Google announced its intention to ban advertisements related to risky financial products, including any that promote cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs), beginning this June. This is part of an update to Google’s policy and seems to closely resemble a similar ban announced by Facebook in January. However, reports indicate that ad makers have found workarounds within Facebook (like typing “Bitc0in” with a zero instead of “Bitcoin”). Google plans to anticipate these sorts of workarounds in advance of the ban.

Continue reading Google to Ban Cryptocurrency and ICO Ads Beginning in June

Several high-profile technology companies, most notably Hewlett-Packard, have been hard at work trying to reinvent the hard drive. But it looks like Intel will be first to market with its new Optane drives. Although a current prototype of Intel’s Optane drives only functions seven times the speed of a top-end flash disk drive, it could be much faster by the time it is released in 2016. And the potential is great: Optane drives are said to operate as much as 1,000 times faster than today’s memory technology. Continue reading Intel to Bring Superfast Optane Hard Drives to Market in 2016

A privilege-escalation bug was identified in the latest version of Apple’s OS X this week by security researcher Stefan Esser. The vulnerability reportedly provides hackers with root user privileges that make it possible to infect Macs with rootkits and other malware. This type of bug is commonly used to bypass security protections created for applications and operating systems. According to Esser, the vulnerability can be found in OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 and the beta version of 10.10.5, but not in the recent beta version of El Capitan 10.11. Continue reading Security Researcher Reports Privilege-Escalation Bug in OS X

CEA gathered a panel of four significant leaders at CES to discuss the current state of the Internet of Things. Panelists from Cisco, Verizon, the city of Los Angeles, and the Zigbee Alliance all see momentum building for a connected world; however, at this still early stage of adoption the most significant and meaningful inroads are happening on a macro scale. As Cisco’s John Chambers noted during a CES keynote panel, the Internet of Everything becomes most meaningful when there is broad participation. Continue reading CES Panel: Is the Internet of Things Poised to Make History?

WhatsApp, currently one of the most popular messaging services in the world, wants to make it nearly impossible for anyone to snoop on its users. The company announced that it is taking privacy a step further by implementing end-to-end encryption for its 600 million users. This is considered to be one of the largest deployments of this type of encryption, which scrambles messages so that even the company doesn’t have access to its users’ unique cryptographic keys. Continue reading WhatsApp Messaging Service Launches Encryption Protection