Home webcams designed to keep your family safe may in fact put them at risk, suggests a settlement filed by the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday against a video camera servurity company. In some cases, cameras designed to check in on children were instead used by computer hackers across the [Keep reading]
1. Create a “disposable” e-mail account that you use to sign up with various websites. It’ll keep your main e-mail account “cleaner,” and prevent firms from tracking you across sites. 2. Create a fake persona, complete with birthday and phone number, that you can use to sign up for grocery [Keep reading]
The arrival of Labor Day is like the playing of “Last Dance,” at a wedding. What, it’s over already? But we just started dancing… Endings are hard, and always sneak up us, but they must be marked. Consider this my farewell to readers of MSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles…and the announcement [Keep reading]
“MSN is going to be better than the web.” If you want to know why Steve Ballmer was such a failure, you don’t have to look much farther than that sentiment. I heard it when was a Microsoft intern in 1995, arriving in Redmond just a few months before the [Keep reading]
Throughout the NSA/Ed Snowden surveillance scandal, the so-called FISA court that secretly reviews government spying orders has been cast as little more than a rubber stamp. With the release of a 2011 FISA court opinion on Wednesday, you can throw that opinion out, along with the notion that the NSA [Keep reading]
s smartphone viruses creep closer to U.S. shores, malicious programmers behind them have become more ingenious, according to a report issued Tuesday by computer security firm McAfee. Predictably, it’s all about the money — that is, hackers are learning how to turn your smartphone into cash for them. One year ago, state-of-the-art [Keep reading]
It’s long been theorized that the U.S. stands to lose the most from a cyberwar. We have the most technology, and our economy relies more on that technology than any other nation on earth, so we are the most vulnerable. The continuing controversy swirling around the National Security Agency and electronic [Keep reading]
If you haven’t heard the term already, you won’t be able to avoid it soon: “The Internet of Things.” Tech companies are racing to attach small computers and sensors to everything in our lives — coffee cups, pens, toilet paper, cars — and then enabling them to talk to each [Keep reading]
NSA leader Edward Snowden participated in an online chat or sorts on Monday, says the Guardian newspaper. There’s no way of verifying it was Snowden behind the keyboard, of course. You can read NBCNews.com’s coverage of the chat, by Tracy Connor, here. You can see the original chat page at The [Keep reading]
Americans were never any good at relaxing, anyway. But technology has taken away our nights and weekends, and it sure seems like holidays are at risk, too. I explored this phenomenon on the Friday before Memorial Day in my Red Tape Chronicles column. Users check their phones every 6 [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan