The spying game: Obama announces watered-down NSA surveillance reforms -- but will we see any difference?
Unless you have been living under a rock for many months, you couldn't help but be aware of the activities of the NSA. They certainly knew what you were up to, even when you were hiding under that rock. Campaigners have been calling for reform ever since Edward Snowden blew the lid off previously secret surveillance of telephone calls and web activity of millions of users in America and around the world. In an address at the Justice Department, President Obama gave details of some reforms to surveillance, but at the same time remained defensive of the National Security Agency.
Referring to surveillance (or spying, if you will) carried out in the 1960s, Obama said: "In the long twilight struggle against communism, we had been reminded that the very liberties that we sought to preserve could not be sacrificed at the altar of national security". The speech continued, making the obligatory nods to terrorism, "weapons of mass destruction" and September 11th; all very emotive stuff. This heartstring tugging was cited as the reason the intelligence community in general -- including the NSA -- needed to up its game. They "suddenly needed to do far more than the traditional mission of monitoring hostile powers and gathering information for policymakers."
The most popular stories on BetaNews this past week - January 12 -- 18
Now that CES 2014 is completely out of the way (although there was still time for me to pick my favorite tech from the show), it's back to business as usual. For many a company, business as usual means security issues, and Microsoft suffered at the hands of The Syrian Electronic Army. Again. The earlier security issues at Target were found to be far worse than first thought, affecting an estimated 100 million customers, and a potential security flaw was identified in Starbucks' mobile apps. For the antivirus side of protection, Kaspersky's Internet Security was named product of the year by AV-Comparatives.
Hoping against hope that new tech isn’t embraced for the sake of embracing new tech, I pondered the need for curved screens. In the mobile world, KitKat started to roll out to the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and also announced the company somewhat deceptively named Galaxy Tab3 Lite, which is in fact no lighter than the non Lite version, other than in terms of hardware specs.
Starbucks brews security vulnerability with its soy lattes
Some coffee aficionados might dislike my taste in coffee. I consume trendy drinks like Skinny Vanilla Lattes from Starbucks when on the go and Keurig coffee pods at home -- hardly a French press. While the Starbucks drinks are expensive, this is my only vice -- I do not drink alcohol or smoke, so I justify the cost that way.
Whenever I am at the famous coffee chain, I see a lot of people using Apple devices. One of the coolest things about this, is that Starbucks offers an iPhone app which makes it possible to make purchases using the smartphone. Sadly though, it has come to light that there is a vulnerability in the software. While security weaknesses in the Java programming language are nothing new, one regarding java the drink is.
Microsoft gives Windows XP a partial reprieve -- to 2015
While many of our young readers may associate Saturday Night Live with people like Andy Samburg, I remember a greater cast -- John Belushi, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray to name a few. One of my favorite sketches, was called "The Thing that Wouldn't Leave". In it, Murray and Curtin play a married couple, who want nothing more than for their guest, played by Belushi, to leave. The wife screams in agony as the guest keeps finding reasons to stay.
Well, sometimes true life imitates art, as Windows XP becomes "The Thing that Wouldn't Leave" for Microsoft. While the world has been preparing for XP's 2014 death, Microsoft today throws a curve-ball and announces a reprieve (at least partially).
AV-Comparatives names Kaspersky as Product of the Year
Independent testing organization AV-Comparatives has released its Anti-Virus Comparative Summary Report 2013.
This rounds up the results of the company's tests carried out over the past year on 22 consumer antivirus and internet security products.
Quiet Patch Tuesday for January with only four Important bulletins
January's Patch Tuesday has seen only four bulletins, with no Critical ones (hooray!) and no patches for Internet Explorer. However, the four bulletins are rated Important and users should apply the related patches as soon as possible.
According to security specialist Trustwave two of the vulnerabilities result in a privilege elevation and a third involves remote code execution utilizing an Office document.
Dropbox talks about its weekend outage, says data is safe
Over this past weekend Dropbox went down, and thanks to all of the recent news about companies being hacked, the worst was feared. But those unconfirmed reports have proven to be false, as the cloud storage service has set the record straight.
The real truth behind the incident turns out to be much more mundane. In fact, it was simply a scheduled maintenance that went wrong. "On Friday at 5:30 PM PT, we had a planned maintenance scheduled to upgrade the OS on some of our machines. During this process, the upgrade script checks to make sure there is no active data on the machine before installing the new OS. A subtle bug in the script caused the command to reinstall a small number of active machines. Unfortunately, some master-slave pairs were impacted which resulted in the site going down".
