Privacy

In a recent experiment writer Andy Baio was able to uncover the identities of seven anonymous bloggers from a random sample of 50 in under 30 minutes; all thanks to a simple mistake they'd made in setting up their websites.

"One blog about Anonymous' hacking operations could easily be tracked to the founder's consulting firm, while another tracking Mexican cartels was tied to a second domain with the name and address of a San Diego man."

South Korea's communications regulator said on Saturday that personal information of more than 13 million subscribers of a popular online game of Nexon Korea Corp, a leading game developer in the country, had been leaked in a hacking attack.

The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said in a statement Nexon reported to the commission late Friday afternoon that the company on Thursday discovered the leakage of personal data of its online game Maple Story's 13.2 million subscribers.

Anxiety over the public snooping of police radios using smartphones is persuading a growing number of US police forces to take the controversial step of moving their communications to fully-encrypted operation.

The Washington D.C. police department has become the latest to adopt radio encryption after mounting evidence that criminals were listening in to police conversations using cheap applications running on mass-market phones, the Associated Press has reported.

Many large UK companies are failing to ensure that confidential data is destroyed when their IT equipment reaches the end of its working life, putting their own staff, customers or partners at risk of fraud, or further serious security breaches.

Depending upon who you listen to, GPS tracking shouldn't be your only concern when you are out and about on the streets. The ACLU hammered license plate scanners as 'logging our every move,' a different investigative report concluded your car is spying on you, and some even claim the street lights are out to get you.

A new batch of ‘Climategate’ emails last night appeared to implicate a government official in the furore over global warming data.

More than 5,000 documents were published online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.

The Tor Project is tapping Amazon's EC2 cloud service to make it easier for volunteers to donate bandwidth to the anonymity network.

Developers with the project have released preconfigured Tor Cloud images that volunteers can use to quickly deploy bridges that allow users to access the service. The new system is designed to take some of the pain out running such Tor relays by reducing the work and cost of deploying and running the underlying hardware and software.

A Special Agent Supervisor of the CA Department of Justice is the latest victim of Anonymous who claims that their operations against the FBI succeeded once again after managing to hack two of his Gmail accounts.

As a result, 38,000 emails containing “detailed computer forensics techniques, investigation protocols as well as highly embarrassing personal information,” were published online.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon university – in partnership with Google - have developed a Windows application that can scour the internet, comparing images found online with a submitted picture, and identify you within 60 seconds.

The image analysis technology doesn’t actually operate in under a minute, Infosecurity notes, but harnesses the existing search algorithms that Google uses for its image search. It’s similar algorithms that allow Google to spider-search all aspects of the web on a 24x7 basis, allowing your text searches to return a result in a matter of a few seconds.

Private signEarlier this week the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first drafts of two new privacy standards aimed at simplifying and standardising how websites read and comply with web users’ privacy settings.

The Tracking Preference Expression and Tracking Compliance and Scope standards define a ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) mechanism that will allow users to opt out of the sort of tracking increasingly used for web analytics and behavioural advertising.