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
- The Register MS Made Millions of Pounds by Participating in the Slop Hype Campaign (It's Still Doing It), Now It Admits That It's Just a Bubble
- the slop frenzy played a role in the Microsoft meltdown
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
- We were right about Microsoft
- The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
- AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
- Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
- They're trying to save face right now
- What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
- History goes in circles
- Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
- Shame in SRA
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- Ethics in Perspective, Free Software and Morality
- top clients of Jeffrey Epstein are one happy family
- Richard Stallman (RMS) at Universidad Central del Ecuador (Guayaquil), Cuenca, Campus Sur Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Quito), and Ohio State University
- Long live the message and mission of RMS
- They Paid Workers in 'Shares' (That Lost Almost Half Their Value in One Month)
- Welcome back 1999 or 2007
- Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
- Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
- Links for the day
- Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
- We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
- Links for the day
- It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
- What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
- No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
- Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
- "Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
- Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
- Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
- That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
- "NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
- Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
- Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
- The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
- United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
- cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
- Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
- Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
- Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
- Links for the day
- The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
- Remember that it all began with trust
- Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
- This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
- At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
- From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
- Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
- Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
- Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
- Linus caught the 'brain virus'
- Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
- IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
- Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
- Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: A Firing of a Boss and Geminispace Growing Fast
- Links for the day
- Bill Epsteingate-Funded BBC "Totally Ignoring the $1.7 Trillion Wiped off NVIDIA Stocks"
- Imagine how many pension funds are tied to this NVIDIA pyramid scheme
- A Few Hours Before NVIDIA CEO Canned (and NVIDIA Shares Plunged) the NVIDIA-Funded The Register MS Published Paid Spam With "AI" 18 Times in It
- Anything to inflate the bubble
- Links 11/11/2026: NVIDIA Decapitated, "The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically"
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIX - We Didn't Start the Fire
- It started in 2012
- Photo Ops Are Liabilities
- NVIDIA is not a "family business" and its CEO isn't some modest genius
- NVIDIA’s Total Debt Trebled in Three Months!
- Not the hallmark of a rich company unless its accounting is fraudulent
- NVIDIA Turns Out to be Serial Cheater, Stock Plunges 33% in 5 Weeks
- The "slop bros" have long relied on patience and blind faith
- Adopting LLM Slop is Still Suicide
- Suicide (in the literal sense) is also linked to adoption of chatbots
- On Laundering Licences and Code
- A "Second SCO" waiting to happen
- The Cyber Show on Slop and the Ministry Of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty Four"
- "cultural erasure" by slop
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVIII - Keeping Both Eyes on the Ball
- One upside of these disputes is that they raise at least two very important issues concerning the law
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: Encryption is Easy, Human Emacs, and Legislation in Italy
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, November 11, 2026