Pornographic deepfakes are being weaponized at an alarming scale with at least 104,000 women targeted by a bot operating on the messaging app Telegram since July. The bot is used by thousands of people every month who use it to create nude images of friends and family members, some of whom appear to be under the age of 18.
At the end of September, amidst its usual flurry of fall hardware announcements, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other. The first is a small autonomous surveillance drone, Ring Always Home Cam, that waits patiently inside a charging dock to eventually rise up and fly around your house, checking whether you left the stove on or investigating potential burglaries. The second is a palm recognition scanner, Amazon One, that the company is piloting at two of its grocery stores in Seattle as a mechanism for faster entry and checkout.
The virtual job fair, which took place on August 13, attracted more than 3,000 attendees and included recruiters and subject matter experts from 17 government intelligence agencies including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), NSA, and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
iOS 14 has begun rolling out to iPhones worldwide, and as is typical for Apple and a new iOS release, security and privacy enhancements are front and center. The new mobile operating system should make you and your data safer than ever. But it's important to know where these various features are and how to use them.
Below you can find the most important security and privacy features your iOS device now has that it didn't have before. Make sure you check them as soon as you've got iOS 14 on your iPhone or iPad.
Federal courts in the Chicago area have three times rejected government applications for warrants to force Google to produce a list of smartphones near two particular commercial establishments during one of three 45-minute intervals. The most recent ruling was handed down last week and was recently made public.
Smart-assistant devices have had their share of privacy missteps, but they're generally considered safe enough for most people. New research into vulnerabilities in Amazon's Alexa platform, though, highlights the importance of thinking about the personal data your smart assistant stores about you—and minimizing it as much as you can.
The emergence of mobile voice calls over the standard known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been a boon for millions of cell phone users around the world. VoLTE, short for Voice over LTE, provides up to three times the capacity of the earlier 3G standard, resulting in high-definition sound quality that’s a huge improvement over earlier generations. VoLTE also uses the same IP standard used to send data over the Internet, so it has the ability to work with a wider range of devices.
No matter which browser you prefer—Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera, or any of the others—it will almost certainly offer an incognito or private mode, one which ostensibly keeps your web browsing secret. (Google Chrome still shows a hat-and-glasses icon when you go incognito, as if you're now in disguise.)
Instagram is a massive money-maker. Parent company Facebook doesn’t release figures on how much the division makes, but reports claim it generated $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019–that’s a quarter of Facebook’s entire yearly revenue. Or, to put it another way, more money than YouTube makes for parent company Alphabet.
At the heart of Instagram’s financial success is two things: advertising (the Stories feature it nabbed from Snapchat is now filled with it) and the data that powers all that advertising. There’s a lot of it.
OmniBallot is election software that is used by dozens of jurisdictions in the United States. In addition to delivering ballots and helping voters mark them, it includes an option for online voting. At least three states—West Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey—have used the technology or are planning to do so in an upcoming election. Four local jurisdictions in Oregon and Washington state use the online voting feature as well.
