Head of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, has announced that human brain implants that can link directly to devices could be a reality within a year. Neuralink The implanted brain-computer interface (BCI) that Mr Musk talked about recently to the California Academy of Sciences audience in San Francisco will be known as a ‘Neuralink’.  Mr Musk believes that the operation to insert such an implant could be low risk and as affordable and non-invasive as laser eye surgery and would only require a short visit to a doctor rather than a hospital stay. Why? The main reason why Mr Musk [...]

Transport for London (TfL) has announced that from March 2020, 4G rollout will begin across the London Underground network, thereby allowing customers, for the first time, to check emails and travel information, use social media, and stream music and video uninterrupted. First Section The first section of the network to get a trial of full mobile connectivity within station platforms, tunnels, ticket halls and corridors from March 2020 will be the eastern half of the Jubilee line (between Westminster and Canning Town).  This will help to remove one of the most high-profile mobile 'not-spots' in the UK, and to fulfil an [...]

Lancaster University, which offers a GCHQ accredited cyber-security course and has its own Cyber Security Research Centre has been hit by what it has described as a "sophisticated and malicious phishing attack”, resulting in the leak of the personal data of new university applicants. 12,000+ Affected? On the University’s website, even though it states that only “a very small number of students” actually had their records and ID documents accessed as a result of the attack, other estimates published by IT news commentators online, and based on statistics compiled by UCAS suggest that possibly over 12,000 people may have been [...]

The issuing of an £80,000 fine by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to London-based estate agency Parliament View Ltd (LPVL) highlights the importance of due diligence when keeping customer data safe. What Happened? Prior to the introduction of GDPR, between March 2015 and February 2017, LPVL left their customer data exposed online after transferring the data via FTP from its server to a partner organisation which also offered a property letting transaction service. LPVL was using Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) but didn’t switch off an Anonymous Authentication Function, thereby giving anyone access to the server and the data without [...]

Following criticism of the Police use of facial recognition technology in terms of privacy, accuracy, bias, and management of the image database, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has called for a temporary halt in the use of the facial recognition system. Database Concerns Some of the key concerns of the committee were that the Police database of custody images is not being correctly edited to remove pictures of unconvicted individuals and that innocent peoples' pictures may be illegally included in facial recognition "watch lists" that are used by police to stop and even arrest suspects. While the [...]

The free online Data Discovery Portal from F-Secure shows you what personal information you have given to tech-giant free services Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Twitter and Apple over the years. If you visit https://data-discovery-portal.f-secure.com/en/ and click on the logo of each of those companies you will be taken straight to the page where you can download a copy of the information that they have collected about you (Apple requires a login).  With Amazon, for example, you can even discover the way to review, listen to, and delete any voice recordings associated with your account. The F-Secure Data Discovery Portal is, therefore, one [...]

Alan Turing, head of the Enigma code-breaking team at Bletchley Park in World War 2, mathematician and father of computer science who was driven to suicide over the treatment of his sexuality is finally being honoured by the featuring his image on the new £50 note. Chosen By Committee The UK Bank of England’s Banknote Character Advisory Committee advises the Governor on the characters that appear on new banknotes. In December, members of the committee were given summary biographies of 989 dead scientists, put forward by more than 225,000 members of the public, from which one would need to be [...]

Scientists from Brown University are reported to have discovered how to store data on metabolic molecules, which are pieces of matter that are even smaller than DNA. Storage In Artificial Metabolomes   The results of the recent research announced on the Brown University website and published in the PLOS ONE journal describe how researchers have discovered a way to store/encode and retrieve kilobyte-scale image files from artificial metabolomes which are arrays of liquid mixtures containing sugars, amino acids and other types of small molecules.  Some of these small molecules are smaller and have greater information density than DNA. According to [...]

Cybersecurity firm CyberMDX has reported the discovery of a security flaw in some Internet-connected GE Healthcare anaesthetic machines which could leave them vulnerable to hacks. Security Flaw The security flaw has been described as the exposure of the configuration of certain terminal server implementations that extend GE Healthcare anaesthesia device serial ports to TCP/IP networks. This could potentially mean that when the devices are connected to the Internet, they could be remotely targeted by hackers who could modify the parameters of the anaesthesia devices. According to CyberMDX, this could mean that hackers could silence device alarms and even adjust anaesthetic [...]

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has complained that it has been unable to compile meaningful statistics and draw meaningful conclusions about email security in its latest report because Microsoft stopped sending Dmarc reports two years ago. What Is Dmarc? Domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (Dmarc) is a protocol, developed by the Trusted Domain Project, to help provide greater assurance on the identity of the sender of a message, and it builds upon the email authentication technologies SPF and DKIM developed over a decade ago and the work on a collaborative system pioneered by PayPal Yahoo! Mail and later Gmail. Dmarc [...]