Twitter has announced intentions to launch its first algorithmic bias challenge, one that offers cash rewards for individuals who help uncover "potential harms" caused by the company's saliency algorithm. This new competition builds upon the bias identification approach Twitter detailed back in May. The challenge will take place as part of DEF CON AI Village this year.
Google Play Store is home to many apps. Some might say it's actually home to far too many apps. Android's official app marketplace is better known for the quantity of apps available rather than the quality of those apps, and it might be long-overdue some trimming. It seems that a great culling is finally coming to Google Play Store as Google announces new policies that will clean up developer accounts and apps that have barely been used.
Today's civilization revolves around software and data to the point that some even say that today's products are people. Specifically, the data associated with people are the products. Security and privacy have become huge and controversial topics in the tech world and have even been used as advertising points used by some companies. In that light, Google has been working hard to remove the stigma of being one of the biggest violators of privacy and has implemented changes to secure the safety of its users. Its upcoming changes to Google Play promises to make it easier for Android users to see and understand what all these safety features mean for them.
The ongoing legal spat between Apple and Epic Games over alleged app store monopolies has sent ripples throughout the entire software industry. App store owners have started making changes to appease a growing number of disgruntled developers, and Microsoft is pushing itself at the forefront of those developer-friendly changes. To be fair, the upcoming changes to the Microsoft Store policies will indeed benefit developers, but one change, in particular, could be trading users' security in exchange.
Apple's Face ID may have been logging us into iPhone and iPad for several years now, but the facial recognition tech looks set to finally be coming to Mac too. While recent Mac models have been able to unlock either with a nearby Apple Watch or using a Touch ID sensor, an equivalent to Microsoft's Windows Hello is predicted to be in the pipeline.
Although Macs have traditionally been seen as offering better security against malware compared to Windows PCs, it isn't completely immune. The recent reports of new malware targeting macOS, especially the crippling ransomware kind, show that Apple's desktop platform is gaining popularity as a target by malware writers and hackers. In fact, a report on a new kind of malware shows just how interesting macOS is becoming to these malicious actors that have revived an almost forgotten Windows spyware in order to add support for targeting Macs.
There was a time when you could do almost anything in a web browser or could at least install extensions to do what the browser natively can't. While the craze of turning browsers into Swiss Army knives has mellowed down a bit, there's still plenty of things you can do with the software that would normally require a separate app for the same task. Ironically, Firefox is moving in the opposite direction and is removing FTP functionality that has been a staple in web browsers for decades.
Windows 10 and Windows 11 users, along with Linux users, face two huge security vulnerabilities it's been revealed, which could allow hackers to get their hands on sensitive PC data. The newly-identified local privilege escalation vulnerabilities could allow bad actors to take advantage of a simple loophole in the OS to effectively climb through levels of much more important data.
Everyone talks about steps to take in protecting your security and privacy on the Web, but, to be honest, not all security measures are easy to understand or use. Some come with a plethora of options that overwhelm people, while others impact performance and the overall experience in exchange for better security. Chrome 92 was just released on all platforms to address those issues by making it easier to access relevant security and privacy settings and by mitigating the performance impact of certain security features.
Despite advancements in detecting and filtering out nuisance email addresses, spam can still be a major problem. Even worse is when a dodgy service reveals your email address to the wider internet, potentially paving the way for everything from phishing scams to doxing. Here to help with that problem is DuckDuckGo and its latest beta offering.
Smartphones have been using biometric authentication like fingerprints and faces long before those became more common on laptops and even desktops. Microsoft's Windows Hello framework is its attempt to bring the same mix of convenience and security to its desktop platform, and, for the most part, it seems to work well enough. New security research, however, reveals a fatal flaw in Windows Hello's face recognition process that could bypass authentication using a custom-made USB device. Fortunately, exploiting that in real life isn't as simple as the flaw itself.
WhatsApp has introduced a key privacy feature that'll help prevent unwanted snooping in your old chat logs -- but you can only access it if you're a beta user on Android. With the latest beta update, WhatsApp now offers encrypted cloud backups, meaning that anyone who acquires your stored chat logs won't be able to read them.