Posted on Wednesday May 16, 2018
Google. Facebook. Amazon. These tech giants collect data from us the moment we sign up for their products and services. Some information we willingly surrender (like our name and email address) and others they collect from the services we use (like the sites we visit or the people we contact). Does Apple collect as much information about you as other companies do?
Posted on Tuesday May 15, 2018
Laptops may be more affordable than ever, but we're also using them for more advanced tasks than ever. This means you run the risk of overheating your laptop and causing long-term damage. Here's how to avoid that.
Posted on Monday May 14, 2018
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're a Gmail user, your messages and emails likely aren't as private as you'd think. Google reads each and every one, scanning your painfully long email chains and vacation responders in order to collect more data on you. Google uses the data gleaned from your messages in order to inform a whole host of other products and services, NBC News reported Thursday. Though Google announced that it would stop using consumer Gmail content for ad personalization last July, the language permitting it to do so is still included in its current privacy policy, and it without a doubt still scans users emails for other purposes. Aaron Stein, a Google spokesperson, told NBC that Google also automatically extracts keyword data from users' Gmail accounts, which is then fed into machine learning programs and other products within the Google family. Stein told NBC that Google also "may analyze [email] content to customize search results, better detect spam and malware," a practice the company first announced back in 2012.
Posted on Monday May 14, 2018
As a startup business owner, you may think social media isn't worth the effort because no one knows about your business. You may have dabbled in Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and seen minimal (if any) results. What can a business owner with a new brand/product do? Well, it turns out quite a lot. And to prove it, here are tips everyone can learn from.
Posted on Monday May 14, 2018
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The ubiquitous email encryption schemes PGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to attack, according to a group of German and Belgian researchers who posted their findings on Monday. The weakness could allow a hacker to expose plaintext versions of encrypted messages -- a nightmare scenario for users who rely on encrypted email to protect their privacy, security, and safety. The weakness, dubbed eFail, emerges when an attacker who has already managed to intercept your encrypted emails manipulates how the message will process its HTML elements, like images and multimedia styling. When the recipient gets the altered message and their email client -- like Outlook or Apple Mail -- decrypts it, the email program will also load the external multimedia components through the maliciously altered channel, allowing the attacker to grab the plaintext of the message. The eFail attack requires hackers to have a high level of access in the first place that, in itself, is difficult to achieve. They need to already be able to intercept encrypted messages, before they begin waylaying messages to alter them. PGP is a classic end-to-end encryption scheme that has been a go-to for secure consumer email since the late 1990s because of the free, open-source standard known as OpenPGP. But the whole point of doing the extra work to keep data encrypted from the time it leaves the sender to the time it displays for the receiver is to reduce the risk of access attacks -- even if someone can tap into your encrypted messages, the data will still be unreadable. eFail is an example of these secondary protections failing.
Posted on Friday May 11, 2018
The first thing you'll notice in the new Gmail for web is its uncluttered look, but there's plenty more to be excited about. Greater security, easy-to-use sidebar apps and inline buttons, and more have been added to improve Gmail users' experience. Here's a quick rundown of all the features you need to start using now.