John Lister

Hackers who stole data from a website promoting extra-marital affairs say they did so to promote misleading claims. The Ashley Madison site has responded by dropping a controversial fee to delete user accounts. The site openly promotes itself as ... appealing to people who want to arrange dates online where at least one party is already in a relationship. Not surprisingly, that setup brings added interest in keeping client details confidential. Earlier this week attackers claimed to have breached security and got access to the records of a supposed 33 million members around the world. They've ... (view more)

According to security firm Symantec, the proportion of spam emails has fallen to their lowest levels in 12 years. It's the first time since 2003 that the majority of emails are not spam. While the figures are compiled from a variety of sources, the ... main source comes from customers using Symantec security products containing some form of email filtering. That could mean the report is slightly distorted towards those who find spam especially problematic, and thus overstate their level of spam. Overall, Symantec estimates that 49.7 percent of email messages contain spam. This covers all email ... (view more)

The proportion of people getting their news from social media sites continues to rise. That's prompted debate about who decides what news is most important. In 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that 52 percent of Twitter users get their news ... from Twitter, with the figure being 47 percent for Facebook users. In a follow-up survey this year, the figure is now 63 percent for both sites. In both surveys, the question defined news as "information about events and issues beyond just your friends and family." (Source: journalism.org ) Between the increasing proportions and the ... (view more)

Mozilla has blocked Adobe Flash from running by default in the Firefox browser, citing security concerns. Meanwhile, Facebook's security chief has called for Adobe Flash to be killed off permanently. Adobe Flash is widely used for both videos and ... animations, including ones which play automatically on a website. The technology has fallen from favor over the years, however, thanks to problems with both performance and security. It's a popular target for malware creators as it is so widely used by users, regardless of their operating system or browser. A big part of the decline came when ... (view more)

The super computer that won Jeopardy! is now turning its hand to cooking. IBM's Watson has come up with some unlikely recipes including a strawberry curry. IBM originally developed the supercomputer specifically to compete on the game show called ... Jeopardy! . It was considered a major challenge for a computer as Jeopardy! doesn't simply require players to know facts, but to decipher clues. While normal game shows have a question with a single answer, winning Jeopardy! means finding the most likely of all possible questions that could relate to the supplied answer. Watson proved up to ... (view more)

A federal court has awarded a woman $229,500 compensation after a cable company unlawfully called her cellphone 153 times in less than a year. Time Warner Cable continued to make the automated "robo calls" even after Araceli King complained. The ... court ruled Time Warner Cable had violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, passed in 1991. The issue wasn't simply that the company made the calls without permission, but that they were automated. Robo Calls Illegal Without Express Permission With the so-called robo calls, a computer automatically dials a home phone number. If and ... (view more)

Amazon will have to go to court to defend claims that the search tool on its site misleads customers about the products it stocks. Watchmaker Multi Time Machines (MTM) wants Amazon to make it clearer that it doesn't sell its watches. MTM specializes ... in selling expensive watches which are particularly sturdy and water resistant. They are designed to display the time in a way that's easy to read with very little light used; however, some models also have an option to switch on an extremely bright light. Although sold to the public, many of the watches are designed for and used by the ... (view more)

A business which makes spying software for governments and police has been hit by a major hacking attack. The company has recommended customers temporarily stop using its products in case the attack compromises security. The business is named ... "Hacking Team," and is based in Italy. It specializes in software that can monitor the online activities of computer users and even retrieve data from their computers. Critics claim the software often uses the same tactics as malware created by cyber criminals. The firm says its situation is different as it only sells its products to public ... (view more)

Google has apologized after its new Photos app for mobile devices labeled two black people as gorillas. It says it is taking both immediate and long term steps to make sure the mistake never happens again. The software bug follows a series of ... incidents in which searching for racist terms on its mapping service brought up the White House as the top result, though that particular incident was a "social prank," rather than a genuine bug in the software. The Photos app for mobile devices is designed to be a single online storage place for pictures, accessible from any computer or device ... (view more)

Apple has lost a federal appeal against a ruling that it conspired to keep e-book prices artificially high. The verdict means it will have to pay $450 million in penalties and compensation. It marks the ending of a case dating back to 2012 based ... around two different models of pricing for electronic books. Amazon, which dominated the market before Apple started selling ebooks, uses the same model as with print books: the publisher sets a wholesale price and then the retailer decides how much to charge customers. Apple instead pushed for the "agency model" in which the publisher ... (view more)