Privacy

Two laptops used by European Commission officials were pinched last week in Azerbaijan's capital Baku during the Internet Governance Forum, Digital Agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has revealed.

In a blog post at the weekend, Kroes explained that she was in two minds about attending the summit, held this year in the gas and oil-rich country, because the Azerbaijani government has “a very troubling attitude to freedom and democracy”. She added the following:

Developers are brewing an anonymous general purpose computing platform, dubbed Whonix.

Whonix is designed to ensure that applications (such as Flash and Java etc) can only connect through Tor. The design goal, at least, is that direct connections (leaks) ought to be impossible. "This is the only way we know of that can reliably protect your anonymity from client application vulnerabilities and IP/DNS and protocol leaks," the developers explain.

David Litchfield of security firm Acuvant reveals that the McDonald’s from Sydney Airport records its customers’ conversations.

“Your conversations will be audio and video recorded for quality assurance purposes,” reads a sign at the entrance.

Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.

The average home user upgrades his or her browser to the latest version one month after it is released, according to a survey of 10 million punters. Two thirds of those using old browser software are simply stuck on the version prior to the latest release - the remaining third are using even older code.

Hackers linked to the Anonymous collective have exposed a list of Navy email logins after breaking into Queen's Harbour Masters websites.

The websites, hosted by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), were public-facing and not linked to internal defence systems, a MoD spokesman told SC.

The number of South Carolina taxpayers who had their Social Security numbers hacked from state computers has risen to 3.8 million, about 5 percent higher than previously reported, a government spokesman said on Wednesday.

The state Department of Revenue also said tax records from up to 657,000 businesses and companies who have filed a state return since 1998 were exposed in the breach of its computers, which was first disclosed publicly by Governor Nikki Haley on Oct. 26.

On Tuesday night, hackers defaced the Australian website of Pizza Hut and made off with customers' personal data, including names, email addresses and other contact information.

Victims of a PIN pad tampering incident, which compromised customer information at dozens of Barnes & Noble stores, have filed three class-action lawsuits against the nation's largest book retailer.

In response to the breach, on Sept. 14, the company removed PIN pads from all of its nearly 700 stores nationwide after tampered devices were discovered at 63 locations in Illinois, New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is one of the best ways you can ensure all of the private information on your laptop stays private in case it's lost, seized, stolen, or if you choose to sell or give away your computer in the future. This feature has been built-in to many GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, for many years. But until the recent release of Ubuntu 12.10, it was hidden away in the "alternate" text-mode installer of Ubuntu that many non-technical users don't even know exists.

Thinking about the bits of data you leave behind is a one-way ticket to paranoia. Your browser? Full of cookies. Your cellphone? A beacon broadcasting your location at every moment. Search engines track your every curiosity. Email services archive way too much. Those are just the obvious places we're aware of. Who knows what's going on inside those routers?