Police north of Toronto say scammers posing as Chinese law enforcement officials are targeting the Chinese community in York Region and demanding money from victims for fabricated legal issues.  York Regional Police are warning the community about a recent surge in police extortion schemes in which scammers make victims believe that they are facing legal […]

Nova Scotia’s information commissioner says the province’s rejection of her appeal for more staff will leave citizen requests to access government documents languishing in a years-long wait-list. “I was disheartened and disappointed to learn we did not get any additional budgeted positions, despite our four-year-long backlog of cases to review,” Tricia Ralph said in a […]

Georgia’s largest county is still repairing damage inflicted on its government a month ago by hackers who shut down office phone lines, left clerks unable to issue vehicle registrations or marriage licenses and threatened to publicly release sensitive data they claimed to have stolen unless officials paid ransom. The ransomware syndicate LockBit took credit for […]

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas judge on Friday temporarily blocked state Attorney General Ken Paxton from forcing an LGBTQ+ advocacy group to hand over information about transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care. The ruling came just one day after PFLAG National went to court to try to stop Paxton’s office from getting the information. […]

The Supreme Court of Canada says police need judicial authorization to obtain a computer user’s internet protocol address, calling the identification number a crucial link between a person and their online activity. The top court’s 5-4 ruling came Friday in a case that began in 2017, when Calgary police investigated fraudulent online transactions from a […]

Hundreds of thousands of books have been freed from a months-long purgatory as scores of staffers race to get them out of storage and back on shelves following a cyberattack that felled the Toronto Public Library’s computer systems in October.  Workers at a Scarborough distribution hub have cleared more than 10 tractor-trailers full of boxes […]

Ontario’s privacy commissioner is looking into a southwestern university’s campus-wide installation of more than two dozen vending machines that came equipped with facial analysis technology – a situation that drew concerns from students earlier this month.  The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario said it has received two complaints on the matter […]

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Three Montana laws restricting abortion access are unconstitutional, including a ban on abortions beyond 20 weeks of gestation, a state judge said in granting a motion for summary judgment filed by Planned Parenthood of Montana. The 20-week ban and the two other laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2021 — […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Citing potential national security risks, the Biden administration says it will investigate Chinese-made “smart cars” that can gather sensitive information about Americans driving them.  The probe could lead to new regulations aimed at preventing China from using sophisticated technology in electric vehicles and other so-called connected vehicles to track drivers and their […]

The Montreal-based operator behind Pornhub and other pornographic websites broke the law by enabling intimate images to be shared without direct knowledge or consent, the federal privacy watchdog has found. The privacy commissioner’s investigation into Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, followed a complaint from a woman whose ex-boyfriend had uploaded an intimate video and other […]

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is signing an executive order aimed at better protecting Americans’ personal data on everything from biometrics and health records to finances and geolocation from foreign adversaries like China and Russia.  The move allows the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to take steps to prevent the large-scale transfer […]

The head of the RCMP said Tuesday there was no evidence to date that personal or operational information had been pilfered from the national police force’s systems during a recent cyberattack. “Based on information that we’ve gone through, there’s no data that’s been extracted from the systems, which is the good news,” RCMP commissioner Mike […]