Facebook encourages ISP customer protests over Phorm-DPI The Register

Facebook’s privacy chief today urged customers of BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media who are unhappy about their ISP’s plans to work with Phorm in monitoring and profiling web use to “make their feelings known”. Asked to clarify Facebook’s position, Kelly added: “If [users] are deeply unhappy with it we hope they express that as clearly as possible to the ISPs.”

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Open Letter – Call for major websites to opt out of Phorm-DPI The Open Rights Group

Open letter, sent to Chief Privacy Officers or equivalent at: (i) Microsoft (ii) Google / Youtube (iii) Facebook (iv) AOL / Bebo (v) Yahoo (vi) Amazon (vii) Ebay

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London cops reach new heights of anti-terror poster stupidity – Thou shalt spy on thy neigbour Boingboing

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The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others’ trash-bins looking for “suspicious” chemical bottles, and to report on one another for “studying CCTV cameras.” [Comment: Time to put a wall up and around the UK me thinks]

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“Unafraid” of Internet, China appears to block YouTube Reuters

China is not afraid of the Internet, its Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, even as access to the popular video sharing site YouTube appeared to be blocked. YouTube has unavailable for users in China, which filters the Internet for content critical of Communist Party rule, since late on Monday.

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Canadian radio content brought to your BlackBerry ITbusiness

A deal struck by Corus Entertainment and mobile applications maker Viigo makes Web content from nine Corus radio brands available on popular smartphones.

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How Come SoundExchange Is Holding Onto Over $100 Million? TechDirt

In fact, the new Choruss offering, which we’ve already explained why it’s a bad idea that’s more of a bait-and-switch than anything useful, has been described as a similar “non-profit” collections group. But, as we’ve noted in the past, supposedly nonprofit collections groups such as SoundExchange (a spinoff of the RIAA) are notorious for not finding artists to pay — even some of the biggest names in the business. Oh, and did we mention that if the royalties go “unclaimed” the recording industry (via SoundExchange) often gets to keep the money? Given that bit of info, it’s perhaps no surprise at all that P2Pnet is noticing that SoundExchange’s own tax returns note that the nonprofit was sitting on over $100 million at the end of 2007, a pretty significant leap over previous years, and a somewhat startling sum for a supposed “nonprofit” in charge of both collecting and distributing funds. The P2Pnet report also points out… [Comment: P2Pnet? hmm where have I heard that name before... Check out the Techdirct article. Good read]

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Air Canada sued over passenger info case by Canada’s privacy commissioner Canwest

Canada’s privacy commissioner is taking Air Canada to court to compel the airline to release records involving a so-called “unruly” customer, arguing passengers should be able to know the information air carriers are collecting about them. “The ability to obtain access to one’s personal information and to challenge its accuracy is a critically important means of holding an organization accountable for its personal information practices,” according to Carman Baggaley, senior policy and research analyst at the commission.

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Colbert wins NASA space station name contest Canoe

NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the International Space Station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won. [Ah! The Power of the Net! ]

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Academic Earth Is The Hulu For Education TechCrunch

Launched, Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface.

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Worm breeds botnet from home routers, modems – More than 100,000 hosts invaded The Register

Vulnerable devices include any home router or modem that uses Linux Mipsel, has an administration interface, sshd, or telnet in a DMZ, and employs a weak password. ecurity researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corrals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet. The “psyb0t” worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of abusable internet addresses. It has already infiltrated an estimated 100,000 hosts. It has been used to carry out DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks and is also believed to use deep-packet inspection to harvest user names and passwords. [Additional: http://dronebl.org/blog/8]

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Twitter Starts Serving Ads For Third Party Apps (But They Aren’t Charging For Them) TechCrunch

Tweetie developer Loren Brichter says that he actually isn’t paying Twitter a cent to get featured on the site. Twitter came to him, explaining that it wants to promote projects like Tweetie which promote “variety, relevance, and value” (apparently a number of Twitter employees use the app).

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AOL eCard scammer avoids jail The Register

A US fraudster who used fake electronic greetings cards to spread malware has avoided a jail sentence for his crimes. Thomas Taylor of West Haven, Connecticut, was sentenced to four years of probation for his part in a malware-powered ID theft scam targeting AOL users. He was further ordered to pay $33,714 in restitution to victims of the scheme. [Comment: eh, ID theft = no problem. Upload a guns and roses song and get a few year in jail? Sounds balanced to me!]

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Earthcomber Drops Patent Lawsuit Against TechCrunch, Loopt TechCrunch

Just a housekeeping item: the ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit brought against us and mobile social network Loopt (details here and here) by Earthcomber is history. The company walked away from the lawsuit. We criticized being included in the lawsuit because we are nothing more than a search filter on Loopt. And the Earthcomber founder appeared to include us out of spite for not giving them as much press as they wanted.

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London health authority put on notice over data breach The Register

ICO fumes over dumped PCs with patient records. A north London health authority has been given until the end of the month to improve its information security policies following an embarrassing information security blunder last year. The Information Commissioner’s Office has given Camden Primary Care Trust until the end of the month to pull up its socks following a breach of the Data Protection Act. The ICO’s enforcement order comes after PCs containing 2,500 patients’ names, addresses and medical histories were dumped beside a skip inside the grounds of St Pancras Hospital last August. Data on the obsolete computers was left unencrypted.

