IRS Suspends $7 Million Contract After Equifax Screws Up for the Umpteenth Time

The IRS announced late Thursday night that it has temporarily suspended a $7.25 million contract with Equifax to help verify taxpayers’ identities when creating accounts on the agency’s website, citing “new information available today.”



That “new information” presumably concerned the Equifax webpage which was recently discovered to be redirecting users to download adware. Yesterday, the company took the page down, but denied their systems had been (additionally) compromised, blaming the issue on “a third-party vendor that Equifax uses to collect website performance data.”



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Microsoft’s Windows 10 breaches privacy law, says Dutch DPA | TechCrunch

The Dutch data protection authority has concluded that Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system breaches local privacy law on account of its collection of telemetry metadata. The OS has been available since the end of July 2015.



Personal data being harvested by default by Microsoft can include the URL of every website visited if the Windows 10 user is browsing the web with Microsoft’s Edge browser (and has not opted out of full telemetry), as well as data about usage of all installed apps on their device — including frequency of use; how often apps are active; and the amount of seconds usage of mouse, keyboard, pen or touchscreen.



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Adware Hits Equifax Website | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Equifax.com visitors were offered a fake Flash Player update that installed adware. Equifax blames a third-party performance data vendor, which served malicious content

Credit reporting agency Equifax already earned its place in the history books for a "cybersecurity incident" that impacted more than half of all adult Americans. Names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers were all exposed through the company's website.





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Intel created a superconducting test chip for quantum computing

Quantum computing is the next big technological revolution, and it's coming sooner than you might think. IBM unveiled its own quantum processor this past May, scientists have been experimenting with silicon-laced diamonds (and basic silicon, too) as a quantum computing substrate, Google is already looking at cloud-based solutions and Microsoft is already creating a new coding language for the technology. Now Intel has taken another big step towards a quantum computing reality: the company has created a new superconducting chip using advanced material science and manufacturing techniques, and delivered it to Intel's research partner in the Netherlands, QuTech.



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Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 November Update and Office 2007 | VentureBeat

Microsoft’s support for Windows 10 November Update (version 1511) ends today. The company’s support for Office 2007 ends today as well.

The fact both of these software releases are no longer being supported on the same day isn’t a coincidence. Microsoft releases regular patches on Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month, and we’ve reached that time of the month again.

Microsoft supports its products for a predetermined amount of time

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Windows 10 WARNING - Why you need to upgrade to latest Microsoft OS TODAY | Tech | Life & Style | Express.co.uk

WINDOWS 10 doubters need to upgrade to the newest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, and this is why.

Windows 10 is the most current version of Microsoft's flagship OS after first launching two years ago.

However, despite this it is not the most popular Windows OS out there for PC fans.

According to NetMarketShare, Windows 7 is used by more PC users than Windows 10 - with the eight year-old OS having a market leading 47.21 per cent share.

This is compared to the second most popular PC OS, Windows 10, which has a 29.09 per cent chunk of the operating system market.

While Windows 8.1 and Windows XP have an operating system market share of around five per cent each.

However, for the huge amount of PC owners using an earlier version of Windows, they’ve been given a stark warning as to why they need to upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as possible.

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37,000 Chrome users downloaded a fake Adblock Plus extension

If you use Adblock Plus with Chrome and downloaded the extension pretty recently, you may want to check what you've installed. Apparently, a fake Adblock Plus extension made it through Google's verification process and lived in the official Chrome Web Store alongside the real one. Google has taken down the phony listing after SwiftOnSecurity tweeted about it and put the company on blast, but by then, it has already been up long enough to fool 37,000 people. That's a drop in the bucket for a service that has 10 million users, but it sounds like trouble for those who were unlucky enough to download it.



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