Trump’s executive order won’t destroy Privacy Shield, says EU

Fears that U.S. President Trump has destroyed the Privacy Shield Transatlantic data transfer agreement with one of the many executive orders he has signed this week are unfounded, the European Commission said Friday.

On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order entitled "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the U.S.," one of several he has issued since taking office on Jan. 20. Such executive orders are used by U.S presidents to manage the operations of the federal government.

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First person perspective Resident Evil 'is the right move'

The people behind the new Resident Evil game insist switching to a first person perspective was "the right thing to do".

How to grow a huge tech firm

CEO Secrets asks four founders what it's like to turn a small company into a huge one.

Yahoo sale delayed following security breaches

Internet search company Yahoo says the sale to Verizon will go ahead later than planned.

Australia plans biometric border control

Australia begins to search for biometrics to automate passport control at its airports.

US libraries hit by ransomware attack

Hackers gain control of the servers of 17 Missouri libraries, demanding ransoms to restore data.

Pokemon Go finally reaches South Korea

Pokemon Go has finally been launched in South Korea, months after the rest of the world got the game.

Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

Massive collections of fake accounts are lying dormant on Twitter, suggests research.

Pompeo sworn in as CIA chief amid opposition from surveillance critics

Mike Pompeo was sworn in late Monday by U.S. Vice President Michael Pence as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, amid protests from surveillance critics who worry about his conflicting views on a number of key issues.

The oath of office was administered to him after the Senate voted in favor of his confirmation in a 66-32 vote.

Critics of Pompeo, a Republican representative from Kansas, are concerned that he may weigh in with the government on a rollback of many privacy reforms, including restrictions on the collection of bulk telephone metadata from Americans by the National Security Agency under the USA Freedom Act. There are also concerns that the new director may try to introduce curbs on the use of encryption and bring in measures to monitor the social media accounts of people.

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Court denies U.S. government appeal in Microsoft's overseas email case

A U.S. appeals court will not reconsider its groundbreaking decision denying Department of Justice efforts to force Microsoft to turn over customer emails stored outside the country.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a 4-4 decision Tuesday, declined to rehear its July decision that denied the DOJ access to the email of a drug trafficking suspect stored on a Microsoft server in Ireland. Microsoft has been fighting DOJ requests for the email since 2013.

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GPG Suite updated for secure email on OSX Sierra

GPG Suite, an application that brings encrypted email to Mac OS, is now available in public beta for Sierra.

The software package had been compatible up to El Capitan but wasn't working with Sierra, which was released by Apple in September. The new software can now be downloaded from the GPG Tools website.

It adds support for the OpenPGP encryption standard, which is an open-source version of the PGP encryption package first developed in 1991.

Four software apps are contained in the package:

-- GPG Mail is a plugin for Apple Mail that allows users to encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify mails sent using OpenPGP.

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Indian privacy case against WhatsApp gains momentum

A privacy lawsuit against WhatsApp in India over its new data sharing policy has got momentum with the country’s top court seeking responses from Facebook, WhatsApp and the federal government.

The privacy policy of WhatsApp at launch in 2010 did not allow sharing of user data with any other party, and after Facebook announced its acquisition of the messaging app in 2014, it was “publicly announced and acknowledged” by WhatsApp that the privacy policy would not change, according to the petition filed by Indian users of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp sparked off a furore last year when it said it would be sharing some account information of users with Facebook and its companies, including the mobile phone numbers they verified when they registered with WhatsApp. The sharing of information will enable users to see better friend suggestions and more relevant ads on Facebook, it added.

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Terrorists are winning the digital arms race, experts say

Terrorist groups are embracing a huge number of digital tools to recruit members and plan attacks, putting them a step ahead of governments trying to combat them, a group of counterterrorism experts said.

Twitter removed about 250,000 accounts connected with ISIS in one year, but the terrorist group uses 90 other social media platforms, Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol said Tuesday. Terrorist groups have begun to live stream their attacks, and they are using the internet to launch “innovative crowdfunding” campaigns, he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland.

“The technology is advanced,” Wainwright added. “They know what to do, and they know how to use it.”

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CES 2017: Highlights from the technology show

BBC Click's Lara Lewington looks at the latest technology showcased at CES 2017.

Daz Black, Ben Phillips and Tish Simmonds pay tribute as Vine closes

The six-second clip-sharing service is shutting down but it's still not clear exactly why.

Google Play and iOS apps demand surges in India and China

India set a new record for Google Play downloads in 2016, while demand for iOS software soared in China, a study says.

Ambulances to jam car radios in Sweden

Ambulances in Stockholm are to test a system that stops radio in cars to tell drivers that an emergency vehicle is approaching.

Squirrel 'threat' to critical infrastructure

It's squirrels, not cyber-attacks, that pose the real threat to critical infrastructure systems, says one security expert.

Porn videos streamed 'via YouTube loophole'

Adult video websites appear to be exploiting a YouTube loophole to host explicit material on the platform.

Apple App Store prices rise in UK, India and Turkey

Apple is raising prices in its UK App Store by 25% to take account of sterling's drop versus the dollar.

Qualcomm sued in US over claims of unfair phone chip patent deals

The firm is accused by US antitrust regulator of unfair practices in the way it licenses technology.

Deliveroo to add 300 UK tech jobs in new London office

The food delivery firm will hire a third more staff when it opens its new London HQ in summer 2017.

GoDaddy revokes nearly 9,000 SSL certificates issued without proper validation

GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars and certificate authorities, revoked almost 9,000 SSL certificates this week after it learned that its domain validation system has had a serious bug for the past five months.

The bug was the result of a routine code change made on July 29 to the system used to validate domain ownership before a certificate is issued. As a result, the system might have validated some domains when it shouldn't have, opening the possibility of abuse.

Industry rules call for certificate authorities to check if the person requesting a certificate for a domain actually has control over that domain. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by asking the applicant to make an agreed-upon change to the website using that domain.

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Trump's CIA nominee wants a massive surveillance database of Americans

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency wants to create a massive surveillance database by resurrecting a U.S. telephone records collection program, but some senators questioned what limits he would accept.

CIA nominee Mike Pompeo, currently a Republican representative from Kansas, has called on Congress to reverse its mid-2015 decision to rein in the phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency, a sister agency to the CIA that focuses on signals intelligence.

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EFF warily applauds the Windows 10 Creators Update's privacy concessions

Recent concessions by Microsoft in the data its Windows 10 “phones home” to company servers won cautious praise from one critic this week.

“The changes were very welcome from our perspective,” said Maul Kalia, legal intake coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in an interview Wednesday. “They were definitely needed.”

Kalia was referring to the announcement Tuesday that Microsoft would soon reduce the amount of diagnostic data collected from Windows 10 under an optional setting, and immediately launch an online portal where customers can lock in privacy settings.

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Missing the point

China is close to producing a fully domestically-made ballpoint pen after a long struggle.

Russia taunts British PM with cartoon frog tweet

The Russian embassy in London sent a picture of Pepe the frog to British PM Theresa May.

Work on Xbox One and Windows 10 game Scalebound is cancelled by Microsoft

Production of the highly-anticipated exclusive game is scrapped after reported development problems.

Lutz Pathfinder driverless cars tested in Milton Keynes

The public react to the first view of a driverless car in Milton Keynes.

'Smart motorway' offenders could be offered retraining

Drivers caught offending on "smart motorways" in England could be offered re-education courses.

Marissa Mayer not on new Yahoo holding group board

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer will not be on the board of the new company that emerges from the Verizon deal.

Snapchat sets up international office in London

Snap, the firm behind Snapchat, says it has set up its international hub in London.

Uber to share data to help ease city congestion

Uber is launching a website that will share data about how its cars move around cities

Facebook 'to launch ads within videos'

Facebook is to test "mid-roll" video advertising - in which ads are played after a video has already started - the BBC understands.

Uber offers cities ‘anonymized’ ride data

Uber Technologies is offering data from trips on its ride-hailing platform to city officials, planners and policymakers to help them better understand traffic patterns and improve investments in infrastructure.

