Facebook has made its site available to users of the Tor network, creating an odd mix of anonymity and accountability. On the face of it, Facebook over Tor doesn’t seem to make much sense: if you feel the need to obscure your Internet connection, it doesn’t seem likely you’d want to post publicly under your […]
Google has beefed up its two-factor authentication by offering a physical key in the form of a USB stick. It’s designed to cut down some of the loopholes exploited by phishing scams. To date, the “something you know” (login details) in Google’s two-factor authentication has been accompanied by the “something you have” of a cellphone, […]
Five British police forces have confirmed that phones and tablets seized as evidence have been remotely wiped while in their custody. Responding to enquiries by the BBC, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Durham and Nottingham police all reported one wiping incident, while Dorset said it had suffered six such incidents in the space of a year. A sixth […]
The man who’ll almost certainly be Europe’s next head of digital issues appears to be standing by his comments that victims of the recent celebrity photo leak were “stupid” and can’t be protected. Gunther Oettinger introduced the statement by saying that it was impossible for lawmakers and regulators to mitigate all risks. He then gave […]
Claims that Gmail has been hacked and five million passwords stolen appear to be overstated at best. The scare follows the publication by what appears to be a Russian user of a message board discussing Bitcoin security. The file contains around 4.9 million Google user names and passwords, with the original poster claiming more than […]
The maker of a new gadget claims it can knock any unwanted device off a local network. But Julian Oliver concedes that some features of Cyborg Unplug may be illegal depending on your location. Oliver previously developed a web script named glasshole.sh that is specifically designed for finding and blocking Google Glass connections on a […]
A British bank is introducing finger scanners that work by recognizing a pattern of veins rather than a fingerprint. It’s taken from a trial of the technology on ATMs in Poland. The idea of Barclays Bank is for the machines to be plugged into computers and replace the need for passwords or PIN codes. At […]
Californian politicians have passed a law mandating a “killswitch” in all smartphones, allowing users to remotely disable the phone if it’s lost or stolen. It’s the first such law to require such a feature to be enabled by default. Bill 962 says all phones that are manufactured after 1 July 2015 and then sold in […]
Security researchers say a widely-used airport security scanner can be fooled fairly simply. Although the model in question was dropped from airports last year, it’s still used in prisons and courthouses. The model in question is the Rapiscan Secure 1000, which the TSA dropped after controversy over the way it produced what effectively appeared to […]
An engineer has told a hacking conference how he turned a cat and a dog into tech weapons: the former to make a point and the latter for a prank. Gene Bransfield of Tenacity Solutions discussed his work at the DEFCON event and then followed up with an interview with the Guardian. His first project, […]