Meltdown and Spectre, which exploited a weakness in speculative execution, an important part of how modern processors work. Speculative execution helps processors predict to […]
WhatsApp just fixed a vulnerability that allowed malicious actors to remotely install spyware on affected phones, and an unknown number reportedly did so with a commercial-grade snooping package usually sold to nation-states. The vulnerability (documented here) was discovered by the Facebook-owned WhatsApp in early May, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. It apparently leveraged a bug […]
A development lab used by Samsung engineers was leaking highly sensitive source code, credentials and secret keys for several internal projects — including its SmartThings platform, a security researcher found. The electronics giant left dozens of internal coding projects on a GitLab instance hosted on a Samsung-owned domain, Vandev Lab. The instance, used by staff […]