Jamaica’s JamCOVID Pulled Offline After Third Security Lapse Exposed Travelers’ Data

Jamaica’s JamCOVID app and website were taken offline late on Thursday following a third security lapse, which exposed quarantine orders on more than half a million travelers to the island. From a report: JamCOVID was set up last year to help the government process travelers arriving on the island. Quarantine orders are issued by the Jamaican Ministry of Health and instruct…

Google’s Password Checkup Feature Coming To Android

Android users can now take advantage of the Password Checkup feature that Google first introduced in its Chrome web browser in late 2019, the OS maker announced today. From a report: On Android, the Password Checkup feature is now part of the “Autofill with Google” mechanism, which the OS uses to select text from a cache and fill in forms. The…

Firefox’s Total Cookie Protection Aims To Stop Tracking Between Multiple Sites

As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. From a report: The “Total Cookie Protection” feature is included in the web browser’s latest release — alongside multiple picture-in-picture views — and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you…

Epic’s New MetaHuman Tool Lets You Craft Realistic Faces Inside a Browser

Epic Games has announced a new, browser-based software tool powered by its Unreal Engine called the MetaHuman Creator that can craft highly realistic human faces and help power more realistic body movements and facial animations. The Verge reports: Epic says the MetaHuman Creator can be used in conjunction with modern motion capture and animation techniques for creating lifelike movements and human…

Google Explores Alternative To Apple’s New Anti-Tracking Feature

Google is exploring an alternative to Apple’s new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the internet industry is slowly embracing user privacy, Bloomberg is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less…

Google Chrome Sync Feature Can Be Abused For C&C and Data Exfiltration

Threat actors have discovered they can abuse the Google Chrome sync feature to send commands to infected browsers and steal data from infected systems, bypassing traditional firewalls and other network defenses. From a report: For non-Chrome users, Chrome sync is a feature of the Chrome web browser that stores copies of a user’s Chrome bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and browser and…

To Re-Enable Flash Support, South Africa’s Tax Agency Released Its Own Web Browser

“The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser,” reports ZDNet, “for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms.” To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe…

Opera Now Has a Game Engine To Go With Its Gamer-Focused Browser

Opera has acquired YoYo Games, a British game development platform best known for GameMaker Studio 2, and is launching its Opera Gaming division. Engadget reports: Opera has bought the company for a simple reason: Opera GX. The gamer-focused web browser was launched in early access back in June 2019. Its headline feature is a slide-out control panel that lets you limit…

Google Ad Changes Face UK Probe in First Shot at Big Tech

Google is the U.K.’s first big post-Brexit antitrust target as regulators opened a probe into the company’s planned changes to curb publishers’ collection of advertising data. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said it’s investigating Google’s so-called privacy sandbox changes that could “undermine the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market…

‘Ubuntu Web Remix’ Distro Offers Firefox-Based Chrome OS Alternative

Rudra Saraswat is the creator of the Ubuntu Unity distro (which uses the Unity interface in place of Ubuntu’s GNOME shell). But this week they released Ubuntu Web Remix, “a privacy-focused, open source alternative to Google Chrome OS/Chromium OS” using Firefox instead of Google Chrome/Chromium. Liliputing reports: If the name didn’t give it away, this operating system is based on Ubuntu,…