There’s a revolution happening right now in biometrics. But the technology for identifying people based on biology is outpacing our ability to understand the consequences for privacy. Passwords – which have proven time and again to be inadequate for security purposes – are steadily being replaced by fingerprints, irises, voices and faces. The patterns of our veins, heartbeats, and...

Since it was released, Windows 10 has incited a privacy furor. Hundreds of commenters on sites such as Hacker News and Reddit have criticised default settings that send personal information to Microsoft and use bandwidth to upload data to other Windows 10 computers. Concerns have risen over the Wi-Fi password sharing feature, Microsoft’s plans to...

Do you trust your web browser? It’s your gateway to the web, a guardian against the multitude of infected websites and a foothold on your computer for some of the largest, most data-hungry organisations in the world. The major web browsers are fast, highly sophisticated pieces of software backed up by slick distribution channels and...

We’ve written an eclectic range of stories about selfies lately. There’s Siri’s willingness to open the pod bay door and let other people sneak a look at your iPhone photos without the passcode. There’s Snapchat’s new “Do you want to buy a replay” feature, where you can send someone a disappearing selfie, but at a...

Facebook plans to charge users £5.99 ($9) for “subscription gold” that will keep our accounts private? Outrageous!!! No, seriously, it is outrageous. But that isn’t keeping the Facebook rumour du jour from being passed around. Here’s the whole, bogus shebang: I havent had time to check it out and won't get around to it until...

European law makers are looking to collect and store information on all airline travelers – a move that breaches EU privacy laws, the data protection supervisor has warned. The so-called PNR (passenger name record) scheme has again risen from the dead after Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) declined to pass it three times: in...

If you’ve ever fallen into the work-day habit of opening random programs (.EXE files) that came in via email, you’ve probably ended up in trouble with IT. Or looking for another job. Legitimate software hardly ever gets distributed by email, so those .EXE attachments are almost always malware: viruses, worms, password stealers, ransomware, banking Trojans,...

Hot on the heels of Firefox 41 – which saw the end of a 14-year-old bug that sucked up memory for Adblock Plus users – Mozilla announced a new beta of the popular web browser. Firefox 42 beta for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android is packed with new features, such as indicators which make it clear when a tab is...

This week sees the 25th Virus Bulletin conference, which takes place in Prague from 30 September to 2 October. We spoke to Virus Bulletin’s editor, Martijn Grooten, about how threats have changed over the last 25 years. My colleagues and I have been very busy preparing for this week’s 25th annual Virus Bulletin International Conference, but on the occasion...

The morality of blocking ads is a perplexing dilemma. That was made clear when Marco Arment – developer of the Peace ad-blocker that shot to the top of Apple’s paid app list when Apple rolled out iOS 9 and allowed users to add ad-blocking extensions for the first time – pulled a 180-degree turn and...