John Lister

Google is making three changes to make it easier to control privacy while using its services. Now, Google Maps, YouTube and the Google Assistant have the option to control privacy settings in more detail. The company's privacy chief Eric Miraglia ... wrote that controlling privacy and security settings should be as easy as using the services themselves. That might provoke some skepticism from critics who believe Google wants to maximize the amount of data it stores about people. (Source: blog.google ) Google Maps Goes Incognito The first change is to Google Maps, which is now getting an " ... (view more)

Researchers say they discovered eight security flaws in the way Android handles voice calls through the Internet. Unlike most such bugs which involve specific apps, these problems were with Android itself. The good news is that the researchers ... reported all of the bugs to Google while carrying out the project and most have now been fixed. However, it does raise concerns about the development and design of the system itself. (Source: github.io ) The researchers looked at the three latest Android versions (7, 8 and 9), specifically addressing the components that allow Voice Over Internet ... (view more)

The word "hacked" is worth 16 points in Scrabble. It's also what appears to have happened to a database of 218 million users of the popular online game "Words With Friends." A few weeks ago game creators Zynga said it "recently discovered that ... certain player account information may have been illegally accessed by outside hackers." It didn't give any detail on numbers, but went on to say that account login information may have been accessed. (Source: zynga.com ) Now a hacker has come forth and is attempting to sell the details of 620 million Zynga game accounts, of which 218 million ... (view more)

Microsoft has issued an emergency patch for Internet Explorer. In the most extreme circumstances, a user simply visiting a website could give a hacker complete remote control of a computer. Between Chrome's dominance and Edge becoming the default on ... new Windows machines, Internet Explorer is far from popular and is now used on around 8 percent of desktop computers. However, that still means around a hundred million machines could be affected by this bug. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) It's a sign of how serious the problem is that Microsoft has issued an emergency patch, or as it calls it, an out-of- ... (view more)

Google has won a major victory over "right to be forgotten" rules . When it agrees to delete 'outdated' search results, it will no longer have to do so outside of Europe. The latest ruling is part of a long running saga that began when European ... courts tried to find a balance between the competing rights to free speech and privacy. It all began with a Spanish man whose house was forcibly sold to settle a debt - an incident that was reported in a local newspaper. Eleven years later he asked the newspaper to delete the archived report, saying it was the top search result for his name and the ... (view more)

Google is making several changes to the way it handles audio collected from phones and smart gadgets such as the Google Home speaker. It follows revelations that humans listened to recordings collected by several tech giants. Amazon, Apple and ... Google were all hit by claims that they'd not done enough to make clear that staff or contractors listened to recordings to check the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. In several cases, human engineers heard sensitive material which appeared to have been collected unintentionally, rather than the user meaning to make a spoken query or request. ... (view more)

Researchers have discovered that many smart gadgets (such as smart TVs and streaming sticks) send data to tech companies, even when idle. The purpose of the experiment was to determine if devices were being used to monitor users, or could ... potentially leak data about the user to a third party. The research was a joint project between Northeastern University and the UK's Imperial College London. They examined 81 devices under the broad category of the Internet of Things (IoT). The study included security cameras, home automation devices such as WiFi plugs, Smart TV sets, smart speakers and home ... (view more)

Users have highlighted two more problems with the latest Windows 10 Update, released September 10, 2019. It's messed up sound for some users, while others can no longer get online. For those keeping track, the problems are with the Windows 10 update ... KB4515384 , which has already given some users a broken Windows search tool and others a mysterious red or orange hue to their screen. Ironically, that update was designed partly to fix problems with a previous update ( KB4512941 ) which broke the Windows Search for some users, and also caused constant high processor demand for others. One of the ... (view more)

Password manager LastPass has suffered an embarrassing security glitch that reveals a user's last used password, though some security experts argue that pulling off the exploit would have been difficult at best. The purpose of LastPass is to solve ... the problem of people having too many passwords to remember, but not wanting to reuse passwords across multiple sites. Once somebody signs up to LastPass, they create a single master password which is completely secret. Even LastPass itself doesn't store this password, so if a user forgets it, they are out of luck. The master password then stores ... (view more)

It's becoming something of a pattern that Microsoft issues a Windows 10 Update that causes a problem , then issues a follow-up that fixes it, but then introduces new problems. And it's happened again. Just last week Microsoft issued an update ( ... KB4512941 ) that fixed problems in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903), but introduced new bugs with some users finding the Windows search tool didn't work at all, or their processors were under constant strain. Microsoft has since release a new bug fix (KB4515384) for the previous bug fix, but users are reporting new problems. At the time of ... (view more)