Privacy

Seventeen million customers of the online payment service iBill have had their personal information released onto the internet, where it's been bought and sold in a black market made up of fraud artists and spammers, security experts say.

The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.

A laptop computer containing names and Social Security numbers of 93,000 people who attended Metropolitan State College of Denver from 1996 to 2005 was stolen from a campus employee's home, leaving students vulnerable to identity theft.

The laptop was taken from the home of an admissions office employee Saturday. He was authorized to have the data for a grant he was working on for the school, said Metro State president Stephen Jordan.

Ernst and Young appears set on establishing a laptop loss record in February. The accounting giant has lost four more systems, according to a report in the Miami Herald.

Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers.

IN HOLLYWOOD he was always known by his last name — Pellicano.

His influence in a town where power is measured by box office sales was obvious from his roster of A-list clients — Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Michael Jackson, as well as several prominent entertainment executives and celebrity defence lawyers.

But Pellicano — Anthony Pellicano, “celebrity sleuth” and professional muckraker — played by his own rules for too long, and yesterday he was indicted for illegal wiretapping and obtaining confidential records about his targets.

Over the past months more Bittorrent users noticed that their ISP is killing all Bittorrent traffic . ISP’s like Rogers are using bit-shaping applications to throttle the traffic that is generated by Bittorrent.

But, at the same time two of the most popular Bittorrent clients are working together to implement header and message stream encryption in order to take out these traffic shapers.

The Bush administration's recent overreach for vast amounts of data from Google and other search engines raised all sorts of hackles, many of them misplaced. It was decried as an extension of the government's plan to snoop on Americans, an attempt by the Justice Department to catch child pornographers and an assault on personal privacy.

It was none of those things.

But the very public flap alerted millions of Internet users to what could have been.

A security bug in Winamp is being exploited by miscreants to install spyware on machines running the media player software, experts have warned.

Earlier this week, security companies warned that attack code for exploiting the flaw was circulating on the Internet. On Thursday, Sunbelt Software said it had found a Web site hosting a malicious Winamp playlist file. Opening the file loads spyware onto an unwitting user's PC, it said.

Ten internet service providers have been ordered to hand over the details of 150 UK customers accused of illegally sharing software.

The High Court order follows a 12-month covert investigation by the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast).

Among the internet providers are BT, NTL, Telewest and Tiscali.

Over the next two weeks, they are expected to provide the names, addresses and other personal details of the alleged file-sharers.

The government may not think you're important enough to eavesdrop on your telephone conversations, but did you know that anyone with a passing interest and a few bucks can go online and buy a record of your phone calls? Don't care? Privacy experts say you should.