News

The Week’s Most Global, Immobile, and Ignoble Headlines

A privacy hole in WhatsApp allowed anyone to view someone else's profile photo.

A new extension for a web browser claims to spot unencrypted tracking.

Google has again taken one more step towards knowing everything about its users.

Canada's electronic spy agency has been operating a massive global surveillance operation that targets users of popular file sharing websites.

The Blackphone might not be as secure as advertised. Ars Technica reports that the device had a bug which allowed anyone to read messages sent to it, write code to its internal storage, view its contacts list, and track its location.

If there is such a thing as a "secure app" on a smartphone, then Vodafone might have got a step closer today.

Researchers told Davos that privacy is already non existent; and that technology will allow governments and insurance firms to steal your DNA.

"Cell phones are tracking devices that make phone calls".  Jacob Appelbaum

In the US, if you question authority, you can be labeled mentally ill.

After the Charlie Hebdo incident, new attempts to rush through new surveillance and law enforcement powers with depressing predictability.

Apple is said to have given the Chinese government access to the software used in its iPhones to conduct “security checks” meant to ensure the privacy of China’s citizens.

The American National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies aren't just hacking and spying these days - they’re also hacking and spying on other peoples' hacking and spying.

The ease with which identity theft and hacking seems to occur suggests that many passwords aren't strong at all. Many people appear to prefer the most simple solutions, such as "123456".

Tor’s developers are asking those users to continue trusting their lives to a network that we now understand can easily be compromised by a small group of hackers or a handful of G-men with a warrant. Moreover, no one in the Tor community seems to fully understand where the network’s vulnerabilities lay, nor do they have any concrete plan for fixing them.

Google has a habit of overstepping the limits of what consumers will allow it to learn about them only to blame the problem on a technical issue when it’s caught.

What could be a better encryption strategy than erasing the information from history itself?

TempleOS V2.17 is a "Public Domain Operating System" produced by Trivial Solution. It was build because God told the programer to do so.

Anyone who uses Twitter for work will get lots of mileage out of it for sure.

The European Parliament is getting ready to call for a breakup of Google. The draft motion suggests the separation, or "unbundling," of the Internet giant's search engine from its other services.

Researchers at Symantec have discovered malware that has been used to spy on individuals, telecoms, and businesses since 2008. The espionage tool, dubbed "Regin", closely resembles Stuxnet, the infamous malware used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programs in 2010, and therefore is believed to be made by the United States and/or Israel.

A new bill expected would require ISPs in the United Kingdom to keep records of their customers’ IP addresses which would be handed over to police to combat "terrorism, online bullying, suicidal thoughts, and other emergencies".

Physicists managed to take data packaged into three qubits and stuff it down into a two-qubit container. The road toward something as powerful and daunting as real-world quantum computing is getting littered with proofs of concept.

One of the most compelling things about the 3D printing market right now is quite simply the variety of printers and other related design tech, out there. In turn, that leads to an incredibly diverse range of products now being scanned, modelled, and printed.

The "Minibuilders" project features three small robots that work together to build objects much bigger than themselves. Quite adorably, teamwork is their greatest asset: by taking over from each other as the building requirements change throughout construction, they can print the whole thing from start to finish.

It has not been made yet. But physical chemists have made one unit of a boron cluster, called B36, and detailed its interesting structure on a supercomputer. They claim that "a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.”

The first bricks of a canal house in Amsterdam have been printed, bringing the world a step closer to 3D-printed buildings. Dutch architects are taking things full-scale with a life-size, habitable canal house.

Researchers have developed a battery that runs on sugar, emits only water, is refillable and biodegradable, and has more energy-storage density than lithium ion batteries.

A nickel alloy wind turbine that's approximately 1.8 milimeters in diameter--the smallest working windmill yet constructed--could eventually be worked into panels that power your smartphone.

For the past two years, a mysterious online organization has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301.