2020 is off to a chaotic start, but locking down your online privacy is still vital. Give yourself an online privacy check-up and start 2020 securely

Why your electronic voting options might not get better any time soon: RISC-V-based solution under development, but the very nature of a voting system raises issues.

The best way to distribute quantum entanglement around the globe is via a massive constellation of orbiting satellites, physicists say. The quantum internet is a dream that many technologists have expounded in recent years. The idea is to exploit the strange quantum properties of photons and electrons to send messages with perfect secrecy.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL’s Instant Messenger introduced millions of people to the internet—and the idea that you were always online, even when you were “away.”

This Christmas, you may be considering just how much your family would appreciate a cool new gadget – that latest internet-enabled watch for dad, a smart speaker for your grandmother’s kitchen, or an amazingly interactive talking doll for your niece.

EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Section 230 of the 1996 US Telecoms Act is just 26 words long – but its impact has been incalculable

As part of a dark web investigation, Evernote handed over a suspect's notes stored on the company's servers.

You may have shrugged when you heard that some Facebook staff are suing the company over working conditions. But welcome to my world – content moderation – where we deal with the worst of humanity so you don’t have to. Naked migrants are being tortured with molten metal in Libya; Facebook’s quality assurance (QA) department is challenging whether that baby in Myanmar is dead; Dave and Doreen are using its report function as a weapon again. All their tedious posts end up on a screen in front of us, punctuated by atrocities, porn and distasteful jokes.

At least one major provider of hardware-level BIOS drivers is actively deleting old stuff it no longer supports, while old FTP sites where vintage drivers are often found are soon going to be harder to reach.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has debuted its first-ever broadcast campaign, aimed at making the ownership of a “.ca” website a point of national pride for business owners. The CIRA is the organization responsible for policies related to the internet in Canada, as well as the country’s involvement in international internet governance, but its primary task is managing Canada’s “.ca” top-level web domain.

Last year, it was estimated data centres around the world generated the same amount of carbon emissions as created by the global airline industry's fuel usage.

RuNet disconnection tests were successful, according to the Russian government.

In April 1997, Wired magazine published a feature with the grand and regrettable title “Birth of a Digital Nation.” It was a good time to make sweeping, sunny pronouncements about the future of the United States and technology. The US stood alone astride the globe. Its stock market was booming. Microsoft was about to become the world’s most valuable company, a first for a tech firm. A computer built by IBM was about to beat the world chess champion at his own game.

In April of 2019, Pulse Secure issued an urgent patch to a vulnerability in its popular corporate VPN software—a vulnerability that not only allowed remote attackers to gain access without a username or password but also to turn off multi-factor authentication and view logs, usernames, and passwords cached by the VPN server in plain text. Now, a cybercriminal group is using that vulnerability to target and infiltrate victims, steal data, and plant ransomware.

Misinformation techniques first deployed by Russian agents are now more commonly used in Britain by the far right, as well as by politicians to convince their own voters, an audience in Oxford has been told.

Today, the Public Interest Registry (PIR), which maintains the .org top-level domain, announced that it will be acquired by Ethos Capital, a private equity firm (via Domain Name Wire). This move will make PIR, previously a non-profit domain registry, officially part of a for-profit company — which certainly seems at odds with what .org might represent to some. Originally, “.org” was an alternative to the “.com” that was earmarked for commercial entities, which lent itself to non-profit use.

In start-up land, the young barely talk to the old (and vice versa). That makes for a lot of cool apps. But great technology? Not so much.

In 2010, I joined Twitter. This momentous development went unnoticed by the world’s press – but to be fair, it went almost unnoticed by me, too. Certainly, I had no particular trepidation about getting involved in social media. The internet still embodied more promise than threat: the iPad was just arriving; Uber and Airbnb were finding their feet; “gamification” was going to solve everything from obesity to voter apathy...

Presenting a keynote address at an ADL conference, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen wasn't kidding around when he painted a bleak picture of our emerging world: "Today ... demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed.