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Displaying items by tag: Privacy

News manstealingdata

About two weeks ago we saw a random tweet that seemed to indicate that Microsoft had added in technology that would allow for easier spying on Skype conversations. Right after this a tweet on the YourAnonNews feed seemed to indicate that the “bug” that was accidentally sending some conversations to random members of your contact list was related to the new “feature”. There was a much more ominous tweet about an hour later that claimed Skype had been hacked and the source code downloaded. Although we never were able to confirm the relationship to the bug and the reworking of supernodes to switch to Microsoft run servers, we did find out that the released code was not the official source code, but a posting of a decompiled version of the Skype application; still useful if you wanted to look for an exploit, but not the original source code to be sure.

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It looks like Facebook has already begun sharing user information with Law Enforcement; possibly without consent and in violation of some wiretapping laws. The news comes on the heels of a Reuters Interview with an investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. In this interview Jeffrey Duncan said that Facebook contacts law enforcement when they find a post or conversation (through the Facebook messaging system) that contains possible criminal activity.

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bill-of-rights

The US Government has gone and done something that they have been trying to claim they would never do. They have put forward an Executive Order that outlines their ability to control communications in the event of an “emergency”. The new order has the interesting title of “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions”. You could say that the new Executive Order does assign functions to different offices in the government and also assigns duties to the rest of the country including “the private and nonprofit sectors, and the public”. If you read the new EO in its entirety (and we highly recommend you do) you will see that this is a precursor to the enablement of the US Government to require surveillance and control measures all across the internet. So it looks like the big content holders have managed to get their way all in the name of “National Security”.

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Google

Google has agreed to settle with the FTC over accusations that they bypassed security features in Safari to track users’ internet habits. Although Google often comments that they maintain the highest privacy and security standards for its users they have been repeatedly in the news for violations of privacy. Let’s face it, Google wants and needs data they really do not care so much about how they get it as long as they do. They have been in trouble over street view, Google Maps, Google Docs, Chrome, and now for tracking people when they specifically use features to prevent them from being tracked.

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cloud-computing-bad

Cisco is now facing exactly what we think will happen when people realize how tied down they will be with Windows 8. The networking giant attempted to force people that own their Linksys consumer line of wireless routers to use their cloud services to control simple management and administrative items in these devices. According to most reports the shift came after an automatic firmware update. This meant that most of the users complaining were never given the chance to accept this. According to some reports the update was required to continue using the product at all.

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UT drone

Last week we published an article that highlighted the work of a group of students at the University of Texas led by Professor Todd Humphreys. During an impressive demonstration they were able to bring a commercial drone (the same type is also used by Law Enforcement) down by spoofing the GPS data sent to it during navigation. The flaw was found in just about any Drone that uses the civil GPS system (which also could apply to many other devices) and does not include encrypted GPS applications yet although the research did show that with the right equipment even encrypted GPS systems could be vulnerable.

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17It is a common comment that the people that buy Apple products will pay more to get less. Although there are some that have “done the math” and calculated the hardware costs a proof of this it is still not where near a “fact” (it is fun to say though). People tend to like what they like and will pay for what they want. As I was told before during a class on sales “a good deal is a state of mind”. If you think it is a good deal then, guess what, it is.

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facebook_moneyWhen the movie “The Social Network” came out it depicted Mark Zuckerberg as a person with, let’s say, control issues. Both Zuckerberg and Facebook tried to play this down and say that he was and is not really like that. The problem is that time and time again the corporate personality injected into Facebook by Zuckerberg keeps rearing its massively ugly head.

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FirefoxFirefox has caught up with Google’s Chrome browser when it comes to insecurity. After forcing updates on unsuspecting users (we turn on the computer the other day to be told it was already updated) the newest version of Firefox apparently takes screen shots of your pages to put them into their Tab-Thumbnail view including sites that might be encrypted or secure connections (like your banking information). This is a pretty big privacy issue and one that has quite a few people upset.

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drone01As we race toward a day when we might not have any real privacy we are wondering where things will actually stop and where the general public’s rights come in and corporate “rights” actually stop. During all of the privacy debates over Facebook, Google and many others that seem to view personal data as a commodity to be traded for cash one thing has been repeated over and over again. This is “do users of online services have a reasonable expectation of privacy?” We have heard this one bandied about by Congress Men and Women, Facebook and Google Lawyers and even legal scholars seem to be unable to answer this.

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