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Identity theft protection firm LifeLock — a company that’s built a name for itself based on the promise of helping consumers protect their identities online — may have actually exposed customers to additional attacks from ID thieves and phishers. The company just fixed a vulnerability on its site that allowed anyone with a Web browser to index email addresses associated with millions of customer accounts, or to unsubscribe users from all communications from the company. The upshot of this weakness is that cyber criminals could harvest the data and use it in targeted phishing campaigns that spoof LifeLock’s brand. Of...

Samsung announced an "unbreakable" smartphone display on Thursday. It uses plastic instead of glass and is flexible. It's for smartphones and other gadgets, and may be used in Samsung's first foldable phone. Samsung Samsung's unbreakable display __________________________________________________________________________ Samsung said on Thursday that it has developed an "unbreakable" and flexible display that may soon be used in smartphones and other gadgets. Unlike traditional smartphone displays, which are typically covered in glass that can be prone to cracking or shattering, Samsung coats its new panels with a "fortified plastic window." The solution didn't break in drop tests from 4-6 feet, Samsung said,...

Not even James Bond had an Aston Martin like this. The British sports car maker revealed a concept version of a flying car, the Volante Vision Concept, at the Farnborough Airshow this week. Aston Martin has billed the futuristic vehicle as a luxury car for the skies. The autonomous hybrid-electric vehicle, which has room for three passengers, is designed for urban and inter-city travel, the company said. It’s also capable of vertical take-offs and landings. The vehicle could fly at top speeds of around 200 miles per hour, according to Reuters.

Rolls-Royce has released plans for a flying taxi that could be taking to the skies in the early 2020s. The British manufacturer will unveil its designs for an electric vertical take-off and landing (EVTOL) vehicle at the Farnborough Airshow, which will be officially opened by Prime Minister Theresa May tomorrow. The air show is one of the biggest events in the aviation calendar, and May is expected to use the occasion to announce a slew of new initiatives to boost employment and growth in the UK’s aerospace industry, and to protect the supply chains that companies such as Bombardier, Rolls-Royce...

The U.S. Army will unveil details about its largest reorganization in 45 years Friday, senior service officials said, as they create a new organization in an attempt to adapt more quickly to technology and address expensive failures in weapons acquisitions. Army Futures Command is being established in part to address concerns about the more than $32 billion the Army has spent since 1995 on programs that it canceled early with little to nothing to show for them. The new power center will be on par with other influential Army organizations, such as Training and Doctrine Command and Forces Command, and...

Universities and other institutions are watering down requirements in order to attract more women and minorities. Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at...

The company formed data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Samsung and dozens of other device makers, raising new concerns about its privacy protections. As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information. Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers...

<p>A Tesla sedan driving outbound on Laguna Canyon Road in "autopilot" collides with a parked Laguna Beach Police Department vehicle. Source: Laguna Beach Police Department A Tesla sedan driving outbound on Laguna Canyon Road in "autopilot" collides with a parked Laguna Beach Police Department vehicle.</p>

The PCI Security Standards Council, the body governing credit card transactions, has set a deadline for disabling early versions of TLS/SSL to June 30, 2018. What are these technologies? TLS (Transport Layer Security) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) are fundamental to internet transport security. Early versions are still fairly common in older infrastructure. Not updating to the newer versions by the deadline could cause your organization to incur a major fee and potentially halt taking credit card transactions. Why is the TLS update critical?  Let’s take a step back and lay some groundwork. TLS and its predecessor SSL are a set...

s a kid, I’d sometimes try to imagine what life would be like without a particular sense or part of my body, like with questions from the Would You Rather? game. Would you rather be deaf or blind? Would you rather have no legs or no arms? I’d try to erase the sound of my mom’s piano playing, the sight of the ground growing smaller as I soared on the tree swing in my backyard, or the feeling of playing basketball so hard my lungs might explode, but I just couldn’t. How could life go on without these sensations that...

The first patient I saw during my clinical rotations as a medical student was dying from chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Today, with treatment, the 5-year survival rate for CML is about 90%. But when I was a student, CML was incurable. It was an early and poignant reminder of the limitations of medicine that I have never forgotten. We didn’t understand cancer like we do now, nor did we have the tools to treat it, which meant there was agonizingly little we could do. With the national hospice and palliative care movements only beginning, our discussions with this man and...

If Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought last week was bad, this one might be worse. Before Zuckerberg’s two days of grilling by D.C. lawmakers had even faded from the headlines, the company was back in the spotlight on Monday with a federal judge’s ruling to allow a class action lawsuit against Facebook over a facial recognition feature. And the damages could be in the billions. Advertisement - story continues below According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge James Donato ruled on Monday that a suit against Facebook could proceed under class action status for users in Illinois who sued the company...

As tension mounts between Russia and the West, Syria’s brutal seven-year civil war has become an arena for world powers to display their advanced weaponry and ability to project their military might. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said his country had tested nearly 215 advanced weapons in Syria since his country directly intervened in the conflict to support Syrian President Bashar Assad in September 2015. Russia has shown off both its Kalibr cruise missiles, launched from warships and submarines in the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas, and the ability of its Tu 160 bombers to fly an 8,000-mile strike round trip mission...

Immigration agents knocking at the door? Now, there’s an app for that, too. United We Dream, the largest national immigrant youth-led organization, has officially launched a smartphone application that added yet another tool to protect immigrants living in the U.S. illegally by utilizing high tech and online social communications. The app, called Notifica, allows immigrants here illegally to activate a plan if they come in contact with immigration law enforcement authorities or find themselves at risk of being detained. Users can prepare a set of automatic messages to alert — with one click — family members, lawyers and others if...

Facebook censors.... It’s not just conservative US websites that are being targeted and banned. The Voice of Europe, a European website against unlimited migration and Islamic radicalism, was banned and censored recently by Facebook.No conservative thought will be allowed.

The discovery was made by New York cybersecurity expert Kelly ShortridgeShe noticed the browser tool was scanning files in a folder on her Windows PCMs Shortridge shared her worries that it was gathering data on social media Google's head of security for Chrome responded that this is not the caseGoogle users are sharing their shock at discovering Chrome's built-in anti-virus tool is scanning private files on their computers.Chrome Cleanup Tool, a browser component added in 2014 to scan and remove malicious or resource heavy software, is behind the outcry.

LANGLEY, British Columbia (Reuters) - Layers of squirming black soldier fly larvae fill large aluminum bins stacked 10-high in a warehouse outside of Vancouver. They are feeding on stale bread, rotting mangoes, overripe cantaloupe and squishy zucchini. [snip] Enterra Feed, one of an emerging crop of insect growers, will process the bugs into protein-rich food for fish, poultry - even pets. After being fattened up, the fly larvae will be roasted, dried and bagged or pressed to extract oils, then milled into a brown powder that smells like roasted peanuts.

Microsoft may be moving to discontinue several first-party apps installed in Windows 10 that aren’t a major priority. Unnamed sources indicate that the company is now shifting internal developers away from the likes of Windows 10’s Stocks and Weather apps to focus on Microsoft Edge. Microsoft is also grabbing employees that previously worked on now-canceled Redstone 5 enhancements to provide them with positions on the Edge browser team. The news arrives after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella distributed an email to employees in March that outlined a restructuring within the company. Rajesh Jha now leads a new engineering team focused on...

Chipmaker AMD has released new microcode updates to mitigate the Spectre variant 2 side-channel attack, which Microsoft has supported with a Windows 10 patch for AMD systems. AMD's latest microcode update coincided with Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday fixes and comes just weeks after Intel wrapped up its Spectre 2 mitigations for all CPU families released over the past nine years. AMD's chief mitigation for its chips on Windows affected by variant 2 CPU indirect branch target injections is called 'indirect branch prediction barrier' (IBPB), which is only intended for cases when software switches from one user context to a context...

HAS the recent Facebook data scandal got you a little paranoid about sharing information on the internet? asks Jody Chudley, financial analyst for The Daily Edge, in Addison Wiggin's Daily Reckoning. I don't blame you. After all, Facebook has access to some of your most personal information. I'm talking about every message you've ever sent or been sent, every contact in your phone and even access to your computer's camera and microphones. Now would you like to get a lot more paranoid? Okay. Let me introduce you to a company called In-Q-Tel. This is a venture capital firm funded by...