Edward Snowden’s coming out party at the SXSW conference on Monday was largely a geekfest, with most discussion focused on what technology firms should do to allow consumers snoop-free communications. You can review the discussion in plenty of places if you like, but I suspect if you care about those [Keep reading]
Beginning tonight and into tomorrow, thousands of Americans will celebrate the National Day of Unplugging. They’ll attend music festivals where cell phones must be checked at the door. They will go on walks. They will talk to each other! You should try it to. If not for a day, then [Keep reading]
Now that Glenn Greenwald has launched First Look and Ed Snowden is….live online, I have some advice for the two men who desperately want to make sure U.S. government digital surveillance doesn’t slip from the headlines. Let’s get right to the point. Please search that treasure trove of documents you [Keep reading]
So Newsweek found the founder of Bitcoin. Bitcoin, as most of us already know, is the world’s most recognizable cryptocurrency, that being a decentralized digital currency, about which you can learn more about over at VanillaCrypto. Outing its founder is a great journalistic coup. It’s also precisely the kind of [Keep reading]
UPDATED — Twitter users took to the service late Monday evening to say that they’d been told hackers had attempted to access their accounts, and that Twitter was forcing them to update their passwords. At 1 a.m. ET, Twitter told me that reset notices were sent by accident. “We unintentionally [Keep reading]
This is sure to raise alarm with consumers. First American Bank in Illinois issued a warning to consumers on Friday, telling them to stop swiping their credit cards in Chicago taxis. The banks says in a notice on its Website that a system which processes back-seat plastic card transaction for [Keep reading]
Hands-free cell phone driving laws are widely ignored, almost entirely unenforceable, and illogical. Now they are also archaic, a California court has ruled. A California driver given a summons for using his phone with his hands while driving beat the ticket by saying he was using his phone’s map application, [Keep reading]
If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. WhatsApp just managed to score $19 billion by making a product that users actually want to pay for, rather than tricking them into being a product others paid for. Maybe….just maybe…this signals a shift in the way technology companies [Keep reading]
Roughly two-thirds of partners in a committed relationship share passwords, a practice that makes most security professionals shudder. Older, retired couples are also very likely to share an e-mail account, social media account, or online calendar, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. That makes sense: plenty [Keep reading]
If you want to share bad news, send it along on the Saturday of a long weekend. Kickstarter has been hacked, and its 5.6 million user-investors put at risk for identity theft, the firm told customers in an email sent on Saturday. Hackers may have stolen usernames, email addresses, mailing [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan