Security News
Apple says it will roll out a new privacy control in the spring to prevent iPhone apps from secretly shadowing people. Although Apple didn't provide a specific date, the general timetable disclosed Thursday means a long-awaited feature known as App Tracking Transparency will be part of an iPhone software update likely to arrive in late March or some point in April.
Mozilla this week announced further improvements to user privacy in Firefox, through the isolation of network connections and caches, thus essentially cracking down on supercookies. Specifically, Firefox 85 is arriving with an updated network architecture, where network connections and caches are isolated to the website being visited.
A remote team of three hobbyist cryptologists have solved one of the Zodiac Killer's cipher after a half century. The 340 Cipher, named after its 340 characters, was trickier to figure out - until this week, almost 50 years later, when an unlikely team of cryptographers broke the code.
Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is having another crack at fixing the internet's biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise server. The Inrupt Enterprise Solid Server is the first product from a company the inventor started two years ago in response to the problem of personal data online, where tech giants like Facebook and Google build vast databases on user's profiles and sell them to advertisers to make massive profits.
Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is having another crack at fixing the internet's biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise server. The Inrupt Enterprise Solid Server is the first product from a company the inventor started two years ago in response to the problem of personal data online, where tech giants like Facebook and Google build vast databases on user's profiles and sell them to advertisers to make massive profits.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100.
For the second time in as many years, Google is working to fix a weakness in its Widevine digital rights management technology used by online streaming sites like Disney, Hulu and Netflix to prevent their content from being pirated. The latest cracks in Widevine concern the encryption technology's protection for L3 streams, which is used for low-quality video and audio streams only.
Governments around the world are using the pandemic as a justification to expand surveillance and crack down on dissent online, resulting in a 10th consecutive annual decline in internet freedom, a human rights watchdog report said Wednesday. "The pandemic is accelerating society's reliance on digital technologies at a time when the internet is becoming less and less free," said Michael Abramowitz, president of the nonprofit group.
Taiwan's CERT detected cyber-crooks impersonating medical authorities to attack the country's tech industry during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. "Attackers used COVID-19 social engineering to increase the success rate of their attacks," said TWCERT/CC director Chih-Hung Lin.
The Bletchley Park Trust, the host of Britain's National Museum of Computing and the site of critical feats of wartime code-cracking, has hit financial strife and expects to lay off around a third of its staff. The Trust posted news of its plight late last week, writing that it "Is proposing to restructure as a result of the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis."