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‘privacy’ Archives
House Committee Postpones Action on SOPA
Wowsers! The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has postponed further debate on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) until after Congress' holiday break. At the urging of some SOPA opponents, Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, said Friday he will consider a hearing or a classified [...]
Homemade anti-SOPA PSAs
We Forgot Our Name! is so worried about the Stop Online Piracy Act that he's created four short PSAs to help explain what's wrong with the idea to your friends and family: "The Stop Online Piracy Act will be going back to the House for a vote this WEDNESDAY December 21st. The House tried to make people think they would not reconvene to vote on [...]
Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial
Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that [...]
ICanStalkU twitterbot nags Twitter users about disclosing their location
ICanStalkU is a twitterbot Twitter-analyzing servicethat seeks out Twitter users who transmit their location in the photos they tweet and generates responses like "ICanStalkU was able to stalk @XXXXXXXX at http://maps.google.com/?q=35.5371666667,139.510166667," with the stated purpose of "Raising awareness about inadvertent information [...]
Facebook “flaw” lets anyone see your private photos
Features in Facebook give users access to personal, private and hidden photos that would normally be hidden from view. The flaw, spotted by members of a body building forum, no less, allows Facebook users to access photos revealed by the report abuse tool. This flaw appears to expose private photos of any person on Facebook. We tried this out for [...]
Malls stop tracking shoppers’ cell phones
The Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va., launched a survey on Black Friday, tracking shoppers' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones. The original plan was for those malls to continue the survey through New Year's Day, but after receiving a phone call from Sen. Charles [...]
You say “rootkit,” I say “diagnostic tool”
"The only way to remove Carrier IQ is with advanced skills," Eckhart wrote in a report, published on the Web on Monday. "If you choose to void your warranty and unlock your bootloader you can (mostly) remove Carrier IQ." The software, Carrier IQ, tracked the location of the phone, what keys were pressed, which Web pages were visited, when calls [...]
As you already suspected, the CIA is reading your tweets and Facebook status updates
According to this Associated Press story, the tinfoil beanie hat crowd was right all along: In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians' also pores over Facebook, [...]
BART police officers website hacked, database released
Reports are circulating that databases containing BART police officer information from the website for The Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Officers' Association site have been published. The bartpoa.com site is currently down. Who is responsible for the hack? Whoever ends up claiming credit, it's complicated. What isn't complicated: the notion that [...]
LinkedIn opts you into being used in advertisements; Here’s how to opt out
LinkedIn have rolled out a new line of advertisements in which their customers' faces are used to advertise their sponsors' products. Helpfully, LinkedIn have decided to opt all their users into this. Here's a guide to keeping yourself from being an unpaid shill by opting out again. 1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right [...]
House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months
Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a “data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us [...]
New Service Adds Your Drunken Facebook Photos To Employer Background Checks, For Up To Seven Years
The FTC has given thumbs up to a company, Social Intelligence Corp., selling a new kind of employee background check to employers. This one scours the internet for your posts and pictures to social media sites and creates a file of all the dumb stuff you ever uploaded online. For instance, this sample they provided was flagged for [...]
Why using Facebook doesn’t mean you don’t value privacy
Microsoft Research Group researchers Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have posted a draft paper entitled "Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens' Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies" that reports on fieldwork interviewing teenagers about how they view privacy. It rebuts the cynical, easy dismissal of online privacy issues that says that kids [...]
Best iFixit teardown ever: FBI tracking bug
Ifixit and Wired got together to do a teardown of an FBI tracking gadget: "The device was loaned to us by a person who found the device on their car, and is similar to the one Yasir Afifi recently found underneath his own vehicle. The hand-assembled device is comprised of a GPS unit for receiving the car's position, an RF transmitter for [...]
Federal judge: Open WiFi doesn’t make you liable for your neighbors’ misdeeds
A Federal judge in Illinois has once again rebuffed a copyright troll's request for easy court orders to allow him to connect IP addresses with people. The judge said that open wireless networks and other factors make the connection between IP addresses and defendants difficult, and that making it easy to connect people and IPs would invite [...]
Cellebrite Cell Phone Extraction Device
We had to see for ourselves just how much data could be extracted, so we acquired a software program called Lantern from Katana Forensics, which was recently detailed on the tech blog Gizmodo. Although Lantern is not the same software Cellebrite uses, its a similar law-enforcement-grade data extraction application, which can nab surprising amounts [...]
In-depth look at SpyEye crimeware
Brian Krebs has an in-depth look at SpyEye, a "crimeware" trojan horse that is used to harvest personal information (especially banking credentials) from infected Windows machines. SpyEye's keylogger is capable of prioritizing the information it grabs by paying special attention to information from browser forms, including Chrome and [...]
Render frosted glass transparent with Scotch tape
YouTube user TheFarmacyMan discovered that his workplace frosted glass privacy screen could be rendered transparent by applying a piece of Scotch tape to it. A useful detail for anyone planning a caper novel or a robbery. A user called rawnoodles10 posits "..the glue on the tape fills in the small imperfections on the surface of the glass. [...]
Dropbox’s new security policy implies that they lied about privacy from the start
Miguel de Icaza noticed that Dropbox's new security terms of service allows it to decrypt your stored files for law enforcement; but Dropbox has always claimed that it did not store the keys necessary to do this. This has been used as both a selling point ("we keep your files so safe, we can't access them") and an excuse ("don't ask us for help [...]
ACLU to Michigan cops: Stop searching mobile phones during traffic stops
The ACLU is trying to get the Michigan state cops to stop dumping mobile phone storage during routine traffic stops. At present the Michigan troopers use something called a Cellebrite UFE that slurps up recently dialed numbers, SMSes, Facebook/Twitter posts, emails, bookmarks, Web history, cookies, notes, MMS, IMs, lists of recent Bluetooth [...]
