Privacy »
People who torrent are monitored, recorded within 3 hours of download [Study]
Do you enjoy the occasional movie off of The Pirate Bay? Or maybe you prefer a “private” torrent club? As it turns out, regardless of if you are torrenting off The Pirate Bay or exclusive, members-only torrent clubs, your IP address is not safe.
Dr. Tom Chothia and other computer [...]
Read More »Sniffing unprotected WiFi is not wiretapping (and, thus, is legal), American federal judge rules
A few years ago Google got in trouble for (accidentally) sniffing data from unprotected WiFi nodes. While sniffing unprotected WiFi networks wasn’t declared explicitly illegal, in 2011 a federal court hinted as much. Now, thanks to a recent ruling by a different federal judge, the question of the legality of [...]
Former NSA director claims U.S. government has been spying on Americans for over a decade, collecting e-mails, call records, and other data
Scared of Google? If what William Binney claims is true, your time will be better spent being scared of the National Security Agency.
William Binney, a mathematical genius that worked for the NSA for 32 years with part of that time being served as the technical director of National Security [...]
Read More »Court says warrantless cell phone tracking is legal in USA
Melvin Skinner was arrested in 2006 for alleged drug trafficking. He was tried and eventually convicted of two counts of drug trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Law enforcement agencies where able to arrest Skinner by tracking him through his cell phone prior to his arrest [...]
Read More »Facebook agrees to privacy settlement with US Federal Trade Commission
Facebook has a bad rap across the digital world for its lack of respect for user privacy. Indeed Facebook is often juggling its privacy settings and introducing new, confusing features; Mark Zuckerberg himself has admitted Facebook has made “high-profile mistakes” in regards to user privacy. With all the personal information [...]
Read More »American court makes spying with warrantless wiretaps legal
September 11, 2001 changed the world. As a result of 9/11, then USA President George W. Bush introduced what has come to be known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, a program that allows the NSA (National Security Agency) to spy on conversations between an American and someone from outside [...]
Read More »Google admits it still has some Street View WiFi data that it was supposed to delete two years ago
Two years ago it was discovered Google had been ‘accidentally’ gathering data from unprotected WiFi access points. For those not familiar with the issue, here is a quote from my earlier article on this topic explaining, in simple terms, what was going on:
In other words, if you have an
[...]
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Can Microsoft spy on Skype calls? According to reports, yes it can
Some sort of access to citizen phone calls is required by many governments around the world whether that be warranted-required wiretaps or dictator-ordered interceptions. Because of how they operate and the lag time it takes for law to catch up with technology, until now VoIP services have been generally excluded [...]
Read More »WARNING: Skype bug sends instant messages to unintended contacts
Word around town is Skype has a bug. That bug is making Skype send copies of instant messages to random contacts — unintended recipients who are not part of the conversation.
The bug was first reported by Skype users on Skype’s support forums. The issue doesn’t appear to happen very [...]
Read More »Facebook is launching targeted mobile ads based on app usage data (i.e. personal user data)
It’s not the first time that we are hearing about the social networking giant trying to peep into the lives of its users. This time around Facebook is planning is to track the usage statistics and characteristics of mobile apps that Facebook users install on their devices to provide users [...]
Windows software of the day [March 28, 2012]
![Windows software of the day [March 28, 2012]](http://cdn.dottech.org/media/2012/03/flashcookiesomg-290x160.png)
Windows has hundreds of thousands of programs. Because of this great volume and lack of a central store, software discovery (aka finding new and useful programs) is extremely difficult. With our Windows Software of the Day initiative, dotTech aims to change that. Everyday we post three programs, allowing our readers [...]
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