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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Forecast of social network's impending doom comes from comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
- Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
- How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
- Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
- He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
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- Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
- Links for the day
- Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
- they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
- Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
- just trying to make a lot of trouble
- Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
- Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
- Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
- The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
- Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
- Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
- Computers Are Just a Tool
- People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
- Apple Way Past Its Prime
- Apple deserves a decline
- The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
- About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
- all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
- Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
- Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
- PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
- It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
- Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
- Links for the day
- Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
- Links for the day
- FSF40 T-shirt message
- by Alex Oliva
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
- Links for the day
- More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- "pepe the frogs"
- Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
- Links for the day
- Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
- And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
- Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
- Answers must be given
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025
- Layoffs and Shutdowns at IBM, Not Just Microsoft
- Same as Microsoft
- The FSF's (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) 2025 Summer Fundraiser Already Past Halfway Line
- This is where GNU/Linux actually started
- With Workers Back From a Holiday Weekend, Microsoft Layoffs Carry on, More Waves to Come
- Now it's Monday and people are bad to work, even some journalists
- Mozilla Had No Good Reason to Outsource Firefox Development to Microsoft
- What does Mozilla plan to do when GitHub shuts down?
- Mozilla Firefox Did Not Die, It Got Killed
- To me it'll always look like Mozilla got killed by its sponsors, especially Google, which had a conflict of interest as a sponsor
- You Need Not Wave a Rainbow Flag This Month to Basically Oppose Arseholes Looking to Disrupt and Divide the Community
- Don't fall for it
- Dan Neidle, Whom Brett Wilson LLP SLAPPed (on Behalf of Corrupt Rich Tax Evaders), Still Fighting the Good Fight
- Neidle fights for the poor people
- What Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- Similar aims, different methods
- Wayland Should Start by Dumping Its Very Ugly Logo
- Wayland wins the "ugliest logo" award every year
- Stop Focusing on Hair Colours, Focus on Corporate Agenda
- If someone commits a crime, it does not matter if his or her hair was mostly white or there was no hair or a wig or whatever
- Links 07/07/2025: Science, Conflicts, and a Fictional K-pop Group
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: Being a Luddite and Announcement of Gotify
- Links for the day
- Links 07/07/2025: XBox Effectively 'Dead', DMCA Subpoena Versus Registrar
- Links for the day
- The 'Corporate Neckbeard' is Not the "Good Guy"
- Works for IBM
- The Nasty Smear (and Stereotype) of "Neckbeard" or "Greybeard" is Ageism
- This is the sort of stuff they might try to volley at critics of Wayland
- Why Many of Us Use X Server and Will Continue to Use It For Many Years to Come
- Don't make this about politics
- Microsoft's Nat Friedman Became Unemployed the Same Time the SLAPPs Against Techrights Started Coming From His Friends (Weeks After We Had Exposed Scandals About Him and the Serial Strangler, His Best Friend, Who Got Arrested a Few Days Later)
- Nat Friedman is not "Investor, entrepreneur"
- Brett Wilson LLP Uses Threats to Demand Changes to Pages or Removal of Pages Without Even Revealing Which Staff Member Does That (Sometimes People From Another Firm!)
- This has been in the public for years
- Dan Neidle Said "It Really Then Became a Job of Tormenting" Lawyers Like Brett Wilson LLP (Who Threatened Him for Exposing Crimes, Just Like They Threatened My Wife a Few Months Later)
- he and his wife decided to take on the evil people and their evil lawyers
- Large Language Models (LLMs) Externalise Their Cost to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- "The forty-sixth Free Software Bulletin is now available online!"
- Weeding Out Extremism in Our Community
- To me it seems like Microsoft Lunduke is rapidly becoming like a "hate preacher" who operates online, breeding an extremist ideology or trying to soften its image
- Censorship Versus Fact-Checking and Quality Control
- It's not censorship but a matter of quality control
- Reinforcing the Allegations Some More, Bryan Lunduke Digs His Own Grave
- In his latest episodes he merely repeats his own lies, which I debunked using evidence right from his own mouth
- Global Warming and Free Software as a Force of Mitigation
- we'll need to think about Software Freedom, not just brands like "Linux"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 06, 2025
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and TUI Rant
- Links for the day