Google engineers yesterday acknowledged that half of all Android devices had not received a security update in the past year, even as they argued that the firm has made progress in streamlining the open-source operating system’s patching process. “About half of devices in use at the end of 2016 had not received a platform security…
Facebook has incorporated new features into its Messenger app, and they may seem familiar to iMessage users. Facebook Messenger now lets users add emoji reactions to individual messages, just how Facebook users can “react” to posts in their News Feeds. Facebook is also giving users the ability to include @mentions in their messages. Both of…
The new Raspberry Pi Zero W was designed to be a board to make internet-of-things devices, but a key OS from Google won’t work on the hardware. Google’s Android Things IoT OS will not work with the small developer board, which is partly a wireless board, partly a gadget development tool. The Zero W is…
The U.S. CIA has had tools to infect Apple Mac computers by connecting malicious Thunderbolt Ethernet adapters to them since 2012, according to new documents purported to be from the agency and published by WikiLeaks. One of the documents, dated Nov. 29, 2012, is a manual from the CIA’s Information Operations Center on the use…
Intel’s artificial intelligence efforts have been scattered over many different units but are now being united into a single operating group. The Artificial Intelligence Products Group will focus on the development of chips and software products tied to machine learning, algorithms, and deep learning. The new group could become Intel’s single most important group as…
The U.S. Senate has voted to kill broadband provider privacy regulations prohibiting them from selling customers’ web-browsing histories and other data without their permission. The Senate’s 50-48 vote Thursday on a resolution of disapproval would roll back Federal Communications Commission rules requiring broadband providers to receive opt-in customer permission to share sensitive personal information, including…
Steven Bay, a former defense contractor, knows a thing or two about insider threats. For a brief period, he was the boss of Edward Snowden, the famous leaker who stole sensitive files from the U.S. National Security Agency. Recalling the day he learned Snowden had been behind the NSA leaks back in June 2013, Bay…
In a few months, you may no longer have to write “FAKE” below your friends’ Facebook posts. Fake news warning alerts appear to be rolling out to Facebook users in the United States after first appearing in Germany in January. The new alerts, flagged with help from independent fact-checkers, are designed to prevent users from…
Last week, the Trump administration announced the appointment of a White House cybersecurity coordinator. That’s a good first step, security experts say, but the government also needs to have a federal CISO. “It’s a big leadership vacancy,” said Sanjay Beri, CEO and co-founder at cloud security vendor Netskope. The job of a federal CISO is…
Most technologies go through a stage when everything seems possible. Personal computers in the early 1980s, the internet in the late 1990s and mobile apps around the beginning of this decade were like that. But so was the first unboxing of a Galaxy Note 7. In time, either suddenly or gradually, reality sets in. The…