Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the enterprise security software and services company BlackBerry Limited has announced the launch of BlackBerry Advanced Technology Development Labs (BlackBerry Labs). The company’s new business unit will be focusing on research and development (R&D) in the cybersecurity space, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. According to a statement, BlackBerry chief technology officer (CTO) Charles Eagan will lead this initiative, which will include a team of over 120 software developers, researchers, system architects, product lead and security experts. These communications professionals will work together to identify, explore and create new technologies to ensure BlackBerry is on the cutting edge of security innovation. The company stated that the initial projects from BlackBerry Labs will focus on machine learning approaches to security, in partnership with BlackBerry’s existing Cylance, Enterprise and QNX business units. “The establishment of BlackBerry Labs is the latest in a series of strategic moves…
The problems for the social networking giant Facebook continue to mount as yet another data-sharing scandal has exploded. The New York Times (NYT) has published a thorough investigation detailing Facebook’s data sharing practices, and reported that the social network provided some well-known tech companies with access to hundreds of millions of users’ data without their consent. Interviews with former Facebook employees and its corporate partners, as well as hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the NYT, confirmed that Facebook made the questionable arrangements with partners such as Amazon, Spotify, Netflix and Microsoft. These alliances enabled the companies to “read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread”. The records revealed, that “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent. The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information…