Live free or die. That, possibly the most well-known of US state mottos, is declared on vehicle license plates throughout the verdant, mountainous, cantankerous state of New Hampshire. True to that in-your-face independence, on Tuesday evening, in the New Hampshire town of Lebanon, the Lebanon Libraries board unanimously seized freedom and privacy by flipping the...

Google pushed out its first-ever monthly security update for Android in August, fixing the Stagefright vulnerability that an attacker could use to own your device with a malicious MMS message. Nexus devices got their September security update last week, fixing another eight vulnerabilities, including one that could allow an attacker to bypass the lockscreen and access...

Apple iOS 9 is out. As usual when the left-most number changes, as here from version 8 to version 9, the download is bigger than your typical point release. For example, when we recently updated to 8.4.1, the download was about 50MB; this time, the over-the-air (OTA) update we were offered was 1.2GB. → Because...

Snapchat has just released version 9.15 of the popular messaging app, and for the first time it includes a feature that users can purchase in-app. It’s called Replay, and for 99 cents you can replay an additional three snaps per day – additional because users already have the ability to replay one snap per day for...

Among the Republican candidates for US president, Jeb Bush is something of a cybersecurity policy wonk. At least, Bush talks an awful lot about cyber issues, like encryption, the NSA, and the steady onslaught of cyberattacks over the past few years. A few weeks ago, Bush made headlines when he said encryption employed by technology companies is...

– Kim Dotcom as you will find him on Twitter – It seems like ages since we last wrote about Kim Dotcom. Indeed, it is ages – more than a year, in fact – since our previous piece on the larger-than-life online entrepreneur who used to run a website called Megaupload. Megaupload, essentially a file sharing site,...

Yandex – the “Google of Russia” – has prevailed in getting the country’s antimonopoly watchdog agency to rule that Google has abused its dominant position in the market with Android. The agency, FAS, has 10 days to make the details of its decision public, it said in a statement on Monday. Yandex – which operates...

Researchers have shown that a smartwatch’s motion sensors can be used to detect what keys you’re pressing with your left hand (or whatever hand the watch is on) and thus guess at the words you’re typing. Their findings suggest that it’s possible for cybercrooks to come up with an app that camouflages itself – for...

The Kilton Public Library in the US town of West Lebanon, New Hampshire is only 5 years old, and its modern sensibilities show: for one thing, it brags about sustainable technologies such as ground source heat pumps and radiant floor slabs throughout. It’s also a cutting-edge library in an entirely different sense: in July, it...

– Approximate Bitcoin-to-US$ rate (from oanda.com) – Mt. Gox was once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange. Now it’s a heap of digital rubble, after collapsing in early 2014. The company filed for bankruptcy after admitting it had “lost” customers’ bitcoins that were worth about $500,000,000 at the time. “Losing” bitcoins isn’t like a regular bank...