OSS Technology Blog

A hackable baby monitor, a water bottle that gives away your location and a cooker that can potentially be controlled via WiFi by anyone- these are just some of the vulnerable products that’ll be on sale in the UK this Black Friday.   Security experts at Online Spy Shop rated devices for encryption and data privacy to determine individual vulnerability...

Inspired by the amount of people who ask us whether it’s legal to record a conversation or phone call, we looked into the other legal grey areas people are confused by. In fact, by analysing Google’s own data, we were able to determine the exact things UK residents were keen to know about, in relation to the legal rights. According...

As many of us look forward to an extra hour in bed this Sunday morning, new research reveals that actually winding clocks back, fiddling with watches and resetting household devices could soon be a thing of the past. Almost six in ten (59%) adults say they no longer use any analogue timepieces or technology and will instead wake up to...

On September 26th 2018, Facebook will have been open to the general public for 12 years, having previously been available only to elite university students. This means children who were starting school when Facebook became mainstream are now entering adulthood and many of them will have had their pictures posted onto the platform without their consent. According to a study...

Parents being worried about and protective of their children is certainly no new thing, but there is now a new threat to the safety and wellbeing of young people. Parents now have to contend with the online world, seemingly full of dangers from inappropriate and adult content to peer bullying and internet predators. If you are a parent, you’ll likely...

Anti-child alarms have been in the press a lot recently, after the story of feuding neighbours received national media coverage. Former magistrate Lesley Cooper fitted an anti-child alarm to her home in order to deter the “persistent nuisance” she claims was caused by the children of neighbour Thomas Weldon. Mr. Weldon claims that the device, which emits a high-pitched sound audible...

Fly tipping is a blight on neighbourhoods, spoiling green spaces and potentially leading to further acts of anti-social behaviour. Residents in areas where it happens often can find it extremely frustrating, especially if the local authority seems ill-equipped or unwilling to help. What can make fly tipping even harder to stomach is that it can seem as if the perpetrators...

New technology has been developed which may be able to detect violent behaviour in large crowds of people, enabling law enforcement to potentially stop trouble before it gets out of hand. It could also have applications which could help to prevent a number of other crimes and disturbances, including kidnappings in public places, vandalism and illegal border crossings. The technology...

We live in an increasingly monitored world, where CCTV cameras point at practically every corner. There are laws relating to the use of CCTV, which stipulate that all of these cameras must be used for a very specific purpose – for example, ensuring public safety or gathering evidence for crimes committed in public. However, members of the public aren’t always...

The days of the carefully honed personal signature could be coming to an end, according to a national study* by a UK cyber security consultancy. According to the research by Online Spy Shop, more than half of adults in the UK rarely sign their name and one in five admit they don’t even have a proper signature, instead just writing out...