A Supreme Court decision handed down on Wednesday has given carte blanche to police forces to retain personal data they have collected for virtually any purpose and hold it as long as they like – even when the people targeted are not violent and have committed no crime.
via UK Supreme Court waves through indiscriminate police surveillance • The Register.
Despite privacy concerns and doubts over its usefulness, a plan to track passengers entering or leaving the European Union in a series of national databases is likely to become reality by the end of the year.
The call to build national databases of so-called passenger name records (PNRs) has become louder since the recent terror attacks in Paris in which 17 people were killed.
via EU air passenger surveillance system could be ready for take-off by year end | ITworld.
Because centralised databases are a really great idea, as we’ve seen from all the times they have been abused and lost on USB sticks.
Of course it’s hardly surprising that the Chalie Hebdo affair would be used to limit our freedom of movement.
via a piece of javascript, so using NoScript on Firefox negates it. Beware!
http://webwereld.nl/beveiliging/85263-webrtc-verklapt-je-verborgen-ip-adres
“If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.”
Where is the microphone so we can put a sticker over it?
How is it possible these muffheads running Europe didn’t realise this? If you put stuff in American cloud it is giving it away to the NSA FBI and any other 3 letter US acronym you can think of. And these dozy fuckers are surprised it’s going badly with the economy? And that people don’t like politicians?
Glad someone cottoned on to this, even if it is a few years late.
go install Kolab please.
http://webwereld.nl/overheid/85329-outlook-app-europese-politici-lekt-data-naar-fbi–nsa
He wants to use it to couple databases such as the license plate data they gather everywhere in NL with the tax database, creating huge centralised databases. Because centralised databases are great! Especially when everyone can access them. Do people never learn? Centralised databases are a very very bad idea.
Privacy volgende slachtoffer van Charlie Hebdo-aanslag – Webwereld.
Refuse to just let it die and give people some form of privacy. Does the US never learn?
House Dem revives major cyber bill | TheHill.
By installing a back door into encrypted communications and storage, they not only allow the government unfettered access, but also criminals. Although I’m not sure where the distinction lies, nowadays.
Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1
via What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?.
So, the family of dead people are still being paid sometimes huge amounts of money for creativity they didn’t display themselves. Copyright is crazy.
Ah the wonders of big data. Needlessly scaring twice as many people as guilty people you find with a valid search warrant and invasion of innocent people’s privacy is being lauded as a success by the NL Government and will result in 30000 people’s houses being needlessly searched next year.
30.000 onschuldige Nederlanders opgejaagd door overheid – Webwereld.
BT, Sky, and Virgin Media are hijacking people’s web connections to force customers to make a decision about family-friendly web filters. The move comes as the December deadline imposed by prime minister David Cameron looms, with ISPs struggling to get customers to say yes or no to the controversial adult content blocks.
The messages, which vary by ISP, appear during browser sessions when a user tries to access any website. BT, Sky,TalkTalk and Virgin Media are required to ask all their customers if they want web filters turned on or off, with the government saying it wants to create a "family friendly" Internet free from pornography, gambling, extreme violence and other content inappropriate for children. But the measures being taken by ISPs have been described as "completely unnecessary" and "heavy handed" by Internet rights groups.
via BT, Sky, and Virgin “hijacking” browsers to push porn blocks | Ars Technica.
I think the unnamed “Internet rights groups” would do better to criticise the Tory policy of censoring the internet at all.
The Netherlands is now officially moving towards becoming a banana republic. Foreign media hasn’t really seemed to catch on to this, but there’s a very important cabinets crisis happening in the Netherlands at the moment. A translated version for English people: An incredibly stupid law* was stopped in the senate by 3 brave PvdA** senators led by Guusje ter Horst (who’s husband is a doctor) who actually stood up for their priciples. Upon hearing this apparently surprise result, the VVD minister who submitted the law stamped her little feet and threatened to resign. Of course, that would have made the VVD leave their coalition with the PvdA, bringing the whole parliamant down and forcing re-elections on two parties that are doing badly in the polls (I wonder why?). Yes, Dutch politics is not only that petty, but also that silly.
Now the majority parliament, consisting of the PvdA and the VVD*** seems to have found a way to push the law through anyway if the law is resubmitted and stopped in the senate again. They will use something called an AMvB, which translates to a general directive.
If they do this, then what is the point of the senate at all? Or the whole democratic process. Shameful that Diederik Samson and Mark Rutte, the NL heads of the left and right parties and their cronies are both taking down the rule of law and democratic process together.
Fortunately the minority parties (called a constructive minority because they will every so often support the coalition in the senate) are having none of it and will hopefully stop something like this from going through somehow.
* allowing insurance companies to determine which health organisations their clients could use and be reimbursed for. The net effect of this is to give insurance companies huge leverage in a market they already have too much power in. They can determine prices, treatments or threaten (small and large) hospitals (eg) with no more customers.
** Partij van de Arbeid is a bit like the UK labour party. It is left leaning.
*** VVD is like the UK conservatives or US republicans – a very right leaning party
This site looks at surprisingly few browser attributes to see how unique you are. Currently you are being compared to 37753 other browsers, but as more people check on the site, the representation will be more accurate. It’s pretty scary to see how individual your browser settings are, even with javascript disabled.
via Am I unique?.
