data

A hack of nearly 800,000 accounts on an adult entertainment site could be among the most embarrassing ever. The breach at "Brazzers" may expose some of the very personal tastes of the site's users. The stolen data doesn't come from the main Brazzers ... site, which sells access to videos the company has made itself. Instead, it comes from the site's discussion forum, where users can discuss the scenes on the site and talk about what they'd like to see in future videos. Passwords Stored Without Encryption The data is said to include 790,724 email addresses (not including ... (view more)

Users of the Opera browser's sync tools have been warned to change their passwords for every website. The organization behind Opera says the warning is with "an abundance of caution." The warning only covers people who use Opera's system for ... synchronizing bookmarks, passwords and other information so that they can access the feature on any computer. This covers around 1.7 million people among the 350 million who use the browser. Writing on a company blog, Opera's Tarquin Wilton-Jones said an attack on the system had been detected and, although quickly blocked, was ... (view more)

A consumer rights group has slammed Windows 10's privacy settings. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says Microsoft is unfairly linking privacy to security in its update system. The attack comes in a lengthy blog post by the EFF's Amul Kalia, ... published just after Microsoft released its Windows 10 Anniversary Update. It starts by recapping the numerous complaints about Microsoft using unfair measures to try to maximize the number of people upgrading to the system, including closing an on-screen window as consent for the installation. (Source: eff.org ) Data Transfer Is " ... (view more)

AT&T is dropping overage charges for mobile data plans. Instead of charging extra fees, it will slow down the connections of users who exceed their monthly data allowance. The move is accompanied by a general price rise, though it will only ... affect new customers or those existing customers who choose to change plans. The change makes AT&T the last of the three biggest carriers to drop mandatory fees for customers who go over their monthly data cap, an issue that became even more important as truly unlimited data plans were phased out across the industry. T-Mobile dropped overage ... (view more)

Google has reported a dramatic increase in the number of requests from government agencies for information about web users. The figures show a significant global variation in how many of those requests proved justifiable. The numbers come in the ... latest installment of Google's Transparency Report in which, every six months, it gives the figures for the number of government requests for data related to user activity. The newly published figures cover the second half of 2015, as there's a lengthy delay in compiling the numbers. During that period, the total number of requests was 40,677 ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader William O. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have a Samsung smartphone with a 16 GB SD card, which I use to store all my pictures and videos. I have taken the SD card out of my smartphone and placed it into an SD card reader, so I can copy ... files over to my computer. I get about 13% through the transfer and then I get an error message that says: 'Error 0x8007045D: the request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.' I then have the option to skip the current file; when I click that, the transfer resumes, but then it says it will take over 1 day to complete the transfer ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Pat S. writes: " Dear Dennis, I am running Windows 7 and I'm trying to shrink my C drive, but Windows won't let me shrink it to the desired size - even though I have tons of free space. I have a 500 GB drive and I'm trying to ... shrink the volume to 250 GB. Whenever I try to shrink the C drive it only lets me shrink 70GB. Can you help? " My response: I have had this problem many times in the past - especially when I am trying to shrink the C drive for my clients so that I can split the drive in half and make a disk image backup onto the second partition. The reason why you can ... (view more)

A series of massive but dated breaches of high-profile sites is yet another reminder of the dangers of poor password security. While the sites in question are taking preventative measures, experts warn that hackers could use the stolen details to ... access other sites. In the past few weeks, hackers have offered up massive hauls of stolen login details from four major sites. They include details of 360 million accounts from MySpace and 65 million accounts from Tumblr, both lists appearing to date from 2013. Questions Posed For Sites And Users This follows 164 million account details from ... (view more)

Stolen usernames and passwords from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's webmail services are reportedly being traded by Russian criminals. They are said to be among a batch of 272.3 million accounts, though most are from a popular Russian service. The ... trade has been revealed by Hold Security in a discussion with Reuters. Hold's founder says his staff uncovered the batch when trawling an online forum used by hackers. The person who provided the information claimed he had a total of 1.17 billion records, but agreed to hand over a portion of them. It seems that while many criminals buy and ... (view more)

Google has been granted access to millions of patient medical records in the United Kingdom. It plans to use it to develop a way to spot patients at risk of developing serious kidney conditions. Although officials say personally identifying details ... will remain encrypted, the move has raised controversy with questions about the scope of the data involved. The records cover every patient who had dealings in the past five years with one of three specific hospitals in London overseen by the same NHS Trust. That's the local organizational body that delivers government-funded healthcare. ' ... (view more)