Sexy Jihad

I as a blogger and citizen of the European Union am disgusted and ashamed to have to report that today, the EU has passed legislation requiring all participating countries to log all internet traffic for a period of up to 24 months:
EU justice and interior ministers have sealed a landmark data-retention law, forcing telephone […]

According to this article on Wired hotel IT security is apalling in general. An Excerpt:
A vulnerability in many hotel television infrared systems can allow a hacker to obtain guests’ names and their room numbers from the billing system.
It can also let someone read the e-mail of guests who use web mail through the TV, putting […]

It seems that if you’re lucky and buy 2nd hand computer equipment from you local goverment, you may get more than you bargained for:
Early last week eighteen IBM RS/6000 E20 servers went up for sale at an government auction for ~$20 AUD a server, anyway after a couple days they were delivered and I began […]

Bruce Schneier has written a disturbing piece on how your cellphone could literally give out all sorts of information about your life to dataminers:
Eagle’s Realty Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends […]

It seems that some people who are technically incompetent, have money to burn or a mixture of the two have found a new solution to spyware. Throw away your PC and get a new one (annoying registration required, use Bugmenot to get around it):
SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 - Add personal computers to the list of […]

Bruce Scheier reports on some intersting comments regarding the recent Minnesota court hearing that just having PGP on your computer can be used as evidence against you:
The opinion is not explicit that the PGP evidence was used to show criminal intent or consciousness of guilt, but I think that is fairly implied, especially since the […]

CNN has an interesting article on how long Google hangs on to the stuff they log from you (read indefinately):
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — When Google Inc.’s 19 million daily users look up a long-lost classmate, send e-mail or bounce around the Web more quickly with its new Web Accelerator, records of that activity don’t go away.
In […]

In a scary turn of events an appeals court in Minnesota has ruled that having PGP installed on your computer can be used as evidence against you:
A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.
Ari David Levie, who was convicted […]

In what’s a great victory for privacy, Lycos Germany had decided to stop logging IP data:
Lycos DSL in Germany says it will no longer store dynamic IP addresses of its customers, now that a specialist on data privacy laws from Frankfurt University has threatened to sue the company.
Jonas Breyer had asked Lycos what data was […]

It seems that my hitherto published worries about Google Web Accelerator are being given some grounds by a recent article published in Eweek:
Google’s effort to speed the pace of Web browsing quickly aggravated some early users, who say that the software is delivering them Web pages under other users’ logins and breaking Web applications.
Google Inc.’s […]