An incompetent New Zealand burglar captured and hog-tied by elderly members of a petanque club is a laughing stock in prison and will never again be able to hold his head up in criminal circles, his lawyer says.
A man is due to face court in Sydney’s inner west today charged over the theft of his neighbour’s hot water system.
Going maybe where no other actor has gone before, Star Trek star William Shatner has sold a piece of his body for charity.
Hey folks, Harry here with a real movie… that just happens to be adapted from a video game. It’s amazing how this works. First you hire a really great screenwriter like Roger Avary. And you team him up with a great director like Christophe Gans…. and you give them the money and latitude to make and cast the film with quality actors - and stay true to the best aspects of the game whi
But Broader Privacy Concerns Remain
San Francisco - Yesterday, the Justice Department asked a federal court in San Jose, California to force Google to turn over search records for use as evidence in a case where the government is defending the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Google has refused to comply with a subpoena for those records, based in part on its concern for its users’ privacy.
COPA is a federal law that requires those who publish non-obscene, constitutionally protected sexual material online to take difficult and expensive steps to prevent access by minors, steps that would chill publishers of sexual material as well as the adults who want to access such material anonymously. EFF is one of the plaintiffs in the First Amendment challenge to COPA.
The subpoena to Google currently asks for a random sampling of one million URLs from Google’s database of web sites on the Internet. More importantly, the DOJ is also subpoenaing the text of each search string entered into Google’s search engine over a one-week period, absent any information identifying the people who entered the search terms.
“The government is overreaching here, asking Google to do its dirty work and collect information about the Internet speech activities of Google users,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Last month, the federal court rejected many of the government’s over broad discovery requests to its opposing parties. Rather than learn its lesson, the DOJ continues to push for overreaching discovery, this time from a company that isn’t even a party to the case.”
Google has cited its concern for user privacy as a reason for not complying with the subpoena, in addition to the unreasonable burden that compliance would place on Google and the proprietary nature of its query database. In particular, Google is rightly concerned that many of the randomly selected search queries would contain personal information about Google users.
While EFF applauds Google for defending its users’ privacy in this case, the current controversy only highlights the broader privacy problem: Google logs all of the searches you make, and most if not all of those queries are personally identifiable via cookies, IP addresses, and Google account information.
“The only way Google can reasonably protect the privacy of its users from such legal demands now and in the future is to stop collecting so much information about its users, delete information that it does collect as soon as possible, and take real steps to minimize how much of the information it collects is traceable back to individual Google users,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “If Google continues to gather and keep so much information about its users, government and private attorneys will continue to try and get it.”
Importantly, users can also take steps to protect their privacy from Google, the government, and others, by using anonymizing technologies such as Tor when surfing the web. Tor helps hide your IP address from Google so that even if the lawyers come knocking, Google cannot identify you by your searches.
More about Tor:
http://tor.eff.org/
Contacts:
Kevin Bankston
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
bankston@eff.org
Kurt Opsahl
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
kurt@eff.org
Lee Tien
Senior Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
tien@eff.org
Al Saunders, whose Kansas City offense led the NFL in yards and touchdowns the last five years, has agreed to become offensive coordinator for the Washington Redskins.
A Sydney woman has won $100,000 with an Instant Scratchie ticket bought more than 14 years ago.
Steve Gibson with the final word on the Windows Metafile (WMF) vulnerability, and a new program he’s written to detect it in all versions of Windows.
Main feed - courtesy AOL Radio
It’s now pretty clear that the ability to execute code in WMF graphics files was intentional - but we may never know why it’s there. Steve wraps up the subject, lays a few myths to rest, explains why Windows 95/98/Me are not vulnerable, and offers a tool to detect the hole in all versions of Windows, including the WINE emulator for Linux.
Download your free copy of GRC’s Mousetrap from grc.com.
Steve also hosts transcripts, show notes, and a 16kbps version of the show for the bandwidth impaired at grc.com.
Running time: 29:08
The Detroit Lions hired Rod Marinelli because they hope he’s the tough coach they need to turn around the team that has been the NFL’s worst since 2001.
iTunes boosts prime time ratings for NBC/ABC, Apple Intel-Ad Postal, Play Half-Life on iPod Nano, Make your own Island, LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?, Make your own Island, Stardust Probe, Turn and old scanner into a 115 megapixel camera, Old Tetris, An animated GIF showing a stabilized version of the infamous Bigfoot film.
I don’t know if everyone reading this is familiar with podcasting but it is a kind of internet broadcasting that works with Apple’s iTunes and iPod. Once a listener subscribes to a podcast “feed” the current shows are transferred directly to the listener’s computer and iPod without them ever having to search for and download […]
E! Online - Should Simon
Cowell ever find himself in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, he may want to mind his mouth.