25 Alleged Anonymous Members Arrested

Interpol said in a statement Tuesday that 25 alleged members of the loose knit hacking collective called Anonymous have been arrested for their role in a coordinated cyber-attack on Columbia's defense ministry website, Chile's Endesa electricity company and other targets. From the AP article:

The international police agency said in a statement Tuesday that the arrests in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain were carried out by national law enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol's Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime.

Officers in Argentina, Columbia, and Spain worked together on "operation unmask" to seize 250 pieces of equipment in searches of 40 locations in 15 cities.
Wired News reports that the Interpol web site was down on Tuesday after a Denial of Service Attack spurred by a Spanish language twitter account. A Brazilian account associated with Anonymous claimed shortly after; "Interpol, you can't take Anonymous," the message read. "It's an idea."
On February 3 Anonymous attacked the FBI in the U.S., listening in on a phone call with Scotland Yard and publishing the discussion.



Article first published as 25 Alleged Anonymous Members Arrested on Technorati.

Social Media Used to Sell Drugs to Youth

The International Narcotics Board (INCB) highlighted the social problems caused by illegal online pharmacies today in their annual report. An alarming trend the INCB sees is the use of social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook to reach out to young people to market these online pharmacies.

According to the Chicago Tribune, India is one of the leading countries of origin for these illicit, and often counterfeit substances accounting for 58% of substances seized, with the United States, China, and Poland also accounting for a large portion.

The report warns that marginalized communities like young people are particularly vulnerable to these sales attempts, and that illegal pharmacies are "part of a vicious cycle involving a wide array of social problems such as violence, organized crime, corruption, unemployment, poor health and poor education".

The report offers advice to governments on how to shut down illegal pharmacies, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime emphasizes that "key activities of illegal Internet pharmacies include the smuggling of products to consumers, finding hosting space for their websites and convincing consumers that they are, in fact, legitimate."

While some of these sites have been shut down and are operating in plain site, making it easier to identify and shut them down, drug and paraphernalia site the Silk Road is only accessible through an encrypted connection and isn't easy to get to. As Wired News points out:

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network, TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

While it is important that the international community is aware of the use of Facebook and YouTube to promote illegal sites, the Silk Road is a cautionary tale of how law enforcement may always be fighting the last war.

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmgimages/
Article first published as Social Media Used to Sell Drugs to Youth on Technorati.

Would Google's New Privacy Policies Protect Student Privacy?

An interesting post by Andrew Weis in the Chronicle of Education raises the question of whether Google's plan to consolidate data across all of its services would allow for the protection of student privacy. Students have a higher privacy bar since academic information is covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, and many schools contract with Google to provide either a local appliance that serves Google apps, or cloud based apps access. Weis doesn't answer the question in his post, probably because the answer depends on the contractual agreement each school has with Google.

Google has asserted that the changes in its consumer-privacy policy will not affect the services it offers to businesses, the government, and educational institutions. According to its vice president of enterprise, Amit Singh, the company "will maintain our enterprise customers' data in compliance with the confidentiality and security obligations provided to their domain. The new Privacy Policy does not change our contractual agreements... ." This statement implies that users of Google Apps for Education, for example, will be shielded from the changes by their existing contracts. The problem is that the privacy rights afforded to educational institutions through existing contracts are often hard to distinguish from the terms and conditions offered to regular consumers.

Republicans Probe FCC Over LightSquared

Republicans in the House Energy and Commerce Committee have demanded all of the FCC's internal documents related to LightSquared. This isn't the first time Congress has demanded more information, but now that LightSquared has been blocked from any more testing until they can show that their wireless broadband strategy doesn't interfere with GPS signals, the demand may have more traction. From The Hillicon Valley Blog:

The FCC granted LightSquared a conditional waiver last year to move forward with its plans for a nationwide 4G network, but the agency now plans to block the network after tests showed it would interfere with GPS devices, including ones used by airplane pilots. 

Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) questioned why the FCC allowed LightSquared to get as far as it did in the regulatory process.

Twitter Sells Old Tweets

In addition to public Tweets being handed over to the Library of Congress, Twitter has sold 2 years worth of Tweets to a company called DataSift, according to Mashable.

DataSift confirmed the report to Mashable, but Twitter could not be reached for comment. The former has launched a product called DataSift Historics, which lets companies extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion, a rep says. DataSift will analyze public tweets, not private ones. If you delete a tweet, it’s deleted from DataSift’s archives.

Google Will Give $1 Million To Chrome Hackers

Google announced yesterday that they will offer up to $1 million in cash and Chrome books to hackers who find flaws in Chrome code. This is one way to limit the chances of "accidentally" tracking users. From the Mashable article:

$60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself. 

$40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug. 

$20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

 

Firefox Plug-in Boosts Privacy

The Firefox plug-in Collusion is another tool in the privacy toolbox. Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs offered a demo at TED yesterday and talked about how the plug-in works. According to the Mashable article:

Collusion looks to offer more transparency to users by creating a visualization of how your data is being spread to different companies as you navigate the web. Each time it detects data being sent to a behavioral tracker, it creates a red (advertisers), grey (websites) or blue dot on the visualization and shows the links between the sites you visit and the trackers they work with.

Key TechDirt Anti- SOPA Post Censored by Bogus DMCA Claim

One of the key posts on TechDirt explaining why SOPA and PIPA are bad ideas was taken down (from Google search results) by a DMCA complaint claiming infringing content. The story is fascinating and shows how easy it is to execute a denial of service attack on any web site using the DMCA as a vehicle. In this case, a take-down notice company (yes, you can hire a company to submit take-down notices for you) submitted a complaint on behalf of a porn website claiming the TechDirt article was in violation of copyright law. According to the author,  Mike Masnick, the site was blocked from Google on January 20th, the day SOPA was withdrawn.

Last November, in the heat of the SOPA fight, I wrote a blog post, where I tried to pull together a bunch of the different reasons why SOPA and PIPA were really bad ideas. It was a very popular post for us, and I heard directly from many people that it was quite helpful in getting them to understand the real problems of these two bills.

Well, as I just discovered, that post cannot be found directly via Google any more.

Clearly one thing missing from the notice and takedown process is the "notice" component needs to go to the content provider.

Hacker Monthly Makes a Profit

A tech-heavy print monthly based on stories posted to hacker news actually turns a profit:

Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said. Annual subscriptions cost $88 for the print edition or $29 for the digital .mobi/.epub/.pdf bundle. Only five percent of subscribers get the print version, he said, but that’s still a tidy sum of about $20,000 on top of an estimated $130,000 in subscriptions per year. He also sells full-page ads.

Pretty remarkable feat in an age where the death of print is frequently heralded, and major content providers thrash about trying to protect copyright and IP. Here is a tiny startup pulling together great content, charging reasonable subscription fees and turning a profit.

AT&T's Plan to Double Charge Content Providers

AT&T is running out of wireless bandwidth and struggling to find a way to keep the network usable for the majority of customers; it's eliminated the all you can eat data plan, tried throttling the top 5% of customers, and now it wants to "allow" content providers with heavy bandwidth usage to pay any overage a customer might encounter. If you are close to your bandwidth cap, and you want to download a movie from Netflix, AT&T wants to make it possible for Netflix to cover the additional charges that you might encounter if you go over your limit.  Some see this as a backdoor way to introduce a double sided pricing model, which may be the case, but AT&T has claimed they are at full capacity and either need more spectrum or need new ways to manage demand, through price.

Universities have been dealing with this problem for years - exponential growth in demand, limited growth in supply (for both technical and budgetary reasons), so tiered network plans and bandwidth throttling have become the norm. Without increased supply, the options are limited.

Google Tweaks Search Results

Google has announced a group of changes that are focused on the perennial concerns of limiting people who are trying to game the system and improving search results that are local to the individual that is doing the searching. From the article:

The algorithm tweak with the codename "Venice" "improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal." That means the same search engine optimization practices used for websites will now have more of an effect onGoogle Places results as well.

The classic privacy and security conundrum; I want accurate search results that match my location, my "real" intention (not just the words I put into the search box), and what most other people found interesting based on the same search terms. But I don't want to share my location or have my search terms, or the links that I click on as a result of those terms, recorded.

EPIC Files an Emergency Appeal Against Google

Google's recently proposed privacy changes will consolidate all Google privacy policies, and data, into one. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC, asked the FTC to investigate this new round of privacy changes, given the fact that Google had agreed to submit to privacy audits and not to make changes that would affect it's users privacy without allowing subscribers to opt-out. That first request was rejected, but since this privacy policy change has no option for subscribers to opt-out, so EPIC is pushing the issue. From the TechCrunch article:

EPIC says it filed an “emergency appeal” within hours of the ruling where the court stated that it could not require the FTC to enforce a prior consent order against Google. The reason for the emergency status of the new appeal has to do with the fact that the privacy changes Google plans to enact will go live on March 1st, 2012. EPIC is therefore asking the appellate court to overturn the earlier decision before March 1st.

Nascar Driver Tweets During Race (While Waiting for a Crash to Clear)

Texting and Tweeting while driving is worse than drunk driving, which is why we should all honk and call 311 when we see someone do it. A Nascar driver, stuck waiting for a crash to clear, Tweeted some status updates from his car and gained 100,000 followers in an hour. Missed opportunity to emphasis staying focused in the car.

Warrantless GPS Surveillance Shut Down by FBI

After the U.S. v. Jones Supreme Court case ruled that warrantless GPS surveillance was unconstitutional, the Justice department has shut down over 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were installed without a warrant.

AT&T Loses Court Case Over Throttling

AT&T lost a recent small claims court case over data throttling - the settlement was $850, or $85 a month for the remaining ten months of Matt Spacarelli's contract with the company. The Yahoo news article claims that this will result in a flood of similar lawsuits.

The AT&T contract does not allow for class-action or jury trial suits, only small claims, and AT&T claims to be throttling only 5% of it's 17 million customers on unlimited data plans. That is 850,000 people that would have to research and file their case individually in small claims courts all over the country. IF each throttled subscriber did sue, and won the same amount as Spacarelli, that would be a $72 million dollar settlement cost, not to mention attorney billing hours all over the country.

If Spacarelli publishes his research and court preparation docs, it might be more likely that these folks would actually show up in court.

Federal Appeals Court Rules Encryption is Fifth Amendment Right

A U.S. Federal Appeals Court has ruled that a man suspected of child pornography cannot be required to decrypt his hard drive because that requirement would be a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. One important detail; law enforcement did not know beforehand what the man had on his computer. From the Wall Street Journal article:

In a ruling that could have broad ramifications for law enforcement, a federal appeals court has ruled that a man under investigation for child pornography isn’t required to unlock his computer hard drives for the federal government, because that act would amount to the man offering testimony against himself.

I'll be curious to see what this means for the woman suspected of mortgage fraud who was ordered to decrypt her laptop, but forgot the password.

Wikileaks to Release Hacked Security Firm Emails

Wikileaks is calling it the "Global Intelligence Files" - they are teaming up with 25 media partners to release the 5 million emails they claim were received as part of a successful hacking attempt of Texas based geopolitical consulting firm Stratfor. From the article:

WikiLeaks has begun publishing a new batch of revelations, ‘The Global Intelligence Files’, which contains information taken from 5 million emails belonging to Stratfor. The announcement was made minutes ago on the Web, and it comes ahead of a press conference that Julian Assange’s organization will hold in London tomorrow (Monday) at 12:00 GMT.

Journalists Killed in Syria May Have Been Tracked by Satellite Phones

Journalist Marie Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik were killed yesterday in Syria - here is a well written story about the constant shelling of a particular building they were hiding in by the NYTimes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an article on speculation that these journalists were tracked by their satellite phones and purposely killed by the Syrian Government, and how technically easy it would be to use a satellite phone for surveillance. From the article:

On Monday night, Colvin appeared on CNN, telling Anderson Cooper that “the Syrian army is shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Responding to Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s statement that he was not targeting civilians in the barrage of rocketfire raining on Homs, Colvin accused the regime of “murder” and said: “There are no military targets here…It's a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists.” A few hours later, she was dead. 

The Telegraph quoted Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Colvin in Homs last week, as saying: “The Syrian army issued orders to 'kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil'” and that the Syrian authorities were likely watching the CNN broadcast. The Telegraph then described how “[r]eporters working in Homs, which has been under siege since February 4, had become concerned in recent days that Syrian forces had ‘locked on’ to their satellite phone signals and attacked the buildings from which they were coming” (emphasis ours).

Looking for an image for this story (disturbing activity) I came across this site: www.spiegel.de, with a photo gallery here: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-78598-4.html
This quote was particularly poignant:

A YouTube video of the shelling of Baba Amr, a neighborhood in Homs, Syria. "We are the last people still in contact with the outside world," says Omar Shakir, a spokesman for the neighborhood. "For seven days now, we have had no electricity and no water, and all the phone lines are dead. We don't know how much longer we can last." 

38 Million Mobile Social Media Users in the U.S., Daily

A new study by Comscore asserts that 64 million Americans use their mobile devices to check social networks, and half of them check in almost every day. From the Mashable summary:

A full 38.2 million people use social networks on their phones or tablets on a “near daily” basis, according to the report. What exactly are they doing? Reading updates from friends, the study says, with 84.6% of mobile social networkers checking out “posts from people known personally.” Posting status updates was the second most popular activity, with 73.6% of users partaking. It’s important to note comScore counts reading blogs as social networking.

image: http://www.socialnomics.net

Mobile Companies Google, Apple and Others Commit to Privacy Policy

Apple, Google, HP, Amazon, Microsoft and RIM have signed an agreement with the California Department of Justice to commit to new privacy protection procedures. The companies have agreed to allow customers to see privacy policies before they download an app, to display the policies in a consistent place, and to inform developers of requirements to protect consumer privacy. From the Wired article:

The announcement comes after a string of privacy and security snafus on multiple platforms. Most recently, the iOS version of the app Path came under fire for uploading and storing users’ address-book information without their consent. The Android platform has also been under fire for privacy andmalware breaches, and Amazon’s App Store has been under scrutiny for security concerns as well.

image: http://www.truste.com/

Supreme Court Warrantless Eavesdropping Case May be Stopped by DOJ

The Department of Justice has asked that the Supreme Court case about warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA be dropped because there is no evidence that the ACLU and other parties don't have standing to sue since they do not have evidence that their communications have been targeted by the secret program. The program was legalized in 2008 when the public became aware of its existence. From the Wired article:

The FISA Amendments Act(.pdf), the subject of the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The administration is asking the Supreme Court to review an appellate decision that said the nearly 4-year-old lawsuit could move forward. The government said the ACLU and a host of other groups don’t have the legal standing to bring the case because they have no evidence they or their overseas clients are being targeted.

image: ACLU

Infrared Camera Allows Surveillance from a Greater Distance

A new camera designed to protect  military personnel by allowing them to view targets and assess threats from a greater distance also has surveillance and privacy implications once it is in civilian hands. The Supreme Court Kyllo decision limits the use of thermal imaging for surveillance without a search warrant because the technology is not in common use. The "reasonable expectation of privacy" is self-reinforcing: as privacy declines, so do our expectations. As privacy increases, our expectations increase.



image: http://www.imaging1.com

The Pope Tweets to Save Lent

Further evidence that Tweets can sometimes be records of enduring historical and cultural value -  The Pope has taken to Twitter to try and remind Catholics that lent is a time to volunteer and give up bad habits. From the Mashable article:

“In our increasingly secular societies, many young people no longer keep the Lenten season in any special way – that’s why the Pontifical Council for Social Communications has come up with a new idea to focus hearts and minds on the challenges contained in Pope Benedict’s Lenten message for 2012. 

‘Starting on Ash Wednesday, themes from that papal message will be posted on Twitter each day during Lent and over the coming months other papal speeches and documents are likely to be tweeted in a similar way, hoping to attract the media-savvy generation and entice them to find out more.’”

The Pontifical Council for Social Communications!

image courtesy: http://www.shc.edu/theolibrary/Vatican.htm

ABC's Inside Look at Apple's Foxconn Factory in China

ABC News ran an exclusive inside look at the Foxconn Apple factory - you can watch an embedded clip below, or see the whole thing at the ABC News Web Site.

Google Glasses Bring the Web To Your Eyes

By the end of the year we will be able to view everything we can see on a smartphone through a pair of sunglasses, according to a New York Times Bits blog report. According to the post, an unnamed Google employee has indicated that the company is preparing a pair of Oakley Thumps sunglasses (pictured above) that will retail for the same price as a smartphone - $250 - $600, to be used as a heads-up display running the Android operating system and a 3g or 4g network connection.

Navigating the system is supposed to be easy to learn and will require a series of head nods and tilts - and we thought mobile phones made for odd social interactions, imagine what it will be like to talk to someone wearing sunglasses that continually nods and twitches at inappropriate times! If this article wasn't in the New York Times, I would seriously doubt the accuracy, but all of the technology already exists to make these glasses happen, so why not?

From the article:

Seth Weintraub, a blogger for 9 to 5 Google, who first wrote about the glasses project in December, and then discovered more information about them this month, also said the glasses would be Android-based and cited a source that described their look as that of a pair of Oakley Thumps.

Any new technology raises privacy concerns. Given all of the recent privacy issues Google has had, do you think Google glasses will be more or less of a privacy risk than smartphones?
Article first published as Google Glasses Bring the Web To Your Eyes on Technorati.

Government Seeks OWS Tweets Without Warrant

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports the New York City District Attorney has requested all information related to Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcom Harris' Twitter account over a three month period. Since Mr. Harris has many followers, this subpoena, if Twitter is forced to comply, would reveal all associated email addresses, location information, and direct messages. Mr. Harris' account is public, so presumably any information that would help the NY City case is readily available. From the article:

Most of the protesters, including Malcolm Harris, were charged with the mundane crime of disorderly conduct, a "violation" under New York law that has a maximum punishment of 15 days in jail or a $250 fine.

And yet on the basis of a charge no more consequential than speeding ticket, the New York City District Attorney's office sent a poorly worded subpoena to Twitter requesting "any and all user information, including email address, as well as any and all tweets posted for the period of 9/15/2011-12/31/2011" regarding Mr. Harris' Twitter account, @destructuremal. Unsurprisingly, the government wanted to keep it quiet, but thankfully Twitter didn't listen. Instead, as it has consistently warned law enforcement, Twitter notified Mr. Harris, who through his lawyer, Martin Stolar of the National Lawyers Guild, has moved to challenge the subpoena in court.

picture: www.dailymail.co.uk

Kim Dotcom Out on Bail as MegaUpload is Still Shut Down

MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom was released on bail today in New Zealand as the court found his fiscal affairs were in such disarray that he did not have the resources to flee the country and avoid extradition. From the article:

And today in New Zealand, or rather tomorrow (it’s the 22nd in NZ), Dotcom was released under a number of conditions: he will have no Internet access, will not travel 80km from his home except in emergencies, and no helicopters would be permitted to fly to his property.

BuzzFeed Allows for Back Dating Facebook Timeline Posts

TechCrunch reports that content site BuzzFeed has worked with Facebook to allow subscribers to backdate Facebook posts, enabling you to enter "events" like your first computer back in 1978, or other things that happened before Facebook was introduced:

Specifically, it’s adding buttons in a few posts to take advantage of the Timeline’s ability to backdate content. The first post with this feature asks, “What Was Your First Computer?” For example, you could say that your first computer was an Apple II, and that you got it in 1978, and that would be added to the relevant section of your Timeline. Another post asks, “What Toys Did You Play With As A Kid?“

This is interesting to me because I am studying the implications of digital preservation on social media. As companies team up to encourage us to document all of our major life events, we should ask (at least) two questions:

1. What are the privacy implications of preserving social media records forever?
2. Should we trust the preservation of our cultural record and valuable personal correspondence to corporations?

Sounds like a dissertation.

ABC Gets All-Access Pass to Foxconn

According to Mashable, Apple has invited ABC News inside the Foxconn plant for an "all access" pass to the factory floor. Anchor Bill Weir says the segment will change the way you think about Apple, because

"what is acceptable on a Chinese assembly line is soul-crushing by American standards,” said Weir.

It reminds me of a review of the Lays potato chip corporate offices around the world. Everyone interviewed was amazed that "salty snacks are delicious any time of day". In a place surrounded by suicide nets, we're supposed to think Chinese are just more adept at working 20 hour days than Americans? I'll have to watch the segment and see.

image from: http://davidsmoyer.com/

Google Will Put Satellite Stations in Iowa

Mashable is reporting that Google, under the subsidiary name Google Fiber, is asking the FCC for permission to put "earth stations" in Council Bluffs Iowa. Google is already launching fiber to the home in Kansas City, which could lead to some friendly competition for established telecoms.


 

Google Caught Bypassing Safari Privacy Rules

Security researcher and Stanford Graduate student Jonathan Mayer has discovered that Google and three other ad service companies have written code to bypass the security settings of Safari.The Wall Street Journal ran an expose on his discovery today, after having the results verified by an independent researcher.

Safari's default setting is to block all cookies, frustrating attempts by advertising companies to gather more information on users for advertising purposes. According to Mayer, Safari has a loophole that allows for tracking if a user interacts with an ad. In order to allow the +1 button to be used with these ads, Google added code to their advertisements to fool Safari into thinking that a user had interacting with the ad.

This new revelation will undoubtedly add increase the pressure on the privacy audit settlement that Google has recently agreed to. In addition, Google's recent changes to combine all of their privacy policies into one have created calls for closer review of Google's privacy practices, even though the Justice Department has recently asked that the law suit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center be dismissed.

Article first published as Google Caught By Passing Safari Privacy Rules on Technorati.

Facebook Hacker Gets Jail Time

A 26 year-old software development student will spend eight months in jail for hacking into Facebook - he claims he was trying to help the social media giant improve security, just as he did for Yahoo!

Reddit Users Start Drafting an Alternative to SOPA

Reddit, the social bookmarking site that lead the charge against SOPA, has a group of international subscribers that have created a subreddit that aims to write an alternative to SOPA and PIPA:

“My initial idea came up when I noticed all these laws popping up,” says Royal. “I got the impression it’s a worldwide trend of people trying to clamp down on the Internet. I thought, inspired by the recent success Reddit had with SOPA and PIPA, maybe I should suggest another solution to this. One that not just deals with a single law or proposed treaty but one that handles all of that.”

Crowdsourced, international copyright law - I haven't heard of this before, but it is similar to the RFC process the Internet community is used to.

Google ByPasses Privacy Settings - Internet Explorer, This Time

A week after a researcher discovered that Google was bypassing Safari privacy controls, Microsoft has announced that Google also bypasses Internet Explorer's privacy protections. From the Venturebeat article:

Specifically, Google has been bypassing Internet Explorer’s P3P Privacy Protection feature, which defines how cookies are used by browsers and websites. P3P Compact Policy statements are provided by websites to explain how the site’s cookies will be impact a visitor’s privacy while browsing.

