Archive for April 2017

If you participate in blog conversations, then you’ve probably heard of Disqus. It’s the largest and most well-known blog commenting software on the web today, used by a variety of news media sites and blogs of all shapes and sizes. Its user base numbers are in the hundreds of millions. Unfortunately, since literally anyone can…

What’s old is new again. In the days before the internet, scammers frequently weaponized the telephone, but now, that’s considered old school. While telephone scams still exist, they’re not nearly as common as they once were. Recently, however, a new scam has been making the rounds that has even gotten the attention of the FCC.…

Microsoft hasn’t been making many friends, thanks to its rather invasive data collection policies. In fact, the sheer amount of data the company collects on you via Windows 10 is nothing short of alarming, and it has even caught the attention of government agencies. Several European countries have filed formal complaints about the types and…

Amazon has been in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission since 2014 for not warning parents that the free apps they let their kids play with can be used to authorize in-app purchases. Thanks to this policy, some $70 million dollars’ worth of in-app purchases were made by minors between 2011 and 2016, and…

Over the past two years, the hackers of the world have begun to shift focus. Previously, their preferred targets had been big credit card companies, and all over the dark web, interested parties could find as many credit card numbers (including all relevant account information) as they were interested in purchasing. Times and tastes change,…

If you use either an Android or Apple smartphone, which describes approximately 100% of the world’s smartphone-using population, then you’ll want to pay close attention to the security updates that both Google and Apple released recently. Four months ago, Google security researcher Gal Beniamini, a member of Project Zero, identified a string of critical security…

Samsung, the world’s largest cellphone manufacturer, has a problem with their flagship offerings, the new S8 and S8+ devices. Both were released with a new facial recognition software the company used as an advanced security measure. The idea was a thing of beauty in its simplicity. Advanced machine learning coupled with advanced image recognition routines…

If you have a laptop, you’ve probably noticed that your laptop’s battery doesn’t seem to last as long as the manufacturer says it will. Maybe you just figured you were a power user, or maybe you thought it was just your imagination. It isn’t. A company called “Which?” that runs a popular website offering expert…

In 2016, security firms Lookout and Citizen Lab identified a dangerous new type of malware, dubbed Pegasus, that surfaced in the iOS ecosystem. The software was developed and sold by the NSO Group, a licensed cyber-arms dealer operating out of Israel. Highly advanced, it was primarily sold to governments, including a number of oppressive regimes,…

WordPress remains the undisputed king of content management systems. It is the web’s most popular site-building platform, and odds are good that you either have a WordPress site or know someone who does. Legions of businesses use the open source CMS to build business-grade websites with a staggering degree of functionality. Unfortunately, the immense success…