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An open source research tool and application that looks into the circumstances in which Android's permission model can be compromised to harm user privacy. Note that we are not talking of exploits here, but normal usage of Android's APIs which can be manipulated in ways that can expose the phone user's privacy. For example. one issue is that apps can monitor the phone's screen state, which of course has legitimate uses. but can also be manipulated into: on i-programmer

Like bread and beer, free software development is not for free: developers need some incentives, let’s say just the money they need for purchasing their bread and beer or for ensuring their family a decent way of life. In order to provide these incentives, the European Commission is launching in January about 15 bug bounties on Free Software projects that the EU institutions rely on. A bug bounty is a prize for people who actively search for security issues. The amount of the bounty depends on the severity of the issue uncovered and the relative importance of the software. This EU initiative is part of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project. "Software Security as a Civil right", Nikos Vaggalis wrote in i-programmer news, quoting the scheme that Julia Reda (MEP) pushes forward. Mission-critical F/OSS applications' audits should be state funded in order to serve the wider good. full article on joinup.ec.europa.eu

A State-sponsored bug bounty comes as refreshing news in that it shows that amongst the bureaucrats there are tech savvypeople who understand the true value of OSS software to society, and as such the impact when its security goes wrong.  This EU initiative is part of the Free and Open Source Software Audit (FOSSA) project, thanks to Julia Reda MEP of the EU Pirate Party, who started the project thinking that enough is enough after severe vulnerabilities were discovered in key infrastructure components like OpenSSL. This prompted her to involve the EU Commission in contributing to the security of the Internet. full article here

Blaming everything on encryption is a recurring event. Whenever something bad happens that the intelligence services have no control over, it's because the encryption is at fault. The latest outcry against it was UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd's take on What's Ups end-to-end encryption arguing that Britain’s intelligence services must have: “ the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp ” adding to the voices supporting the weakening of encryption or the planting of backdoors to popular consumer-level applications. In stark contradiction to the Home Secretary's fruitless political talk, consider the position of ENISA, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, and the centre of network and information security expertise for the member states, the private sector and Europe’s citizens. This was outlined in its  December 2016 essay on its recommendations on cryptography in the context of proposals to reduce its strength...

Show Facebook Computer Vision Tags is a new Chrome and Firefox extension that overlays all images appearing on your Facebook timeline with a neural-network derived classification. This reveals what Facebook's algorithms makes of them. Should we be worried? Before any image reaches your timeline, Facebook's Deep ConvNet deep learning framework scans it in order to recognize the objects that it consists of so that  it classifies it based upon those findings. Subsequently, these classifications make their way into HTML alt tags in order to annotate the image before it appears on the web and your timeline. As an example of how it works, consider the following picture of a dog out on the snow, shot by people inside a café. full article on i-programmer.info

Could Preevio's innovative keyboard be the perfect answer to the privacy concerns arising from the monitoring and tracking of all our daily activities that take place online? It's common fact that keeping a secret online is not something that the average computer user can master, despite the wealth of information on how to go about it as well as the attempts taken in simplifying the procedures. Disabling third party cookies and tracking code, keeping your anonymity and browsing history clean, fooling keyloggers or avoiding drive-by malware downloads are just some of the  pitfalls in abundance that stand between you and the safe carrying out of your online activities such as doing your shopping or sending confidential emails. In fact the situation is much worse than just described, since looking for countermeasures, for example browser addons, antivirus software, anonymous proxies or VPN's, you find yourself tangled between the act of first discovering them,...

Face recognition, once the preserve of the few, the likes of intelligence and security services, is now made available to the masses as well, thanks to OpenFace. Caveat, there are many face detection libraries, such as OpenCV, and applications like Facebook or Picasa, but this is about face recognition, and applications of this kind are not easily found in public. OpenFace changes all that. It is an open source face recognition implementation, written in Python and Torch, and based on deep learning and neural networks . As such, it relies on a number of components that work together as pipelines, each one basing its input on the previous component's output. These are dlib and OpenVC, used for the face detection, alignment and transformation; the Torch machine learning library for implementing deep learning; and nn4 , the neural network model itself. full article on i-programmer