In another difficult weekend for Sony, the company has admitted that the PlayStation Network is likely to remain switched off for several more days. It has also been forced to take action after another security breach, which saw the stolen details of 2,500 sweepstakes contestants being published on a website.
In a message posted on the Sony blog on Saturday, the company stated:
The war on terror is a worldwide endeavor that has spurred massive investment into the global surveillance industry, which now seems to be becoming a war on “liberty and privacy.” Given all of the new monitoring technology being implemented, the uproar over warrantless wiretaps now seems moot.
People who advocate for privacy in the digital age spend a lot of conjuring up hypothetical situations to illustrate how technology could be misused to violate basic human rights. They won't have to tax their imagination so much anymore. A new lawsuit suggests consumers who rent computers may be suffering the most dramatic kind of privacy violation.
As the concerns surrounding the data collected and transmitted by mobile apps continue to grow, Whisper Systems, a small start-up, has released WhisperMonitor, a free tool that enables owners of Android phones to control exactly what each of their installed apps can do and monitor what data is sent out from the device.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are actually tools for the U.S. intelligence community.
Speaking to Russian news site RT in an interview published yesterday, Assange was especially critical of the world's top social network. He reportedly said that the information Facebook houses is a potential boon for the U.S. government if it tries to build up a dossier on users.
As the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone personal tracking database brouhaha rolls on, it's becoming increasingly clear that Apple isn't exactly tracking iPhones -- though there are many shades of gray -- and that reactions to the idea or practice of tracking has a surprisingly wide range of feeling.
Sony Corp. said Monday that hackers may have taken personal information from an additional 24.6 million user accounts after a review of the recent PlayStation Network breach found an intrusion at a division that makes multiplayer online games. The data breach comes on top of the 77 million PlayStation accounts it has already said were jeopardized by a malicious intrusion.
Yet another large-scale personal information heist came to light today with news that the information of entrants to Simon Cowell’s star-seeking program, X-Factor, were stolen. About 250,000 U.S. residents are expected to be affected by the attack, which is currently under investigation by the FBI.
Office documents can contain metadata such as names, storage locations and version information about the software used to create them. An attacker can exploit this information for targeted attacks. The free tool Foca shows how talkative a company's downloadable documents are.
The New York Yankees have made a serious error.
According to an email sent by Yankees Chief Operations Officer Lonn Trost, an employee accidentally emailed a spreadsheet file that listed season-ticket holders' personal information: account numbers, names, home addresses, phone numbers, seat numbers and email addresses. The document was sent to thousands of current Yankees clients.
