Microsoft just won a huge military contract worth $480 million to bring 100,000 customized AR (Augmented Reality) headsets, based on their HoloLens technology, to the US Army.
The army's plan is to integrate the headsets with their STES (Synthetic Training Environment Squad) system, which allows US forces to conduct hyper-realistic mock battles as practice before a live firefight, with an emphasis on improving close-combat capabilities, especially in subterranean and urban environments.
Bob Diachenko, the Director of Cyber Risk Research for Hacken, recently made a disturbing discovery. He found an ElasticSearch server open and vulnerable on the internet, without so much as a password to protect it.
Unfortunately, the server was leaking a staggering 73GB of data and had a number of databases cached inside the server's memory.
Do you have an account on USPS.com? If so, you're not alone. Tens of millions of Americans use it daily for a variety of purposes. Unfortunately, if you do have an account, it may have been compromised.
Recently, the USPS announced the discovery of a critical security vulnerability that exposed the account information of more than sixty million customers to literally anyone with a USPS.com account.
There's trouble brewing at Amazon, although details are sketchy about how much trouble there might be.
Recently, the company sent the following message to some of its customers:
"Hello, We're contacting you to let you know that our website inadvertently disclosed your email address due to a technical error.
The mobile payment platform Venmo (owned by Paypal) has a fraud problem. That's not exactly new. The company has struggled with fraud issues for a long time, but recently, things have gotten out of control. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company reported losses of $40 million in just the first three months of 2018, and there's no end to the red ink in sight.
Bad news for computer users everywhere. Researchers at the University of California in Riverside have discovered that GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are vulnerable to side-channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which have been plaguing Intel CPU's for the better part of a year.
In the world of data security, cryptocurrency mining software is often overlooked or discounted as a threat because it doesn't do serious harm to the infected system.
It bleeds off computing resources, putting them to work for the miners who control the software, working for them to solve complex cryptographic puzzles which generate revenue for the hackers.
Remember earlier this year when net neutrality got killed off and everybody said it wouldn't matter? Well, it seems it might have mattered after all.
Recently, three US Senators sent letters of inquiry to four wireless carriers. They are investigating allegations that the carriers have been throttling (slowing down) video services or Skype video calls.
As you probably heard, Microsoft's October update of Windows 10 was a bit of a disaster. Sure, it updated your OS, but unfortunately for many users, it also deleted a variety of files. This prompted outrage from the company's massive user base.
Things would have been bad enough if the calamitous October update had been an isolated mis-step.
The wheels of government bureaucracy turn slowly, but they do turn. Currently, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is slowly pressing forward with an expansion of the available spectrum, on a quest to increase bandwidth for connected devices.
