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Privacy

Submission + - Judge Orders Man To Delete Revenge Blog (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: A Minnesota man violated a restraining order obtained by his ex-girlfriend by blogging about her mental health and sexual issues, and sending links to posts on the blog to her family, friends, and co-workers.The judge then extended the restraining order by 50 years, ordered the guy never to write about his ex on the Internet and ordered him to delete the blog he created. Even though there was no evidence that what he had written was false, the judge said the ex-gf's "right to be free from harassment" outweighed the guy's "right to free speech."

“I believe it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for a court to order an entire blog deleted,” says technology law professor Eric Goldman.

Thoughts, slashdot?
Government

Submission + - DHS wants its own fusion center (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: The Department of Homeland Security wants to create its own internal fusion center so that its many agencies can aggregate the data they have and make it searchable from a central location. The DHS is calling it a “Federated Information Sharing System” and asked its privacy advisory committee to weigh in on the repercussions at a public meeting in D.C. last month.

The committee, consisting of an unpaid group of people from the world of corporate privacy as well as the civil liberty community, were asked last December to review the plan and provide feedback on which privacy protections need to be put in place when info from DHS components (which include the TSA, the Secret Service, and Immigration Services, to name a few) are consolidated. The committee raised concerns about who would get access to the data given the potentially comprehensive profile this would provide of American citizens."

DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division has already awarded a contract to Raytheon for a “new system [that] will enhance how agencies manage, investigate, and report on law enforcement and intelligence activities by improving data sharing between multiple law-enforcement agencies,” reported Information Week (http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/info-management/231903005).
China

Submission + - China Blocking The Tor Tunnels In Its Firewall? (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: In recent months, administrators of services with encrypted connections designed to allow users secure remote access say they’ve seen strange activity coming from China: When a user from within the country attempts to reach a server abroad, a string of seemingly random data hits the destination computer before he or she can connect, sometimes followed by that user’s communication being mysteriously dropped.

The anti-censorship and anonymity service Tor, for instance, has found that many of its “bridge nodes”–privately-placed servers around the world designed to connect users to the rest of Tor’s public network of traffic re-routing computers–have become inaccessible to Chinese users within hours or even minutes of being set up
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 8 Secure Boot Defeated (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
jhigh
jhigh writes: "An Austrian security researcher will release the first "bootkit" for Windows 8 at MalCon in Mumbai. This exploit loads in the MBR and stays memory resident until Windows loads, resulting in root access to the system. This allegedly defeats the new secure boot features in Windows 8's bootloader."
China

Submission + - Google Maps Mystery Spied in China Desert Solved (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Slashdotters read Monday about strange symbols in the Gobi Desert recently imaged and indexed by Google Maps. Alien landing zones? Some military thingy? Bizarre art project? Nope. The grids of zigzagging white lines seen in two of the images — the strangest of the various desert structures — are spy satellite calibration targets, according to one NASA scientist.
Businesses

Submission + - Tech Site Sues Ex-Employee, Claiming Rights To His (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: Noah Kravitz worked as a mobile phone reviewer for a tech website called Phonedog for four and a half years. While there, he started a Twitter account (of his own volition) with the handle @PhoneDog_Noah to tweet his stories and videos for the site as well as personal stuff about sports, food, music, etc. When he left Phonedog, he had approximately 17,000 followers and changed his Twitter handle to @noahkravitz.

This summer, Phonedog started barking that it wanted the Twitter account back, and sued Kravitz, valuing the account at $340,000 (!), or $2.50 per follower per month. Kravitz claims the Twitter account was his own property. A California judge ruled that the case can proceed and theoretically go to trial. Meanwhile, Kravitz continues to tweet.
Privacy

Submission + - Supreme Court Wary Of Tech-Enabled Gov Surveillanc (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case involving a DC nightclub owner who was busted for running a massive cocaine ring thanks to police putting a tracking device on his car for 4 weeks (without a warrant). The government argues that it didn't need a warrant because it was only tracking the guy's Jeep on public streets where he has no right to privacy. The Supreme Court Justices were skeptical, to say the least. From article:

“If you win this case, there is nothing to prevent you from monitoring 24 hours a day every citizen in the United States,” said Supreme Court Justice Breyer. “If you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like 1984.”

