It looks like Lenovo has been installing adware onto new consumer computers from the company that activates when taken out of the box for the first time.

The adware, named Superfish, is reportedly installed on a number of Lenovo's consumer laptops out of the box. The software injects third-party ads on Google searches and websites without the user's permission.

Superfish, an adware program that Lenovo admitted in January it included as standard on its consumer PCs, reportedly acts as a man-in-the-middle" so it can access private data for advertising purposes. The adware makes itself an unrestricted root certificate authority, installing a proxy capable of producing spurious SSL certificates whenever a secure connection is requested. SSL certificates are small files, used by banks, social networks, retailers such as Amazon, and many others, to prove to incoming connections that the site is legitimate. By creating its own SSL certificates, Superfish is able to perform its advertising tasks even on secure connections, injecting ads and reading data from pages that should be private.

However, if you have an older Mac that is not supported by OS X or some of the slower G3 machines (like the WallStreet, which officially supports up to OS X 10.2.8 Jaguar), there is still a strong case to be made for running OS 9 - and there are also certain software applications that are only supported in OS 8/9 that may be mission critical for some users.

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

In November 2012 the Mozilla Foundation announced "Project Shumway", an effort to create a "web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format."

Two-and-a-bit years, and a colossal number of Flash bugs later, Shumway has achieved an important milestone by appearing in a Firefox nightly, a step that suggests it's getting closer to inclusion in the browser.

Barack Obama has angered officials in Europe after suggesting that investigations by the European Union into companies like Google and Facebook were "commercially driven." In an interview with Recode, the president claimed that European "service providers who ... can't compete with ours, are essentially trying to set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there." The truth, however, is more nuanced than this.

It's not a secret that I've been working on sandboxed desktop applications recently. In fact, I recently gave a talk at devconf.cz about it. However, up until now I've mainly been focusing on the bundling and deployment aspects of the problem. I've been running applications in their own environment, but having pretty open access to the system.

Now that the basics are working it's time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure. We also need to use kdbus to allow desktop integration that is properly filtered at the kernel level.

LG today has unveiled its latest Android Wear building on the original LG G Watch R and coming up with a more stylish and formal and all-metal "LG Watch Urbane" that's "designed for a sophisticated and cosmopolitan wearer." Available in gold or silver, it's still a standard 22mm model, so you'll be able to swap out straps if you like. LG's slimmed down the bezel, as well as the overall size and thickness. The stainless steel handle also has improve protection against scratches and corrosion.

In 1989, Commodore began an endeavor which was way overdue. The creation of a near Amiga-quality computer that is 8-bit in spirit, compatible with the popular Commodore 64 (through an emulation mode), and containing a built in disk drive. Assuming that the price range could have been set below $499, and assuming that this project had been done back in 1985 instead of 1989-1991, I believe this would have been an big seller for Commodore, and would have breathed life into them which would have extended CBM beyond 1994.

One morning at Apple’s headquarters, a few weeks earlier, Ive recalled how, in 1997, the company seemed to be dying around him. "Every story you'd read, every morning before coming to work, started with the phrase 'The beleaguered computer maker, Apple,' " he said. Ive was then thirty; after five years at the company, he had become its head of industrial design. “There was a Wired cover that had a big Apple logo with a crown of barbed wire, as thorns, and underneath it just said, 'PRAY.' I remember this because of how upsetting it was. Basically saying: either it's going to just go out of business or be bought."

From a high level this works by using FiddlerCore to intercept the traffic going to the Microsoft WPflights server that controls the Insider app and responds with our own custom data. The app accepts registry editing information from the web responses and acts upon that. This allows us to write stuff to select locations in the registry. In the case of the Windows 10 Preview, it appears to only look for your phone's PhoneManufacturerModelName to decide if it should be offered previews. Windows Update also checks this value. Other devices like Samsungs or HTCs may need different settings.

Following a report today that Apple was hiring experts from the automotive industry for a new research lab, The Wall Street Journal adds to the story claiming Apple has several hundred employees working on an Apple-branded electric car:

Apple has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter. They said the project, code-named "Titan," has an initial design of a vehicle that resembles a minivan, one of these people said.

The report adds that CEO Tim Cook approved the project close to a year ago with product design Vice President Steve Zadesky leading the group, lining up with rumors that Apple is working on something that will "give Tesla a run for its money."

Wow. There are quite a few people talking about yesterday's Canalys estimate of 720,000 Android Wear shipments in the last six months of 2014. And most of that talk is ridiculous, with little to no perspective on the market itself. All of the doom and gloom I’m reading about Android Wear may yet come to pass, but to base it on shipment data at this point in time is premature for several reasons.

This spontaneous anti-green-bubble brigade is an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people tweeting from outside its ecosystem.

In 2014, according to Verify Apps data collected by Google and ignoring rooting apps that were intentionally installed by users, fewer than 0.15 percent of Applications installed from outside of Google Play to U.S. English devices were classified as Potentially Harmful Applications. Given the built-in protection provided by Verify Apps and the low frequency of occurrence of installation of PHAs, the potential security benefit of an additional security solution is very small.