Security researchers at Malwarebytes has a new blog post up talking about the dangers of "sideloading apps," or bypassing the app store on your preferred Android-based device to install games. Malwarebytes say that this practice is "best avoided" because it makes it easier for malware makers to install something nefarious on your device.

The National Security Agency has denied that it knew about or took advantage of the Heartbleed online security flaw. The U.S. spy agency made the statement following this Bloomberg report that it took advantage of the OpenSSL exploit before it was made public by security researchers.

Today President Obama issued a statement announcing plans to push for an adjustment to the National Security Agency's collection of phone metadata, but opponents say his suggestions may not go far enough. The White House offered support for legislation to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection, instead putting the data into the care of phone companies.

President Barack Obama is expected to put forward a proposal that would end the National Security Agency’s collection of a huge amount of data on U.S. mobile calls, according to what an unnamed Obama administration official told Politico. The proposal is a familiar one: the NSA would eliminate the database of phone data it stores, instead relying on accessing the data from carriers who would be required to store it for up to 18 months.

When the Daily Caller and the San Francisco Gate report a positive in the same story, it doesn't mean that the apocalypse is in full swing; it generally means that something particularly interesting and possibly good has occurred.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) will deliver an address to students at the University of California-Berkeley that paints a dark portrait of the intelligence community as power hungry and out of control, according to excerpts from the speech obtained by Politico.

Earlier this week it was revealed (through documents from Edward Snowden's cache of NSA internal documents) that the National Security Agency planned to infect millions of computer systems using sophisticated malware. This would allow it to pose as Facebook and other sites in order to intercept data. Today the agency is denying the information in those documents. The agency said today that it does not pose as any U.S. companies and that "what it does is legal."

We know that the NSA has been ramping up its efforts to collect data from computers since 911, but as more information from Edward Snowden's cache of lifted NSA documents are made available it is becoming evident that the intelligence agency has already put the necessary tools in place to compromise or hack computers on a grander scale than anyone could have imagined.

In a statement to NBC News former NSA contractor (currently in exile in Russia after leaking classified NSA documents about domestic and international spying programs) called Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA.) hypocritical for complaining about the CIA allegedly spying on the Senate while strongly supporting the NSA's spying programs and bills like CISPA.

Did the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spy on Senate staffers in an effort to stymie an investigation into illegal torture tactics being used by the agency during the Bush Administration? CIA Director John Brennan said that the agency does not spy on Congress and that such an allegation is beyond the scope of reason and simply not true.

Speaking at the Cebit tech fair in Hanover, Germany recently, European Commission vice-president Neelie Kroes said that the future of the internet has to be based on trust. Kroes is responsible for the European Commission's Digital Agenda, and was giving the speech to an audience which included such state leaders as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

The number of malicious apps has quadrupled in past two years on Google Play, according to a new report from online security services firm RiskIQ. The number of apps that were found to contain malicious code was 11,000 in 2011. That number jumped to 42,000 in 2013, the firm claims. Of course that number correlates to the growth of apps available on Google Play, which went from hosting 250,000 to 1,000,000 apps in the same two year time period.

Over the weekend Kickstarter revealed that it had been hacked earlier in the week and that, while financial information was not stolen from the site, other user information may have been compromised. The country's largest and most prominent crowd-funding site told users that attackers made off with usernames, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.

Today is the day that advocacy groups and businesses have designated as a day of protest online against the NSA's unfettered surveillance and data collection practices. Led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the collective are calling on websites and internet users to show their support by displaying special banners online and to contact their elected official in D.C. to let them know that the mass surveillance being conducted by the NSA needs to come to an end.

Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) said in a new report that it would push hard for the passage of an national Internet sales tax law and for better data privacy regulations this year. In its annual policy agenda, the trade group highlighted the issues it deemed to be of grave importance this year. A federal law to deal with online sales tax is at the top of the list. The group, which represents traditional retailers, believes that having a national sales tax collection law will levy the playing field so that online-only retailers don't have an advantage.

