Security

The United States Federal Trade Commission reportedly has launched an investigation into philanderers' dating site Ashley Madison. The company, which suffered a massive data breach last year that resulted in extortion attempts and ruined lives, as well as class-action lawsuits, earlier this week ann...

BlackBerry on Tuesday announced it will cease manufacturing the BlackBerry Classic. "The Classic has long surpassed the average lifespan for a smartphone in today's market," noted COO Ralph Pini. "To keep innovating and advancing our portfolio, we are updating our smartphone lineup with state-of-t...

With breaches of consumer data occurring all too frequently, who could be against proposals to improve privacy on the Internet? Well, a broad swath of the e-commerce sector, ranging from CTIA-The Wireless Association to USTelecom and the National Retail Federation, is strongly opposed to a recent pr...

The United States Senate last week rejected a Republican-backed amendment that would have given the FBI expanded authority to access the browser histories and other electronic records of targets of terrorism and other national security investigations without first obtaining a warrant. The Senate vot...

Almost lost among the deluge of new features in the upcoming version of iOS Apple touted last week was the company's announcement about privacy. "All this great work in iOS 10 would be meaningless to us if it came at the expense of your privacy," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president for so...

Yahoo last week published the text of three National Security Letters it received from the FBI in 2013. The letters demand the names, addresses, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records -- existing transaction and activity logs and all email header information -- of the...

Digital rights and free speech advocates are up in arms over Tuesday's announcement of an agreement between the European Commission and four leading U.S. social media firms -- Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft -- on a Code of Conduct designed to crack down on hate speech. The companies have a...

Antiquated IT systems are soaking up federal technology dollars and creating risks for both bureaucrats and citizens, the GAO reported last week. More than 75 percent of the federal IT budget in 2015 went toward the operation and maintenance of nearly obsolete legacy systems that use outdated softwa...

A hacker reportedly has offered to sell the account information of 117 million LinkedIn users, which was stolen in a 2012 hack. The data includes users' email addresses and passwords.The hacker, who goes by the handle "Peace," reportedly offered the data on The Real Deal -- a site on the dark web -...

Google on Thursday filed an appeal with France's supreme administrative court over an order from a privacy regulator requiring it to scrub certain search results around the world under a law called "the right to be forgotten." The March order from the CNIL requires Google and other search engines to...

China reportedly is investigating the encryption and data storage features of technology products sold there by large foreign companies to determine whether the products pose a security threat. A committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China reportedly is conducting reviews that i...

Concern about online security and privacy are leading Americans to curtail online activity, the United States National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported last week. More than 41,000 households with at least one Internet user in July responded to several privacy and security q...

Twitter reportedly has blocked U.S. intelligence agencies from accessing information from Dataminr, a firm that tracks tweets in real time to provide actionable information for financial, media, security and other types of institutional clients. The block suggests Twitter is unwilling to cooperate w...

Adblock Plus, which has been in the forefront of online ad blocking, this week announced the beta of Flattr Plus, a joint project with micropayment site Flattr, which promises no less than to revolutionize Web monetization. Users decide how much money they want to have distributed among their favori...