Traveling is stressful. The last thing you want to worry about is getting scammed by crooks on the street. Your best tool? Knowledge. Know how they work. Know what they’ll do. Prevent it from happening in the first place. —Relatively Interesting
The European Union’s competition chief is zeroing in on how companies stockpile and use so-called big data, or enormous computer files of customer records, industry statistics and other information. The move diverges starkly from a hands-off approach in the U.S., where regulators emphasize the benefits big data brings to innovation. —Natalia Drozdiak @ MarketWatch
The cybersecurity industry has mushroomed in recent years, but the data breaches just keep coming. Almost every day brings news of a new data breach, with millions of records compromised — including payment details, passwords, and other information that makes those customers vulnerable to theft and identity fraud. —Alistair Johnston @ MarketWatch
To break the dominance of Google on Android, Gael Duval, a former Linux developer and creator of now defunct but once hugely popular Mandrake Linux (later known as Mandriva Linux), has developed an open-source version of Android that is not connected to Google. —Kavita Iyer @ TechWorm
China has rarely undertaken a role in developing public international cybersecurity law over the many years the provisions have existed. Only once did it submit a formal proposal — fifteen years ago to the 2002 Plenipotentiary Conference where it introduced a resolution concerning “rapid Internet growth [that] has given rise to new problems in communication security.” Thus, a China formal submission to the upcoming third EG-ITRs meeting on 17-19 January 2018 in Geneva is significant in itself. —Anthony Rutkowski @ CircleID
If all you want is the TL;DR, here’s the headline finding: due to flaws in both Signal and WhatsApp (which I single out because I use them), it’s theoretically possible for strangers to add themselves to an encrypted group chat. However, the caveat is that these attacks are extremely difficult to pull off in practice, so nobody needs to panic. But both issues are very avoidable, and tend to undermine the logic of having an end-to-end encryption protocol in the first place. —Krebs on Security
This past Friday Twitter issued what is perhaps one of the most remarkable statements in modern diplomatic history: it said both that it would not ban a world leader from its platform and that it reserved the right to delete official statements by heads of state of sovereign nations as it saw fit. Have we truly reached a point in human history where private companies now wield absolute authority over what every government on earth may say to their citizens in the online world that has become the defacto modern town square? —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes
Related
