Are you, or is someone you know a driver for Uber? Have you used the rideshare service to get from Point A to Point B? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then odds are good that at least some of your information has been shared with a variety of government agencies.

When you surf the web, do you use a VPN (Virtual Private Network)? More than half a billion of the web’s users do, which is about a quarter of the web’s population, so you may be one of them. If you’re not, you should consider it, because it makes your browsing experience safer and more secure.

Google takes security more seriously than most companies, and it’s no wonder, given that the company’s Android Operating System is currently in use by more than 1.4 billion users worldwide. The latest version of Android (version 6.0, dubbed Marshmallow) includes such things as support for fingerprint scanners, a built-in patch level checker, verified boot functionality, full disk encryption and more granular app permissions, all of which are regarded as huge steps forward where security is concerned.

You may not have heard much about USB-C cables, but you will. They are the future of USB connectivity, and will ultimately replace both USB-A and USB-B cables, which are the ones you’re likely using right now to connect your various devices.

A few months ago, Google Engineer Brian Leung had a nasty encounter with a sub-standard USB-C cable that fried his Chromebook.

If you have a Windows-based PC (and you probably do), then you’ve almost certainly had the dubious honor of seeing the dreaded BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death. Unfortunately, since the first appearance of that screen, it has had a history of being less than helpful.

Remember the good old days, when all Adware did was make your web browsing experience inconvenient by bombarding you with annoying popups? Sadly, those days appear to be over. There’s a new generation of Adware that goes far, far beyond that.

Recently, a particularly nasty variant called VLMiner was found.

So, it turns out that the “Badlock” Samba exploit wasn’t quite as bad as it was originally cracked up to be. If you haven’t heard of Badlock, you’re not alone. It made the rounds in Internet security circles, but wasn’t widely publicized because it is a fairly specific, narrow threat, unlike some of the other broad spectrum security flaws we’ve seen in recent months.

If your company has one or more of millions of PCs still running Windows XP, your options are collapsing around you rather quickly, making it more important than ever to finally get around to upgrading to a more current OS.

Microsoft formally ended all support for XP last year, and now Google has decided to follow suit, with no additional security patches available for machines running Windows XP. Currently, if you plan to keep using the aging OS, the only web browser still offering support for the platform is Firefox.

It’s been a busy week at Oracle. The company has recently released a massive flurry of patches that fix a staggering 136 security issues for a wide range of the products it sells. This release comes in tandem with the decision to switch from CVSS 2.0 to CVSS 3.0 (the Common Vulnerability Scoring System).

The change is significant because the switch to the more up to date CVSS changes the way security issues are rated, on balance, increasing the severity level of known issues.

Last year, an IoT (Internet of Things) security firm called Bastille Networks uncovered an attack from an unexpected vector. Hackers can actually take control of your wireless mouse, which has no on-board security, and use the device to spoof keyboard inputs to the computer it is attached to.