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Submission + - FTC Releases Google Privacy Audit, Blacks Out The Details (securityledger.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Google could tell you about its privacy practices except, well....they're private. That's the conclusion privacy advocates are drawing after the Federal Trade Commission took a black marker to an independent audit of the company's privacy practices before releasing it to the group EPIC in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Security Ledger is reporting that the FTC released a copy of a Price Waterhouse Coopers audit of Google that was mandated as part of a settlement with the FTC over complaints following a 2010 complaint by EPIC over privacy violations in Google Buzz, a now-defunct social networking experiment. However, the agency acceded to Google requests to redact descriptions of the search giant’s internal procedures and the design of its privacy program."
Hardware

Submission + - The CIA and Jeff Bezos bet $30 million on quantum computing company (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The CIA's investment fund, In-Q-Tel, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have invested $30 million in a Canadian company that claims to build quantum computers, reports Technology Review in a detailed story on why that startup, D-Wave, appears to be attracting serious interest after years of skepticism from experts. A spokesman for In-Q-Tel says that intelligence agencies "have many complex problems that tax classical computing architecture", a feeling apparently strong enough to justify a bet on a radically different, and largely unproven, approach to computing.

Comment No Access for Amateur Coders (Score 1) 469

by poena.dare (#39217751) Attached to: Why Didn't the Internet Take Off In 1983?

Amateur programmers couldn't run and test their own code on it.

If nascent code monkeys weren't interested, then you lose the wow factor pretty quickly.

GEnie, Compuserve, Applelink, and AOL had some success because they were 1/2 BBS-like and 1/2 virtual desktop publishing.

One look at Mosaic + HTML, though, and it was painfully obvious that not only could you publish your random crap without AOL, but you could spend an eternity tinkering and extending it.

Comment Re:sony all over again.. (Score 5, Informative) 270

by poena.dare (#39150251) Attached to: The Dark Side of Digital Distribution

On December 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count of the class action lawsuit, stating: "As a legal matter, [..] plaintiffs have failed to allege facts or articulate a theory on which Sony may be held liable." He then removed massive amounts of wax from his ears after the trial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

Once again, I am in the wrong damn business.
Privacy

Anonymous Cowards, Deanonymized 159

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the we-know-who-you-are dept.
mbstone writes "Arvind Narayana writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their 'fists,' Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses 'since' as opposed to 'because,' can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure." In this exploration the algorithm's first choice was correct 20% of the time, with the poster being in the top 20 guesses 35% of the time. Not amazing, but: "We find that we can improve precision from 20% to over 80% with only a halving of recall. In plain English, what these numbers mean is: the algorithm does not always attempt to identify an author, but when it does, it finds the right author 80% of the time. Overall, it identifies 10% (half of 20%) of authors correctly, i.e., 10,000 out of the 100,000 authors in our dataset. Strong as these numbers are, it is important to keep in mind that in a real-life deanonymization attack on a specific target, it is likely that confidence can be greatly improved through methods discussed above — topic, manual inspection, etc."

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