The Stupidest Tech Laws Congress Is Trying To Pass. Associated Press Senator Leahy The bill: S. 968: Protect IP Act The bill's stated goal: To prevent online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property, and for other purposes. Why it's stupid: The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) is the Senate's version of the SOPA bill, with all the same crappy implications to the Internet. DNS is the system that takes the words you type into your browser and translates them to the numbers that servers worldwide use to identify specific Web pages. There are so many reasons why tampering with DNS is stupid, we won't go into them all again, now. Max's privacy war brings Facebook to heel. Last month, several US privacy interest groups asked the US Federal Trade Commission in Washington to look into recent changes made by Facebook that give the company greater ability to disclose users' personal information to businesses than it used to have.
The German lawmakers brought up a raft of complaints, from allegations that Facebook's "Like" button allows the company to track non-members' internet activity, to concerns over the company's use of facial recognition software on personal photos. One of Schrems's main complaints with Facebook, he says, is that the company retains information far longer than allowed under European law, which in most cases is limited to a few months. "I wondered, what are they doing with my data? " Schrems said, sitting with his laptop in a Viennese coffee house. "I thought through everything that one can do with that amount of information; all the marketing that is possible. " Keen On … It’s Official: Privacy Is Dead (TCTV)
Yes, it’s really true. Nobody can hide anything anymore in our digital age of transparency. And thus, Dov Seidman, author of the re-released How and CEO of LRN, says we have entered an “era of behavior” in which we can no longer separate our private and public lives. As Seidman told me when we caught up earlier this week on Skype, the era of behavior means that our reputations now always “precede us”. And this “unprecedented transparency” compounds the possibility of doing both good and evil. For Seidman, this is all excellent news.
Our new transparency makes going good much more effective, he told me, citing the example of doctors in Michigan whose public apology built a new trust with their patients. But is Seidman really correct? Facebook Says 600,000 Accounts Compromises Per Day. Spokeo Knows Where You Live, How Much You Make, and How Old You Are - Culture. If he was like mine, your grandfather always said "the computers" were going to get too powerful one day. Frighteningly, finally, the old men may be right. Founded in 2006, Spokeo began as a social network aggregator whose deep web-searching tools allowed people to keep tabs on their friends' various online profiles. The site's innocent origins, however, gave way to a creepier reality when it was discovered that it was a really great way to wrangle a lot of different, intimate information about a person into one place.
What it's become since—Spokeo 5.0 was launched in November of 2010—is a strange amalgamation of information about where people live (complete with pictures of their homes via Google Maps), how much money they make, how to reach them on the phone, and who their relatives are. And that may be the spookiest thing about Spokeo: Much of the damage it can cause is self-inflicted. Eight percent of online Americans now use Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center. Who Owns Your Identity on the Social Web? When I go to a bar, the bouncer usually stops me and asks for an ID. I show him my state-issued driver’s license and walk on by. This may be unusual, as I’m 36 (thanks, mom, for the good genes), but we’re all pretty accustomed to presenting our official identification when needed.
We need IDs to vote in an election, and when we get pulled over for speeding. If identification is so commonplace in the physical world, why is it still such a hazy area on the Internet? In the old days of web publishing, almost every site required its users to register in order to access certain functionalities, like commenting. However, each login was only useful to its corresponding website. Users had to remember a myriad of usernames and passwords just to read up on the morning news. With the rise of social networks and search platforms, a few large B2C companies evolved into large-scale consumer identity providers (a.k.a. For instance, we just launched our Mashable Awards 2011 microsite.