Rose is a 31-year-old security analyst and hacker from San Francisco, a self-described “computer nerd” with “quirky attitudes” towards life, and an “unorthodox family.” She doesn’t like for people to know too much about her because her work makes her aware of how “under surveillance we all are,” but she also has a “flamboyant and...

Facebook knows a lot about you. If you were honest when you first signed up, it knows your real name, age, gender, location and interests – as well as what you have done on-site ever since – valuable data indeed when it comes to delivering relevant advertisements to your browser. But ad companies want more,...

As you probably heard, Facebook recently announced that it is working on a “Dislike” button at last. Well, perhaps not exactly a Dislike button, or perhaps not only a Dislike button, but something beyond just good old “Like”, anyway. And “Dislike” was definitely one of the, errr, likely and well-liked possibilities in Mark Zuckerberg’s recent...

Ads are larger and harder to dismiss on mobile, they slow down page loading with JavaScript, that in turn leads to burned battery power, they waste the cellular data that many of us have to pay for on a metered basis – and they can be used to deliver malware, exploits and fraud. How does...

Apple’s week has been a bit of a curate’s egg. If you’re unfamiliar with that metaphor, it’s a Victorian joke in which a curate, a cleric on the bottom rung of the Church of England hierarchy, is invited to breakfast with the Bishop. When the Bishop apologises that the curate seems to have been served...

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...

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...

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...