Privacy and data protection

Facebook voting is gone, but privacy issues just get worse

Facebook has pulled the plug on community voting, following an anemic voter turnout, and today's new privacy changes in the aftermath of that decision bear ill tidings for consumer privacy.

For one thing, though not even 700,000 of the more than 1 billion Facebook subscribers voted, nearly 88 percent of those who did vote cast their ballot against the changes. But Facebook's not likely to listen to them.

Facebook is rewriting a lot of its policies to make them easier to understand, surely a noble act. Options like being able to ask somebody who's tagged you … Read more

Facebook privacy settings get reworked once again

Get ready -- Facebook is making changes to how users access its privacy settings, again. The social network hopes this latest overhaul will make the now bloated process easier to understand, according to a blog post today from Sam Lessin, a director of product for Facebook.

The changes, which come a day after Facebook implemented its new privacy polices, are mainly cosmetic. Facebook is not changing what settings you can set, except for the option to block searches of your profile within the social network. The network has already begun phasing out this feature and soon it will be removed … Read more

GhostShell claims breach of 1.6M accounts at FBI, NASA, and more

Team GhostShell, the hacktivist collective, said today that it has stolen accounts from a large number of government agencies, contractors, and security firms, posting information from 1.6 million accounts online.

Dubbed Project White Fox, the hacking project appears to have affected NASA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and Interpol, among many others. The hackers announced their work in a file posted on Pastebin.

Our colleagues at ZDNet report:

The file dump, upon closer inspection, seems to include a number of records obtained via SQL injection. A random selection of the files contain email and home addresses, defense material tests and … Read more

No password is safe from this new 25-GPU computer cluster

Your really, really strong password just became a little bit easier to break.

Jeremi Gosney, founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, a company that handles password-cracking, has unveiled a computer cluster boasting 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards. The cluster's horsepower allows it to make 350 billion password guesses per second against the NT Lan Manager (NTLM) security protocol Microsoft has used in Windows Server since 2003.

Ars Technica was first to report on the cluster.

Speaking to Ars in an e-mailed statement, Gosney said that his company's technology "can attack hashes approximately four times faster" … Read more

DoNotTrackMe: New name, same tracker-blocking game

While providing sharp teeth for the Do Not Track header has proved to be futile so far, Abine's DoNotTrackMe makes increasing your privacy online as easy as installing an add-on. The latest update, available exclusively today from Download.com, makes it much easier to use while making some important but small security changes.

Known as Do Not Track Plus when it underwent a massive overhaul at the beginning of this year, DoNotTrackMe remains available as a cross-platform, multibrowser add-on.

You can download DoNotTrackMe for Firefox (Windows | Mac), Chrome (Windows | Mac), Internet Explorer 32-bit (Windows only) | Internet Explorer 64-bit), and … Read more

Facebook users seek answers on advertising, privacy

When given the opportunity to question those who lead Facebook's privacy team about proposed changes to the social network's data use policy before voting on the matter, Facebook users were more concerned with how the site currently manages its data.

Questions during today's half hour live Web talk (archived here) included ones about how posts on Timeline are displayed, what information is shared with advertisers, online bullying, what happens if your account is hacked and, of course, what about that viral copyright post. (It's fake.) One user wasn't even sure there was a vote: "… Read more

U.S., U.K. caught in middle of huge Swiss spy data leak -- report

The U.S. and U.K. have been warned by Swiss spy agency NDB that some of the information they had shared related to counter-terrorism has been stolen, according to a new report.

Last summer, a disgruntled NDB IT technician who believed he wasn't being taken seriously over the way in which data systems should be handled, allegedly downloaded terabytes of counter-terrorism information shared among the NDB, the CIA, and the U.K.'s MI6, and had eyes on selling it off to "foreign officials and commercial buyers," Reuters is reporting today, citing European national security sources.… Read more

Military judge sets terms for possible Manning plea

Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of sharing documents with WikiLeaks that were eventually released on the Internet, is now one step closer to handling some of the claims brought against him.

Military judge Col. Denise Lind today accepted the language used to describe seven charges to which Manning could plead guilty. The charges include Manning willfully sending videos, war logs, and other classified materials to WikiLeaks.

The Associated Press was first to report on the ruling.

To be clear, Col. Lind's ruling does not imply that Manning willl offer a guilty plea. Instead, the ruling approves … Read more

Some Samsung printers vulnerable to hackers

Owners of certain Samsung printers may find their devices a target for hackers.

Samsung printers and some Dell printers made by Samsung have a hardcoded account that someone could use to control and access information on the devices, according to US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team).

As described by the security team, these printers contain a hardcoded SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) string that has full read/write access and stays active even if the network protocol is disabled by the user.

"A remote, unauthenticated attacker could access an affected device with administrative privileges," US-CERT said. "… Read more