Mozilla has launched the first full edition of its Internet Health Report. The report is "an open source effort to explore the state of human life on the Internet," said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman. It consists of research and analysis compiled by researchers, engineers, data scientists, policy analysts and artists in Mozilla's extended community. The digital rights, open source, and Internet freedom movements hold that it is possible to build a digital world that is open, accessible and welcoming to all, according to Mozilla.
Hackers planted malware on StatCounter to steal bitcoin revenue from Gate.io account holders, according to Eset researcher Matthieu Faou, who discovered the breach. The malicious code was added to StatCounter's site-tracking script last weekend, he reported. The malicious code hijacks any bitcoin transactions made through the Web interface of the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange. The malicious code secretly can replace any bitcoin address that users enter on the page with one controlled by the attacker.
Do you take your online privacy seriously? Most people don't. They have an ideal scenario of just how private their online activities should be, but they rarely do anything to actually achieve it. The problem is that bad actors know and rely on this fact, and that's why there's been a steady rise in identity theft cases from 2013 to 2017. The victims of these cases often suffer a loss of reputation or financial woes. If you take your online privacy seriously, follow this 10-step guide to protect it.
Just when the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, was about to go into effect, the United States Congress created the CLOUD Act. Without any public hearings, review or public comment, Congress passed the legislation as part of the $1.3 trillion government spending bill. The CLOUD Act changed the privacy provisions that were in effect under the 1986 Stored Communications Act. Needless to say, Internet privacy issues create headlines around the world every day.
We rely on our phones to process and store reams of personal digital data. Our digital activities -- from checking bank balances to paying for a product with a tap of the screen, to sending friends and family messages over social media, to accessing work emails remotely -- have turned our phones into a goldmine of personal information. It's likely that by 2020, there will be more than 6 billion smartphone users in the world. How secure is your mobile device? It's easy to forget that your mobile phone is essentially a pocket-sized computer.
Tomorrow a minority of those who are eligible will take time off, drive through traffic, and wait in lines to take part in one of the most artificially annoying obligations of U.S. citizenship: voting. Many who make that inconvenient trek will treat the process like a multiple choice test they haven't studied for, either voting the party line or guessing at the right answers. The smarter citizens will use absentee ballots, take their time, study the initiatives, and pick those they vote for based on qualifications.
The line between journalism and public relations can be fuzzy, and news organizations have wrestled with that problem for some time. However, that line recently has become more blurred than ever, with some publications enlisting armies of nonprofessional scribes to satisfy an insatiable appetite for content. It's easy to understand why the problem has mushroomed. Demand for copy has gone up. The number of people to produce it and the revenue it generates have gone down. The result has been the rise of dubious business models.
Think about planning for a natural disaster emergency that might affect your home. You'd likely store some water, flashlights, food, blankets and other essentials. The key element of your planning would be proactivity. You'd do all of the work before an emergency occurred, not during the actual crisis. If your supplies were used up after the emergency passed, then you would restock before the next disaster might strike. Protecting data requires a similar approach: putting in place as many safeguards as you can before anything bad happens.
In my career as an IT resume writer, I've seen a lot of IT resumes cross my desk, and I'd like to share some common of the most common formatting problems that I see regularly. Of course, an IT resume requires more than great formatting. It requires well-written, targeted content, and a clear story of career progression. It needs to communicate your unique brand and value proposition. Still, if the formatting is off, that can derail the rest of the document and prevent your story being read by the hiring authority.
The MakuluLinux Flash distro is splashy and fast with a spiffy new look and new features. MakuluLinux developer Jacque Montague Raymer just announced the second of this year's three major Series 15 releases. The Flash edition follows last month's LinDoz edition release. The much-awaited innovative Core edition will debut between the end of November and mid-December. MakuluLinux is a relatively new Linux OS. Its positive reputation has been developing since 2015. The three-year growth spurt involved a variety of desktop environments.
For all of the dazzle of its rapidly evolving software portfolio, which includes a self-monitoring and self-patching database that also configures itself, as well as numerous cloud applications, Oracle has begun showing its credibility as a hardware vendor. Hardware has commoditized and will not return to the prominence it had in the early days of the tech era. However, commoditization brings new opportunities simply because price-performance numbers work better. Under Oracle's tutelage, hardware has found a disciplined and important niche.
Facebook has been in seriously hot water for its data monetization model almost from the firm's beginning. The Cambridge Analytica, election meddling and fake news scandals have turned up the heat. Facebook's problems aren't limited to the public and government backlash that spans several countries; the firm faces potentially devastating legal threats too. On the surface, it appears to be a clear-cut issue: Social media and other tech companies must be reined in. Certainly, the EU thinks so, as is evidenced by its new GDPR.
SpaceChain has entered a partnership with the Arch Mission Foundation to use open source technology to launch an ambitious project involving the storage of large data sets in spacecraft and on other planets. Arch Mission will load large quantities of data onto SpaceChain's satellite vehicles with the eventual aim of storing data on other planets. "The goal of archiving and preserving knowledge of future generations will advance archiving science and human knowledge by itself," SpaceChain cofounder Zheng Zuo said.
"Too many digital leaders have lost their minds," Kara Swisher recently wrote, citing some frightening examples of poor leadership. Swisher pointed to the solution adopted by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who hired a chief ethical officer -- but I think that would just repeat the mistake we made with chief risk officers around a decade ago. What happened was that the risk managers had responsibility but no real authority, so while they were viewed as some kind of shield, they were in effect more like sacrificial goats.
User engagement with podcasts has been steadily increasing, and many listeners actually prefer longer-format content, based on results of Apple's Podcast Analytics. The service, which Apple launched late last year, gives podcasters a way to track performance metrics including number of listeners, total time listened and time per device. The audience for podcasts has increased as content has become more specialized in nature, the analytics show. Listeners engage with podcasts for much longer periods than with other types of online content.
