Security

Google on Wednesday introduced the Google Wallet Card, a debit card that gives people instant access to the funds they have stored in Google Wallet. The card works like a traditional debit card, so users can swipe it to pay at a restaurant or store, for instance, or use it to get money from an ATM.

Yahoo on Monday announced it will extend 2048-bit encryption planned for Yahoo Mail across its entire network. CEO Marissa Mayer reiterated that the company "has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency." However, documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Sno...

The Internet of Things has been receiving quite a bit of attention. Definitions vary, but at its core the concept is a simple one: Extend computing and data-processing capability to the physical world around us. The earliest manifestations of this are starting to be seen already in the growth of sma...

A class action asserting that LinkedIn harvests and sells users' email addresses was brought in September 2013. More than a month after the lawsuit was filed, LinkedIn still uses the same approach to collect email addresses and personal information -- that is, it encourages users to "sync your conta...

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," wrote Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789. You have to wonder if Old Ben wouldn't add cyberattacks to that list were he alive today. We live in a world in which hundreds of thousands of new threats ar...

The tough political bargaining over the federal budget underscored by the recent government shutdown portends a continuing emphasis on keeping the cost of government under control. As federal agencies resume full operations after the budget and debt ceiling hiatus, it is clear that the goal of getti...

Oracle has released a whopper of a critical patch update for October, with 127 security fixes across several of the company's products. Of these, 51 are fixes for Java SE, and all but one of those will allow remote exploitation of a computer without authentication. Oracle recommends the patch be app...

Facebook announced Thursday that it will finish killing off the privacy setting that previously let users opt out of searches. Members of the social network used to have a privacy setting called "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" that allowed their profile to be hidden from searches within the...

Microsoft on Tuesday forked out what might be the biggest payment to a bug hunter yet: $100,000. The money went to James Forshaw, head of vulnerability research at Context Information Security, for coming up with a new exploitation technique that affects Windows 8.1 Preview. "James' Mitigation Bypas...

PayPal on Tuesday announced Payment Code, a new tool that allows customers to pay for in-store purchases by simply presenting a QR code or four-digit number at the cash register. Similar in some ways to PayPal Beacon, which the company rolled out last month, Payment Code is intended both to simplify...

U.S. law enforcement officials have shut down Silk Road, the online marketplace that allegedly facilitated the anonymous sale of illegal drugs as well as illicit services such as murder for hire. FBI officials also on Tuesday arrested the site's alleged founder, 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, at a publi...

As the prolific trend of adoption would suggest, the case for cloud is compelling from both a business and technology perspective. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the more compelling reasons from a technologist's point of view has to do with the ability to abstract lower levels of...

Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws by machine-scanning Gmail messages in order to deliver targeted advertising, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled on Thursday. As a result of the ruling, a class-action suit against Google over the issue can now proceed. The suit, whi...

Facebook this week began testing a new feature dubbed "Autofill with Facebook" that aims to simplify mobile purchases by filling in customers' credit card information for them, thus eliminating the need to type it in each time. "Autofill with Facebook gives people the option to use their payment inf...

LinkedIn has responded to claims in a class action lawsuit filed against it, maintaining that it does not break into users' email accounts and insisting that it asks for permission before using information from anyone's email accounts. Four LinkedIn users filed the suit, claiming it had appropriated...