From Consumer Reports:
Car insurers didn’t use credit scores until the mid 1990s. That’s when several of them, working with the company that created the FICO score, started testing the theory that the scores might help to predict claim losses. They kept what they were doing hush-hush. By 2006, almost every insurer was using credit scores to set prices. But two-thirds of consumers surveyed by the Government Accountability Office at about the same time said they had no idea that their credit could affect what they paid for insurance.
When I travel I use a VPN. It’s a nice little bit of security when on a strange WiFi network. It’s not bullet proof but it’s a minimal layer between me and a coffee shop or hotel. If you’re unfamiliar with VPN, it’s a private tunnel between your machine and another machine on the Internet. You connect to the VPN host and the VPN host handles all of your requests out to the Internet.
Ghostery is a browser plugin available for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera and it dramatically speeds up the web. Ok, that’s not the goal of Ghostery, but it’s a major benefit. Ghostery blocks calls to web servers that it knows are ad or tracking networks. Some would call it an ad-blocker. I call it a drain unclogger. It prevents Web pages from making additional calls out to known bad actors. It prevents a Web site from hijacking your own browser to track you.
If this story from Techdirt is true (and it looks compelling) then I hope lots of people are going to jail.
In other words, Jim Hood and the MPAA were out and out planning a coordinated media attack on Google using the editorial properties that supposedly claim to have editorial independence from the business side. Notice that with the WSJ piece, they flat out admit that the editorial will be based on the ideas that “we” have developed.
From Engadget:
We’ve never heard of Inscape before, but as explained in the S-1 Vizio filed today, it’s based on ACR (automatic content recognition) software licensed from a third party, and viewers can opt-out of participating in it while maintaining other connected features. That’s actually fairly common in modern TVs, and others like LG and Samsung have already rolled out features based on the tech to do things like integrate with TV shows, or display ads based on what the TV is showing.
I think these three consecutive articles describe the current problem pretty well:
The original report from The Register
We completely cracked the keychain service - used to store passwords and other credentials for different Apple apps - and sandbox containers on OS X, and also identified new weaknesses within the inter-app communication mechanisms on OS X and iOS which can be used to steal confidential data from Evernote, Facebook and other high-profile apps.
The latest Synology DSM update out this week adds some critical security fixes but there’s also a nice update to the Cloud Sync application.1 If you are using Amazon’s new Cloud Drive service your Synology can now automatically sync (both directions) with the service.
The Amazon Cloud Drive is free for unlimited storage of photos and videos with a Prime membership. Or, you can sync an unlimited amount of data of any kind for $60 per year.
From the 1Password blog (which is totally worth subscribing to):
It all came to a head when we were on a business trip and in a meeting with a handful of individuals whose opinions we really respect. With our usual gusto we showed off 1Password for Apple Watch and…it fell flat. Out of the five people in the room with us, only one person was genuinely excited about. They say two outta three ain’t bad.
From Lisa Vaas over on NakedSecurity:
That means that everybody who succumbed to the viral spread of the tool gave up metadata that included not only age and gender, the writers said, but also geolocation data
I’m assuming that some sort of authentication was required to get accurate geo location information beyond what is available from an incoming IP address.
I did think this was interesting though:
Not coincidentally, Microsoft was also busy at Build touting its new “Hello” authentication protocol, which supports three types of biometric authentication: fingerprint, iris and yes, facial recognition.
Jeff Atwood takes a look at password length and complexity across several services.
That’s a bit better, but you can’t really feel safe until the 12 character mark even with a full complement of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters.
I like 1Password and it thinks some of these passwords are moderately OK. It’s not until passwords reach about 20 characters, that 1Password thinks these are very strong.
