In about a week’s time, owners of Microsoft’s game console will have another way to pay for their Xbox Live memberships and DLC, when PayPal support happens by way of a spring update. If you’re setting up through the Xbox accounts web site, you can already choose the popular payment service as a billing option but the update will let you …
Security
“Operation Protect Our Children” Accidentally Shutters 84,000 Sites
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jerry Brito, a policy wonk and web developer based in Washington, D.C.
What if you woke up one morning and your blog’s URL pointed to a Department of Homeland Security page that said, “Website seized for trafficking in child pornography”? That’s what happened to 84,000 innocent site …
Techland’s Top Stories of the Year
It was a big year in tech: Apple unveiled the iPad (remember how much slack they got for the name? Now it’s a part of our everyday language). Google’s Nexus One launched (and failed), but the android operating system and app market blew up big. Facebook had lots of issues with privacy (but still managed to make an impact).
As 2010 …
9 Online Scams & Cyber Threats To Avoid In 2011
As more of our existence seems to transfer to a digital realm, our vulnerabilities will also make the shift. Here are the things to look out for in 2011.
Facebook Blocks j.mp Links Over Spam Concerns
Due to a tidal wave of spam-filled links from Bit.ly’s j.mp URL shortener, Facebook has temporarily blocked the links from the site. “As part of our effort to keep Facebook and the people who use our service secure, we closely monitor the content shared on the site for spam and malicious content,” Facebook said of the blockage. …
IronClad: A Tiny, Secure Computer in Your Pocket
One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can’t bring your laptop, or don’t want to. But working on somebody else’s machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails. Even if you keep your files on a portable drive, Windows will scatter …
The Snoop In Your Browser: An Alternative
In my last post I said some companies do better than others at scrubbing your confidential search logs as time passes. Google appears to be the worst of the major search engines from a privacy point of view; Ask.com, with AskEraser turned on, is among the best.
But there’s a far better answer than looking for the search company that …
The Snoop In Your Browser
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life — online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs. But you pay a …
What Is ‘Privacy’: a Professor’s Taxonomy
Mike Masnick over at Techdirt, who had a kind word for my first post about “nothing to hide,” draws my attention to a short scholarly essay on the subject by GW Law School’s Daniel Solove. By way of rebutting the claim that we don’t need privacy if we do no wrong, Solove lays out what he calls a taxonomy of the many issues …
Worst Government Snoops: Russia, China … and USA
Ah, the land of the free.
Forrester Research has a depressing summary of international privacy protections for data stored in a cloud service like Mozy, Google Docs or Dropbox. (It’s a clever graphic done up as a “data protection heat map.”) The worst countries to live in, if you value your digital secrets, are marked with an …
Digital Privacy: If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, Do You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’?
A few years back, I did a long newspaper story about the FBI snooping on the private records of ordinary citizens. As my old editor Michael Kinsley likes to say, the scandal is what’s legal. The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI was doing it, in …