Apple responds to PRISM by issuing Privacy Statement

Apple has issued a Privacy Statement in the wake of the PRISM revelation which was said to monitor online servers of the top Internet and technology companies for security and surveillance purposes. Apple was one of the companies mentioned in the leak that exposed PRISM to the public. Apple's initial response was that it denied the allegations, stating that it safeguards its user's data on their servers. The company recently issued a more comprehensive privacy statement available after the jump.

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McAfee Safeguards Facebook Photos by blurring with McAfee Social Protection

McAfee today announced the availability of a free public beta of McAfee Social Protection, a new app for Facebook that protects users’ photos from being shared without their permission. Offered as a Facebook app together with a browser plug-in, McAfee Social Protection lets users select which friends have access to their photos and makes pictures appear blurry to everyone else.

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Check if your Yahoo! email account has been hacked

We really should have learned by now. Using web-based email is convenient, easy and free but it is also risky. Yahoo! Mail got hacked a few days ago and the accounts of over 450,000 accounts were compromised. These accounts (and their log in credentials, i.e. passwords, were also published online.

For people who rely on their Yahoo! mail this is terrible news. To check if your account has been

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Microsoft deems Windows Gadgets vulnerable to hacker exploits, issues fix

Gadgets were Microsoft's answer to Apple's Widgets. Mini apps that could run on top of your desktop and give you weather and news updates, flight information, stock tickers, webcam feeds, you name it

Aside from being an unwelcome reminder of the train wreck that was Windows Vista, it seems these Gadgets are extremely dangerous and should be removed completely.

"An attacker who successfully exploited a Gadget vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user," company officials declared in an advisory issued yesterday. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system." To be successful, they added: "An attacker would have to convince a user to install and enable a vulnerable Gadget."

Bad Gadgets! The best way to deal with this is to disable them completely and Microsoft has pulled the Gadget library altogether. In order to fix the situation Microsoft has enabled a quick fix that disables the sidebar and the widgets altogether.