The lead author of the Patriot Act said on Tuesday that he will spearhead an effort to reject reauthorization of the law (which is set to expire next year) if the White House doesn't make some serious changes to Section 215 of the law, which has led to the NSA and other government agencies collecting and storing all kinds of information on American citizens.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on everyone on the Internet to make something extraordinary happen: end mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Following its report yesterday that the NSA and other spy agencies were exploiting "leaky apps" such as Rovio's Angry Birds to gather information on users around the world, ProPublica has released this handy FAQ to better explain exactly how the whole process works and what consumers can do to moderately protect their privacy.

Angry Birds maker Rovio issued a statement today (which they passed along to GamePolitics this morning following a request for comment yesterday) in response to a report from ProPublica that spy agencies were gathering information on users of its popular game. The company said in a statement that it does not share data about its users with government agencies such as the NSA or the UK's GCHQ.

It sounds far-fetched when someone says that playing something as innocent as Angry Birds is helping spy agencies gather information about you, but that is just what happens when users launch what this Pro Publica investigation claims is a "leaky app."

The Republican National Committee passed a resolution today renouncing what it is calling "unconstitutional National Security Agency surveillance programs." This is quite a shift in position for the party which defended the ramping up of these programs after the 911 attacks. The resolution was affirmed by a voice vote at the GOP’s winter meeting.

The RNC called upon Republican lawmakers "to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s data collection programs."

The great debate about the fate of the former NSA contractor who leaked documents detailing the agency's spying programs on the Internet, mobile phones and even in video games rages on. Some believe that Edward Snowden is a patriot and a whistleblower who deserves a full presidential pardon, while others believe that he should be get the maximum penalty under the law for treason and espionage.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that President Barack Obama's speech on reforming the National Security Agency contained a lot of lies and that the president spent a lot of time saying nothing. Assange made his comments during an interview on CNN after the speech aired.

"We heard a lot of lies in this speech by Obama," Assange said. "I think it’s embarrassing for a head of state to go on like that for 45 minutes and say almost nothing."

App store scammers are selling a modified version of Mojang's popular mobile world builder Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Android devices that contains a Trojan, according to anti-virus outfit F-Secure. The fake version of the game, which seems to be aimed at European customers, costs 2.50 Euros - a price too hard for some customers to resist because the real version costs 5.49 Euros.

Outgoing National Security Agency deputy director John C. Inglis tells National Public Radio that the spy agency would welcome the creation of a public advocate position to take part in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court deliberations as a check against NSA requests. Inglis, who is retiring after being the number 2 man in the agency for seven years says that an advocate for the constitutionality of requests to be included would be fine as long as it doesn't impede the expediency of the NSA's activities.

Ars Technica offers some interesting insights into why the recent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that took out EA's Origin service, Blizzard's Battle.net, and League of Legends were particularly potent. According to the report the DDoS attacks used an unheard of method to amplify the amount of data being sent in order to grind many popular online games to a halt.

Several states (or at least a handful of state lawmakers) have decided to fight against the federal government's surveillance activities in their own way. In California, two state senators have introduced a bill in Sacramento that would forbid state agencies from cooperating with the National Security Agency to collect "any electronic data or metadata... not based on a warrant." The bill sponsored by state senators Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and Joel Anderson (R-San Diego), is the first state-level proposal to compel non-cooperation with the federal agency.

A quarter of British and Canadian technology firms surveyed say that they want their data taken out of the United States because of the NSA's unfettered spying activities. The survey was conducted by cloud provider Peer1, which has infrastructure in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

After a two week hiatus (thanks mostly to the holidays and Andrew's self-imposed exile to a small town in Kentucky) we return with Super Podcast Action Committee Episode 81! On this week's show hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the Killer Instinct DRM that popped up during a recent competition at a NYC college, the EFF's annual Wish List, and investors suing EA over the shaky Battlefield 4 launch. Download Episode 81 now: SuperPAC Episode 81 (1 hour, 17 minutes) 88.4 MB.

Cisco Systems, one of the companies mentioned in a Der Spiegel report on the NSA's catalog of backdoors into various networks and technologies, said that it is investigating if the NSA has in some way compromised the networking hardware equipment it provides to companies throughout the world.