Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising

October 23, 2026

Using Google’s products and services has always been fundamentally precarious—doing so gives the world’s largest advertising company a lot of juicy personal data. Google has long said it won’t use the sensitive data from products like Gmail, Drive, and Photos for ad personalization, but a change to the company’s privacy policy appears to dismantle that firewall. On October 16, Google issued an update to its privacy policy, spotted by Android…

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Spotify ramps up policy enforcement on family plans

October 23, 2026

As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify appears to be stepping up enforcement of existing policies regarding Family and Duo subscription plans by requiring users to scan a QR code in person on the plan manager’s device in order to maintain access to it. Those who fail to scan the address verification QR code within seven days will see their account demoted to the free tier and be barred from…

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Disgraced eMudhra drops out of TLS business after using cert private key of 4

eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business. V. Srinivasan, chairman of India-based eMudhra Limited, cited increasing costs and complexities of compliance requirements—paired with the business generating just 1 percent of its revenue. He also said that the emergence of organizations…

October 22, 2026
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Samsung all but confirms iPhone Duo is goosing Galaxy Z8 sales

Android-powered foldable phones have been available for years, but most people never paid attention to them. As predicted, that could be changing now that Apple has entered the folding phone market with the iPhone Duo. Analysts have speculated that Samsung’s Z8 foldables were seeing a boost from the iPhone announcement, and now Samsung has seemingly confirmed that. In a new blog post, Samsung UK crows that the company’s 2026 foldable…

October 22, 2026
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333 Tor exit nodes hijacked to intercept SSH traffic and retrieve plaintext email

Unknown hackers hijacked more than 300 Tor exit nodes and reconfigured them to favor unencrypted email traffic and redirect SSH connections through servers they controlled, a researcher reported Tuesday. The hijacking began in late August, when, according to Tor volunteers, the attacker used a valid password that had been reused to gain access to a Tor management server. The attacker then installed Ebury, a backdoor written for Linux that was…

October 22, 2026
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Enterprises keep buying software upgrades that IT thinks will make things worse

Enterprise-sized businesses spend, on average, 28 percent of their software budgets on unwanted upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes. Often, those firms’ IT heads think those changes are detrimental. Those results are according to a survey of 2,018 chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers at companies with at least 10,000 employees that Origina commissioned for its report, “The Software Tax.” About half of the respondents (1,011) are from the US,…

October 21, 2026
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Does opting out of smart TV tracking work? Research finds “suspicious” traffic.

Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio, and Roku continue sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opt out of tracking in the devices’ settings, according to research published on Monday. The paper from Northeastern University researchers points to potential privacy violations from some of the biggest TV brands. ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from smart TVs and sends the data to remote servers,…

October 21, 2026
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PHP warns it plans to release 2 emergency patches imminently

Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10. Waiting for PHP2Shell “All PHP users are encouraged to…

October 21, 2026
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JustWatch, which tackles streaming fragmentation, launches own streaming service

Since launching in 2015, JustWatch has helped people navigate the growing number of streaming services by providing a guide on where to find movies they want to stream. Now JustWatch has its own streaming service and wants people to subscribe. Launched today, JustWatch TV offers some movies available for free with ads that aren’t free on any other streaming service, including Green Room (2015), Locke (2013), and Sing Sing (2023)….

October 20, 2026
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OpenBSD 8.0 arrives with security record still intact

OpenBSD 8.0 is here, marking the project’s 61st release and continuing its schedule of semiannual releases dating back to 1996. What started more than 30 years ago as a fork of NetBSD has grown into one of the most security-conscious operating systems in active development. In a post to the project’s announcements mailing list, OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt highlights a host of improvements included with the latest version and…

October 20, 2026
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