IT ministry shelves plan to install massive URL blocking system. MNA Bushra Gohar confirms project to be taken back. MoIT to issue statement tomorrow. Pakistan's great Electronic Great Wall may yet not come. ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT) has apparently decided to shelve its plans to install a massive URL blocking system. The MoIT, through its research arm, the National Information & Communication Technology Research and Development Fund had thorough a public advertisement on February 23, 2012, sought bids for a system that “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs with a processing delay of not more than 1 millisecond.”
On Monday, Member National Assembly Bushra Gohar confirmed to The Express Tribune that the MoIT had decided to reverse its decision. “Secretary IT Farooq Ahmed Awan said to me that the URL project has been withdrawn due to the concern shown by various stakeholders,” the legislator from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said. Meanwhile, the MoIT has neither confirmed nor denied the report. More Info About You. ## ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use# available at: If you see inaccuracies in the results, please report at# The following results may also be obtained via:# 198.27.64.0 - 198.27.127.255CIDR: 198.27.64.0/18NetName: OVH-ARIN-4NetHandle: NET-198-27-64-0-1Parent: NET198 (NET-198-0-0-0-0)NetType: Direct AllocationOriginAS: AS16276Organization: OVH Hosting, Inc.
Anonymous does not mean secure… While browsing interesting stories on Slashdot.org I found reference to an astonishing blog entry over at derangedsecurity.com; in this blog, the author gives out a list of 100 government e-mail accounts and their passwords. Mainly belonging to Asian and Eastern European embassies, the account details were captured by simply sniffing unencrypted network traffic. Following the story further, the Web site hosting the blog was taken offline at the request of U.S. law enforcement officials!
Interesting, seeing as no details of U.S. accounts were divulged! Later on, the author explained how he had collected the information without any hacking, cracking, or decryption. What is Tor? Tor has a few vulnerabilities that may enable the identity of a user to be traced. What interested me about this particular breach was that it underlines people's misapprehension of ‘anonymous' and ‘secure'. NSA Chief Appears to Deny Ability to Warrantlessly Wiretap Despite Evidence. The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says. —Wired Magazine, April 2012 Last week, in Wired Magazine, noted author James Bamford reported on an expansive $2 billion “data center” being built by the NSA in Utah that will house an almost unimaginable amount of data on its servers, along with the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Part of the purpose of this new center, according to Bamford, is to store “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’” In the Wired article, Bamford interviewed former NSA official William Binney, a “crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network.” Gen. What Traffic is on a TOR Relay? - OmniNerd. What Traffic is on a TOR Relay? [index] [6,594 page views] I'd long heard about the The Onion Router (Tor), but really had no reason to use it myself.1 But then I was reading the Wired story Vanish about the attempt of Evan Ratliff to disappear in the digital age and Tor was mentioned as a tool he used to protect the secret of his location.2 Intrigued, I decided to finally take a look.
In a nutshell, nothing says it better than Tor's website: Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Joining Tor So I installed the software and took a peek. Feeling like I was part of the greater good of the Internet, I let the relay run and didn't give it another thought. Watching Tor With all the software installed, it was time to get things running. Tor Traffic. Compete CEO: ISPs Sell Clickstreams For $5 A Month.
At the Open Data 2007 conference in New York today, David Cancel, the CEO of Compete Inc. revealed that ISPs happily sell clickstream data -- and that it's a big business. They don't sell your name -- just your clicks -- but the clicks are tied to you as a specific user (User 1, User 2, etc.). How much are your clicks worth? About 40 cents a month per user (per customer)... and the Compete CEO estimates that there are 10-12 big buyers of this data. In other words, your ISP is probably making about $5 a month ($60 a year) off your clickstreams. Someone points out that this is just as bad as the AOL search thing.
David steps down. The Open Data morning session ended with a general consensus that consumers would be surprised and outraged by the amount of online data that is being collected, stored, and sold--and that sooner or later some smart journalist will pretend to discover this secret and trigger a consumer firestorm. Do you trust this author to give you good analysis? (35 followers) A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749. FAQ – Policies & Principles. How does Google protect my privacy? Why does Google store search engine logs data? Why are search engine logs kept before being anonymized? How can I remove information about myself from Google’s search results? Does Google use cookies? What happens when different privacy laws in different countries conflict? How often are you asked by governments to provide data on users?
How can I contact Google if I have a privacy question or complaint? At Google, we are keenly aware of the trust our users place in us, and our responsibility to protect their privacy. We store this data for a number of reasons. We strike a reasonable balance between the competing pressures we face, such as the privacy of our users, the security of our systems and the need for innovation. Like all search engines, Google is a reflection of the content and information publicly available on the web.
We’ve been told most users don’t want to re-set their computers every time they log on.