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Cybercrime server exposed through Google cache – UK and US IDs exposed to world The Register

A reported 22,000 card records have been exposed through cached copies of data stored on a defunct cybercrime server. iTnews in Australia reports that 19,000 of the 22,000 exposed details referred to US and UK cards and that data came from Google cache records of a disused internet payment gateway, a line picked up by Slashdot.

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Skype Takes Aim At Business PBXes TechDirt

We wondered a couple of months ago if eBay was warming up the Skype Billion-Dollar Buyout Plan, a hype-driven business model aimed at inflating the perceived value of the unit to would-be buyers. But Skype’s emerged with a real business plan to try and boost its business by targeting small- and medium-sized businesses with a version of its service that can connect to their PBX phone systems using the popular SIP standard. Skype is selling one major benefit of the service as the ability for companies to accept inbound Skype calls to their PBX system, but aside from that, it’s just trying to undercut other providers’ rates for outgoing calls.

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A Closer Look At How The Takedown Process Is Widely Abused TechDirt

Last week, we wrote about how, in a filing over the proposed three strikes rule in New Zealand, Google had filed a report pointing to widespread abuse of the DMCA takedown process. Plenty of others have noted the same thing, but some of the entertainment industry’s lawyers are claiming my original report was false (it’s great to feel loved). It’s worth looking more closely at the numbers. Thankfully, one of our readers, Chris Brand, sends in the details of where Google’s numbers came from. They did not — as implied by the original report, on which I based my post — come from Google’s internal review, but from a report from two academics who studied the takedown process (pdf file).

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German Mickey Mouse radio snoops on cops The Register

The German powers that be are investigating a kids’ miniature Mickey Mouse radio which apparently entertains nippers with police radio traffic.

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French Lawmakers Trying To Regulate File Sharing Don’t Know Much About It TechDirt

Over in France, where politicians are pushing hard for a three strikes law, a reporter went and asked some politicians some basic questions to gauge their understanding of the technology in question — and found that most had absolutely no clue. [ok quick! Who's surprised?]

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AntiPolygraph.org Receives (and Rejects) a Copyright Takedown Request Antipolygraph

On Friday, 20 March 2009, AntiPolygraph.org received a communication from a lawyer for NCS Pearson, Inc. demanding the removal of a post from our message board that purports to list the first 75 questions of the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test 2 (MMPI-2). (A seemingly knowledgable poster on the message board maintains that the questions are not from the MMPI-2, but from the older MMPI.) Many government agencies in the United States use the MMPI-2 to screen applicants for employment, so it is of considerable public interest. The post, made some three years ago, initiated one of the longest discussions on our message board–one that remains active with over 260 posts to date. [forum: https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1109032158]

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Telstra is chasing your last cent NewsAU

TELSTRA has resorted to charging customers in increments of one-tenth of a cent. The ploy stands to reap millions of dollars in additional revenue for the nation’s largest telco. Telstra has more than eight million customers, generating revenue of more than $10 billion last financial year. On such a vast amount, even a 0.1 per cent increase adds $10 million. Consumer groups are outraged.

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Media Giants Asking Google To Weight Its Content Higher TechDirt

A bunch of folks have been sending in the story from Ad Age, where a bunch of media giants have apparently been demanding that Google change its weighting algorithm, because they’re upset at how low they appear, compared to other sites, including blogs. This is pretty amusing for a variety of reasons. A big part of the reason those media sites appear so low in the Google rankings is their own damn fault.

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Cox to roll out tru2way, new UI this summer BetaNews

Cox Communications may finally be making tru2way a reality. Tru2way is a common software platform that allows software developers, cable companies, or in this case set top box DRM maker NDS, to create interactive software and Web-based applications for use on the TV. [Comment: This is the future of the internet. DRM'd boxes that the telco's control, and control the pay for view content. P2Pnet.net will be the blog option for only 7.99$]

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Super-sized Supernova Explosion Observed Start to Finish Including Black Hole Ending Science Daily

In the first observation if its kind, scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University were able to watch what happens when a star the size of 50 suns explodes. As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star’s mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.

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Why is Blockbuster Suffering? Simple, Says CEO Jim Keyes. Because the Movies Suck Dallas Observer

“We think the single biggest driver in the current marketplace the last few months has been title strength and this week is a classic example. Box office is down 56% this week versus the previous year. I think the titles say it all.”

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Lawyer-client privilege no bar to surveillance, say Lords – Yes sir, I can bug you The Register

The state is allowed to bug communication between lawyers and their clients, the House of Lords has said. The UK’s highest court ruled that spy law the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) allows lawyers’ conversations to be bugged.

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Google behavioral ads tap DoubleClick eyeball – It’s not the ads. It’s the behavior The Register

So, Google is now using your surf history to tailor online ads to your particular online interests. It’s a rather creepy thought, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Google won’t say how much of your surf history it’s capturing – or how long it plans on keeping this potentially ginormous data hoard.

March, 2009

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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