Target security breach is even worse -- now an estimated 100-million customers
Apparently Adobe should not rest on its laurels, as Target reaches record-setting data losses. Over the past couple of weeks we have gradually learned of a security breach at the retailer that exposed customer data, including credit card information.
The whole thing seemed bad enough right off the bat, when we reported the number of affected customers at 40 million. It grew worse this week, when that total rose to 70 million. Now the retailer has truly hit the big time.
How to disable Gmail's new email via Google+ option
Google recently made an interesting change to Gmail, making it possible for users to send messages to anyone in their Google+ circles. If the prospect of receiving emails from people you don’t know concerns you -- they don’t even need to know your email address -- you might like the idea of locking down your account. Thankfully, Google has made it quite simple to put restrictions in place. So if you'd like to avoid a possible influx of unsolicited emails, here's how to go about it.
Before we get started, it's worth pointing out that you may not see these settings in Gmail yet. This means that the feature has not been enabled for your account yet -- which means you don’t need to worry about receiving messages in this way anyway!
Target hack actually affects 70 million -- phone numbers, email addresses and more stolen
When I bought my iPad Air at Target on December 13, 2013, it was supposed to be a happy moment. People that know me, know that I am extremely frugal. The old adage is that a fool and his money are easily parted. Well, I am certainly no fool in this regard. With that said, Target had a really good deal on the tablet and and I uncharacteristically decided to treat myself for Christmas. I took my new Apple device home and I was in heaven -- until I heard about the Target breach.
Truth be told, I wasn't too worried, as I paid for it with a credit card and not a debit card. In other words, my money was safe as long as I paid attention to my credit card bill for any oddities. While Target initially said 40 million people were affected, and that is a lot, I accepted it as something that happens and didn't hold any grudges with the retailer. The hack was acknowledged on December 19th and I have shopped there since. However, my forgiveness and understanding may be short lived. Today, Target announces that it wasn't 40 million customers affected -- it was 70 million! Not only that, but more types of information was stolen than originally reported.
Banks urged to improve security as the financial malware arms race heats up
Since the first personal computer viruses appeared in the 1980s, avoiding malware has become a fact of everyday life for computer users. There's a constant battle to stay ahead of the game and fend off the Trojans and botnets.
Where the conflict is at its fiercest though is in the financial sector as this is where malware has the potential to earn its authors serious money.
Gmail lets you email Google+ users without exchanging email addresses
Assuming you're a Gmail user you'll be aware that there's rarely a need to type out an email address in full. Once a contact is in your address book, you can start typing a name into the To field and suggestions will pop up as you type. But what about those people whose email address you don’t actually have? You may have connected with someone on Google+ but start to type out an email and you suddenly realize you don’t have an address to send to. D'oh! However a new feature that's rolling out could see this frustration becoming a thing of the past.
What’s the solution? Google is keen on integrating Google+ with as many products and services as possible, and now this is spreading to Gmail. You've probably got a large number of contacts on Google+ (well… maybe you have some... Google+ isn't that unpopular!), but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have their email address. Over the next few days, when you start to type the name of a recipient in the To field, Google+ contacts will be displayed as suggestions in addition to entries from your address book.
Malware introduced by employees a major concern for business
A new study from Osterman Research finds that malware is still one of the main security concerns for businesses.
The survey, sponsored by security specialist Trustwave, asked 160 security professionals about email, web and social media threats. It finds that employees were the number one reason for concern when it comes to introducing malware to enterprise systems.
McAfee name set to disappear in Intel rebranding
Yesterday's speech at CES by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich contained lots of stuff about plans for wearable technology and computers housed in SD card form factors.
But also in there was the announcement of a new Intel Security brand and the news that McAfee products will transition to this over time. Krzanich also says that Intel is planning to offer some elements of McAfee security products free of charge to protect the latest mobile devices.
Pafwert generates strong passwords you can actually remember
If all the regular high-profile website hacks have persuaded you that using "password" as your password is a bad idea, then you could use a password generator to produce something more cryptic. There’s a problem, though. Most generators create random passwords like "dml&$s2j" or "lBH6-aa5", which are secure, but also very difficult to remember.
Pafwert is a password generator with a difference. Instead of churning out random text strings, it uses a far more intelligent algorithm to produce passwords which are both secure and memorable.
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