Security News
Last month, Google announced plans to roll out a new privacy-focused feature called Federated Learning of Cohorts for the Chrome browser and ad serving websites. FLoC has been criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and outright rejected by makers of Vivaldi and Brave browsers for its debatable claim of being a privacy-preserving technology.
America's plan to compete with China includes a call for the land of the free to dominate tech standards bodies, especially for 5G, and to appoint an ambassador level official to lead a new "Technology Partnership Office" that Washington will use to drive tech collaboration among like-minded nations. Released last Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and expected to have bipartisan support, the draft Strategic Competition Act of 2021 offers 281 pages of policy aimed at "Ensuring the United States is postured to compete with China for decades to come," in the words of ranking member US Senator Jim Risch.
Tech support scammers are pretending to be from Microsoft, McAfee, and Norton to target users with fake antivirus billing renewals in a large-scale email campaign. While browsing the web, most people at one time or another have been redirected to a tech support scam web site that pretends your computer is infected and then prompts you to dial a displayed phone number.
Scott Matteson: How is technology being used for money laundering efforts? Gudmundur Kristjansson: Money laundering begins when illegal sums are deposited in a bank, which triggers a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions that return the money to the launderer in an obscure and indirect way.
When version 90 of Google's Chrome browser arrives in mid-April, initial website visits will default to a secure HTTPS connection in the event the user has failed to specify a preferred URI scheme. Chrome 90 will make HTTPS the default for first time website visits where no transport has been declared.
Britain plans to cut the size of its army and boost spending on drones, robots and a new "Cyber force" under defense plans announced by the government on Monday. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said the British Army would shrink from 76,500 soldiers to 72,500 by 2025.
RingCentral announced the acquisition of the technology and engineering team at Kindite. The new technology will be incorporated into RingCentral's global communications platform, providing customers with enhanced security capabilities including end-to-end encryption.
China's government on Thursday called on Washington to drop efforts to expel three state-owned Chinese phone companies from the United States in a new clash over technology and security. The United States should "Stop the wrong practice of generalizing the concept of national security and politicizing economic issues" and "Stop abusing state power to unreasonably suppress Chinese enterprises," said a ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian.
"Unfortunately, it seems that FLoC contains a privacy design bug that leaks the information about whether the user is browsing in private mode or not," Olejnik wrote in a blog post on Monday, noting that he'd spotted a similar Incognito detection bug in another API. Incognito mode is supposed to prevent online histories from being recorded in the browser's local log and to erase local HTTP cookies and site data from memory at the end of a session. The service's name suggests otherwise and Google was sued in June, 2020, for allegedly collecting data from Incognito Chrome users.
Many who were largely confined to their homes contributed to the surge in home improvements like new or upgraded home offices, kitchen and outdoor rec spaces. Home security during the pandemic was critical, notably to those who were working from home, because the change from in-office to in-home was so swift, many IT departments couldn't cover all the employees with access to what-should-be-secure files.