By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's targetted-advertising-is-awesome department:
parallel_prankster writes
"The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Google will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube, and other services; a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes. The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users. 'If you're signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services,' Alma Whitten, Google's director of privacy, product, and engineering, wrote in a blog post."The angle of the Washington Post article is a bit negative; Google sees this as consolidating an absurd number of privacy policies for its various services into a single, unified document. Reader
McGruber adds: "Donald E. Graham, the Washington Post's chairman and CEO,
joined Facebook's Board of Directors in January 2009. Curiously, the Washington Post article neglects to disclose that."
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By timothy from
Slashdot's conspiracy-against-the-laity-part-XVXIIIX department:
New submitter Elenor writes with this story (excerpted) from TorrentFreak, another nugget gleaned from the cables made public by WikiLeaks:
"The Canberra Wikileaks cables have revealed that the U.S. Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers. Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate." The cable describes no overt action on the part of the American embassy, but the wording is telling: "Mike Ellis, the Singapore-based President for Asia Pacific of the Motion
Picture Association ... said MPAA did not see any role for Embassy at this
time, but wanted to keep us informed."
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's framed-by-darpa-created-ai department:
wiredmikey writes with an update on Microsoft's
takedown of the Kelihos botnet. From the article:
"Microsoft is not just taking down botnets; it is taking them down and naming names. In an amended complaint [PDF] filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Microsoft named a man from St. Petersburg, Russia, as the alleged head of the notorious Kelihos botnet. Naming names can be a risky business. Previously, Microsoft alleged Dominique Alexander Piatti, dotFREE Group SRO and several unnamed 'John Does' owned a domain cz.cc and used cz.cc to register other subdomains used to operate and control the Kelihos botnet. However, the company later absolved Piatti of responsibility when investigators found neither he nor his business was controlling the subdomains used to host Kelihos. Whether naming Sabelnikov – who, according to Krebs on Security, once worked as a senior system developer and project manager for Russian antivirus vendor Agnitum, will have the same effect as naming the Koobface gang remains to be seen. Though Kelihos has remained defunct since the takedown last year, the malware is still on thousands of computers."Read Replies (0)