Displaying items by tag: The New York Times

With the Democrat Joe Biden set to take over as the next US president on 20 January 2021, it is high time for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to make contact with him and discuss the matter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange if Canberra is, as it claims, serious about providing assistance to the man and helping him go free.

One of Australia's main newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, believes that technology companies can open "very small" encryption backdoors to enable government agencies to snoop on encrypted communications.

With the US presidential elections just 35 days away, mentions of Russia in the American mainstream media have, expectedly, reached a feverish pitch, with every Tom, Dick and Harry — not to mention every Sarah, Holly and Nicole — raising the alarm about the possibility of forces from Moscow poking their noses into the election.

With less than six weeks to go for the US presidential election, it is not surprising that the American media is full of tales about Russian hacking, election interference and likely scenarios where some foreign country meddles in the contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

A company that used its engineering expertise to develop a ventilator in a month because it was needed in New York has fallen victim to a ransomware attack, with cyber criminals using the Windows DoppelPaymer ransomware to attack the company's infrastructure.

Globally renowned author Philip Roth, him of Portnoy's Complaint fame, who passed away two years ago, faced an unusual situation eight years ago, in which Wikipedia is refused to correct a mistake in an entry discussing his novel The Human Stain despite his making a request for a correction. The people behind the Internet encyclopedia apparently wanted a secondary source to back up Roth's claims that there was a mistake.

For the second time in as many days, former Washington Post employee Brian Krebs has been caught out for making false accusations against an individual over last week's Twitter scams, with The New York Times pointing out that he had wrongly identified an individual known as PlugWalkJoe as being a pivotal player in the Twtter hack.

More than 17 years have passed since the US invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts, with lies about this, that and the other, being used to justify the violation of a sovereign country.

A well-known security researcher has pointed out a major flaw in an article about hacking published by the Australian Financial Review on 26 June: its over-eagerness in attributing attacks, when that is the toughest part of a threat analyst's job.

Search behemoth Google scooped US$4.7 billion in revenue from news content in 2018 for which it did not pay a single cent, according to a study by the News Media Alliance, a group that counts about 2000 American publishers in its ranks.

The row between information security professionals and The New York Times, over an article it ran recently, claiming that a ransomware attack on local government offices in Baltimore, Maryland, was carried out through the use of a leaked NSA exploit known as EternalBlue, has moved in a different direction, with some of the infosec people themselves coming under attack – from their peers.

A number of information security professionals in the US have sharply criticised The New York Times over an article it ran recently, claiming that a ransomware attack on local government offices in Baltimore, Maryland, was carried out through the use of a leaked NSA exploit known as EternalBlue.

There are many things that one can say about America's premier spy agency, the NSA, but one can never accuse it of not instilling an incredible degree of loyalty among most of its employees, to the extent that those who left its portals decades ago still carry water for it when someone attacks the agency.

Apple appears to be looking to start its own news service, using as the base a magazine app known as Texture which the company purchased in March.

A claim by a prominent cyber security reporter that security firm Mandiant, a subsidiary of multinational security outfit FireEye, hacked into the computers of a Chinese military unit while it was investigating the activities of the group, known as APT1, appears to have alarmed the company which has issued a detailed denial.

A 5% fall in the value of Facebook shares on Monday followed the exposure over the weekend of a leak of data from the social media giant that is claimed to have exposed details about more than 50 million users.

Last year, the three big mainstream US newspapers ran articles that more or less spelt the death knell for Kaspersky Lab's deals with the American public sector. The new year has hardly begun, but The Wall Street Journal has been quick off the mark to recycle old claims against the Russian security firm, apparently relying on the old adage that if mud is thrown, then some will stick.

Under pressure after a series of articles in the US press made various claims about its links to Russian state authorities this week, security firm Kaspersky Lab appears to be reluctant to dismiss the allegations out of hand.

A number of news organisations in the US will make a bid to band together and negotiate collectively with Google and Facebook, provided they can get an anti-trust exemption from Congress to do so.

The New York Times has released its much-hyped Google Glass app into the wild.