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Submission + - A Day in the Life of Privacy (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: An interesting read on the state of privacy and how technology, along with government and social media have changed the idea, and reality, of privacy forever.

The article takes the reader through a typical day, and highlights many of the privacy issues that we face, from our mobile phones, Internet at local coffee shops, Facebook, Twitter, Fourquare, all the way down to cars equipped with OnStar, public cameras, facial recognition technology and more.

As one can imagine, and the author concludes, everyday we make compromises in the face of Privacy, and none of us will ever have as much privacy as we want.

One can argue that many of these things are controllable, and people have a choice, but the fact is, many things we can’t.
Security

1 In 3 Sysadmins Snoop On Colleagues 392

Posted by timothy from the and-they-steal-chips-and-soda dept.
klubar writes "According to a a recent survey, one in three IT staff snoops on colleagues. U.S. information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 percent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role. Makes you wonder about the other 2 out of 3. Did they lie on the survey or really don't snoop?"
Security

Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn 635

Posted by samzenpus from the your-computer-wants-porn dept.
Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."
Programming

Visualizing Open Source Contributions 80

Posted by CmdrTaco from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

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