Dreeben argued that the government isn’t doing this universally (and doesn’t plan to ). In response to a question from Justice Elena Kagan, he said the federal government use of GPS trackers annually numbers in the low thousands (but said he didn’t know how often the devices are used by state law enforcement).

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the most adamant in asking about the larger repercussions of how the government is interpreting what constitutes a “reasonable search” using tracking devices. “By your theory, you could track everyone using their cell phones. Your theory is that as long as you’re monitoring someone in public, it’s reasonable for you to use their possessions to track them,” she said.
Facebook

Submission + - Judge Orders Divorcing Couple To Swap Facebook/Dat (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: A Connecticut judge issued an order telling divorce attorneys for Stephen and Courtney Gallion to swap passwords for their clients' Facebook and dating site accounts. The husband's lawyer asked for access to the wife's account to try to find evidence that she didn't want responsibility for caring for their two children so that he could get full custody. This is quite an overreach when it comes to discovery — usually discovery is limited to making you turn over "responsive" material, not letting opposing counsel shuffle through anything they want to determine what's relevant. It's a huge violation of privacy, but apparently judges are increasingly forcing litigants to turn over their social networking passwords, especially in personal injury cases.
Idle

Submission + - TSA Officer Leaves A 'Get Your Freak On' Note (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: TSA officer finds a tiny vibrator in a passenger's bag, then scrawls a message on the official form letting her know that her bag had been searched: "Get your freak on, girl." C'mon, TSA, really? Funny, but so inappropriate.
Google

Submission + - Google Won't Leak Search Terms Anymore (blogspot.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: Google plans to encrypt search for signed-in users, so that websites will no longer get to see the search terms that led a user to their site, though they will get aggregated reports on the top 1000 search terms that led traffic to their sites.
Privacy

Submission + - Feds Shy Away From Raiding Email Without Warrant (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: In December, a federal judge ruled that the 4th amendment applies to email and that the feds cannot go after it without a warrant. (We have Smilin' Bob to thank for that — https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory-appeals-court-holds). Though the federal judge's decision only applies to the four states in his jurisdiction, it looks like federal agencies are applying it nationally. An internal email written by the IRS general counsel cites the law and says that its collectors can no longer get the contents of suspected tax cheats' email by sending letters to their ISPs, though it can get non-content information, like who they email and how they pay for their accounts.
Facebook

Submission + - School builds private social network to teach kids (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: This is quite a cool idea. A New York middle school built a private social network using open source tool Elgg as a "walled garden" where students can experiment and practice without leaving a permanent footprint on the Web. The School wants the kids to learn about “the quandaries of digital life,” such as “invisible audiences,” and “the permanence and persistence” of things put online. But the school doesn’t want the students learning these lessons “out in the wild” — on Facebook, for example — where the students would leave permanent evidence on the Web that could haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The lessons haven't completely sunk in though:

"In another instance of mistakes on the wider Web, a few years ago, some of the students discovered Formspring — a place where users can publicly ask and answer questions of one another. Despite the school’s digital literacy lessons, some of the students had started accounts using their real names and images. A parent-teacher Googling one of the student’s names happened upon it. Blumberg printed out pages and pages of the questions and answers and confronted the school’s 8th graders with it.

“Reading through I was shocked by how many conjugations of the F word there are,” says Blumberg. “I told them this is what people will now find when they Google your names: answers to questions like, ‘Have you ever given a blow job?’”

Some were angry, saying that the questions and answers were private and asking whether teachers were stalking them online. Others just wanted to know how they could delete it."
Facebook

Submission + - 91% of surveyed employers check applicants' social (forbes.com)

Submitted by nonprofiteer
nonprofiteer writes: Round-up of what employers like and don't like to see on applications' social network accounts:

"69% of those surveyed say they had at some point rejected a candidate based on what they found there. The most frequent sin committed by the erstwhile job seekers was not drinking (reason for the rejection 9% of the time) or drugs (10%) or having a mutual Facebook friend that the employer thinks is a total skeezeball (0%), but getting caught for lying about their qualifications (13%). Honesty is the best policy, job hunters, especially when there are so many places on the Internet for fact-checking your resumé."

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