John Lister

Amazon wants customers to let couriers have an electronic key to get inside customer homes for deliveries. The Amazon Key program also appears to be a way to promote customers buying security cameras and smart locks. The Amazon Key feature is only ... available to customers in the Amazon Prime subscription program, which includes free home delivery and access to streaming video. They'll also need a compatible camera and smart lock, with Amazon bundling the two devices together for $250 including installation. The smart lock technology can be added to an existing standard deadbolt, meaning a ... (view more)

Gmail users can now add third-party tools to merge email messages with other programs - without the need to manually load a specific app, then copy and paste data. The idea is similar to using browser extensions on a web browser, but will likely ... raise privacy and security concerns. Google already has its own tools that connect Gmail with other services. For example, users who receive a message confirming a flight booking or restaurant reservation can often add the relevant information to their Google Calendar tool with a single click. The Google Translate tool is also built in to Gmail. Now ... (view more)

A life insurance company is offering the Apple watch for just $25 to customers. The catch is that they will have to meet health goals as tracked by the watch to be eligible for the discount. The smart watch connects wirelessly to an iPhone and has ... two main uses (besides telling the time): displaying information so that users don't have to retrieve their phone, and tracking activity for fitness apps. Normally the latest model costs at least $329, so the offer from John Hancock insurance is a significant discount. It's only eligible for people who take out life insurance and sign up for ... (view more)

Google's sister company is to build a mini-city in Toronto that includes a range of technologies built into the infrastructure. It's designed partly to help locals and partly as a test bed for new technology. The 68-acre project on the Lake Toronto ... waterfront is led by Sidewalk Labs - a spin-off company that's owned by Google's parent company Alphabet. It's a partnership with the city and won't involve Google owning any land or acting as a landlord, though Google will move its Canadian headquarters to the area. It'll be part of a wider regeneration project covering 800 acres. Free Public WiFi ... (view more)

The latest major update to Windows 10 starts rolling out to the general public this week. Some of the most useful changes will be behind the scenes, but there will be the first hints in a longer-term program to revamp the way the system looks on ... screen. The "Fall Creators Update" is the latest of the twice-yearly major Windows 10 updates that add new features. That's in contrast to the more frequent updates that fix performance and security problems. As usual, it's been available to people in Microsoft's testing programs before this roll out. Windows 10 Fall Creators Update will be a ... (view more)

One of the key security protections in WiFi has a serious vulnerability, a researcher has revealed. The exploit has to do with the protocol "WPA2" - currently considered the most secure protocol commonly used on WiFi routers and hotspots. Here's ... what you need to know about the WPA2 exploit. What's the problem and what does it affect? Security researcher Mathy Vanhoef has published a demonstration for what he's called "KRACKs," short for key reinstallation attacks. That's a way of exploiting a weakness in WPA2 (WiFi Protected Access II), the security system that is most ... (view more)

T-Mobile has fixed a bug that let hackers get sensitive personal data just by using a phone number. In theory, it could have been possible to collect details on all the company's customers, though T-Mobile denies this. The problem was discovered by ... Karan Saini, a security researcher who discussed the problem with the Motherboard Vice website. The site then approached T-Mobile about the problem. It said "we were alerted to an issue that we investigated and fully resolved in less than 24 hours. There is no indication that it was shared more broadly." (Source: vice.com ) The bug had to do with T ... (view more)

Users of a popular ad-blocking tool have been warned to watch out for a bogus version of the tool. One copy of the fake Adblock Plus was downloaded 37,000 times before being removed from the Google Chrome store. The legitimate version of Adblock ... Plus is one of the most popular tools available as a Chrome extension: a third-party tool that can be added directly to the browser itself. The makers claim that more than a hundred million devices are actively using the tool. The bogus version is particularly ironic, though not in a way that victims would appreciate: rather than block ads, it ... (view more)

Microsoft says it won't add any new features or devices for Windows 10 Mobile. It's a sign that hopes Windows 10 would revive the company's smartphone presence have largely failed. While what was then called Windows Mobile was once technically the ... most common smartphone operating system, it faded behind Apple's iOS and Google's Android as smartphones became more widely used. The attempt to relaunch under "Windows Phone" failed to make a breakthrough, and the system fell well under a one percent market share. The most recent figures suggest just one in every three thousand phones ... (view more)

Yahoo has admitted that a hacking incident in 2013 affected three billion user accounts. That's three times more than it originally disclosed and means every account was affected. The incident was one of two Yahoo hacks revealed last year. The ... first, announced in September, involved 500,000 accounts being hacked in 2014 . The second, announced in December, was said to have involved a hack of a billion accounts in 2013 . It's the 2013 attack that Yahoo now says it believes "all Yahoo user accounts were affected." It's keen to stress that it only recently discovered that the number was bigger ... (view more)