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The open source Mozilla project has been offering cash bounties for security bugs for six years now, but often bug finders simply turn down the cash. Between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge, according to Mozilla. “A [...]

A Defcon contest that invites contestants to trick employees at U.S. corporations into revealing not-so-sensitive data has rattled some nerves. Contest organizers have been called by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and seen warnings issued by security groups and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, (FS-ISAC) an industry group that provides information [...]

AT&T says it won’t interfere with a highly anticipated talk on intercepting cell phone calls at the Black Hat conference this week, even though rumors are circulating that it will do just that. Last week, hacker Chris Paget said he plans to demonstrate how to set up what’s essentially a fake cell tower that lets [...]

Apple lost its bid today to criminalize “jailbreaking,” the practice of hacking an iPhone to install unauthorized apps on the smartphone, according to a decision by the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress. The decision, which was announced Monday by Librarian of Congress James Billington, adds jailbreaking to the list of practices that [...]

Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give Web sites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The research puts a quantitative assessment on something that security gurus [...]

Two nonprofit groups with a history of criticizing Facebook’s privacy policies put out splashy messages on Friday to voice their opposition to the social network’s latest changes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook’s privacy policy modifications over the years, and liberal activist group MoveOn.org launched a Facebook group called “Facebook, respect my [...]

Apple’s agreement with iPhone developers contains several “troubling” clauses that paint the company as a “jealous and arbitrary feudal lord,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said yesterday. The nonprofit digital rights advocacy group on Tuesday published a January 2010 version of the iPhone Developer License Agreement obtained from NASA through a Freedom of Information Act [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created an on-line tool that details the wealth of information a Web browser reveals, which can pose privacy concerns when used to profile users. The EFF’s Panopticlick tool takes just a few seconds to pluck out information that a Web browser divulges when visiting a Web site, such as a [...]

Google risks having its online services blocked in China as it defies local authorities by ending censorship of results on its Chinese search engine, analysts said. Google has long removed sensitive search results from its Chinese search engine at Google.cn, but said Tuesday it plans to end the censorship and may ultimately shut down the [...]