Security

North Korea has pounced on the recent revelations of NSA snooping to take a few digs at the United States.

Minju Joson, the country's state-run newspaper, lashed out at the U.S. in the wake of leaks from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting data on U.S. citizens under a secret program known as PRISM. Snowden also said last week that the U.S. has been hacking into computers in China and Hong Kong for the past several years.

A commentary in Minju Joson called the U.S. "a kingpin of human rights abuses … Read more

"It's a new world" out there in terms of digital identity and security, Microsoft said Monday. And, this world is far more dangerous than it used to be.

In order to mitigate e-mail infiltration by hackers and wrongdoers, Microsoft has announced that it's tossing linked accounts for its Outlook.com service and instead will be using aliases.

"There are a number of people who have more than one email address and want to manage these multiple email addresses from Outlook.com," Microsoft account group program manager Eric Doerr wrote in a blog post Monday. &… Read more

A high-profile group of technologists and privacy advocates is attempting to halt domestic surveillance of Americans through a clever twist: using federal bureaucratic rules against federal bureaucrats.

In a request today to National Security Agency director Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the group argues that the NSA's recently revealed domestic surveillance program is "unlawful" because the agency neglected to request public comments first. A federal appeals court previously ruled that was necessary in a lawsuit involving airport body scanners.

"In simple terms, a line has been crossed," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the … Read more

Edward Snowden, the one-time U.S. government analyst responsible for the most high-profile leaks from the National Security Agency in its history, is explaining his decision to disclose top-secret documents in a live chat hosted by the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.

Snowden, 29, is reportedly still in Hong Kong after leaving his home and girlfriend in Hawaii. His disclosures about NSA surveillance, including acquiring logs of millions of Americans' domestic phone calls, have left the Washington establishment reeling. On Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney called him a "traitor."

In his responses to questions on Monday from … Read more

As the passions and justifications swirl around the revelations concerning the NSA, the rest of the world sits and wonders.

Is only the U.S. involved? Or might, perhaps, every government on Earth be rather keen to use all technological methods to protect its interests?

What do ordinary Americans think (apparently, we don't mind too much)?

But, more importantly, what does Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak think?

It so happens that Latin American tech site FayerWayer happened upon Woz as he sat at San Francisco airport.

So often known to be obliging and spontaneous, Woz offered his thoughts. Essentially, he … Read more

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled,&… Read more

Who understands the importance of performance better than an engineer?

Yet the pressures that come with performing to perfect levels can cause some engineers to cut corners, even obfuscate.

How tragic, then, that three apparently bright (or not quite so bright) young things studying engineering at Purdue University have been charged with using their skills to artificially jack up their grades.

I am not sure how sophisticated this alleged scheme was.

It all began to allegedly unravel at the end of 2012 when an engineering professor was suddenly struck by suspicion that the password on his computer kept changing. He … Read more

Facebook and Microsoft on Friday became the first Internet companies to disclose the total number of legal orders they receive for user data, including ones from the National Security Agency and from state, local, and federal police performing criminal investigations.

The total for Facebook: About 18,000 accounts over a six month period, or one-thousandth of one percent of user accounts.

Microsoft's total was about 31,000 accounts over the same six month period ending December 31, 2012. A Google representative told CNET this evening that the search company is working on disclosing the same type of statistics, and … Read more

Apple's CoreStorage disk encryption technology has a small bug that will keep a disk unlocked, even after it has been ejected from the system.

In OS X Lion, Apple introduced a drive management technology called CoreStorage. When enabled, CoreStorage will create a "logical volume group" out of one or more physical drive partitions, and then create usable "logical volumes" from this group to serve as storage for your system. This setup allows the logical volume to span multiple physical partitions (as is seen with Apple's Fusion Drive), and support features like encryption for Apple'… Read more