Items tagged with security
When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's comprehensive spying efforts a few years ago, some might have thought that the agency (along with others) would cool their jets. After all, they were caught red-handed prying into our lives without our knowledge. As recent months have shown, however, the government...
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If you've ever tried to link someone to a Google Maps URL, you'll undoubtedly understand the benefit of URL shorteners. With them, we can take grossly long URLs and shorten them to a mere fraction of their original length, allowing your Facebook status update to retain a clean look and actually put a few words...
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Israeli tech firm Cellebrite has offered to help an Italian father hack into a locked iPhone 6 handset that belonged to his deceased son. It's the same tech firm that assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation with hacking an iPhone 5c after Apple refused over fears that cracking its own security would leave...
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It's no secret that law enforcement agencies and governments at large want to have access to our personal data whether we like it or not. Hot on the heels of the FBI managing to bypass security measures that should have protected the data on a terrorist's iPhone 5c, we see that the case is definitely not closed. As...
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Picking up where the FBI left off against Apple, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) are getting ready to introduce a bill that would force companies like Apple and Google to provide "technical assistance" to government authorities trying to access encrypted data on locked devices.
"We're...
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Here's a tip for anyone who owns a smartphone (so pretty much everybody)—don't leave your handset out in the open and unattended, even if you've locked it. Case in point, an online video making the rounds showed how it was possible to bypass an iPhone's passcode using Siri to access the device's contacts and...
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A prosecutor in Arkansas will get an assist from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a murder trial where key pieces of evidence may be contained in a pair of Apple devices. Having just recently thwarted the security on an iPhone 5c that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters, the FBI has agreed to help...
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The FBI dropped its case against Apple yesterday claiming it had extracted the contents of the now infamous iPhone 5c model that belonged to Syed Farook, the terrorist involved in the San Bernardino shooting, with the assistance of a third-party. It's as much a win for Apple as it is for the FBI, though instead of...
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In December, HotHardware reported that Microsoft had entered the planning stages for introducing a tweaked version of its Windows 10 operating system in China, and just three months later, the first iteration is being delivered. You have Windows 10 Pro? China has Windows 10 'Zhuangongban'. That rolls right off the...
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Over the past couple of years, law enforcement at large has ramped up its efforts to try to gain access to communication mediums, which can include being able to browse unlocked smartphones. As it stands today, most jurisdictions do not give a member of law enforcement the ability to gain access to a smartphone...
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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...
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Apple and the FBI have locked horns with one another over an iPhone 5c model that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters, but what seems like a suddenly contentious relationship may have roots that go even deeper. If a new report is to be believed, Apple's distrust of the U.S. government runs so deep that it's...
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With agencies like the NSA and FBI wanting to peer into our personal communications at will, we have to be proactive about keeping ourselves safe. But what if there's a fault we can't work around and simply have to live with? Unless you're a skilled developer, you have to rely on other to come up with an improved...
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Tired of reading about the FBI and Apple trading blows over an encrypted iPhone yet? Well relief may be in sight. This evening, the FBI filed a request to delay Tuesday's court hearing on the matter, and now that request has been accepted by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym.
Why has the FBI suddenly changed...
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Thought the Stagefright saga was all behind us? Think again. In a new paper published by Israel's NorthBit, we're shown that Stagefright can still prove to be a serious threat to older devices, with some able to be cracked in as little as 20 seconds. If you're still toting around a Nexus 5, LG G3, HTC One, or Samsung...
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Could your smartphone be listening in on your life? If you download mobile apps without much care for their permissions requests, you might not ever know. The privacy threat is so significant though, that the Federal Trade Commission has stepped in and warned us to be aware of it.
On Thursday, the FTC sent a letter...
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It's been an incredible month for Apple, the FBI, and all of us. We've been sitting back, watching the battle of these two giants, as a conclusion about whether or not the FBI should have a right to access encrypted data on someone's smartphone is reached. It seems like not a day can go by without an update to this...
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If as a child you told your parents you wanted to be a bug hunter when you grow up, they'd probably dismiss the notion before telling you to go wash your hands before supper. But had you stuck with it, you could now show your parents just how lucrative it is to hunt bugs—programming bugs, that is. In fact, you can collect a cool $100,00 for
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Fingerprint scanning is quickly becoming a standard security feature on high-end smartphones. The perceived notion is that this type of biometric safeguard provides a superior means of security due to the unique patterns of everyone's fingers, but a new study and experiment conducted by researchers at Michigan State...
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It's pretty common knowledge that using strong passwords is important, but we'd can understand it if you sometimes take shortcuts for the sake of convenience. A great example for many of us would be with our PCs. Given the fact that we login to them all of the time, it can get old typing in (or even trying to...
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We have been hearing so much about the FBI's pressure on Apple in its encryption fight in recent weeks that it might be easy to forget that it's only just begun in recent weeks. But what a few weeks it's been!
In the middle of February, a federal judge ordered Apple to break encryption on an iPhone that belonged to...
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If you're passionate about the topics of privacy, government surveillance, and security and also how they relate to the FBI and DOJ's fight to unlock that fateful San Bernardino iPhone, the whole situation likely pales in comparison to what communist countries like China force their citizens to tolerate. In an effort...
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