Since 2015 Andrew has been writing about Apple, privacy, security, and at one point even Android. You can find him most places online under the username @andrewornot.
Software system provider Intact collected data and analyzed it to see which brands hackers are searching for as their next potential hacking targets.
We analysed search intent by digging out the number of searches for terms including ‘how to hack [xyz]’. Although career cybercriminals are likely to use more nefarious means to research and test their hacking processes, Google search data provides an insight into global intent and changing trends.
So you’ve purchased cryptocurrency at your favorite exchange, now what? How about getting a crypto debit or credit card?
An app called Weedmaps was updated to let customers purchase products directly within the app. It’s a notable move because Apple’s restrictions previously forbade in-app purchases for cannabis.
The change comes after Apple opened up the App Store for some cannabis apps. Under the new guidance, licensed cannabis operators fall under the same restrictions (to Apple) as licensed pharmacies allowing apps like Weedmaps, which lists licensed cannabis operators, to offer such services.
Apple and security firm Corellium have reached a settlement and Apple has dropped its lawsuit. The terms of the settlement are confidential.
Poly Network is a cross-chain decentralized finance platform and operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. It suffered a hack recently in which approximately US$600 million in crypto was stolen.
About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected. Meanwhile, close to $100 million has been moved out of the Binance Smart Chain address in the past 30 minutes and deposited into liquidity pool Ellipsis Finance.
Recently, Ancestry.com updated its terms and conditions to give itself the rights to use your photos for any reason in perpetuity.
Mozilla’s latest update to Firefox, version 91, offers enhanced cookie clearing when a user deletes their browser history.
When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s “cookie jar”. This “Enhanced Cookie Clearing” makes it easy to delete all traces of a website in your browser without the possibility of sneaky third-party cookies sticking around.
On Wednesday, August 11, 2021 FEMA will test its Emergency Alert System as well as the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. It will happen at 2:20 ET.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, runs the test every year or two to ensure the system is working properly. It’s no small task: A national emergency alert system that can broadcast a message to potentially hundreds of millions of people at any given time is fraught with technological hurdles that require close co-operation from the cell carriers and broadcast networks.
On the iPhone you can see if you have these alerts enabled in Settings > Notifications, and scrolling down to the bottom.
5G that uses “non-standalone architecture” is rife with security issues and doesn’t protect people from Stingray police surveillance.
Borgaonkar and fellow researcher Altaf Shaik, a senior research scientist at TU Berlin, found that major carriers in Norway and Germany are still putting out 5G in non-standalone mode, which means that those connections are still susceptible to stingrays. The two presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last week.
Signal, a messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption, introduced a feature to let you have all of your messages disappear by default.
Until now, disappearing messages had to be enabled on a per-conversation basis, but for those who want to take ephemerality to the fullest, Signal now supports the ability to preconfigure all conversations you initiate with a default timer.
We’ve also added the ability to set custom timer durations on your conversations, so that some content can be gone in 60 seconds and others can exist for 18 minutes or 4 weeks.
Google on Tuesday announced new safety features for minors across YouTube, Google Search, Google Play Store, and more.
In the coming weeks, we’ll introduce a new policy that enables anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, to request the removal of their images from Google Image results. Of course, removing an image from Search doesn’t remove it from the web, but we believe this change will help give young people more control of their images online.
American Red Cross is offering special deals for people who donate blood between August 1-31, 2021. It includes four months of free Apple Music.
Facebook announced on Monday that it added two new services to its information transfer tool: Photobucket and Google Calendar.
Venmo added a feature recently that lets customers automatically purchase cryptocurrency through the new “Cash Back to Crypto” feature.
On Tuesday, accessory maker Twelve South announced its newest product. Called PlugBug Slim, it’s a thin USB-C wall charger.
Andrew noticed something new in Apple’s privacy policy, last updated May 9, 2019. Apple now scans uploaded content for child abuse content.
With iOS 15 Apple will add a system to detect examples of child abuse that get uploaded to iCloud Photos. They now have an FAQ to explain it.
Call center workers in Columbia are worried about plans from Big Tech to install AI-powered cameras in their homes to monitor their performance.
Does the thought of your Apple device scanning your iCloud Photos make you uneasy? Good news! Here are four private alternatives.
This week we discovered that Apple plans to localize its scanning efforts to detect child sexual abuse material. The move has been widely criticized and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has shared its statement on the matter.
All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.
In an email sent to customers, Apple shared new updates related to Apple Cash, involving instant transfers.
Apple is expanding its efforts to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across its platform. Content scanning in Messages, iCloud Photos, and Siri.
CISA is forming an initiative called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative along with certain private sector companies such as Google and Microsoft.
On Thursday Coinbase announced additional payment methods for buying cryptocurrency on its platform. For Apple users that means Apple Pay.
