It’s been reported that New York City’s police department can tap into about 6000 street cameras, two-thirds of which are privately owned, with another 7000 in public housing and more than 4000 in the city’s subway stations. They’re not easy to count with precision. But it’s likely that many major cities are on par, if not...

Microsoft wants people to upgrade to Windows 10 so much that it’s giving it away to home users for free – in some cases, to people who haven’t asked for it. People with Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 devices are discovering that Windows 10 was downloaded to a hidden folder on their computers without prompting. The unprompted downloading of...

The personal details of thousands of Lloyds Bank account holders have gone missing following the suspected theft of a data storage box. The breach affects any customers who made a claim under a Royal Sun Alliance (RSA) emergency home cover policy attached to their £25 a month Lloyds Premier bank account between 2006 and 2012. RSA said...

The Android vulnerability known as Stagefright is back in the limelight. Stagefright is a bug, or more accurately a series of similar bugs, in an Android programming library called libstagefright. Libstagefright is part of the operating system that handles media files such as movies. If you receive an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) message that links...

Pass a 350-foot no-fly law banning drones from buzzing over our heads without our express permission? Oh no, I think not, California Governor Jerry Brown said on Wednesday as he vetoed Senate Bill 142. The ban, which would have only affected commercial and private unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), would have meant that “burdensome regulation” and...

The US Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees the US power grid, nuclear arsenal and national science labs, is a prime target for cyberattackers who want to harm the United States. Now we are beginning to glimpse the extent of the threat, thanks to unclassified records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by USA Today. The government...

Deep in the bowels of the labyrinth that is the US’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA), luggage trundling along on conveyor belts gets barcoded, weighed, sniffed for traces of explosives, 3D imaged, and, if it appears suspicious, opened. As The Washington Post detailed in November 2014, TSA handlers have a set of master keys to open...

A Northern Ireland man has been handed a four-year jail term for running a series of very lucrative piracy streaming websites – including BedroomMedia.com and FastPassTV – from his bedroom, in Carnhill, Derry. According to the Derry Journal, “social recluse” Paul Mahoney, admitted to being responsible for a “highly sophisticated fraud” that netted him almost...

The law enforcement community has been warning technology companies that encryption in their products could let criminals and terrorists off the hook, with little evidence to support that claim. It turns out those warnings – from top law enforcers like FBI Director James Comey and former US Attorney General Eric Holder, and some elected officials in...

Microsoft will appear in a federal appeals court today to argue against the US government’s assertion that companies operating in the land of the free must hand over data stored in other countries when presented with a valid search warrant. The case in question, which began two years ago, surrounds emails stored on Microsoft servers in Dublin,...