Items tagged with Email
Have you ever noticed that if you mention a product in email, it has a way of translating over to ads? In some cases, it might be a coincidence. But if you use Gmail, there is a much higher chance that Google scanned the contents of your email, picked up on a keyword, and delivered a targeted ad based on what you wrote. Oh, you didn't know? Google does in fact sift through the contents of your Gmail, though starting soon, it will stop doing that. Google is looking to bring its consumer-based Gmail service in line with its G Suite for businesses, the latter of which includes a version of Gmail that...
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Most of us could probably stand to be a little bit more organized, whether it's remembering to pick up milk on the way home or making sure not to miss little Katie's recital right after turning in those blueprints to the boss at noon. That is where digital assistants can be useful. Cortana is one of them and Microsoft is making its smarty pants AI even more helpful by having her hold you accountable to what you say in emails. "Cortana already gives you reminders for people, places and times, and helps you make and manage to-do lists so you don’t forget a thing. Now, Cortana can help you remember...
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The growing consensus is that the U.S. government is overstepping its bounds and trampling on people's right to privacy. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the government's vast spying program, and while that was an eye opener for the country (and world) at large, the full extent of its efforts are still coming to light. The most recent example is the email scanner Yahoo built under the direction of the NSA and FBI.Developed in secret, the email scanner was found to be a sophisticated hacking tool, or rootkit, as some experts have classified it. The email scanner gave the...
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We've no doubt all been there: we click the "Send" button on an email, and before we realize what just happened, it's too late. That email and its potential embarrassment is out of your hands. While it's one thing to accidentally send an email too early, or reply all when you shouldn't have, it's an entirely different story when you accidentally email up to 1.2 million people at once. Oh - and if that's not bad enough, imagine taking down an entire email system as a result! That's just what happened to the National Health Service in the UK, as an IT contractor sent a test email to the agency's...
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Ahmed Mehtab, a student from Pakistan and the CEO of Security Fuse, is in the running to score a $20,000 payday from Google's bug bounty program. While there remains some red tape to clear, Mehtab is likely to receive the bounty for discovering a rather crafty flaw in Gmail relating to its authentication and verification system, one that could make it possible for a remote hacker to hijack a Gmail account. The vulnerability lies in how Google handles multiple Gmail accounts. A user who has more than one Gmail address can link them and have the primary Gmail account forward email to secondary accounts....
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There are many different ways of hacking into a person's email account. Some are rather sophisticated and involve a lot of effort, while on the end of the spectrum a scheme known as phishing is one of the easiest methods—all you need is a cooperative victim with limited technical savvy. Hackers found both in John Podesta, Chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.What is even more startling is that hackers found the same in Clinton's IT staff. It now appears that it was not some complex hacking that compromised the security of Podesta's email account, it was the inability to recognize...
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Less than two weeks before U.S. elections kick off on November 8th, the FBI has released a new bombshell that threatens to shakeup what has already been an almost circus-like campaign season. FBI Director James Comey, who is known more widely in the circles for his staunch criticism of Apple in the San Bernardino iPhone encryption case, just sent a letter to Congress informing them that there have been newly uncovered emails that are pertinent to the department’s investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. "In connection with an unrelated case, the...
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Yahoo has turned back on the automatic forwarding feature for Yahoo Mail users after previously disabling the function as part of what the firm claimed was planned maintenance. It's sticking with that explanation, saying the temporary disruption was part of a broader upgrade to its email service that's been taking place over the course of the year.Image Source: Flickr (Rodrigo Paoletti) "Last week, we temporarily disabled the ability to add new automatic forwarding in Yahoo Mail. As of today, auto-forward is enabled again for all Mail users," said Michael Albers, VP of Product Management, Yahoo...
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It's been a long time since I've read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" but I'm pretty sure there isn't a chapter on holding people hostage. That's generally a bad idea, and so is Yahoo's decision to disable the forwarding feature for its email service, which effectively prevents Yahoo Mail users from hightailing it out of there with a note left behind for anyone that comes looking. As one Yahoo Mail user told the Associated Press, the timing here is "extremely suspicious." I don't disagree with that observation. Apparently Yahoo flipped the switch on its forward feature...
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"Yahoo" is a positive word, but in relation to the internet giant, it's starting to feel like it could describe some of the company's key management. Yahoo has been dealing with some troubling issues, but most of those issues were self-created, such as failing to disclose a security breach which took place years ago, and building a custom tool for the U.S. government - and the NSA in particular - to scan user emails. Now, it's being reported that Yahoo's tool is in effect a sophisticated "hacking tool", although it's supposedly not that much different from Yahoo's preexisting tools used to...
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In the wake of a report outing Yahoo's email scanning program for the government, a handful of other major tech firms have gone on record saying they don't snoop your incoming messages for Uncle Sam. Those firms include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, four of which pretty much denied ever receiving such a request from the U.S. government. "We’ve never received a request like this, and were we to receive it we’d challenge it in a court. Separately, while federal law prohibits companies from being able to share information about certain types of national security related requests,...
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The Internet is littered with memes describing awkward moments and perhaps now someone will make a new one describing that awkward moment when a service that prides itself on anonymity mistakenly shares your email address without thousands of others. So it goes with Glassdoor, an online portal where employees past and present can leave anonymous reviews of companies.Glassdoor is a popular and handy website for any job seeker considering employment at a particular firm. It's filled with useful information, a lot of it anecdotal in terms of being user reviews, but also what kind of compensation to...
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It's good computing practice to change your passwords every now and then, and also after a major hacking incident. The latter is why you should considering changing your Gmail or Yahoo password at your earliest convenience—over 272 million online accounts have been stolen and are being traded in Russia's underground market. Researchers from Hold Security told Reuters that it found a Russian hacker gloating in a web forum that he had stolen a larger number of online credentials. His cache of compromised accounts totaled 1.17 billion, though many of them were duplicates. After eliminating redundant...
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Last week, we learned about the company teaming up with others, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, to make SMTP 'Strict Transport Security' a reality, a protocol that would make it even harder for malicious users to gain access to our email. In a new blog post, the company draws our attention to SMTP STS as well as a couple of other recent (and not so recent) ways the company has improved our security. On Safer Internet Day, which happened a month-and-a-half ago, the company introduced a new Gmail feature that highlights when email is received or being sent to a domain...
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