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Privacy

Submission + - Creeper discovers intelligence agencies (gnuheter.com)

Submitted by mpawlo
mpawlo writes: Patrik Wallstrom of Gnuheter fame has released his new privacy project Creeper. Creeper is basically a picture you place on your blog, website or bittorrent tracker site. Creeper will check the IP of everyone accessing the blog, web site etc and do a lookup into a predefined database over governmental agencies. The result is aggregated on a publicly accessible web site. Creeper will disclose a lot of interesting information regarding how and when governmental officials use their computers and what they monitor at work.

The project was initiated in Sweden a few weeks ago and has already raised serious concerns over privacy matters in Sweden. One of the three letter combination-agencies was discovered monitoring a password protected piracy bittorrent site, i.e. it hacked the web site and kept track of everything happeningthere. This will probably keep happening for six months or so, until all agencies will learn to cover their tracks and use other IP numbers and so forth. Or perhaps the ignorance will continue... Meanwhile, we can all learn what to expect in terms of surveillance and Big Brother tendencies online.

An independent German "Creeper" should be released any day now ("überwach" it is called and is not related to Creeper). Patrik is willing to offer the code to anyone interested in releasing the corresponding service in other countries.
Privacy

Submission + - Torrentspy court ordered to log users.

Submitted by
palewook
palewook writes: "Unsealed on June 8th, a May 29th court decision, reveals Torrentspy is now under court order to keep user logs. The logs will record visitors and track user activity. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney, has until June 12th to file an appeal. Torrentspy's Privacy Policy has not been updated to reflect the court order because the site is still fighting the court order."
The Courts

Submission + - Wiretap chage for video of traffic stop (pennlive.com)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Brian D. Kelly didn't think he was doing anything illegal when he used his videocamera to record a Carlisle police officer during a traffic stop. Making movies is one of his hobbies, he said, and the stop was just another interesting event to film.

Now he's worried about going to prison or being burdened with a criminal record.

Kelly, 18, of Carlisle, was arrested on a felony wiretapping charge, with a penalty of up to 7 years in state prison.
Censorship

Submission + - Pirates protected in Sweden (aftonbladet.se)

Submitted by mno
mno writes: The Swedish Chambers Court (Kammarrätten) has ordered Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish version of MPA, to stop collecting IP-address of file sharers. Basically, the Swedish privacy law states that companies cannot collect personal information without your consent or proof of business relation. Since an IP-address can be used to uniquely identify a person, it is now considered as personal information. This is the second time that Antipiratbyrån lost this case. Most likely they will appeal to the highest instance, but it's uncertain if that appeal will be granted. The implications of this ruling is that the hunt for Swedish file sharers is effectively stopped. Since the Swedish privacy law is based on EU law, the whole of Europe was just granted a shimmer of hope for similar rulings. The article is in Swedish.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Church wants to censor shootout in Cathedral (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
eggdeng
eggdeng writes: "Church of England officials threatened legal action against Sony for using Manchester Cathedral as a backdrop for Resistance: Fall of Man. Apparently they are afraid that using a cathedral as a background for a shootout might give people ideas, especially in view of the rise in gun crimes in Manchester. How many masterpieces would they have to ban if they applied this principle across the board to film and literary works?"
The Internet

Submission + - TorrentSpy's RAM data now considered as evidence (com.com)

Submitted by AncientPC
AncientPC writes: This past Friday TorrentSpy was ordered to start tracking visitors (/. discussion). Possibly setting a new legal precedent, TorrentSpy is now required to track visitor info that resides in RAM to turn over as legal evidence.

The courts have for the first time found that the electronic trail briefly left in a computer server's Random Access Memory (RAM) by each visitor to a site is "stored information," and must be turned over as evidence during litigation, according to documents obtained by CNET News.com.

...

This may be the first time that anyone has argued that information within RAM is electronically stored information and therefore subject to the rules of evidence, Chooljian said according to court records. Up to now, many Web sites that promised users anonymity, such as TorrentSpy, believed they need only to switch off their servers' logging function to avoid storing user data.

Should Chooljian's order stand, the decision could force Web sites to rethink privacy precautions.

The Courts

Jailed Chinese Reporter Joins Yahoo! Suit 103

Posted by Zonk from the keep-your-friends-close dept.
taoman1 writes "The Associated Press reports that Shi Tao, who was sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison, is now seeking compensation from Yahoo. He claims the Hong Kong and Chinese branches of the company provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to his arrest. 'Shi, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, was jailed for allegedly providing state secrets to foreigners. His conviction stemmed from an e-mail he sent containing his notes on a government circular that spelled out restrictions on the media. Yahoo has acknowledged turning over data on Shi at the request of the Chinese government, saying company employees face civil and criminal sanctions if they ignore local laws. It denies Yahoo Hong Kong was involved.'"
Privacy

Submission + - Google Engineer Response to Privacy Report (mattcutts.com)

Submitted by
* * Beatles-Beatles
* * Beatles-Beatles writes: "http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/privacy-internationa l-loses-all-credibility/
Sigh. Google as a company takes privacy very seriously. I personally feel strongly about protecting our users' privacy. So I'm frustrated by a recent study that Privacy International did, and I want to know if I'm off-base in my reaction. I got back home from SMX and I'm surfing the web when I see this AP article entitled "Watchdog group slams Google on privacy":

So I surf over to Privacy International (PI) to read the actual report, and I have to be honest with you — it made me mad. But I try not to blog when I'm angry, so I decided to sleep on it. After sleeping on it, I'm still pretty frustrated with Privacy International's conclusions. Here's my take."
Music

