Security

GADGET DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Earrings With Earphones and a Smartphone Bonanza

Swings Bluetooth Earrings with built-in earphones showcase a practical, clever idea for people with pierced ears. Swings certainly could fix the problem of losing Apple's expensive AirPods to the ether or having to root around in one's pockets or purse to find one's tangled-up headset. The earphones...

Hundreds of U.S. utilities were penetrated by Russian hackers who could have disrupted the nation's power grid. The attacks were launched last year by threat actors belonging to a group known as "Dragonfly" or "Energetic Bear," which is sponsored by the Russian government, according to a report. The...

A new feature in iOS 11.4.1, which Apple released earlier this week, is designed to protect against unwanted intrusions through the iPhone's Lightning Port. However, the protection may be weak at best. The feature, called "USB Restricted Mode," disables data transfer through the Lightning Port after...

A popular fitness app provided a convenient map for anyone interested in shadowing government personnel who exercised in secret locations, including intelligence agencies, military bases and airfields, nuclear weapons storage sites, and embassies around the world. The fitness app, Polar Flow, public...

There are times when looking at something narrowly can be more effective than taking a wider and more comprehensive view. Consider the experience of looking at organisms in a microscope or watching a bird through binoculars. Distractions are minimized, allowing optimal evaluation and analysis. In se...

Facebook and Google have manipulated users into sharing data using so-called "dark patterns," according to a report from the Norwegian Consumer Council. The practices nudged users toward accepting privacy options that favored the tech companies rather than themselves, the NCC found.

Network devices with better security will be hitting the market this year, thanks to Wi-Fi Certified WPA3, which the Wi-Fi Alliance launched Tuesday. The announcement paves the way for the proliferation of devices that support the new, more secure protocol for WiFi communication, which is designed t...

The healthcare industry has been moving toward medical equipment connectivity to speed up data entry and recording, as well as improve data accuracy. At the same time, there has been a shift toward incorporating consumer mobile devices, including wearables, so that healthcare providers can monitor p...

Worldwide spending on the Internet of Things will total nearly $773 billion this year, IDC has predicted. The IoT will sustain a compound annual growth rate of 14.4 percent, and spending will hit $1.1 trillion by 2021, according to the firm's forecast. Consumer IoT spending will total $62 billion th...

Just like leaders in every other field you can imagine, academics have been hard at work studying information security. Most fields aren't as replete with hackers as information security, though, and their contributions are felt much more strongly in the private sector than in academia. The differin...

Apple plans to equip iOS 12 with USB Restricted Mode, a feature that requires users to unlock their iPhone with their passcode before USB accessories can connect if the phone last was unlocked more than an hour earlier. The company included this feature in the developer versions of iOS 11.4.1 and iO...

The expanding world of Internet commerce likely will generate a corresponding expansion of data breaches, with the result that e-commerce businesses increasingly will become the targets of consumer class action lawsuits. Breach litigation has become more prevalent as a result of a perceptible legal ...

A significant percentage of IT systems are cloud-based, according to a recent survey. The cloud is a key enabler for emerging technology, suggests the CompTIA poll, which was conducted last month. Cloud computing was one of four trends respondents expected to feature heavily in IT conversations over...

In spite of all the high-profile breaches that seem to sweep the headlines with greater frequency, companies slowly but surely have been getting a handle on internal security practices. At this point, it's hard to imagine any employee, in or out of the tech sector, who hasn't been run through antiph...

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