Kate Conger's posts - French uPOST

Security experts often warn that it’s much easier for hackers to compromise a device if they have physical access to it. This security scenario is often referred to as an “evil maid” attack, the idea being that an attacker could sneak into a target’s hotel room and tamper with his laptop while he’s out of the room—or,…

Altaba, the holding company formed to carry the remains of Yahoo after it sold its core business to Verizon, has agreed to pay a $35 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission for Yahoo’s failure to quickly inform users about several massive breaches.

Careem, a ride-hail startup based in Dubai and operating in 14 countries, announced today that hackers stole data belonging to 14 million riders and drivers.

In a pilot program launching soon, Uber will begin obscuring riders’ exact pickup and drop-off locations in the trip history displayed to drivers. Instead, it will display a broader location area.

Google employees have spent the past few months pushing back against their company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Department of Defense initiative to enhance image processing of drone footage using artificial intelligence. As Gizmodo first reported, Google is contracted with the DoD to provide artificial…

When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress last week, several lawmakers grilled him on Facebook’s failures to comply with a 2012 consent decree that required the social media company to submit routine privacy audits to the Federal Trade Commission.

A researcher with AdGuard discovered five fake ad-blocking extensions in the Chrome Web Store that used hidden scripts to manipulate users’ browsers. The good news is, after AdGuard published the report, the Chrome team removed all five of the extensions from its store.

Samsung nearly lost its right to manufacture and sell phones in China—but it scraped by thanks to a judge’s ruling on Friday that will allow the tech giant to keep its foothold in the Chinese market.

Lea Kissner is back at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, armed with a crisp gray blazer, a slide deck, and a laptop with a ‘My Other Car Is A Pynchon Novel’ sticker on it. Since graduating in 2002, she’s earned a PhD at Carnegie Mellon in cryptography and worked her way up at Google, where she…

President Donald Trump signed a controversial bill today that’s designed to combat sex trafficking online, but has incited strong opposition from sex workers who say that the law, if enacted, will jeopardize their safety.

New research from the Center for Democracy and Technology aims to help security researchers decide what level of risk is acceptable for them and their work.

Uber announced today that it’s acquiring Jump, a dockless bike-sharing service that recently launched a small fleet of bikes in San Francisco.

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to apologize.

Given that password theft from major tech companies like Yahoo has become routine, most large firms now store their users’ passwords in an encrypted format. Keeping a list of users’ passwords in plaintext creates a huge risk—stealing that password database can give a hacker access to millions of accounts. And if a…

Exactly one year ago, Elon Musk revealed that he’d co-founded a new startup, Neuralink, with the ambition of inventing a brain-computer interface or, as it was later called, a “wizard hat for the brain.” These types of interfaces, in their current iterations, are mostly used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other…

A lawsuit brought by a former Google employee who says that the company’s “bro culture” led to daily sexual harassment is being expanded as a class action after Google tried to push the case into sealed, secret arbitration.

Illinois’ Cook County, which includes Chicago and surrounding areas, is joining the legal fight against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica over the misuse of data scraped from social media profiles, claiming that both companies violated state fraud law.

If you ask Google whether it has a discrimination problem, the company might point you to its industry-leading diversity efforts or its program for responding to complaints. But employees who challenge that narrative by asserting that it has created anything but a healthy, supportive environment are being labeled…

Google Cloud has a whopping 20 new product announcements out today, most of them aimed at enterprise customers—which means they probably won’t matter much to you unless you’re in the position to make IT decisions for a company.

The board of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked with Republican candidates during the 2016 US presidential election and made conflicting statements about its involvement in a campaign for Brexit, has suspended its CEO Alexander Nix.