John Lister

Energizer has made a smartphone that is not surprisingly all about the battery. Though to be fair, it's got six times the capacity of some leading models. The few people who've seen the phone say it's bordering on impossibly big, but that it does ... provoke debate about the way phones suck up electricity. The Android-based handset is called the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop. It has a battery capacity of 18,000 mAh. To put that into context, it's three times more than a Motorola phone that's specifically marketed around long battery life. It's also around six times more than many flagship Android ... (view more)

At least eight apps in the official Microsoft Store were secretly designed to use a computer's resources without permission. It undermines Microsoft's efforts to promote the store as a "safe source of software." In the past few years, Microsoft has ... heavily pushed the idea of Windows users getting software from an app store - similar to the way mobile devices work - rather than the more traditional method of getting programs from a third-party sources and installing them directly to the PC or smartphone / tablet. There's even a special 'S' mode for Windows 10 that only allows the ... (view more)

Security researchers say some major password manager tools could be flawed. But they also say it's still sensible to use them, just with a degree of caution. It's a fact that using the same password for multiple sites is a massive security risk. ... That's because if one site gets hacked, it could mean that hackers can use the same password on another website to gain access to potentially sensitive information, resulting in identity theft or financial loss. Password manager tools (such as Roboform and Dashlane ) aim to overcome two big dilemmas with online passwords - which is keeping passwords ... (view more)

Microsoft has warned an update coming next month is absolutely critical for users running Windows 7. Without it, computers won't be able to use any future Windows security and feature updates, leaving users extremely vulnerable to malware infections ... (or worse). It's all to do with a change in the way Microsoft delivers security updates in a secure manner. Whenever Microsoft releases an update, it comes with a digital signature to prove that it came from Microsoft's servers and that the code it contains has not been tampered with. You can think of these security measures much the same way when ... (view more)

Security researchers have warned a notorious piece of malware has returned to Android. It's in disguise, posing as a legitimate and popular VPN application. Researchers at the security firm Bitdefender have dubbed the malware as "Triout," which was ... first spotted last August. It's a particularly nasty piece of malware as it carries out multiple hostile acts. (Source: bitdefender.com ) These include recording phone calls, reading incoming SMS messages, taking pictures and videos, and collecting location data such as GPS coordinates. Triout is designed to operate without being detected ... (view more)

Russia may briefly disconnect from the Internet as a cyber-defense exercise. It's being billed as an attempt to see if the country could keep the benefits of the Internet without having to interact with the rest of the world, though critics suggest ... it is nothing more than political censorship. Russian officials are said to fear that other countries may be taking measures to block its country from the Internet. On paper there does not appear to be any such proposals, though NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has threatened some form of sanctions over alleged cyber attacks by Russia ... (view more)

Google has developed a new type of encryption that could run on any Android device. It means added security even for the most basic phones, smart watches and smart TVs. The encryption in question isn't for transmitting data, but rather for data ... stored on a device. The data is controlled by unlock methods such as passwords, pin codes and fingerprints. The idea is that if somebody gets hold of a device and doesn't have the correct login credentials, they can't simply extract files from the device and access personal data. At the moment Android devices with encryption use Advanced Encryption ... (view more)

A security researcher says he's found a major security flaw in the Mac's password storage tool. But he's refusing to publish the details as a protest against Apple's "bug bounty" program. Linuz Henze has produced a video showing what he calls an ... exploit of the Keychain feature in MacOS Mojave, the current edition of the operating system for Mac computers. Keychain is an application on Macs that lets users save passwords for online accounts and digital certificates so that they don't have to type them in again. Users can also open Keychain and access a full list of passwords. Normally every ... (view more)

Google has launched a new tool to make it easier to know if a password has been hacked. But the way it works has raised some questions. The tool is called "Password Checkup" and is an extension for the Chrome web browser. It's designed to deal with ... details that are known to be part of a security breach, rather than offering more general advice such as using long passwords. If a user installs Password Checkup, Google will run a check whenever they log in to any site (not just ones Google operates). If it matches any entries on a database of known breaches, Chrome will display a ... (view more)

Two organizations hired by Facebook to check facts in news articles have pulled out of the deals. The Associated Press (AP) and Snopes are both being somewhat vague about exactly why they are stopping the work. While financial considerations may be ... the cause, third-party reports suggest the organizations were upset with the way Facebook handled their fact-checking operations. The two groups were among the most high-profile of what Facebook says is 34 organizations checking facts across 16 languages. According to the BBC, the AP and Snopes withdrawal means only two organizations in the US are ... (view more)