Tag: privacy

  1. Microsoft patents the end-all-be-all of spyware; open source community gears up in response.

    18 July 2007

    A couple of days ago it came to light that Microsoft, everyone's favorite software powerhouse took out a patent on what very well could be the spyware to end all spyware - a system which scans information stored on a workstation and sends it Someplace Else for analysis... to generate advertising specifically geared for the person logged into the box. The patent describes a system integrated not only into the operating system and user interface, but all of the applications linked against this functionality that would look at every document on the machine, every e-mail sent or recieved, multimedia files' metadata …

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  2. A significant blow to anonymity - E-Gold indicted!

    01 May 2007

    E-Gold is an online bank which allows customers to anonymously deposit money into an account and transfer it electronically to other accounts on financial networks around the world, very much like Swiss or South American banks allow you to do if you've got enough money. The thing about E-Gold is that you don't have to be as rich as a James Bond villain to open an account, you only need a small amount of money to open one of their numbered accounts. For the past couple of years, however, the United States government has been investigating them, and brought the …

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  3. Cryptome taken offline without reason.

    30 April 2007

    Cryptome is one of the longest-running websites on the Net for information related to personal privacy, whistleblowing and other sorts of information that make the people we're supposed to trust look bad. On 28 April 2007 John Young recieved a notice from his hosting company that Cryptome's plug would be pulled due to a violation of their terms of service agreement. It should be noted that this has happened many times since the site opened in 1999, and each time Verio has accepted Young's explanation for why a particular document was available. This time, they're accepting no reason at all …

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  4. Tor has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code project!

    21 March 2007

    Tor, The Onion Router is a well-known net.privacy project that has been the subject of a grassroots development project for a couple of years now. The EFF has made room for a couple of student developers through Google's Summer of Code programme and posted an official announcement to the NoReply wiki. To apply for a position in the project you have to have a code sample and be at least somewhat familiar with how Tor works and how the code works. Knowledge of crypto is a major plus, seeing as how it encrypts traffic between nodes for privacy. You …

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  5. ADVISE - The TIA Project Strikes Back.

    09 March 2007

    Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.

    As with many government projects are are shelved due to public outcry, it was renamed, reclassified, and worked onapace - the data mining software that TIA was supposed to be based …

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  6. College professor asked to stop using and teaching Tor.

    09 February 2007

    Paul Cesarini of Bowling Green State University is an assistant professor of visual communication and has been using Tor (The Onion Router - an anonymisation system for net.traffic) to familiarise himself with it so that he could then discuss it with students in two of the courses he teaches. He was visited by campus police and a network admin and told to stop using it. It seems that someone else on campus was using Tor, and more's the point he was under investigation for fraud of some kind, and they wanted to know if the student under investigation had been …

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