John Lister

Google has admitted that staff listen to some recordings from the Google Home smart speaker. It says it's only for quality control purposes. It made the comments after a contractor in the Netherlands went to local media to talk about his work, in ... which he was paid a "few cents" to transcribe comments and questions made by people using the voice controlled device or phone app. According to the worker, some of the clips he heard did not appear to be people intentionally using the device. This included one case of a mother scolding a child and another clip which the worker suspected ... (view more)

Microsoft has warned users about a complicated but cunning malware attack that might not be caught by all security tools. The "Astaroth" malware doesn't actually exist as a file in its own right. The main risk to users from Astaroth is that it ... includes a keylogger. This means it can access everything victims type, including passwords and other sensitive data. That's one of the reasons sites such as online banks often ask users to type specific characters (such as third and eighth) rather than an entire password. Malware Hides Within Windows What makes Astaroth so hard to detect is ... (view more)

Chinese phone maker Huawei says its making a rival to Android that will be "up to 60 percent faster." The problem is it will be missing many key Google applications. Huawei started work on the new mobile operating system after an executive order ... from the US President that limits American companies supplying the Chinese company, something said to relate to security concerns. Following the order, Google announced it would no longer supply Huawei with new editions of Android or security updates for the existing system. While it could still use Android, which is an open source system, ... (view more)

An airline faces a fine of more than $200 million after its customers were hit by a hacking scandal. Around 500,000 worldwide customers of British Airways were affected by the breach. British Airways reported the breach in September last year. It ... doesn't appear that the hackers were able to get into BA's system and take any customer data that way. Instead, traffic to the site was hijacked. The attack is believed to have begun last June and involved the hackers exploiting security flaws in the design of BA's site. They were able to intercept traffic to the site and redirect visitors to a bogus ... (view more)

A premium email service has been slammed for letting users track other people's locations simply by sending a message. It's not a new issue, but has raised legal and ethical questions. The email service is called Superhuman and costs $30 a month. ... That covers a host of features, such as being able to "unsend" a message before its read, plus an "artificial intelligence" tool to decide and highlight which incoming messages are most important. While reviewers are split between whether it's a fantastic service for power users or just a jumped-up Gmail, one designer has laid into Superhuman for a ... (view more)

One of the most important services on the Internet went down for around an hour this week, causing widespread problems on other sites. The glitch is a reminder of how fragile some aspects of the Internet are. Cloudflare is a website that offers ... several free and paid services designed to make websites more efficient. Two of its main services are traffic filtering and web caching. The former involves web traffic between a user and a website going through Cloudflare. During this process, the client machine is checked for signs of malicious activity. This can involve attempted hacking, but also ... (view more)

Microsoft is to remove all electronic books sold through its official store. Users will get a refund while those who have made virtual notes on the book will get a bonus payment. Unlike most rival electronic book services, Microsoft had no dedicated ... electronic reading device and did not even offer an e-reader app. Instead, people who bought books through the Microsoft Store had to read them through a web browser. It's probably not a surprise that Microsoft has pulled the plug and will no longer be hosting the books online, most likely as it is ending the relevant licensing with publishers ... (view more)

Officials in Lake City, Florida have voted to pay half a million dollars to hackers to regain access to computer files. It's the second such payment by a local government in the state in as many weeks. Lake City's government computer system was hit ... by a ransomware attack in which hackers remotely encrypt files and then demand payment to unlock them. They asked for 42 units of the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin, worth roughly $500,000. That payment method makes it much harder to trace the recipients. The good news in this case is that public safety networks are unaffected and that all ... (view more)

The man who co-created the USB plug says its greatest annoyance was simply a matter of cost. Ajay Bhatt says that in the original design of the USB-A cable, the plugs were not reversible in order to keep costs down, which would then help get the ... format established. Bhatt discussed his work in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR). He talked about the often baffling experience in which users would try to plug a USB cable in, find that it would not fit, flip it over, find it didn't fit (again), then flip it back to its original orientation and find that inexplicably it now fit. It's a ... (view more)

A report suggests that thousands of apps on the Google Play store are in fact counterfeits made to look like the legitimate app, but instead pose a major security risk to users. The study says such apps ask for dangerous levels of access to the ... phone or are packed with advertising. The study is a joint effort of the University of Sydney and Australia's national science research agency CSIRO. It took two years to carry out and involved trawling through 1.2 million apps to look for potential counterfeits. Rather than have humans check each app uploaded to Google Play (which would be entirely ... (view more)