Remember ONAVO VPN? Facebook secretly pays teens to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that spies on them

According to a TechCrunch Report, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards …

Facetime glitch Lets iPhone Users Eavesdrop, Apple disables group call feature

Apple has annnounced a patch to fix an embarrasing facetime snafu after news site 9to5Mac reported on a strange glitch in the company’s iPhones. The issue: It turns out that an iPhone user can call another iPhone user and listen in on that person’s conversations through the device’s microphone. Apple appears to have disabled the …

Just like the US, Huawei and ZTE 5G banned from Japanese govt computers

Japan’s government has issued instructions Monday effectively banning China’s Huawei and ZTE from official contracts, while the country’s top three telecom operators plan to follow suit, Japanese media reported Monday.  As if 5G equipment bans from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand weren’t enough this year, Huawei will end 2018 on an even worse …

GitHub could soon host Java SE’s OpenJDK

OpenJDK, the basis for Oracle’s edition of standard Java (Java SE), soon could be hosted on GitHub, a move that could aid Java developers. Currently, repos for the OpenJDK project are on an Oracle-hosted Mercurial server. But Project Skara, which is an ongoing effort to examine new infrastructure for OpenJDK, could have the repos moving …

Rwanda launches world’s first blockchain project to track tantalum mining

Rwanda’s mining boss announced on Tuesday the world’s first blockchain project to track tantalum from the pit-face to the refinery, part of a push to woo investors seeking a conflict-free source of minerals. “Blockchain is one of the technologies that has demonstrated capabilities of providing a more efficient and effective way of delivering traceability for …

Sundar Pichai says Google is still considering the Dragonfly, censored search engine in China

Google is still considering whether to launch a censored version of its search product in China, CEO Sundar Pichai said Monday. “It’s very early. We don’t know whether we could or would do this in China, but we felt it was important for us to explore,” Pichai said at the Wired25 conference in San Francisco. …

Windows 10 October 2018 Update stopped by Microsoft due to a serious problem

Microsoft has stopped distributing its latest Windows 10 October 2018 Update. The software giant started rolling out the update during the company’s Surface event earlier this week, but some Windows 10 users immediately noticed their documents were being deleted. In a support document updated today, October 6, the Redmond-based OS maker said it took this …

A Simple Tweak turns India’s controversial Biometric Database, Aadhaar, Into a Profitable Counterfeit System

India’s controversial biometric database, Aadhaar, has been once again compromised, according to a three-month investigation launched by HuffPost India. In a report published Tuesday, HuffPost revealed the existence of a malicious patch said to disable critical security features, making it easier not only to create unauthorized Aadhaar numbers but to fool the system’s biometric recognition …

Microsoft could be acquiring GitHub and this is scary news to the coding industry

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. GitHub is a large code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire …