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I take security and privacy issues seriously, but sometimes I despair when news stories such as that regarding Samsung TVs eavesdropping on private conversation explode across the media as happened last week. The reason for my despondency has less to do with the data privacy debate and more to do …
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released the latest version of its 'Who Has Your Back?' [report](https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-requests-2015) and accompanying infographic, and it makes for interesting reading. Once you appreciate that what the EFF is talking about here is how good, measured as a response to a handful of yes or … |
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The recently revised Facebook community standards page states that the social network is on a mission "to give people the power to share and make the world more open" however it appears that it may have been giving the wrong people the power to share stuff you thought was private. … 
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In his essay '[A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering](http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/how-does-nsa-break-ssl.html)' Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, asks "how the hell is NSA breaking SSL?" If this is news to you, following the Edward Snowden revelations in The Guardian, then you obviously haven't read the New York … 
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Cancer is a terrible disease which it has claimed the life of a well known technology journalist and a well known coder within the last couple of weeks. Now Facebook has been diagnosed as being in the final stages of that online cancer which is a disregard for user privacy, …
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According to the [Daily Mirror](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/charlie-hebdo-isis-flag-death-4946579), a number of official websites connected to French municipalities were hacked at the end of last week to coincide with the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the hostage taking at the Jewish supermarket. The newspaper reported that the home screens of websites belonging to the towns …
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American technology companies are by implication evil, and aiding terrorist groups such as Islamic State/ISIS according to a number of highly influential but terribly ill-informed Western players. Apple and Google have become the command and control networks of choice for terrorists and implementing full-device encryption by default will help Islamic …
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One of the biggest security stories so far this year is that of the high school that remotely triggered webcams in laptops given to students -- which the school said it only did to help track stolen laptops, and which some students and families said was a violation of their …
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Amazon has, this week, revealed the first smartphone designed by the online retail giant in the shape of the Amazon Fire. Described by the company as featuring "two new breakthrough technologies that allow you to see and interact with the world through a whole new lens" and by some others … 
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The Onion Router, better known as the Tor Network, is often thought of as being the dark-side of the web. Not least as the anonymity provided by Tor meant that sites hosted on so-called hidden service servers were free to trade in just about anything from drugs and guns through …
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Today is another of those 'Hallmark' IT security days; in the case of Tuesday the 11th of February 2014 that means 'Safer Internet Day'. I'm not going to start yet another rant about the pointlessness of this, and why every day should be Safer Internet Day. If you want to …
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Apparently it's Data Privacy Day tomorrow (January 28th) which, if you will allow me to quote the [Stay Safe Online](https://www.staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/about) website blurb, is an "international effort to empower and educate people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint". Given the Edward Snowden NSA spying revelations that broke during …
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[ATTACH=RIGHT]22094[/ATTACH]Facebook Vice-President Chris Cox has [announced](https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150251867797131) the latest in a seemingly never ending run of privacy updates for the worlds' biggest social network. The improvements can be summed up as tightening up the question most often asked by those users worried about their privacy, namely "who can see this?" Unless … 
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A [Channel 4 News investigation](http://www.channel4.com/news/phone-mobile-data-24-hours-apps-security-secret) in the UK has revealed that in a 24 hour period just one smartphone made 350,000 requests to 315 different servers and made 30,000 requests to 76 servers when otherwise sitting totally idle for 45 minutes. Oh, and then there was the location data being …
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Discount coupons are OK, but consumers consider drive-by location marketing an invasion of privacy. That's the warning message that research across four countries (US, UK, Mexico and India) by ISACA would appear to be flagging loud and clear to retailers wanting to maximise the marketing potential of customers with smartphones. … |
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Aggressive adware, of the kind that creates shortcuts on your screen or changes your search engine configuration, has arrived on Android devices and then some. According to security vendor Bitdefender, as much as 90% of free Android apps contain adware with up to 75% coming with the 'aggressive' variety. ' as being "the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobility, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios". The global IT analyst outfit has also just released details of research which suggests that the perceived level of maturity when it comes to the …
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When participants of a recent study were asked to share sensitive information on two different online surveys -- one designed to look unprofessional and the other backed by a major university -- the participants were more likely to share private information on the unprofessional-looking site.[ATTACH]16892[/ATTACH]Researchers from Carnegie Mellon released yesterday … 
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Security researchers reveal ways that willy-waving Chatroulette users might be leaving themselves open to much more than accusations of just being dirty perverts as privacy attack scenarios are explored. [attach]15830[/attach]If you have ever been tempted, like so many male Chatroulette users, to show complete strangers the contents of your trousers …
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This is, I would suggest, perhaps the biggest privacy issue of the day. I have lost count of the number of press releases, leads, emails and telephone calls that have come my way this year regarding how search engines treat the data you enter when performing a search. Be it …
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Lawmakers in Washington asked tech companies Tuesday whether they need to create legislation that would protect people's private information online. The Senate Commerce Committee took up the issue, asking representatives from Apple, AT&T, Facebook and Google if an online privacy bill is necessary. Those companies have all dealt with recent …
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[ATTACH=RIGHT]16244[/ATTACH]Ron Bowes has been accused of hacking Facebook. But when he put the information for over a 100 million [URL="http://www.facebook.com"]Facebook[/URL] users into a 2.8 GB torrent stream on his website Skullsecurity.org, he didn't need to hack anything to get it - it was already publicly available on Facebook. All he …
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Over the weekend I wrote a news story for DaniWeb which revealed how the iPhone was vulnerable to SMS text message spoofing. This went under the title "[Why Apple was right about iMessage 'fix' for iPhone SMS spoofing](http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/apple/ios-iphone-os/news/431373/why-apple-was-right-about-imessage-fix-for-iphone-sms-spoofing)" because, simply put, SMS text messaging is exposed to this kind of …
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LiveJournal users are up in arms over a modification to the service that they say allows users commenting to their online journals to also post those comments on Facebook or Twitter, even if the journal is set up to be restricted only to the owners' friends. In response to the …
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While I can't imagine for a moment that Google is in danger of going out of business, with the searching masses marching elsewhere in dismay at various perceived privacy infringing issues. However, if you look at the media attention regarding just that, the privacy issue, then Google is going to …
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Facebook users have been making a lot of use of the new 'like' feature which allows users to link to webpages that they, well, like funnily enough. Not so funny when Facebook users are claiming to like a site called "101 Hottest Women in the World" which features an image …
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Last week, Google's [URL="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#marissa"]Marissa Mayer [/URL]and [URL="http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html#eric"]Eric Schmidt [/URL]appeared in separate interviews on the [URL="http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10129"]Charlie Rose [/URL]show, and not surprisingly they spoke in one voice where privacy and trust were concerned. They both said that when we use online services, we give up privacy in the process. There it is …
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The Maine State Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection reported today that it has received a query from an unnamed out-of-state finance company about placing Global Positioning System units into vehicles it finances or that its customers used as collateral, according to an [URL="http://www.bangordailynews.com/story/Statewide/GPS-data-intruding-on-privacy,151289"]article [/URL]in the [I]Bangor Daily News[/I]. Such GPSes … 
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[ATTACH=RIGHT]16283[/ATTACH]An [URL="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703977004575393173432219064.html"]investigation by the Wall Street Journal[/URL] found that many of the largest websites in the U.S. are installing technologies on the computers of visitors - sometimes tracking them in over a hundred ways. The Journal examined the 50 most popular websites in the United States in order to see …
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Google Buzz has been the center of attention this week to anyone who has a Gmail account. I have to say that Google Buzz took me by complete surprise, so of course I wrote a blog anout how it is Google's new spam system. Well now I'm writing this article …
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The End.