Tech

Twitch source code, creator earnings exposed in 125GB leak

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) Live video broadcasting service Twitch has been hit by a massive hack that exposed 125GB of the company’s data. In a 4chan thread posted (and removed) Wednesday, an anonymous user posted a torrent file of the multi-gig data dump. The dump contains the company’s source code and details […]

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Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | d3sign) Syniverse, a company that routes hundreds of billions of text messages every year for hundreds of carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, revealed to government regulators that a hacker gained unauthorized access to its databases for five years. Syniverse and carriers have not said whether the hacker had access […]

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Facebook’s outage likely cost the company over $60 million

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) In a major outage yesterday, Facebook, along with its sibling sites, WhatsApp and Instagram, became unreachable for hours. Real-time website status tracker DownDetector received over 14 million reports from users who couldn’t use the social media giant’s apps and services. But beyond the obvious inconvenience to those cut off from these services, […]

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Windows 11: The Ars Technica review

(credit: Microsoft) Microsoft wanted everyone to use Windows 10. Faced with slow adoption of Windows 8 and the stubborn popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft made Windows 10 a free upgrade for anyone using either version—the offer technically expired years ago, but to this day, old Windows 7 and 8 product keys still activate Windows 10 […]

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Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down. Here’s what we know

Enlarge / Today’s global Facebook and Facebook-owned-services outage appears to be the result of a flubbed BGP configuration change pushed by a Facebook engineer this morning. (credit: Sean Gladwell via Getty Images / Jim Salter ) Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11: 30 […]

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Researcher refuses Telegram’s bounty award, discloses auto-delete bug

Enlarge (credit: Joshua Sortino ) Telegram patched another image self-destruction bug in its app earlier this year. This flaw was a different issue from the one reported in 2019 . But the researcher who reported the bug isn’t pleased with Telegram’s months-long turnaround time—and an offered $1, 159 (€1, 000) bounty award in exchange for […]

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Hundreds of scam apps hit over 10 million Android devices

Enlarge / Never put a GriftHorse on your phone. (credit: John Lamparsky | Getty Images) Google has taken increasingly sophisticated steps to keep malicious apps out of Google Play. But a new round of takedowns involving about 200 apps and more than 10 million potential victims shows that this longtime problem remains far from solved—and […]

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California DMV gives Cruise and Waymo OK to charge for rides

Enlarge / A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco. (credit: Cruise) The autonomous vehicle developers Cruise and Waymo both got a little closer to running true driverless robotaxi services in and around San Francisco. In May, both Waymo and Cruise applied to the Ca Department of Motor Vehicles for deployment permits (as opposed to […]

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“Wayforward Machine” provides a glimpse into the future of the web

Enlarge (credit: Sandro Katalina) What could the future of the Internet look like? With the digital world of the 21st century becoming a pit of unwanted ads, tracking, paywalls, unsafe content, and legal threats, “Wayforward Machine” has a dystopian picture in mind. Behind the clickbaity name, Wayforward Machine is an attempt by the Internet Archive […]

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Neiman Marcus data breach impacts 4.6 million customers

Enlarge (credit: Jordan Nix) American luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group (NMG) has just disclosed a major data breach impacting approximately 4.6 million customers. The breach occurred sometime in May 2020 after “an unauthorized party” obtained the personal information of some Neiman Marcus customers from their online accounts. Neiman Marcus is working with law enforcement agencies […]