Police in Germany created a viral hit this week when they put out an urgent appeal for people to stop stripping children of their privacy. The appeal, from police in Hagen, was posted, appropriately enough, on Facebook. It was first posted on Tuesday, and by Friday morning, it had been shared by more than 245,000...

San Francisco is extremely scrupulous about its extremely complicated parking rules. Parked in the way of street sweeping? Ticket, sometimes in spite of the signage being missing. Failing to turn your wheels to the curb on a steep hill? Ticket, sometimes regardless of whether the hill’s listed as steep enough to warrant it. Parking at...

Oh, those bad, bad drones. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been spotted hovering over playgrounds, hurtling through the skies over London’s Hyde Park, dropping packets of drugs into prison, gawking at a sunbather, following somebody home and then hovering outside their bedroom window, buzzing at 365 metres (1,200 feet) above Liverpool city centre, being flown...

Relations between China and the US have a long way to go before you could call the rival superpowers friends, but this cold war has begun to thaw in recent weeks. Just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping was to visit to the US last month, the US threatened economic sanctions against Chinese companies engaging in...

In what’s being called a landmark victory for digital privacy, California police will no longer be able to get their hands on user data without first getting a warrant from a judge. Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), SB 178, which requires state law enforcement to get a...

Eddie Raymond Tipton, come on down! Or, more precisely, “We’re sending you down for 10 years.” Tipton faced court in April 2015, and was finally convicted in July 2015, of rigging an Iowa lottery draw. Last week, he was sentenced. The charges went back to December 2010, when prosecutors argued that Tipton, ironically the security...

If you’re a hacker highly skilled at finding exploits in connected cars, here’s a job for you – hacking cars for the Canadian military. There’s no shortage of opportunities for car hackers these days, as we’ve seen in recent months – some computerized cars and trucks are vulnerable and poorly defended against cyberattacks. A notice...

Imagine you’re the CTO of a company in the red-hot market of ride-sharing. One day, you read some very interesting news: it seems that a cyber intruder got their hands on a login key belonging to your biggest rival and used it to access an internal database to download the records of its drivers. It...

The Obama administration won’t seek legislation to force technology companies to decrypt communications, FBI Director James Comey told Congress in a public hearing on Thursday. Instead, it looks like the stalemate in the crypto-wars will continue on as is – technology companies and their allies and the federal government will keep trying to persuade each other (and the...

A journalist was found guilty by a California jury yesterday for conspiring with members of the hacker group Anonymous to alter the website of his former employer. Matthew Keys was convicted after an eight-day trial in which the jury heard about how Keys used an internet chat relay forum to recruit hackers into his scheme. Keys provided...