Egocentric cameras are being worn by an increasing number of users, among them many security forces worldwide. GoPro cameras already penetrated the mass market, and Google Glass may follow soon. As head-worn cameras do not capture the face and body of the wearer, it may seem that the anonymity of the wearer can be preserved even when the video is publicly distributed.We show that motion features in egocentric video provide biometric information, and the identity of the user can be determined quite reliably from a few seconds of video. Biometrics are extracted by training Convolutional Neural Network CNN architectures on coarse optical flow.Egocentric video biometrics can prevent theft of wearable cameras by locking the camera when worn by people other than the owner. In video sharing services, this Biometric measure can help to locate automatically all videos shot by the same user. An important message in this paper is that people should be aware that sharing egocentric video will compromise their anonymity.
via [1411.7591] Egocentric Video Biometrics.
The European Parliament has reached a deal with national ministers to introduce a mandatory “eCall” system for all new cars from April 2018.
However, although the system would automatically call the 112 emergency number in the event of a crash, euro lawmakers say that cars will not be continuously tracked.
“It will be illegal to use eCall to track a driver’s movements or to misuse location data, which must be sent only to the emergency services,” said Olga Sehnalova, the Czech politician who helped broker the deal.
The proposed rules would also follow the principle of data-minimisation, with only basic details such as the class of vehicle, the type of fuel used, the time of the accident, and the exact location given to the emergency services.
Nor is any of the data gathered allowed to be passed on to third parties without the explicit consent of the person involved.
via EU law bods: New eCall crash system WON'T TRACK YOU. Really • The Register.
I’m very curious how the system knows you’re in a crash…
This site is a huge country and brand directory listing of surveillance cameras that are online and still have the default password or no protection set. It’s bizarre to see how many of them there are.
View net surveillance online cameras.
Devuan – the GNU/Linux by Veteran Unix Admins..
From the email:
“If systemd had just been an interchangeable init system it wouldn’t be so problematic. It’s the scope creep and mess of poorly-defined interdependencies that are truly shocking. ”
“With sysvinit great effort was taken never to break existing
configurations, and that appears to have been lost. Introducing dependency-based boot took over two stable cycles; optional in one, default in the next, mandatory after that. That could have been reduced certainly, but the point is that time was taken to ensure its correctness and robustness (and in the beginning, it did need work, so the wait was worthwhile). This has not occurred with systemd, which has been made the default yet is still not ready for production use.”
Big words and big actions!
The addresses and domains you email to, your search terms, how often you use your Mac.
And this with a few hours of poking.
Apple keeps saying it’s leaving users alone, but really?
fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home · GitHub.
The Dutch province Utrecht has signed a deal with City Wireless that allows people free wireless. They can log in with their Facebook profile, which is then harvested for information for marketing purposes. City Wireless has since changed its’ homepage, removing the grizly details, but the Dutch paper still has the screencaps.
Article in Dutch.
Gemeente Utrecht koopt Facebookprofielen burgers – Webwereld.
Thought about privacy? Hell no!
A recent AP survey of 10 leading voice biometric vendors found that more than 65 million people worldwide have had their voiceprints taken, and that several banks, including Barclays PLC in Britain and Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, are in the process of introducing their customers to the technology.
via Banks harvest callers' voiceprints to fight fraud.
Because keeping people’s details without their knowledge or consent is fine, right? Not.
They found that if Friendster had used certain state-of-the-art prediction algorithms, it could have divined sensitive information about non-members, including their sexual orientation. “At the time, it was possible for Friendster to predict the sexual orientation of people who did not have an account on Friendster,”
[….]
The problem Garcia identifies lies in something called “shadow profiles,” and as a consequence, we all could be intimately profiled by the Facebooks and Googles and LinkedIns of the world—whether we agree to it or not.
Garcia says this kind of statistical analysis—essentially using machine learning to study the known tastes and relationships of one person’s contacts, and making a guess about who they are likely to be—could be used to build disturbingly detailed profiles of people who do not even use the social network
[…]
We learned about shadow profiles last year when security researchers at a company called Packetstorm discovered Facebook was maintaining its own files on users’ contacts. For example, if Facebook found two users were connected to a non-member—say, bob@wired.com—it would pool other information—different phone numbers, for example—into one master dossier.
via Not on a Social Network? You've Still Got a Privacy Problem | WIRED.
Adobe’s Digital Editions 4 ebook reader software is collecting detailed information about the reading habits of its users – and sending it back to the company in a format that’s easy for others to slurp.
An investigation by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader blog showed that ADE 4 was collecting telemetry on which pages of ebooks were being read, and in which order. This included the title, publisher, and other metadata, which was then sent to the company’s mothership – a server called adelogs, no less – in plain text over the internet.
via Adobe spies on readers: EVERY page you turn, EVERY book you own leaked back to base • The Register.
So… In the last year, Adobe has lost account details to some 50 million users, has lost its’ source codes to hackers and still doesn’t understand the need for security and privacy?!
Microsoft collects information about you, your devices, applications and networks, and your use of those devices, applications and networks. Examples of data we collect include your name, email address, preferences and interests; browsing, search and file history; phone call and SMS data; device configuration and sensor data; and application usage.
This isn’t the only thing Microsoft is collecting from Insider Program participants. According to the Privacy Policy, the company is collecting things like text inputted into the operating system, the details of any/all files on your system, voice input and program information.