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Submission + - Hosted E-mail is Protected by the Fourth Amendment (freedom-to-tinker.com) 1

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: As reported on the EFF website, today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider's servers are protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the messages are accessible to an email provider.
As the court puts it, "[t]he government may not compel a commercial ISP to turn over the contents of a subscriber's emails without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause."

Submission + - McDonalds Customer data hacked (cnet.com)

Submitted by deseipel
deseipel writes: here goes, my first /. submission

McDonalds has reported that one of its customer databases has been hacked and that personal information such as email addr's, phone numbers, addresses have been stolen... but no financial information was stolen. It might as well be financial info as it's everything else a dubious person needs to steal an identity.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20025579-83.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

I'm lovin it!
The Internet

Submission + - Why I'm Posting Bail Money for Julian Assange (huffingtonpost.com) 3

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes: Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I (Michael Moore) am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
Space

Submission + - Geminid meteor shower TONIGHT! (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes: For sky-watchers willing to brave frosty winter temperatures, more than a hundred meteors an hour may fall overnight on December 13 and 14, the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower.

"The quarter moon will obscure the first part of the show, but once it sets after midnight [your local time], the conditions should be ideal," said Geza Gyuk, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois.

"If you can't stay up that late, then after 10 p.m. is okay too, but the later the better."

The missed sleep may be worth it: The Geminids have been rising in intensity and brightness, and the upcoming show may outshine the more famous August Persieds as the best meteor shower of 2010.
Firefox

Submission + - CEO Credits Chrome to Larry, Sergey's Sneakiness 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If one was asked to cite a modern-day example of The Trojan Horse, the Firefox-Mozilla situation might come to mind. And that was before last week's Chrome Event, in which Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave Larry Page and Sergey Brin kudos for Chrome's existence, explaining that the pair 'sneakily' hired engineers to work on Firefox before secretly cranking out Chrome for Google: 'From my very first day at Google,' recalled Schmidt, 'they [Larry & Sergey] made clear that we should be in the browser business and the OS business. Not being interested in either, I said no. But they rather sneakily hired a number of brilliant computer scientists to work on the amazingly successful Firefox browser, which Google helped fund through an advertising agreement — and that core team went on to create Chrome' (video @5:50). Be interesting to know what the IRS, which has been scrutinizing the tax status of the funds Mozilla received from Google for years, will make of this revelation.

Submission + - The woman's whose making your privacy her business (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by davecb
davecb writes: The woman who faced down Facebook and was dissed by Silicon Valley business boys as "an old-fashioned scold" is really one of the early advocates for using the internet for access to information, and to open up government.

The Globe and Mail has an interview today with Jennifer Stoddart, the privacy commisioner of Canada, who went up against Facebook for all of us, and made them back down.
United States

Submission + - Paypal account frozen for making Wikileak donation (rathergather.com) 3

Submitted by kaptink
kaptink writes: Reddit user 'hellokevin11' blogs:

"I go to log into my business account, and it's locked. The girl on the phone told me it's because my account handles a large amount of money (it's a biz account), I recently sent a lot of money ($4000) overseas, and I also sent money to wikileaks. My account is being investigated for illegal activities and I have to account for what the money was used for. They want invoices and such."

I've been blacklisted as well. "This account has been permanently locked. All information associated with this account has been blocked from the PayPal system and cannot be registered with another account."

Comment Missing the point? (Score 1) 968

by apdyck (#34486432) Attached to: Google Wants To Take Away Your Capslock Key
I think that most people are missing the point of what Google is trying to do. They are not so much removing the Caps Lock key as they are adding a Search key. On a PC that is designed around web browsing (not coding, drafting, etc.) this makes quite a bit of sense. I for one never use the Caps Lock key but my wife uses it constantly. I believe that removing it would force her to learn to type correctly and therefore increase her overall typing speed. Having a search button, on the other hand, will make it very easy to pull up a search box when you're in a hurry to find out what the latest buzz is on your favorite topic.
The Internet

Submission + - How WikiLeaks Survived .. and Flourished (renesys.com)

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes: How has WikiLeaks managed not only to avoid takedown, but diversify its hosting to the point of virtual unstoppability? Renesys takes a look at the DNS mappings, routed IP prefixes, and service providers (and countries) that keep WikiLeaks on the air.

From the article:
"It's apparent that search and social infrastructure (Google and Twitter) now play a key role in re-spawning content that gets blocked in any one place, and drawing even more attention to the surviving copies. If suppressed content automatically goes viral, the Internet's construction basically guarantees that that content will have a home for the rest of time. If you attack DNS support, people will tweet raw IP addresses. If you take down the BGP routes to web content, people will put up more mirrors, or switch to overlay networks to distribute the data. You can't burn down the Library of Alexandria any more— it will respawn in someone's basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing."

Submission + - Wikileaks took advice from media outlets (google.com) 1

Submitted by formfeed
formfeed writes: According to the AP (through Google News), Wikileaks isn't just sitting on the recent material so they can release it bit by bit to the press, as many people implied. On the contrary, it's quite the other way around: "only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material" are they releasing it themselves. These Newspapers "have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents"

AP questions whether Wikileaks will follow these redactions, but nevertheless seems quite impressed by this "extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization"
Censorship

Submission + - PayPal stops WikiLeaks payments (thepaypalblog.com)

Submitted by mpawlo
mpawlo writes: It seems like Wikileaks is finally starting to learn that corporations do not provide free speech or services as such. This week Wikileaks has not been able to use Amazon's cloud service, then its domain name hosting got into trouble, then some of its other hosting disappeared and now Paypal "permanently restricts" Wikileaks account. This due to EULA violations, namely "payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity". The Web and the Internet is fantastic to facilitate free speech, but in practice there is no real safeguards for it, when the sh*t hits the fan for real. You may be a supporter or a non-supporter to Wikileaks, but that is in my opinion the real story here.
Google

Google Loses Street View Suit, Forced To Pay $1 225

Posted by timothy from the token-victory dept.
Translation Error writes "Two and a half years ago, the Borings sued Google for invading their privacy by driving onto their private driveway and taking pictures of their house to display on Google Street View. Now, the case has finally come to a close with the judge ruling in favor of the Borings and awarding them the princely sum of $1. While the judge found the Borings to be in the right, she awarded them only nominal damages, as the fact that they had already made images of their home available on a real estate site and didn't bother to seal the lawsuit to minimize publicity indicated the Borings neither valued their privacy nor had it been affected in any great way by Google's actions."
Google

Submission + - Google buries searches for 'bad' businesses (techtree.com)

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes: Do you wish that all those unhelpful websites that show up in your Google search results would disappear and only those which offer a good user experience stay? Well, Google is here to help. It has tweaked the search ranking algorithm of its search engine. Thus, today onwards, websites giving poor a user experience would not be showing up in the searched results and will get buried eventually.

This was the result of a news story run by The New York Times about Clarabelle Rodriguez's horrible experience with one of the online vendor. Even though Google search engine is smart enough, several individuals try to understand how the search engine's ranking systems work. While many try to make the best of it, select few try to find loopholes and exploit it. As per NY Times' story, Vitaly Borker, a seller at DecorMyEyes.com, purposely shouted and ill-treated several customers as he saw that online complaints of the same put his site rankings higher.

So, does this mean that banks involved in the housing mortgage crisis are getting buried as well?

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