John Lister

A proposed law would dramatically increase maximum fines that can be imposed on companies that break monopoly rules. Tech firms would be among the most likely to be affected in the admittedly unlikely event the law was enacted. The proposed bill ... would be known as the Monopolization Deterrence Act of 2019. It's designed to change the current system by which the maximum penalty for violating the main US antitrust law, the Sherman Act, is $10 million. That applies regardless of the size of the company or companies involved. Critics say such penalties are little deterrent to major companies, ... (view more)

Mozilla has designed a site that will open 100 tabs at once, quite likely crashing a web browser. It's meant as a creative way to show how web tracking works. The stunt is based around cookies: small text files put onto a computer via the browser to ... customize an online session to a website. Third-party tracking cookies are then generated, which keep a record of the sites a user visits. This information is then used by ad servers to deliver targeted ads based on website history. "Track THIS" works by opening 100 tabs selected to represent a particular type of web user. The idea is that there ... (view more)

Microsoft may be ending the need to have a physical disk to reinstall Windows 10. A 'Cloud Download' option could save time and hassle. At the moment, the main way to reinstall Windows is to use a recovery disk (or a copy of the relevant files kept ... on a hard drive or USB device.) That's got a few limitations, most notably that not everyone who gets a recovery disk with a new computer will be able to find it. Other problems are that recovery disks don't always have the drivers necessary to make sure Windows 10 works smoothly with a specific PC, and that the disks don't usually work well for ... (view more)

Google says it has found half a dozen major security flaws in Apple's iPhone messaging system. A new iOS update fixes five of the problems, but Google says one remains unpatched. The flaws were discovered by Google's Project Zero, a department that ... takes its name from the idea of "zero day" bugs . That's where would-be hackers become aware of a security issue before the relevant software developers are able to patch the bug. The zero day bugs are then exploited which often results in elevated privileged access levels given to a rogue program. The problems are with iMessage, the instant ... (view more)

Financial records of almost every adult in Bulgaria have been stolen in a cyber attack. It's led to the unlikely situation of the country's leader reportedly exaggerating the attacker's skills. One man has been arrested following the attack, which ... looks to have involved unauthorized access to a database with records for every working adult in the country. That's almost five million people. There's some debate over exactly what was involved in the breach. Press reports suggest it not only included personal information such as date of birth and address, but also tax ... (view more)

The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly backed a bill to crack down on unwanted robocalls. The bipartisan measure would increase regulatory power and make use of technology to tackle the problem. The proposed Stopping Bad Robocalls Act ... passed by 429 votes to 3. It follows a 97 to 1 vote in the Senate on a similar bill in May. It's now highly likely one of the bills will pass through both houses and become law. (Source: appleinsider.com ) Robocalls are automatically dialed phone calls. Because there's no need for a human to dial the number, both legitimate marketers and scammers can ... (view more)

Google is cracking down on Chrome browser extensions that risk user privacy. The new policies err on the side of caution and follow a Washington Post investigation that claimed millions of users had data stolen by rogue browser extensions. A browser ... extension, also called an "add-on" in some browsers, is a third-party tool that users can incorporate into their web browser. It's designed to add extended functions to the browser, which then make using the browser and web much easier. Examples of extensions include: a password manager, which can remember user passwords and ... (view more)

Google is changing the way its "incognito" mode works. It says the move is necessary, but some news and magazine website owners are upset by the change. Incognito is Google's version of private browsing. Despite the name, it's mainly about privacy ... on the user's device: when in incognito mode, the local browser stops adding websites to its browsing history, which consists of a list of pages the user has visited and the searches they've carried out. The mode won't stop the activity being recorded by an Internet service provider (ISP) or by a local network administrator - something that has ... (view more)

A security firm says hackers have hijacked 180,000 routers in Brazil alone so far this year. They target people who haven't changed the default login for the router's control system. According to Avast, there have been more than 4.6 million attempts ... to modify router settings remotely. Although the attacks were targeted at people using particular Internet service providers in Brazil, there's no reason the same tactics couldn't work elsewhere. The goal of the attacks is to change the DNS settings on a router. In simple terms, that's like the address book that a router uses to turn a website ... (view more)

Two lawyers have been jailed for five and fourteen years respectively for an online copyright scam. The pair uploaded adult material with the specific aim of suing those who downloaded it. John Steele and Eric Hansmeir have been convicted on fraud ... and money laundering charges for their activities as "Prenda Law." The pair bought the rights to adult films and even produced their own material. They then uploaded it to file sharing sites and waited until people downloaded it. $3,000 Settlements Accepted Prenda Law then got court orders for Internet service providers to identify the ... (view more)