Coursera & edX Expanding

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Coursera & edX, two major providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs), have recently announced the addition of 35 new schools between them. According to TechCrunch, Coursera has added 29 schools, 90 courses, and 4 new languages. edX has added 6 schools.


Prince William Photos Show Passwords

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Publicity photos of Prince William covering his day-to-day work as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot were released with computer passwords visible in the background. In at least one photo, login information is shown printed on a sheet of paper tacked to the wall behind the prince’s head. Sophos’ Naked Security blog has a good write-up with […]


Zombie Warning Issued from Hacked TV Station

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A hacker seems to have broken into a Montana television station’s systems and used that access to issue a fake emergency alert that the dead were rising from their graves. According to this article from ComputerWorld, a standard Emergency Alert System message appeared along the top of viewers’ TV screens. After the warning sounds, a male voice […]


Anonymous Hacks Federal Reserve

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Following another recent attack in which the loosely-organized Anonymous hacking collective released the credentials of over 4000 American bank executives, it is now being reported that Anonymous has published additional documents indicating that they have penetrated much further into the US Federal Reserve’s computer systems than previously revealed. ZDNet reports that the documents, obtained as […]


Emergency Update for Adobe Flash

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In response to two zero-day vulnerabilities, Adobe has released out-of-band emergency updates for their Flash Player. Since last fall, Flash has formally been on a regular update schedule like many large software projects, but InfoWorld reports that this emergency fix constitutes the first patch since the schedule was established. Adobe identifies the update as “critical” […]


Twitter Password Data Hacked

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Twitter has reported that encrypted password data for 250 000 users has been compromised. It appears that the attack was highly sophisticated, but engineers were able to stop it while it was still in progress. Ars Technica reports that the affected users have been notified by email and their passwords automatically reset as a precaution. In […]


WhatsApp Subject of Privacy Investigation

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The popular smartphone instant messaging app WhatsApp has been the subject of a joint Dutch-Canadian probe into breaches of the privacy laws of both countries. Sophos’ Naked Security reports that this is the first time two countries have worked together to investigate privacy breaches. Linked from the article is the Canadian report from the Office […]


US DMCA Unlocking Exemption Expires

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The unlocking exemption from the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), previously maintained by the Librarian of Congress, has been allowed to expire. Unlocking a smartphone in the United States that was purchased after October 28, 2012 is therefore now illegal. For now, unlocking remains permitted in Canada. Digital Trends has a question-and-answer article […]


Belkin Buys Linksys

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Belkin has announced a deal to take over the Linksys brand from Cisco, which has owned Linksys since 2003. Engadget provides a copy of Belkin’s press release along with a brief summary, noting that Belkin intends to continue support for Linksys customers. CNET also mentions that Cisco has dropped some other consumer-oriented products from its […]


Three Charged Over Gozi Virus

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Three men from Russia, Latvia, and Romania have been indicted in the United States for creating and spreading the Gozi virus, designed to steal banking information from victims. The LA Times reports that Nikita Kuzmin, Deniss Calovskis, and Mihai Paunescu are accused of programming the virus, creating various “injects” such as fake bank login pages, […]