Okay, this is the most disturbing Apple security weakness I’ve heard about to date: a fairly straightforward Safari exploit that would let a hacker silently swipe information from your address book. Embarrassing, too: The guy who discovered it says he alerted Apple last month, and got only an automated reply.
Tag Archives | Security
Firefox Gets Crash Protection
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.4, a security and stability update with one significant new feature: Crash protection designed to stop Flash, SilverLight, and QuickTime from taking the whole browser with them when they choke. The new capability mirrors one which was a much-touted one in Google’s Chrome from the start.
(Semi-related side note: On OS X, for me, Chrome’s crash protection doesn’t stop Flash from frequently freaking out in a manner that renders the browser unusable until I manually kill and relaunch it. Technically, it’s not crashing–but the end result is just as irritating.)
Firefox’s crash protection is for Windows and Linux only; it won’t reach OS X until Firefox 4 ships. If you try it and notice a difference–or don’t–let us know.
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AT&T's iPad E-Mail Breach
The most fascinating thing about the case of a hacker group downloading 114,000 e-mail addresses of iPad 3G owners from AT&T’s servers–other than the confirmation that a lot of high-powered people bought iPads–is the fact that it’s a major security breach involving one of the most locked-down products on the planet. And there’s nothing iPad owners could have done to prevent it, since the data was swiped from AT&T, not individual iPads.
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A Short History on Hacking
Cool infographic from OnlineMBA.com:
Via: Online MBA
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Norton Plans to Go Beyond the PC
Symantec’s Norton product line has been all but synonymous with utilities designed to fix PC problems since Peter Norton himself wrote some of the first utilities shortly after the IBM PC was released in 1981. Now the company’s announcing a big initiative to bring its software and services to devices other than Windows PCs and Macs–phones, set-top boxes, and just about anything else that connects to the Internet. It’s calling its plans Norton Everywhere, and they involve a variety of new releases.
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Facebook Privacy Tweaks Coming. How About Opt-In, Not Opt Out?
Staring down a storm of criticism around privacy issues on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised today to give users an easy way to opt out of third-party services. Probably, though, most users would be a lot happier if Facebook came up with a simple approach to opting into those services, rather than out of them.
Public outcries over unwanted visibility of users’ Facebook information has reached the halls of Congress, spurring U.S. Senator Charles Schumer to release an open letter last month asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to produce privacy guidelines for all social networking sites – including Twitter and MySpace, for example, along with Facebook – as well as to keep a close eye on compliance.
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Twitter Forced-Follow Glitch Discovered, Fixed
For a brief period this morning, the Twitterblogosphere was abuzz over the discovery of a bug (although it looked like it might be an intentional backdoor feature) that let Twitter users force other people to follow them. Bizarre–and swiftly fixed by Twitter once it was widely covered and abused.
I want to make one thing clear: @janefonda was following me before all this happened. (No, I don’t know why…)
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McAfee Meltdown
Ed Bott reports on a McAfee mess-up that caused major headaches for some of the security company’s business customers yesterday.
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TSA: Netbooks Aren’t Notebooks
Do you need to remove your iPad from your briefcase when you go through airport security? No, says “Blogger Bob” of the TSA. But he also says that netbooks don’t need to be removed:
Only electronics the size of a standard laptop or larger (for example Playstation®, Xbox™, or Nintendo®), full-size DVD players, and video cameras that use video cassettes must be removed from their carrying cases and submitted separately for x-ray screening. Removing larger electronics helps us get a better look at them and also allows us to get a better look at the contents of your bag. If you you have a TSA “checkpoint friendly” laptop bag, you can leave your laptop in.)
Which leaves only one question: What, exactly, is a standard laptop?
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Keep Your iPad in Your Briefcase
Is the iPad a computer? Why not ask the TSA?