Former Google Employees ReImagine Email

Three former Google employees have launched a startup called Fluent that tries to re-imagine email. They left Google frustrated with the work culture there. From the article:

"We're trying to ... imagine the future of email," Adams said. "We think that email has sort of stagnated and got into these set patterns of people using it and it's not being pushed forward any more."

Google's Russian Rival Strikes Deal With Twitter

Twitter has agreed to share Tweets with Russian search engine Yandex, a deal similar to the one Twitter struck with Microsoft, according to a TechCrunch article:

Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.

Domestic Drones Approved by New Law

A new law signed by President Obama requires the FCC to approve domestic drones for a variety of domestic purposes; selling real estate, finding irrigation leaks on farms, and law enforcement activity. Drones will need to fly lower than 400 feet. From the article:

A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels theFederal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones.

Given the privacy implications of camera equipped drones, I'm surprised this article was buried in the business section 3 days after the law was passed. Check out this video of drone surveillance for a better idea:

Book Publishers Shut Down Pirate Sites

Two more file sharing sites have voluntary shut down:  Library.nu and ifile.it. After book publishers managed to get an injunction to shut down the sites, they voluntarily shut down:

The publishers obtained an injunction against Library.nu and the cyberlocker ifile.it from the regional court in Munich. They claimed that both sites were operating an unauthorized “internet library” that made available more than 400,000 high-quality e-books. In addition, the publishers said the sites made $11 million in revenue.

While three sites don't make a trend, the site BTTorrent was the first to voluntarily shut down.

FBI to Abide by Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Laws in Social Network Monitoring

Jaikumar Vijayan writes that the FBI has released a statement saying their plans to monitor social networking sites to improve real-time situational awareness will abide by:

The FBI today said that its proposed plans to monitor social media sites as part of a broader strategy to improve real-time situation awareness will be fully vetted by the agency's Privacy and Civil Liberties Unit. 

The unit will review the legal implications of the monitoring application and ensure that it meets all privacy and civil rights obligations before it is implemented, the agency said in a statement emailed to Computerworld"Although the FBI has always adapted to meet changes in technology, the rule of law, civil liberties, and civil rights, will remain our guiding principles," the agency said.

The problem is civil liberty and privacy protections for publicly posted information are inconsistent, and, at least according to the statement, the surveillance plan will be vetted, but the ongoing oversight and management will not be subject to public scrutiny.

image: http://grantjkidney.com/

FCC to Auction $22 Billion Worth of Spectrum

The Washington Post reports that the payroll bill that was approved this week and may go up for a vote soon includes a plan to auction off $22 billion worth of spectrum:

Tucked into an economic legislative agreement reached early Thursday was a plan to auction off $22 billion worth of spectrum held by commercial broadcasters that will go to consumer networks and public safety first responders.

Hunters Shoot Down Surveillance Drone

Gizmodo reports that a group of hunters have shot down a surveillance drone an animal rights group called SHARK sent up to document their hunt:

..Once the hopeful hunters knew they were going to be watched from above, they started to leave the private shooting plantation. SHARK decided to send up their drone anyway—above a group of cranky firearm-wielding southerners. Big mistake, SHARK. Their drone was quickly shot out of the sky...

From Gizmodo

How Robots.txt Files Can Decrease Privacy

Public Resource, a company that publishes court documents, responds to requests to make documents private by adding a robots.txt file to block search engine crawlers, but will not actually take down documents. Researcher Benjamin Mako Hill explains how this actually makes the files in question less private:

The result for Public Resource, however, is that PR is now publishing, in the form of its robots.txt, a list of all of the cases that people have successfully requested to be made less visible!

