Privacy Watch: Today's Stories of Interest
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-23 21:56:58 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-23 21:56:58 UTC
-
Apple has been hit with a hefty class action lawsuit, courtesy of three men from Massachusetts who say the computer company illegally collected and sold its customers’ personal information.
-
The NHS has been going through some fairly radical changes. This will affect who can see your medical records and what they can do with them.
-
This is the kind of charge that gives people like Richard Stallman fits. Basically, if you have a microphone connected to your computer Chrome accesses it through a Web Speech API and is capable of performing speech-to-text tasks. The claim is that these features can be hijacked through pop-under windows for eavesdropping purposes.
-
Forecast of social network's impending doom comes from comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease
-
The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
-
The bulk collection of phone call data by US intelligence agencies is illegal and has had only "minimal" benefits in preventing terrorism, an independent US privacy watchdog has ruled.
-
The U.S. National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records provides only minimal benefits to countering terrorism, is illegal and should end, a federal privacy watchdog said in a report to be released on Thursday and reviewed by Reuters.
-
The federal agency that declared the NSA's telephone dragnet illegal has now released its 238-page report. One of its best features is a succinct presentation of 4 specific reasons that the program cannot be justified even under the PATRIOT Act. "There are four grounds upon which we find that the telephone records program fails to comply with Section 215," the text states. Here are those reasons:
-
Pitched to us as an entry in a C-Span competition about what issues Congress should deal with in 2014, Data Obsession breaks down the controversy over domestic surveillance with help from AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein.
-
You see, spying is kind of a sensitive topic in the reunified Germany. Before the reunification in 1990, citizens of Communist East Germany grappled with spying on one’s own friends, family and colleagues, under orders by the Stasi secret police.
-
An new commission to be headed by Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt is set to investigate the implications of the US snooping affair for the future of the internet.
-
Tor, an acronym for “the onion router,” is software that provides the closest thing to anonymity on the Internet. Engineered by the Tor Project, a nonprofit group, and offered free of charge, Tor has been adopted by both agitators for liberty and criminals. It sends chat messages, Google (GOOG) searches, purchase orders, or e-mails on a winding path through multiple computers, concealing activities as the layers of an onion cover its core, encrypting the source at each step to hide where one is and where one wants to go. Some 5,000 computers around the world, volunteered by their owners, serve as potential hop points in the path, obscuring requests for a new page or chat. Tor Project calls these points relays.
-
So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA. Though they all differ somewhat, each state's bill would impede NSA operations within their boundaries.
-
Edward Snowden risked everything to expose the secret NSA spying program of our calls and emails. Now he's been formally charged with violating the Espionage Act—the same law used to charge Bradley Manning, who provided information to WikiLeaks.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- IBM Has Taken Control of GNOME
- Don't expect a successor to be found any time soon
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, August 30, 2025
-
- Links 31/08/2025: Baggage Claim Scams, an Insurrectionist’s War on Culture, and a Sudden Robotics Hype
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 31/08/2025: Reviewing Netsurf and Slightly Less Historic Ada Design
- Links for the day
- Links 31/08/2025: Google Gmail Data Breach and LF Puff Pieces for Pay
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- This is What Google News Has Become
- Moments ago
- The Slopfarm WebProNews Has Turned Google News Into a Laughing Stock Full of Plagiarism by Slop
- If Google News dies of neglect, that's one thing. It's starting to seem like active neglect by Google is a form of participation.
- Do What is Moral, as What's Legal Isn't Always Moral
- Do what's objectively moral, no matter the costs and the risks
- Slopwatch: Google News Assisting Plagiarism and Anti-Linux FUD, Serial Slopper Rips Off Linux-Centric Journalists
- This makes the Web a much worse place and lessens the incentive to do journalism
- Links 30/08/2025: NVIDIA Fakes Results to Hide a Bubble Already in Implosion Phase, Data Breaches Galore, Important Win for Workers' Union in Canada
- Links for the day
- Representing and Speaking for Animals
- If I ever choose to take this matter to tribunal with animals-centric NGOs on my side, it'll get some press coverage for sure
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
- In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
- In Kazakhstan, Yandex Estimated to be 20 Times Bigger Than Microsoft
- Bing is measured as down this month
- Shutterstock Not Enough? The Register MS Uses Slop Images in Articles (Seemingly More and More Over Time)
- Cost-saving trajectory amid office shutdown?
- Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Games, PostmarketOS, and Slop
- Links for the day
- Links 30/08/2025: Imgur Uproar and Many Ukraine Updates (Mediazona Reports Over 200,000 Russians Died for Putin)
- Links for the day
- How Not to Build Software
- code forges that need a Web browser perhaps fill some 'niche' demand
- GAFAM and "MATA"
- The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
- Birds Are Not "Pests and Vermin", Privacy is Not a Crime, and GNU/Linux is Not 'Hacking Platform'
- I could not help but think of Free software analogies
- The Sites Should Be Very Fast Again
- That issue is now resolved
- Flying in 2025
- worse than ever before
- Activists, Including Technical Activists, Need Not Pursue Affirmation
- Techrights doesn't play or participate in a "popularity contest"
- The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
- The clock is ticking
- Downplaying the Impact of "UEFI 9/11" is a Losing Strategy
- we won't publish much whilst on holiday
- Government Sites Should Run Free Software
- Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords
- LLM Slopfarms Take No Breaks
- When people run sites by bots they don't need to worry about "breaks"
- GNOME Having a Meltdown Again
- Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
- Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Low Tech and Hunchbin 1.0.6
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, August 29, 2025
- Financiers and Sponsors of the Slop Hype (Pyramid Scheme Waiting to End, Bubble That Will Inevitably Implode)
- It's also burning the planet
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux", Google Helps Ponzi Schemes and Slopfarms in Google News
- Slopfarms are a real pain
- Gemini Links 29/08/2025: Retiring at 62 and URL Filtering HTTP(S) Proxy on Qubes OS
- Links for the day
- Links 29/08/2025: Lisa Cook Sues Convicted Felon and Backdoor Mandate in UK Resisted
- Links for the day
- Links 29/08/2025: Arti 1.5.0, War on Public Health (CDC), and Slop 'Bros' Made to Pay for Their Mass Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- No, 4Chan is Not Fighting for You by Lawyering Up Against Ofcom (UK)
- Don't mistake proto-fascists for people who "fight for you". They don't.
- In Many Places in the World Vista 11 "Market Share" is Going Down, Not Up
- In some countries Windows is already down to third place or lower
- More Microsoft-Connected Layoffs, at Least Third Time This Month! (Also Another Death on Campus)
- Microsoft as a "gaming" company is where studios, projects, games, and even developers come to die
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux", Slop Images in VentureBeat, Linux Foundation Spam Made With LLM Slop and Slop Images
- The only relief or upside - if any exists - is that the pace of slop was down a bit this week
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 28, 2025
- Gemini Links 29/08/2025: Poems, Games, and Java 25 Performance
- Links for the day