Comment To our cell-providers: (Score 1) 1
H-e-l-l-o? Can you hear me? Wouldn't be nice and caring of your customers to let them choose?
Comment Re:Covertly transferring images from your phone (Score 3, Insightful) 71
You have to differentiate between experimentation and use; when you test the idea you need to make sure that your users knowledge of what you are doing is not affecting your results and weakening your conclusion. Of course, if ever deployed, you have to tell people what are they doing.
Submission + - Using Virtual Worlds to 'Soft Control' People's Movements in the Real One (northwestern.edu)
pinguin-geek writes: Computer science researchers at Northwestern University have developed a way to exert limited control one how people move, pushing them out of their regular travel patterns. The key: tapping into some of their cell phone applications. The findings could elicit a broader range of user-collected data by driving foot traffic to under-utilized areas.
Comment Re:I Know Where This Is Going (Score 1) 240
Little problem - there's no 'traffic [..] characteristic of SwarmScreen'; the RIAA Lawyer must read the details and try again.
Comment Re:Ahh, great, just what we needed (Score 1) 240
No, no really, read the details (or followup comments) and you'll see it's not totally random; just random within a set you provide.
Bookmark SwarmScreen -- Hiding in the Crowd (northwestern.edu)
Submission + - Privacy in BitTorrent by Hiding in the Crowd
pinguin-geek writes: Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new "guilt-by-association" threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification.
For the full story ....
