Privacy

By: Daniel Dimov

Google Glass is a wearable computer worn like a standard pair of glasses. The device displays information on a glass screen in front of the eyes of the user. It accepts voice commands that start with the phrase “ok glass.” Google Glass contains 12GB of usable storage and has a 5-megapixel camera which is capable of shooting 720p video. Users will be able to upload photos on the Internet. By the end of 2013, Google Glass will be available to consumers.

Google Glass may be a new and innovative product with the potential to change the world, but one thing that won't change because of Glass is the search giant's unified privacy policy.

The company said "no changes to the Google Privacy Policy are planned for Glass," in a recent letter to members of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus. The letter, dated June 7 but only released on Monday, was a response to Congressional privacy hawks who asked Google for more details about Glass and its privacy implications back in May.

Servers belonging to video game publisher Ubisoft have been compromised in a recent attack. Hackers are said by the company to have gained access to sensitive data, including usernames, e-mails, and encrypted passwords, and has started to e-mail Uplay account holders to warn about the intrusion and the data loss.

US intelligence agencies have sprung so many leaks over the last few years—black sites, rendition, drone strikes, secret fiber taps, dragnet phone record surveillance, Internet metadata collection, PRISM, etc, etc—that it can be difficult to remember just how truly difficult operations like the NSA have been to penetrate historically. Critics today charge that the US surveillance state has become a self-perpetuating, insular leviathan that essentially makes its own rules under minimal oversight. Back in 1975, however, the situation was likely even worse.

New "top secret" slides released by The Washington Post on Saturday shed further light on the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM program, which was first publicly disclosed through a series of leaks by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden earlier this month.

Norton has pinged Facebook for slurping Android users' phone numbers without their consent. The findings, posted here, were announced along with a new version of the company's Android security app.

Norton, which once famously blocked Facebook as a phishing site, says the updated Mobile Insight flagged Facebook for Android as leaking the device phone numbers, affecting a “significant portion” of the hundreds of millions of people who have downloaded the app from Google Play.

Today, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that it got a look at slides detailing the systematic bugging of European Union offices in the US. The news from the paper cited top-secret documents “that Spiegel has in part seen,” which were dated from 2010 and were recently obtained by Edward Snowden. The paper did not publish any of the documents it claims to have reviewed.

If Google Glass isn't enough to get you worried about technology, how about a device that can see through walls using Wi-Fi? Researchers at MIT are experimenting with a system called Wi-Vi, which they say can track moving objects through walls by using the inexpensive, nearly ubiquitous wireless system. Wi-Vi could be built into a smartphone or a special handheld device and used in search-and-rescue missions and law enforcement, according to Dina Katabi, the MIT professor who developed Wi-Vi along with graduate student Fadel Adib.

An unidentified group of hackers has released details of tens of thousands of US troops to websites, according to the South Korean press.

The hacking attacks were carried out on the anniversary of the start of the Korean War in 1950. They brought down the main websites of South Korea's presidential office and some local newspapers.

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been around for a while but they still aren’t much of a mainstream service. The only ones who know about VPNs are those who are sufficiently tech-literate, and of the ones who do know, only a fraction actually use them. That’s a shame because VPNs are a fantastic bit of technology that deserve more attention.