Security News

After observing an increase in the number of fraudulent transactions, Google over the weekend announced that it halted the publishing of paid items to the Chrome Web Store. "Earlier this month the Chrome Web Store team detected a significant increase in the number of fraudulent transactions involving paid Chrome extensions that aim to exploit users. Due to the scale of this abuse, we have temporarily disabled publishing paid items," Simeon Vincent, extensions developer advocate at Google, explains.

Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade. The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every device in a particular geographic area at a particular time.

A leading digital authority and consulting company, has achieved the Data Analytics Specialization in the Google Cloud Premier Partner Program. This Partner Specialization affirms that SoftServe has demonstrated success turning large amounts of data into insights using Google Cloud Platform technology.

UPDATE. Both the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox teams are cracking down on web browser extensions that steal user data and execute remote code, among other bad actions. In this case, Google said that after becoming aware of a widespread pattern of pernicious behavior on the part of a large number of Chrome extensions, it has disabled extensions that contain a monetary component - those that are paid for, offer in-browser transactions and those that offer subscription services.

On Saturday, Google temporarily disabled the ability to publish paid Chrome apps, extensions, and themes in the Chrome Web Store due to a surge in fraud. "Earlier this month the Chrome Web Store team detected a significant increase in the number of fraudulent transactions involving paid Chrome extensions that aim to exploit users," said Simeon Vincent, developer advocate for Chrome Extensions, in a post to the Chromium Extensions forum.

Unexpectedly, in December, Apple published a blog thanking Google for suggesting some changes to ITP which they'd implemented in Safari as part of December's iOS 13.3, and Safari for macOS 13.0.4 updates. Any site can issue cross-site requests, increasing the number of ITP strikes for an arbitrary domain and forcing it to be added to the user's ITP list.

Verizon has slung out a new, privacy-focused search engine in an effort to win over customers who prefer not to have their browsing habits tracked by ad-slingers and the like. Three years ago, it bought Yahoo! and two years before that, AOL, in a ham-fisted effort to woo millennials away from Facebook and Google - which it later rebranded as Oath and then the Verizon Media Group.

Technology Apple designed for its Safari web browser to protect users from being tracked when they surf the web may actually do just the opposite, according to new research from Google. Google researchers have identified a number of security flaws in Safari's Intelligent Tracking Protection that allow people's browsing behavior to be tracked by third parties, according to a report published in the Financial Times Wednesday.

Google security researchers have published details about the flaws they identified last year in Intelligent Tracking Protection, a privacy scheme developed by Apple's WebKit team for the company's Safari browser. Schuh expressed skepticism that Apple will be able to salvage ITP. "They attempt to mitigate tracking by adding state mechanisms, but adding state often introduces worse privacy/security issues," he wrote.

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai this week threw his support behind a European Union proposal for a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public areas while regulators assess the risks associated with the technology. On Friday, Reuters reported that the European Union is considering a five-year ban on the use of facial recognition technology in public areas in order to work out ways to prevent abuses and protect user privacy for citizens who have not given consent.