Privacy

Mozilla has implemented changes to Firefox 14 that address concerns raised by privacy-conscious users over the "new tab" feature in Firefox 13. The Firefox developers have changed the browser's behaviour so that sensitive information should no longer leak via screenshots of web sites.

When opening a new tab, Firefox 13 shows users a grid of screenshots of their most visited pages. After this feature was introduced, several users complained to Mozilla and pointed out that the feature also takes screenshots of sensitive web sites such as login pages for online banking sites.

Antivirus software specialist Bitdefender has found that nearly 19% of iOS apps access your address book without your knowledge — or your consent — when you’re using them, and 41% track your location. What’s most concerning is over 40% of them don’t encrypt your data once it has been collected.

That’s all going to change when iOS 6 makes its debut later this year, however.

A hacker today claimed to have broken into ITWallStreet.com, a website for IT professionals who are seeking Wall Street jobs or working with Wall Street firms, and exposed highly detailed data belonging to tens of thousands of job applicants.

As many as 12 data files containing detailed information on job applicants were publicly posted today after they had apparently been accessed from an ITWallStreet database by a hacker who's a member of a group called TeamGhostShell.

The U.S. Congress may need to pass legislation that limits the way government agencies and private companies use facial recognition technology to identify people, a U.S. senator said Wednesday.

The growing use of facial recognition technology raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns, said Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's privacy subcommittee. Franken, during a subcommittee hearing, called on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Facebook to change the way they use facial recognition technology.

YouTube can turn anyone with a camera into an eyewitness reporter, but that can be a problem when the subjects of the video need to stay anonymous.

To address this issue, YouTube has added a face blurring option to the site's built-in photo editor. When users apply the option, YouTube tries to detect and blur all faces automatically. The option appears under “Additional Features” in YouTube's Video Enhancements tool.

Skype, a division of Microsoft, confirmed on Monday that a glitch in its software has led to instant messages being shared with unintended parties.

The company said it will deliver an update to fix the problem in "the next few days."

The Turkish hacker collective, RedHack, has leaked details on Turkish police informants and spying requests sent in to police. The 75MB text file is available on various file download sites (http://depositfiles.com/files/dgxtgh7mp) and contains thousands of emails most likely obtained when the group breached the site back in March of this year.

Had a rough time playing Minecraft today? There's a reason why.

A security flaw in Minecraft that allowed users to sign into strangers' accounts was exposed by security researchers Alex Vanderport and Keegan Novik when the Team Avolition duo posted a detailed advisory about the snafu on GitHub Saturday. The game's maker, Mojang, has promised the flaw is fixed.

Hardware graphics giant Nvidia has suspended its user forums after hackers accessed usernames, email addresses and salted passwords.

The company began investigating the intrusion on 2 July when it suspended the forums for “system maintenance” before announcing the breach hours ago.

Phandroid has revealed that its Android Forums website was hacked this week using a known exploit. The data that was accessed includes usernames, e-mail addresses, hashed passwords, registration IP addresses, and other less-critical forum-related information. At the time of writing, the forum listed 1,034,235 members.

If you are one of them, you should change your password: go to your UserCP or use the Forgot your password? function. Furthermore, if you use the same e-mail address and password combination elsewhere, you should change it there as well.