Safety Security & Privacy

No good deed, huh. A student from Dawson College in Montreal has been expelled for his involvement in the uncovering of a potentially horrible flaw in his school’s online directories. Sounds dumb, right? Even worse: Everyone more or less agrees he meant no harm. Here’s what happened: Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a Computer Science student at Dawson, Continue Reading →

Want an easier way to log into your Gmail account? How about a quick tap on your computer with the ring on your finger? This may be closer than you think. Google’s security team outlines this sort of ring-finger authentication in a new research paper, set to be published late this month in the engineering Continue Reading →

From embarrassing party photos to confusing privacy settings, there’s no doubt that social media can cause you harm if you aren’t careful. This rings particularly true for younger generations accustomed to sharing liberally across various social networks, and it’ll only get worse with Facebook’s Graph Search. If you’ve ever felt the need to get your Continue Reading →

Remember “liking” a group on Facebook called, “Big Booty Rules?” You will… when someone uses Graph Search to find it… and you. The biggest news in the tech world this week was Graph Search: Facebook’s first true attempt at search. It’s an “inside baseball” name for a very interesting search tool. Graph Search is not Continue Reading →

Along with birthdays, names of pets and ascending number sequences, add one more thing to the list of password no-nos: good grammar. An algorithm developed by Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, makes light work of cracking long passwords which make grammatical sense as a whole phrase, even if they Continue Reading →

Tweaking your Activity Log just became a necessary and tedious new part of being a Facebook user. Thanks to the service’s new Graph Search feature, all that profile info you’ve painstakingly updated over the years (employer, home town, relationship status, movie likes, etc) and all the photos you’ve added over time, are now to become Continue Reading →

Microsoft will issue a critical security patch for Internet Explorer today, Jan. 14, the company has announced. The patch fixes an issue with a severity rating of “Critical”, and affects Internet Explorer versions 6-8 but not the latest two versions, 9 and 10. The vulnerability allows a malicious hacker to remotely execute code on the Continue Reading →

Oracle fixed a security flaw in its Java software on Sunday, after the Department of Homeland Security warned users to disable Java software completely, citing a security hole that allows hackers to take control of their machines. “Java 7 Update 10 and earlier contain an unspecified vulnerability that can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to Continue Reading →

The Wall Street Journal has analyzed the top 50 sites in the United States plus 20 other top sites in sensitive categories like dating or health. They found that 25 of these sites—including OKCupid, Pinterest, YouTube, Yahoo—send personal data to other sites in the open, with no security encoding, using your own browser session. Their Continue Reading →

Shelly Palmer talks about Snapchat’s Leak and Alicia Keys leaving BlackBerry on CNNi’s Quest Means Business. Continue Reading →