data

Nothing beats having access to all your files, e-mail, and contacts almost anywhere you go. Just reach into your pocket for your iPhone or your bag for your iPad and connect to an available network.

The easier the data is to access, the harder it is to protect. This week AT&T unveiled its service that prevents data, voice, and text-message access to iPhones and iPads that owners report to the company as lost or stolen, as CNET's Roger Chen reported last week.

Reactivating the device requires a call to AT&T customer support. The company asks … Read more

T-Mobile experienced an hours-long disruption this evening that prevented many of its customers from accessing its data network.

The outage, which seemed to have begun around 6 p.m. PT, did not appear to affect the entire network and was resolved around 9:20 p.m. T-Mobile customers began complaining on Twitter a couple of hours ago about a lack of Internet access:

I had to check twitter...just to see what was up with T Mobile, since my phone Internet is down..,along with their customer service #

The wireless carrier confirmed the issue … Read more

A group of hackers has posted to the Web today data that appears to include Comcast employee names, ages and salaries, as well as e-mails and passwords associated with AT&T VoIP service accounts.

Proclaiming the kickoff of "#WikiBoatWednesday...when all the members from @TheWikiBoat fight corruption, leak data, and bring down websites," the hackers released the data in two different posts to the Pastebin Web site. Several of the Twitter handles used by the group, including @AnonymousWiki, referenced the Anonymous online activist group, but the connection to the larger, decentralized collective is unclear.

"The first … Read more

If you like the idea of storing sensitive data safely, securely, and away from prying eyes, you need to create an encrypted virtual disk on your hard drive. That's easier than it sounds, thanks to Klonsoft's LockDisk. This tool creates encrypted, password-protected, hidden volumes in your system. You can specify the size of your volume to make sure you have enough space for your stuff without wasting disk space. LockDisk works in 32-bit Windows editions. Some users may need to right-click the program's Start menu entry or executable file and select Run as Administrator to use LockDisk. … Read more

Prepaid may be the way to go for savvy smartphone consumers, as more and more wireless operators are offering cool devices with their cheap prepaid plans.

It used to be that prepaid cell phone users had to sacrifice the ability to get cool devices for cheap service. But that's not true anymore as carriers like Virgin Mobile get top of the line Google Android handsets and even offer the popular Apple iPhone. Consumers can save hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on prepaid services compared to so-called post-paid services, which require a contract. In this edition of Ask Maggie, … Read more

Apple is planning to open a data center in northern Nevada as part of the company's plan to spend $1 billion in northern Nevada over the next 10 years, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.

Local governments are looking at the deal today and tomorrow. State officials will also need to approve the tax breaks, but construction is expected to start as early as August. The new facilities -- which come with $87 million in tax breaks spread over the next decade from city, county and state governments -- include a business and purchasing center in downtown Reno and … Read more

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide and three subsidiaries for allegedly storing data in plain text and other security failures that enabled hackers to access more than 600,000 payment card accounts in three data breaches in less than two years.

The hackers exported the payment card account data to an Internet domain address registered in Russia, according to the FTC lawsuit (PDF). They then used the data stolen from Wyndham's data center in Phoenix to make transactions, resulting in fraud losses of more than $10.6 million, the suit … Read more

Bing is now offering 165 terabytes of new birds-eye-view satellite shots of locations all over the Earth, from the Moroccan Mountains to Egypt's pyramids of Giza to the Extraterrestrial Highway in the U.S.

This is Microsoft's mapping engine's largest satellite data release ever. Before today, Bing Map's total amount of data was 129TB. So, what can be seen on the search engine's maps has now more than doubled in size.

"This release features imagery over North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia," Bing wrote in a blog post today. "… Read more

An analysis of passwords stolen from eHarmony and leaked to the Web recently reveals several problems with the way the dating site handled password encryption and policies, according to a security expert.

The biggest problem clearly was that the passwords, although encrypted and obscured with a hashing algorithm, were not "salted," which would have increased the amount of work password crackers would need to do, writes Mike Kelly, a security analyst at Trustwave SpiderLabs, in a blog post today.

But there were two other less obvious problems. First, the lowercase characters in passwords were converted to uppercase before … Read more