The move will likely win Uber goodwill with city officials, even as the company has resisted other bids for data by some cities. New York, for example, wants to collect trip records from vehicles on hire to monitor adherence to driver fatigue regulations, which Uber has rejected citing individual privacy issues.

Some of the data collected by Uber over 2 billion trips across 450 cities will be provided under the new program, called Movement. However, the data will be “anonymized and aggregated into the same types of geographic zones that transportation planners use to evaluate which parts of cities need expanded infrastructure, like Census Tracts and Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs),” Jordan Gilbertson, Uber’s product manager and Andrew Salzberg, head of transportation policy, wrote in a blog post Sunday.

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Privacy legislation reintroduced for mail older than 180 days

A bill has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require that law enforcement agencies get a warrant before they poke around users’ emails and other communications in the cloud that are older than 180 days.

The Email Privacy Act, reintroduced on Monday, aims to fix a loophole in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allowed the government to search without warrant email and other electronic communications older than 180 days, stored on servers of third-party service providers such as Google and Yahoo.

“Thanks to the wording in a more than 30-year-old law, the papers in your desk are better protected than the emails in your inbox,” digital rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post Monday.

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Cyber-bully checker

What should you do if you find out your child has been bullying others online?

Tech's bad bromance

Can a new system of artificial intelligence mean more women are recruited into IT?

Mini adventure

Renting a car from neighbours makes environmental and economic sense. Can tech take it mainstream?

Meet Moley - the robotic kitchen

BBC Click's Lara Lewington looks at a prototype robotic kitchen.

Dragons' Den winner has £100,000 funding withdrawn

A firm which thought it had secured a £100,000 investment on the BBC's Dragons' Den TV show has the funding pulled by entrepreneur Peter Jones.

France thwarts 24,000 cyber-attacks against defence targets

France warns hackers are attacking its defence systems and this year's election could be a target.

CES 2017: Strap turns your finger into a phone

BBC Click's Marc Cieslak reports on a device that allows one of your fingers to make phone calls.

CES 2017: VR flight kit turns slobs into Superman

A virtual reality contraption aims to give gamers a full-body workout while simulating the sensation of flying.

Chrome bug triggered errors on websites using Symantec SSL certificates

If you've encountered errors over the past month when trying to access HTTPS-enabled websites on your computer or Android phone, it might have been due to a bug in Chrome.

The bug affected the validation for some SSL certificates issued by Symantec, one of the world's largest certificate authorities, as well as by GeoTrust and Thawte, two CAs that Symantec also controls.

The bug was introduced in Chrome version 53, but also affected the Android WebView component that Android apps use to display Web content, said Rick Andrews, senior technical director at Symantec in a blog post Friday.

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Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube will share terror content info

Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google's YouTube have agreed to share with one another identifying digital information of violent terror content that they find on their platforms.

When they remove "violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images" from their platforms, the companies will include in a shared industry database the hashes, or unique digital fingerprints, of the content.

Other participants can use the shared hashes to help identify matching content on their hosted consumer platforms, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove the content when appropriate, according to a statement by the companies on Monday.

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Privacy groups urge investigation of 'internet of toys'

Privacy groups in the U.S. and seven European countries will ask consumer protection agencies to investigate the maker of two internet-connected toys for violations of laws designed to protect children's privacy.

The complaints are scheduled to be filed Tuesday against Genesis Toys, maker of the My Friend Cayla and I-Que Intelligence Robot toys, and Nuance Communications, the provider of voice-recognition software for the products.

The complaints, to be filed in the U.S., France, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway, may be only the beginning of actions taken by consumer and privacy groups targeting a lucrative slice of the internet of things market, the so-called internet of toys.

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Fake news cash-in

Many of the fake news websites that sprang up during the US election campaign have been traced to a small city in Macedonia, where teenagers are pumping out sensationalist stories to earn cash from advertising.

Chatbot sexism

Why do so many artificially intelligent chatbots have female names and avatars?

Shooting stars from space for 2020 Olympics

Project Sky Canvas hopes to paint the sky with colour above the Olympics using ready-made shooting stars.

The AI-generated Christmas karaoke song and other news

BBC Click's Lara Lewington looks at some of the best of the week's technology news.