data

A browser that promotes privacy as its key feature is ditching Google as its default search engine. Brave will instead use its own search service, though users are free to change back. Although Brave is based on the same Chromium code as Google ... Chrome, it's marketed towards users worried about privacy. By default it blocks all third-party ads and tracking tools. Until now, the browser has used well-known search engines as the default search tool. These include Google in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and DuckDuckGo in Germany. However, Brave has been developing its own ... (view more)

Artificial intelligence may be failing thanks to human error according to a new study. That's because data AI models use to learn how to identify images is not always correct to start with. The problem affects neural networks, which are designed to ... work in a similar way to the human brain, considering multiple possibilities at the same time. The idea is to get the benefits of human thought but with the speed and reliability of computers. In principle, training these AI models is a straightforward process. Rather than humans creating a set of rules for the models to follow, they simply give ... (view more)

T-Mobile is investigating claims a hacker stole sensitive data about more than 100 million customers. It hasn't confirmed or denied claims. The haul included social security numbers and driver license information. The alleged breach was first ... reported by Motherboard, which spotted a hacker forum post from somebody attempting to steal the data. The would-be seller says it comes from multiple T-Mobile servers and contains "full customer info" on US customers. The seller claims the haul includes names, phone numbers and physical addresses, along with IMEI numbers that identify individual ... (view more)

One of the key ways online advertising works has led to a court case alleging a breach of Internet users' privacy. A civil liberties group is taking legal action saying current regulations are too slow to have any effect. The Irish Council for Civil ... Liberties (ICCL) says IAB Tech Lab, which operates one of the world's main ad set-ups, is sharing revealing data about online activities without user consent. IAB is based in New York, though the legal case is against its branch in Hamburg, Germany to benefit from tighter rules in Europe. (Source: reuters.com ) Real Time Bidding Relies On Data The ... (view more)

Nearly 30 Android and Roku apps hijacked phones to defraud advertisers. Although users never saw the ads, they may have noticed increased data use and slowed performance. The scammers used the apps distributed in the official Google Play store to ... build up a network of almost a million compromised Android devices. The "PARETO" botnet then used the phones to issue bogus requests to advertisers while making the devices appear to be Smart TV sets. That was particularly appealing to advertisers because of the belief viewers are more likely to pay attention to an ad on a TV screen than on a phone. ... (view more)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has urged the public to use its Internet speed testing app. As with Netflix's tool, it's not just for the benefit of users. The FCC Speed Test App, which works for both WiFi and mobile data connections, ... has the usual simple "one-tap" functionality of such tools. By default is measures upload and download speeds plus latency. That's a measure of how quickly data transmission starts, which can be important for services such as online gaming. (Source: theverge.com ) Speed Maps Boosted Users can also switch on settings to measure jitter and packet loss ... (view more)

A data leak has exposed the phone numbers of an estimated 500 million Facebook users. The data comes from a breach in 2019, but has just been made public. According to Facebook, the breach was "found and fixed" in 2019, which has raised some ... eyebrows given the company never warned users their details may have been compromised. It argues the data wasn't hacked but rather "scraped" from publicly accessible information through a bug in its feature that lets users find the Facebook accounts of people in their phone contacts. That may not be enough to satisfy data protection officials in several ... (view more)

Google believes it's found a way to replace privacy-breaching cookies while still letting advertisers find success. It's testing a way to effectively combine data from thousands of users to target ads. Cookies fall into two main types: first and ... third party. First-party cookies are generally uncontroversial as they simply identify a user on a website, including any previous activity such as website preferences. For example, a premium website could let somebody log in to an account and then use cookies so they don't have to log in again for a set period such as a week. Third-party cookies are ... (view more)

Ransomware infections used to be about forcing victims to pay to regain access to their files. Now it appears more and more scammers are treating it as an exercise in blackmail. A new cybersecurity report says 18 known ransomware gangs have switched ... their focus to threatening to publish stolen data unless the victim pays up. That's led to some businesses paying the ransom even though they had access to backups in order to restore their files. Traditionally ransomware has been about file encryptions. Scammers get access to a victim's computer or network through malware, then the infection " ... (view more)

World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee wants to rethink the way people control online data. He says his "pods" proposal would bring the online world closer to his original vision of the web. Berners-Lee has launched an open-source project and ... associated business to try to counter what he sees as the web's biggest problem: major companies collecting user data and exploiting it as a core part of their business. His new idea is "pods", or personal online data store. This would involve users having a space on a server that acted like a digital safe and contained a range of data. This could be ... (view more)