Privacy

UK ISP Vispa has announced the a new Remote Desktop Support System that will allow a Vispa Support Technician to directly access clients computers in order to solve problems quickly & efficiently.

VISPA can connect to clients systems, fix the problem, reboot the PC and automatically re-connect the Remote Desktop Console. They can also operate your PC in safe mode if necessary.

VISPA say they are able to record the entire Remote Desktop session and email a small AVI file which is useful for re-capping, should the problem recur in the future.

School officials say Vermont Technical College mistakenly posted every student's Social Security number on the Internet for almost two years.

Officials say the data, along with names, addresses, SAT scores and ethnicities, were removed last week. There is no indication the information was downloaded by identity thieves.

College President Allan Rodgers says the 2003 information was publicly posted in January 2004, after the college's coordinator of tutoring services tried to direct it to a secure computer drive, but inadvertently sent it to the public Website instead.

Since the spread of the internet in the mid-nineties, privacy concerns have increased exponentially. Cyberspace has often been equated to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, or to a new, digital version of George Orwell’s Big Brother, capable of seeing and controlling everything and everyone. This rather dystopic vision has rightly generated fear and distrust of the web. Recently, the thickening bonds between authorities and internet companies and the development of the net for political control have given new foundations to those fears.

A recent government order mandating that voice over internet protocol services must include the same government-approved wiretapping capabilities as traditional phone companies threatens to cripple peer-to-peer telephone innovation, according to new warnings from civil liberties groups and an internet telephony pioneer. The new rules from the FCC were published last month and take effect Nov. 14 , though companies have 18 months to comply.

It can turn your system against you, slow your browser to a crawl and inhabit your computer like some grotesque parasite. It can cling to your Windows registry with its grasping mandibles and sucking away its very life. And those are just the side effects of spyware -- those annoying, privacy-invading programs you'll spend the better part of the Thanksgiving holiday removing from your parents' computer.

A majority of net users want their ISPs so block spyware traffic. Half (51 per cent) of 1,000 consumers quizzed by NOP said their service providers should block spyware apps - invasive programs that covertly snoop on user's online activities - while only one in 10 of those quizzed reckon employers should take responsibility for addressing the problem. End user attitudes to seldom offered spyware screening services from ISPs mirror attitudes to spam filtering when such services were in their infancy four or five years ago.

The federal government is asking the telecommunications industry to build a wiretapping capacity into their networks, reports The Globe and Mail.

Federal authorities want to be able to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on the e-mail, Internet, or phone use of more than 8,000 people at a time.

The newspaper -- citing unnamed sources -- says the proposals are part of confidential negotiations between Ottawa and the telecom industry.

Government officials insist their proposals will bring Canada's laws on wiretaps up to date.

With the proper security measures, most online financial transactions are considered safe. But hackers found their way into a Wake County man's online brokerage account and allegedly stole tens of thousands of dollars.

K. L. Murty, a professor at North Carolina Sate University, poured much of his life savings into an E-Trade account, but while he and his wife were overseas this past summer, their stock fund drained from about $216,000 to about $56,000.

"Unfortunately, I'm not a computer specialist and that's a problem," Murty said.

Consumers embarking on a shopping spree may be able to leave their wallets behind in the near future, despite some security and privacy experts' concerns. This week, Pay By Touch Solutions, a San Francisco-based firm whose system allows customers to pay at participating grocery stores with the press of a finger, announced that investors have pledged $130m to fund the company's expansion plans. And, rival BioPay has already enrolled more than two million people into its service for cashing payroll checks and paying at the supermarket checkout.

The Violence Against Women Act may be about to do violence to Americans' right to privacy.

A U.S. Senate committee has adopted an amendment to the VAWA legislation that would add the DNA of anyone detained by the cops to a federal DNA database called "CODIS."