privacy
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How to browse the web anonymously | Digital Crave - Yahoo!
Think your online activities are private? Think again. Not only are your surfing sessions tracked by websites, search engines and social networks, but often your Internet service provider (ISP), web browser, government and potentially hundreds of online tracking companies. Whether it's to collect valuable (read: sellable) marketing data or prevent terrorist activity, movie piracy or kiddie porn, everything you think you're doing privately in the comfort of your home is anything but private.
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You Can't Keep Your Secrets From Twitter
When you tweet--even if you tweet under a pseudonym--how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation . The paper, "Discriminating Gender on Twitter ," which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person's gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others. To conduct their research, the Mitre folks--John Burger, John Henderson, George Kim, and Guido Zarrella--first had to assemble a corpus of Twitter users whose gender they were confident of.
Three Ways to Thwart Identity Theft
When it comes to protecting your credit from identity theft you have a variety of options. You can do nothing. You can pay to monitor your credit reports. Or, you can freeze your credit reports.
The only requirements for becoming a hacker are an inquiring mind and plenty of time. Photograph: Daniel Law/PA The only entrance requirements for becoming a hacker are an inquiring mind and plenty of time. These are things that young teenagers - especially, though not exclusively, boys - tend to have.
How computer hackers do what they do ... and why | Technology
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Think file-hosting sites guard your private data? Think again
Academic researchers say they've uncovered weaknesses in dozens of the most popular file hosting sites that allow people to gain unauthorized access to data that's supposed to be available only to those selected by the user. The services, which include sites such as RapidShare , FileFactory , and Easyshare , allow users to upload large files and make them available to anyone who knows the unique URI (or Uniform Resource Identifier ) that's bound to each one. Users may post the link on websites or forums available to the public or share it in a single email to prevent all but the recipient from downloading it. RapidShare, for instance, says it can be used to “share your data with your friends, colleagues or family.”How to wipe personal data from your smartphone
So you bought a new phone and you want to sell your old phone, but you're worried about the buyer finding personal information on your phone. You can never be too careful, so it's important to know how to remove all that personal data before a stranger has the phone. Before doing this, remember to back up all your data and transfer important files to your new phone. This includes pictures, documents, apps and app logins and media (music, videos and e-books). Some platforms and carrier networks provide some kind of backup service. Next, make sure to delete everything from any storage media.
Fridge | private social networks
We are pleased to announce that Fridge has been acquired by Google! It has been an amazing ride developing Fridge, but most importantly we are very thankful to our enthusiastic community of users. We strongly believe in the group social experience and couldn't think of a better home for Fridge than Google.
“Hey Smitty, I got this guy’s email address. Can you do some digging and tell me more about ‘em? How much does he make? What are his hobbies? Oh, and I want to see pictures of his pet dog too.
RainMaker API
What Does the "Track" in "Do Not Track" Mean?
There is a lot of discussion about Do Not Track at the moment. The FTC has announced support for the idea; Mozilla has added a Do Not Track header option into Firefox betas, and Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a Do Not Track bill . Other proposed privacy legislation, such as Rep. Bobby Rush's bill , could also achieve similar objectives.Making Sure Net Advertisers 'Do Not Track' You - Newsweek
Here is how Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, describes the current state of affairs on the Internet: “Say I’m walking through a mall. And there’s a guy following me.
Stanford Law's Ryan Calo on Privacy Harm and Education - Technorati Family
Welcome to the (R)evolution , a new series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, culture, and media.Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, Germany on Monday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network , a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes. The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network—a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request, for example—to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing.By JULIA ANGWIN And JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission weighed in on the issue of Internet privacy Wednesday, calling for development of a "do not track" system that would enable people to avoid having their actions monitored online—prompting immediate objections from the online-advertising industry.
FTC Backs a 'Do Not Track' System for Internet
Learn how you can easily verify and validate any email address without even sending a test mail. Just ping it from your computer
How to Verify an Email Address - Ping It!
A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook's 'Like This' button is watching your every move. Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not. Roosendaal says that Facebook's tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the 'Like This' button and Facebook Connect. The researcher provides three examples of how the 'Like This' button on any web page can gather user browser data and send it back to Facebook. The first scenario involves users who already have Facebook accounts: