Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

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Amazon Kindle = Privacy FAIL

Leaving aside for a moment that the Kindle’s very name is weirdly evocative of book burning, consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle—convenience, selection, immediacy—we’re losing something too.

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In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

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The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book.

Read more. Thanks, Luis!

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

In Mr. Rodriguez’s case, he participated in a 2003 survey of steroid use among Major League Baseball players. No names were to be revealed. Instead, the results were supposed to be used in aggregation — to determine if more than 5 percent of players were cheating — and the samples were then to be destroyed.

It is odd that most of the news coverage described the tests as “anonymous.” If the tests were truly anonymous, of course, Mr. Rodriguez would still be thought of as a clean player — as he long had insisted he was. But when federal prosecutors came calling, as part of a steroid distribution case, it turned out that the “anonymous” samples suddenly had clear labels on them.

As a friend put it in an e-mail message: “Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.”

Read more, but remember, they know everything about you.

And now the Manchurian microchip

The myth: Chinese intelligence services have concealed a microchip in every computer everywhere, programmed to "call home" if and when activated.

The reality: It may actually be true.

All computers on the market today -- be they Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Apple or especially IBM -- are assembled with components manufactured inside the PRC. Each component produced by the Chinese, according to a reliable source within the intelligence community, is secretly equipped with a hidden microchip that can be activated any time by China's military intelligence services, the PLA.

"It is there, deep inside your computer, if they decide to call it up," the security chief of a multinational corporation told The Investigator. "It is capable of providing Chinese intelligence with everything stored on your system -- on everyone's system -- from e-mail to documents. I call it Call Home Technology. It doesn't mean to say they're sucking data from everyone's computer today, it means the Chinese think ahead -- and they now have the potential to do it when it suits their purposes."

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New Computer Repair Law Could Affect Both Company Owners and Consumers

A new Texas law requires every computer repair technician to obtain a private investigator's license, according to a lawsuit filed in Austin. Violators can face a $4,000 fine and one year in jail, as well as a $10,000 civil penalty.

Unlicensed computer shops will have to close down until they obtain a private investigator's license.

A private investigator's license can be obtained by acquiring a criminal justice degree or by getting a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator.

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Comcast Is Hiring an Internet Snoop for the Feds

Wanna tap e-mail, voice and Web traffic for the government? Well, here's your chance. Comcast, the country's second-largest Internet provider, is looking for an engineer to handle "reconnaissance" and "analysis" of "subscriber intelligence" for the company's "National Security Operations."

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Don't give Microsoft the remote control

Building such a system is no trivial task. To do this, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to restrict users from saving a television program to their computers, we call this kind of functionality an "antifeature," because it takes more work for Microsoft to prevent the user from saving the program, than if they were to leave just the default behavior alone. So instead of letting you record programs as you normally would, it locks you out and deletes the show before you can save it.

However, Microsoft hasn't just made a little tweak to their software to do this -- they have compiled an entire system built upon antifeatures. This antifeature platform is integrated into their Windows Media software and forms the basis of their Windows Vista operating system, and they are working hard to convince companies like NBC, that Microsoft can be in control of how and when you get to watch television. As creepy and as ridiculous as it may sound, this is their business strategy, and by getting this control, both the television and movie industry and computer users will be tied to Microsoft software.

Don't be fooled into their claims that they are following regulations by the FCC -- the court ruled that the FCC has no power to make such regulations. This is also claimed as a measure just to stop unauthorized file sharing, yet what Microsoft is doing is trying to make sure that they are on every end of the market, from how it is delivered, to how you watch it. As Ars Technica reporter Jacqui Cheng puts it, this is not about Microsoft preventing people from sharing files without permission, "[i]t's about the ability to strictly control how we consume content"[2].

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House Approves New Property Seizure Law

If you boil it down to brass tax, this legislation allows the U.S. government to lawfully seize your computer if it has one unauthorized mp3 file on its hard drive. It also provides the authorization for the creation of offices within the executive branch to enforce a law that is impossible to enforce.

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Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

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The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

Humans can be so disgusting.

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How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

And now observers, academics, and even some other companies are taking notes. Because while Apple's tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they've helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors and at the forefront of the tech industry. Sometimes, evil works.

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Study: 'Huge jump' in Microsoft flaws since last year

Between 2006 and 2007, there was an almost threefold rise in Microsoft flaws, Qualys said on Wednesday.

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New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open

The Mac has officially gone mainstream.

The proof? On Halloween, professional online criminals were found using Trojan-horse software to target, for the first time, computers running Apple's OS X operating system -- just as they have been doing for years on the more ubiquitous flavors of Windows.

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Do-not-track lists to shield Net surfers

Most consumers are familiar with do-not-call lists, which are meant to keep telemarketers from phoning them.

Soon people will be able to sign up for do-not-track lists, which will help shield their Web surfing habits from the prying eyes of marketers.

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In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering

At the moment, nobody knows who's behind this. Is it a Russian mafia operation? An al-Qaeda scheme? The really creepy thing is that, to date, the controllers of Storm have used it for such relatively trivial purposes. The suspicion has to be that they are biding their time, waiting for the moment when, say, 100 million naive Windows users have clicked on an infected link and unwittingly added their machines to the botnet.

Only then will we know what a perfect storm in cyberspace is like.

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'Storm worm' exploits YouTube

Spammers are exploiting YouTube's "invite your friends" function to send spam containing a variant of the "Storm worm."

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Online Videos May Be Conduits for Viruses

Online videos aren't just for bloopers and rants - some might also be conduits for malicious code that can infect your computer.

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Microsoft Reveals Windows

"We're focused on giving the customer what they want, and want they want is to just go back to XP," said Microsoft Development Chief Greg Elston.

Elston said not only will the move improve customer satisfaction with Vista, but will allow the company to focus resources on the next operating system instead of the flailing Vista. "We can move people off of Vista development now, and move them to Windows 7 development," said Elston. "That should allow us to only delay Windows 7 by thirteen months past its scheduled date instead of the planned eighteen."

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Microsoft suffers stunning EU antitrust defeat

Microsoft suffered a stunning defeat on Monday when a European Union court backed a European Commission ruling that the U.S. software giant illegally abused its market power to crush competitors.

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Microsoft updates Windows without users' consent

It's surprising that these files can be changed without the user's knowledge. The Automatic Updates dialog box in the Control Panel can be set to prevent updates from being installed automatically. However, with Microsoft's latest stealth move, updates to the WU executables seem to be installed regardless of the settings — without notifying users.

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For users who elect not to have updates installed automatically, the issue of consent is crucial. Microsoft has apparently decided, however, that it doesn't need permission to patch Windows Updates files, even if you've set your preferences to require it.

To make matters even stranger, a search on Microsoft's Web site reveals no information at all on the stealth updates. Let's say you wished to voluntarily download and install the new WU executable files when you were, for example, reinstalling a system. You'd be hard-pressed to find the updated files in order to download them. At this writing, you either get a stealth install or nothing.

Now isn't that interesting?

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Firefox leak could divulge sensitive info

A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Firefox that could allow criminals to remotely siphon private information stored in plugins and call sensitive functions.

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