Submission + - Paul McCartney on music in the digital world

Submitted by
Rachhpal
Rachhpal writes: "Paul McCartney, ex-Beatles member, will release his new album today, "Memory Almost Full". In an interview with L.A. Times, he indicated ending his long time relationship with EMI and making his album fully downloadable through his new relationship with Starbucks' new Hear Music Label. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-mc cartney3jun03,1,1265126.story?track=rss&ctrack=2&c set=true Some of his comments on the music industry currently from the interview: "I was bored with the old record company's jaded view," McCartney says, ..... "They're very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they're a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they've got millions of dollars and X budget ... for them to come up with boring ways — because they've been at it for so long — to what they call 'market' it. And I find that all a bit disturbing."
Patents

Alan Cox on Patent Law and GPLv3 191

Posted by Zonk from the checking-in-with-the-cox dept.
tykev writes "Linux kernel guru Alan Cox talks about kernel features, cooperation with hardware vendors, and software patents. From the interview: 'I don't think [Microsoft's patent threats] are the biggest danger. As Microsoft has been finding out recently it is the patent trolls, and organisations with buried patents in interesting areas that are the biggest threat in the USA. The real answer to that problem, however, is to pull the USA back into line with the majority of the world which simply does not recognize patents on software but respects them as literary works subject to copyright law.'"
Networking

Submission + - Proof that women hate men. (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
mikeeusa2
mikeeusa2 writes: """"Mary Winkler Could Only Serve 60 Days(This is the woman who shot and killed her preacher husband in the back with a shotgun).

Daringest on Sat, 2007-06-09 03:49. informs us:

The trial of Mary Winkler is saddening and disappointing, but it's not surprising. Women get away with murder probably everyday.

The foreman was on the jury this Friday morning on CourtTV. According to him the women on the jury wanted to acquit the murderess. He, the jury foreman, was disappointed by the verdict but said the decision was a compromise since the ten women on the jury wanted to set her free.

Lisa Bloom, host of the CourtTV program and daughter of famed misandrist Gloria Allred, said the defense attorney was smart to keep the platform heels next to the defendant when she was on the stand. Apparently, Mz. Bloom thinks this helped the female jurors to sympathize with and exonerate the murderess. If a man wants his wife or girlfriend to wear heels, he deserves to be killed.

When a man gets married, he gives his wife the right to take his life, as well as his rights and property.

What's interesting is that in another case some months ago, a man was sentenced to eight (8) years in jail for trespassing in a women's apartment and trying on her underwear. So women believe a man who tries on her underwear should be jailed for eight years but a woman has a right to kill a man just because she feels like it. Where's the "equality" here?""""
Security

Submission + - Woman to serve little time for murder of husband. (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
mikeeusa2
mikeeusa2 writes: """Mary Winkler Could Only Serve 60 Days(This is the woman who shot and killed her preacher husband in the back with a shotgun).

Daringest on Sat, 2007-06-09 03:49. informs us:

The trial of Mary Winkler is saddening and disappointing, but it's not surprising. Women get away with murder probably everyday.

The foreman was on the jury this Friday morning on CourtTV. According to him the women on the jury wanted to acquit the murderess. He, the jury foreman, was disappointed by the verdict but said the decision was a compromise since the ten women on the jury wanted to set her free.

Lisa Bloom, host of the CourtTV program and daughter of famed misandrist Gloria Allred, said the defense attorney was smart to keep the platform heels next to the defendant when she was on the stand. Apparently, Mz. Bloom thinks this helped the female jurors to sympathize with and exonerate the murderess. If a man wants his wife or girlfriend to wear heels, he deserves to be killed.

When a man gets married, he gives his wife the right to take his life, as well as his rights and property.

What's interesting is that in another case some months ago, a man was sentenced to eight (8) years in jail for trespassing in a women's apartment and trying on her underwear. So women believe a man who tries on her underwear should be jailed for eight years but a woman has a right to kill a man just because she feels like it. Where's the "equality" here?"""
Privacy

Submission + - Which ISPs Are Spying on You? (wired.com)

Submitted by firesquirt
firesquirt writes: In an article from WIRED http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/20 07/05/isp_privacy The few souls that attempt to read and understand website privacy policies know they are almost universally unintelligible and shot through with clever loopholes. But one of the most important policies to know is your internet service provider's — the company that ferries all your traffic to and from the internet, from search queries to BitTorrent uploads, flirty IMs to porn.
Censorship

Submission + - Slashdot is filtered in Iran !

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "It is a while that slashdot is filtered in Iran and other interesting and scientific sites are becoming banned one after another .People in Iran are used to see their favorite sites banned without any logical reason . It seems that a robot which is sensitive to specific words is used to control the passing traffic without any human supervision and there are no places to complain about or no one is going to be responsible about it. The main purpose of censorship was said to be stopping people's access to pornographic and political sites , The number of dedicated hosts in European countries are increased which are just used for VPN connections. In Iran, people simply know how to tunnel using softwares like VTUND and OpenVPN and where to buy VPN accounts . What they are doing is hiding their head under snow and claiming nothing's going on."
Privacy

Privacy Group Gives Google Lowest Possible Grade 260

Posted by Zonk from the eff-triple-minus dept.
The Washington Post is reporting on a finding by London-based group Privacy International. In a new report, they find that Google has some of the worst privacy-protection practices anywhere on the web, giving them the lowest possible grade. "While a number of other Internet companies have troubling policies, none comes as close to Google to 'achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy,' Privacy International said in an explanation of its findings. In a statement from one of its lawyers, Google said it aggressively protects its users' privacy and stands behind its track record. In its most conspicuous defense of user privacy, Google last year successfully fought a U.S. Justice Department subpoena demanding to review millions of search requests."

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