Technology Search Engine Shows How Sites are Built

Technology search engine BuiltWith - a one man bootstrap startup - uses publicly available code to report the technologies a site is using. From the TechCrunch article:

It shows that TechCrunch, for example, is using the WordPress VIP content management system, ad targeting from Quigo and AdSonar, traffic measurement from comScore, ChartBeat, Optimizely, Google Analytics, and many others. It also shows all the Javascript libraries and widgets that we’re using, including Facebook for Websites, JQuery, and the Twitter Platform. You can take a look at the full results here.

Women Singled Out for Body Scans in Dallas

CBS reports women at the DFW International Airport in Texas felt they were singled out for body scans because they were attractive. The initial complaint came from a woman who had been asked to step through the body scanner three times by a woman screener. The screener asked whether the woman played tennis because she had a "cute body". On the third time through, the woman apparently became frustrated with her male coworkers that were viewing the scanned images in the other room and told them, "Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go. Come on out."

CBS requested the TSA documentation on complaints and found a consistent pattern. One result of this incident is Charles Shumer (D NY) is introducing legislation in the Senate that would require a passenger advocate in each airport.

Security researcher Bruce Schneier calls the whole screening process security theater, saying "We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces — the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else."

Dallas/FTworth and Love representatives say the body scan devices have been upgraded to a privacy enhancing variety.

Regular Scan:

image courtesy: http://www.kpbs.org/

Privacy Enhanced Scan:

image courtesy: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/

Top image courtesy: http://mundicogito.wordpress.com 

Article first published as Women Singled Out for Body Scans in Dallas on Technorati.

Apple Assures Users Contact Data Should Be Private

Apple has issued a statement assuring users that their contact information is private and should not be accessed by any applications without their permission, just minutes after Congress has launched an investigation into reports that multiple applications have been downloading user address books without their knowledge, according to All Things D. From the article:

After a week of silence, Apple has finally responded to reports that dozens of iOS applications have been accessing, transmitting and storing user contact data without explicit permission. Path was thefirst to be flagged for this, andothers, including Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare, have since tidied up the way they ask for address book data. Apple has faced growing criticism that it has given iOS developers far too much access to address book information without requiring a user prompt. 

Today, the company agreed with that assessment, and said that soon, apps that use address book data will require explicit user permission to do so. 

“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines*,”

Image from: http://www.squidoo.com/apple-logo 

Great Article on the Escalating Anti-Censorship Tech War

Ars Technica has a great article on anti-censorship and anti-surveillance technology written by Cyrus Farivar. Any anonymity or anti-surveillance tech is double -edged; it can be used to fight for freedom, or to oppress others and support criminal acts:

As the Arab Spring hits its first anniversary, tech activists around the globe are continuing their efforts to enable secure communications—especially in areas of the world that are in conflict or transition. After all, it's become an open secret that governments ranging from Assad's Syria to local American law enforcement to the newly created government of South Sudan are actively trying to find out what is being said and transmitted over their airwaves and networks...
These projects are being developed all over the world by some small, local organizations, as well as larger, more ambitious projects that are receiving funding from the likes of the New America Foundation. The organization is a key part of the US Department of State's $70 million being spent on "Internet freedom" projects, including a so-called "Internet-in-a-suitcase" deployment.

Facebook to Allow Verified Accounts and Nicknames

Months after a dust-up with Salman Rushdie over his identity, Facebook will allow "prominent" users to verify their identity and select a nickname, a change from previous policy requiring only your real name:

Facebook, a service built on real names and real identities, will tomorrow start allowing prominent public figures to verify their accounts and then opt to display a preferred nickname instead of their birth name. Those with verified accounts will gain more prominent placement in Facebook’s “People To Subscribe To” suggestions.

Apple Starts Fair Labor Inspections at Foxconn

Stories about the horrible working conditions and high suicide rates at Apple factories have been around for awhile, but Apple announced yesterday it will begin voluntary fair labor inspections:

Apple® today announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct special voluntary audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple’s request. A team of labor rights experts led by FLA president Auret van Heerden began the first inspections Monday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City.

image courtesy: www.godammit.com