Autonomous Robocop-style robots, equipped with microphones, speakers, cameras, laser scanners and sensors, have started to guard Silicon Valley. The robots are programmed to notice unusual behavior and alert controllers. It also has odor and heat detectors, and can monitor pollution in carpets as well.
Last but not least: with cameras, the Robocops can remember up to 300 number plates a minute, monitoring traffic. The robotics company says that it will be placing the robots in patrol malls, offices, and local neighborhoods, as well as outdoor spaces like corporate campuses, college campuses and open air malls.
Read moreMore and more, governments are using powerful spying software to target human rights activists and journalists, often the forgotten victims of cyberwar. Now, these victims have a new tool to protect themselves. It scans a person's computer for traces of surveillance software, or spyware.
A coalition of human rights organizations launched it, with the goal of equipping activists and journalists with a free tool to discover if they've been hacked. The open-source tool was developed by security researcher who has been investigating government abuse of spyware for years. The tool designed to discover malware developed both by commercial firms, as well as popular spyware used by cybercriminals.
Read moreGoogle can identify and transcribe all the views it has of street numbers in less than an hour, thanks to a neural network that’s just as good as human operators. Now its engineers reveal how they developed it. Google Street View has become an essential part of the online mapping experience.
It allows users to drop down to street level to see the local area in photographic detail. But it’s also a useful resource for Google as well. The company uses the images to read house numbers and match them to their geolocation. This physically locates the position of each building in its database.
Read moreConsumers experienced a wide range of data privacy and security threats in the third quarter of 2014 as hackers successfully conducted large-scale attacks against financial services and retail companies as well as consumers' personal online accounts and identities.
Between July and September of this year, there were a lot of breaches reported worldwide, an increase compared to the same period last year, and millions of customer accounts and data records containing personal or financial information were either stolen or lost. Individuals also felt the data privacy pinch with breaches occurring across three major consumer activities: their banking, shopping, and online identities.
Read moreFacebook is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work” to get a foothold in the office that will compete directly with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn. The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents.
The new site will look very much like Facebook, but will allow users to keep their personal profile with its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate from their work identity. Facebook employees have long used the site in their daily work and expanding this to other companies has been discussed internally for some time.
Read moreThe USA Freedom Act, blocked by the Senate, would have curbed powers granted under the Patriot Act, including bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
Lawmakers' efforts to overhaul some of the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance programs were dealt a setback Tuesday when a reform bill failed to garner enough votes to proceed in the Senate. The bill had the support of the White House, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, and a host of tech companies but was opposed by all but a handful of Republicans, some of whom were divided over the reason for their opposition.
Read moreIt's easy to understand why privacy advocates and policymakers are sounding alarms about online privacy in general – and singling out Google in particular. If you use Google's search engine, Google knows what you searched for as well as your activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services.
The more Google knows about you, the more it can match you to an advertiser who thinks you are an ideal customer. Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads served to ideal potential customers. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Want to find out all the things Google knows about you? Here are 6 links that will show you some of the data Google has about you.
Read moreResearch suggests that more than 81% of Tor clients can be ‘de-anonymised’ their originating IP addresses revealed – by exploiting the technology that is built into its router protocols, and similar traffic analysis software running by default in the hardware of other manufacturers.
The technique involves introducing disturbances in the highly-regulated environs of Onion Router protocols using a modified public Tor server running on Linux. His work on large-scale traffic analysis attacks in the Tor environment has convinced that a well-resourced organisation could achieve an extremely high capacity to de-anonymise Tor traffic.
Read moreA survey of companies in the U.K. more than half are willing to hire a hacker to help deal with a shortfall of cyber-security professionals. The finding comes from a survey of 300 senior IT and HR professionals in organizations with 500 or more staffers.
The increasing awareness of the cyber threat means the majority of U.K. companies are clear on their strategy for dealing with any skills gaps. Rather than relying on hackers to share their secrets, or throwing money at off the shelf programs that quickly become out of date, U.K. companies need to take stock of their cyber defense capabilities and act on the gaps that are specific to their own security needs.
Read moreSerious concessions have been made about privacy post-Snowden, in particular about how personal information is processed and consumed online. Results from a survey show that the leaks have raised consumers’ consciousness about not only government, but commercial, collection of personal data.
Americans lack the confidence that they have any control over their personal data. The survey asked about six modes of communication: landlines; cell phones; text messaging; email; chat or IM; and social media. People, according to the results, are less worried about their physical location being disclosed, as well as the content of text messages, whom they’re texting or calling.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland