Another day, another revelation revealed by Edward Snowden's leaks. Friday, The Guardian reported that the U.S. NSA and its British equivalent, the GCHQ, have been actively trying to defeat the encrypted protection provided by the popular Tor anonymity software.
Brad Chacos | 04 Oct | Read more
If you have a PC, you're a target.
Brad Chacos | 03 Oct | Read more
Securing your PC against the malicious wilds of the Web isn't as simple as just keeping your antivirus software of choice up-to-date. In fact, the pervasiveness of security software has forced the bad guys to turn to increasingly clever tricks in their quest to "pwn" your PC.
Brad Chacos | 16 Sep | Read more
The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government's behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security "exploitable," and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.
Brad Chacos | 06 Sep | Read more
The premise of the Google Authenticator app is pretty simple: Once you connect it to your online services, the app generates a random numeric code that you need to use along with your password when you're signing into your digital accounts. If the code isn't used in a short time frame, it self-destructs and becomes invalid. Boom! It's two-factor authentication at its finest.
Brad Chacos | 04 Sep | Read more
Rest easy, suspicious Web dwellers: The U.S. Patent Office now officially guarantees that if you're going to get "scroogled" by anybody, you're going to get scroogled by Google.
Brad Chacos | 29 Aug | Read more
The Tor anonymity network is enjoying a massive uptick in popularity after two significant privacy-minded events took place earlier this month
Brad Chacos | 29 Aug | Read more
In the past 24 hours, the New York Times went down and Twitter images went wonky, while the Huffington Post dodged a digital bullet. All the chaos comes courtesy of the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group in love with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad--and this isn't the first time the cyber boogeymen have lashed out at Western targets.
Brad Chacos | 28 Aug | Read more
Game over, man, game over! Late Tuesday, Riot Games announced that hackers managed to breach the company's servers, swiping the usernames, email addresses, salted password hashes, and real-word names of North American players of the uber-popular League of Legends game. Worse, nearly 120,000 credit card transactions have been accessed.
Brad Chacos | 21 Aug | Read more
Earlier this month, Lavabit and Silent Circle--two privacy-minded email providers--decided to shut up shop rather than give the U.S. government the chance to access to their customer data. Shortly thereafter, Lavabit owner Ladar Levison told Forbes, "If you knew what I knew about email, you might not use it."
Brad Chacos | 19 Aug | Read more
There's a place lurking beneath the Internet you use every day.
Brad Chacos | 12 Aug | Read more
Google has announced a new Android Device Manager service and app designed to plug physical security holes. It will be available later in August.
Brad Chacos | 05 Aug | Read more
If you were one of the unfortunate souls whose PlayStation 3 was rendered near-useless by the borked version 4.45 firmware update, fear not! A new PS3 firmware update is on its way to fix that pesky console-killing problem. The bad news: It's not coming all that quickly.
Brad Chacos | 22 Jun | Read more
A future version of Google Chrome may make it a cinch to clean up messy settings cast into chaos by malware (or your own misguided hands).
Brad Chacos | 28 May | Read more
Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, and Oracle's Java. All three are virtually ubiquitous on modern-day PCs, and all three provide handy-dandy functionality--functionality that, in the case of Flash and Java, can't be directly reproduced by a third-party solution. If we lived in a vacuum, it would be hard to argue that the trio doesn't deserve its spot on computers around the globe.
Brad Chacos | 08 Mar | Read more