John Lister

A judge says police can't force a suspect to unlock a phone with a fingerprint or other biometric measure, including a suspect's face . It's the latest step in the way privacy laws interact with technological changes. This ruling came from a federal ... judge in a court in California and involved a review of a search warrant request. The case involved two suspects allegedly using Facebook Messenger to trying to extort a victim by threatening to publish an embarrassing video. (Source: gizmodo.com ) The police wanted permission to not only search a location where they believed they would find the ... (view more)

January 2020 marks the end of extended support for Windows 7 from Microsoft. This means Windows 7 users have just one year left to upgrade to either Windows 8 or 10 (or an alternative), before their systems become a major security risk. Support for ... Windows 7 comes in a two-stage process. The first is known as mainstream support, which means the system is under warranty and Microsoft offers free technical support over the phone and its online forums. During this time, Microsoft also continues developing new features, and users can get hot fixes which patch any performance or security problems ... (view more)

Reports which suggest that Samsung has made it impossible to delete Facebook from its smartphones turn out to be slightly overblown. In fact, the app isn't actually on the handsets in the first place. Many media outlets have followed up on a report ... by Bloomberg that was sparked by Internet forum complaints. Bloomberg cited the case of a man who, like many others, was surprised to discover that it wasn't possible to delete the Facebook app on his Samsung Galaxy S8. The app had been there from the day he first used the phone. (Source: bloomberg.com ) The man noted that it was only possible to ... (view more)

Microsoft will soon "reserve" seven gigabytes of hard drive space to make sure Windows 10 works reliably. But the setup may not work as planned. The change is scheduled for the next major twice-yearly update, expected in April, 2019. It's called ... "reserved storage" and involves earmarking part of the PC's hard drive as a place to store "updates, apps, temporary files, and system caches." These files are separate to the permanent ones used for Windows itself. (Source: microsoft.com ) 7GB Figure Could Increase According to Microsoft, the move will have two benefits. The first is to make sure the ... (view more)

Microsoft may have to pay more than a thousand dollars to a user whose PC was upgraded to Windows 10 without permission. The money covers damage after allegedly breaking the computer. The case is in Finland where the Finnish Consumer Disputes Panel ... ruled on a complaint by a user. Local media reports say that companies usually pay up in such cases. (Source: mspoweruser.com ) The claim followed an unwanted update from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 in March 2016. That's when Microsoft was using the Windows Update service to download the Windows 10 files and then automatically install it on a restart ... (view more)

The way Twitter handles 'dormant' accounts has been hijacked to promote terrorist material, according to a report. It's all to do with the way Twitter associates its accounts with email addresses. The report comes from TechCrunch and follows a ... sudden upsurge in posts that don't seem connected to the account in question, but instead appear to come from members or supporters of Islamic State. (Source: techcrunch.com ) The problem appears to stem from the fact that Twitter doesn't delete accounts even if they aren't regularly used and may even have been abandoned by their original users. ... (view more)

Mozilla says a promotional message that appeared on Firefox's "new tab" page was not a paid ad. It says it was instead an experiment. A "new tab" page appears when the user either presses CTRL +T on the keyboard, or clicks the tab with a plus sign ... to start a new browser tab. The message appeared at the bottom of the screen on the new tab page and offered a $20 Amazon gift card to users who clicked on a link and then reserved a hotel room on Booking.com. It's reminiscent of a few years back when the new tab page was made up of several tiles, mostly linking to some of the ... (view more)

20 popular Android apps are sharing user data with Facebook without permission, according to a new report. Privacy International says the data sharing happens even if the user doesn't have a Facebook account. The organization tested 34 apps, each of ... which have been installed at least 10 million times on Android devices. It looked at data that was transmitted through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK). The kit is a set of tools that are designed to help app developers coordinate their apps with the Facebook system. This is more commonly associated with retrieving data from ... (view more)

Google says it removed "millions" of bogus reviews and ratings for apps in a single week. It's tweaked its approach to detecting fake feedback to avoid mistakenly flagging legitimate reviews. The company says it wants to address three problems with ... user reviews in the Google Play store. One is to address reviews that are "genuine" but contain hateful or profane language or aren't relevant to the app in question. The second problem is "fake" ratings that are part of a campaign to manipulate the overall average score rather than being a real verdict by a ... (view more)

Google is to fight back against websites that make it deliberately hard for users to leave their pages. It's tweaking the way the Chrome browser responds to the back button. The back button sounds like something simple that would intuitive take the ... user to the page they were on before navigating to the current page. However, the way it works has proven open to abuse. In reality the back button doesn't reverse the most recent "move" between pages. Instead it tells the browser to visit the most recent page in its history list. To the user it makes no difference, but to the browser it's ... (view more)