An anonymous reader quotes Mike Melanson’s “This Week in Programming” column: WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine and this week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) dubbed it an official web standard and the fourth language for the Web that allows code to run in the browser, joining HTML, CSS and JavaScript… With this week’s news,…
Tag: Safari
Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market
Two years ago, Apple launched an aggressive battle against ads that track users across the web. Today executives in the online publishing and advertising industries say that effort has been stunningly effective — posing a problem for advertisers looking to reach affluent consumers. The Information reports: Since Apple introduced what it calls its Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in September 2017, and…
Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Safari Cracked In China’s White-Hat Hacker Competition
An anonymous reader quotes the International Business Times: At the recent Tianfu cup held in Chengdu, China, Chinese China’s top white-hat hackers have converged to test zero-days against top software available in the market today. During the first day of the event, Chinese security researchers were able to break into major browsers such as Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Google Chrome. Since…
Why Firefox Fights for the Future of the Web
“Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web,” writes the Guardian, citing Mozilla Project co-founder Mitchell Baker: Baker’s pitch is that only Mozilla is motivated, first and foremost, to make using the web a pleasurable experience. Google’s main priority is to funnel user data into the enormous advertising engine…
iPadOS Discoverability Trouble
Apple this year differentiated the iPad by creating a superset of iOS that only works on the company’s tablet, the cleanly named iPadOS. In theory, iPadOS fixes the many shortcomings of previous iOS versions that tried to serve two masters, the iPad and the iPhone. But some fundamental issues remain. From a column: Apple’s iPadOS page is adamant that a world…
Germany’s Cybersecurity Agency Recommends Firefox As Most Secure Browser
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany’s cyber-security agency — the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik — BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft…
Apple Responds To Reports That It is Sharing Data With Tencent
Over the weekend, reports emerged that claimed that Apple was sending users’ browsing details to Tencent to run it against Chinese company’s safe browsing feature. In a statement on Monday, an Apple spokesperson has offered a clarification: Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in…
Apple’s Safari Browser Is Sending Some Users’ IP Addresses To China’s Tencent
“Apple, which often positions itself as a champion of privacy and human rights, is sending some IP addresses from users of its Safari browser on iOS to Chinese conglomerate Tencent — a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” reports the Reclaim the Net blog: Apple admits that it sends some user IP addresses to Tencent in the “About…
Apple Neutered Ad Blockers In Safari, But Unlike Chrome, Users Didn’t Say a Thing
sharkbiter shares a report from ZDNet: Over the course of the last year and a half, Apple has effectively neutered ad blockers in Safari, something that Google has been heavily criticized all this year. But unlike Google, Apple never received any flak, and came out of the whole process with a reputation of caring about users’ privacy, rather than attempting to…
EFF Warns: ‘Don’t Play in Google’s Privacy Sandbox’
An EFF analysis looks at the problems with some of Google’s new “Privacy Sandbox” proposals, a few of which it calls “downright dangerous”: Perhaps the most fleshed-out proposal in the Sandbox is the conversion measurement API. This is trying to tackle a problem as old as online ads: how can you know whether the people clicking on an ad ultimately buy…