Privacy

Tim Berners-Lee is known as the gentle genius with the mild touch, a man who is strikingly modest despite having created one of the epochal inventions of the modern age, the world wide web. But get him on the subject of what the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ, have been doing to crack encryption used by hundreds of millions of people to protect their personal data online, and his face hardens, his eyes squint and he fumes.

Vodafone Iceland has been hacked and 77,000 customer records spaffed across the internet.

The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service ruv.is reports that the hack became apparent on Saturday. By Sunday Vodafone Iceland had 'fessed up to the incident but denied other reports that personal details including bank account numbers and passwords had been revealed to the world.

When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.

While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.

A rogue anti-virus product that blackmails people by secretly taking their picture with their webcam is on the rise.

Security solutions firm Webroot warns that the malware family – which includes the fake ‘Antivirus Security Pro' software – disables your computer then claims to have detected viruses and demands money from users to ‘buy the full version of product' and remove the threats.

New slides leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the Australian government was willing to share vast amounts of uncensored data that it collected on its citizens with a number of other countries around the world.

The slides from April 2008, first reported by The Guardian, show the willingness of the Australian government, through the Australian Signals Directorate, to hand over large amounts of metadata on its citizens to the other governments of the Five Eyes group — the United States, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand.

Google's practice of combining personal data from different Google services violates the Dutch data protection act, the Dutch data protection authority (DPA) said Thursday. But Google will not face any enforcement actions for now.

In March 2012, Google introduced a new privacy policy that allows Google to share personal data across all its products and services. However, Google made the changes without having adequately informed users, and without asking for their consent, the Dutch DPA said in a news release.

The United Nations on Wednesday approved 18 draft resolutions, notably "The right to privacy in the digital age," despite opposition from the U.S. government.

It is the first such document to establish privacy rights and human rights in the digital sphere.

 The Federal Bureau of Investigation should make public a legal opinion it used to justify a past telephone records surveillance program because other agencies may still be relying on the document for surveillance justifications, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in court Tuesday.

First, an introduction: I write about hackers, and for the past few years that has meant I write about Anonymous. At the time of the Stratfor hack I was working for Wired covering Anonymous — notably the antics of Antisec anons much of the time. I had missed the Lulzsec period, which I spent under federal investigation myself. From February to July of that year I stayed away from the hacker world, unsure if my computer would be seized and unwilling to draw my sources into a possible fishing expedition.

Air passengers can now refuse to go through a security scanner on health grounds or privacy reasons, just as the government introduces such scanners at 11 further airports.

But passengers refusing to go through a scanner will have to submit to a private search by security staff.