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Protests follow Google 'endorsed advert' change 14 October 2013Last updated at 06:35 ET The change might mean comments made on Google turn up on adverts Google is facing a backlash over plans to put people's faces and comments about products and places into adverts. Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show Image: Courtesy of the Guardian The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.” The name of the target is redacted from the unsealed records, but the offenses under investigation are listed as violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property — the exact charges that have been filed against NSA whistleblower Snowden in the same Virginia court. U.S. “Anything done by Mr.

Brazilian president Rousseff: US surveillance a 'breach of international law' Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, accusing the NSA of violating international law by its indiscriminate collection of personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country's strategic industries. Rousseff's angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Rousseff had already put off a planned visit to Washington in protest at US spying, after NSA documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the US electronic eavesdropping agency had monitored the Brazilian president's phone calls, as well as Brazilian embassies and spied on the state oil corporation, Petrobras. "Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately.

Iris-scanning technology streamlines refugee registration process — UNHCR AMMAN — Scores of Syrians waiting to register at the newly opened UN Refugee Agency registration centre in Khalda last Thursday experienced their first iris-scanning. The Iris Recognition Technology was recently implemented to streamline the refugee registration process and to tackle the backlog of 60,000 Syrians awaiting registrations at the Anmar Hmoud Centre for Refugee Registration and the Irbid centre. “The iris scan was introduced because we are dealing with over half-a-million people in various locations so we needed to prevent multiple registration,” said Nihad Hota, a UNHCR registration officer at the Khalda centre. Developed by the Jordan-based IrisGuard company, the technology uses the iris instead of fingerprints to identify a person. Iris-scanning completes the traditional registration where biometric data such as names and addresses are recorded along with testimonies and lists of relatives. “This way, we have a complete and proper data registration of each refugee.

Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet (Update 2) Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments. President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S.

Facebook Now Knows What You're Buying at Drug Stores In an attempt to give advertisers more information about the effectiveness of ads, Facebook has partnered with Datalogix, a company that "can track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores," as The Financial Times's Emily Steel and April Dembosky explain. Advertisers have complained that Facebook doesn't give them any way to see if ads lead to buying. This new partnership is their response. The service will link up the 70 million households worth of purchasing information that Datalogix has with Facebook profiles so they can see if the ads you see changes the stuff you buy and tell advertisers whether their ads are working. Ring Could Log Users In to Houses, Phones and Website as Soon as Next Month The need for more passwords that our feeble human brains struggle to remember can make it feel like we work for the machines instead of the other way around. Wearable, and even embeddable, login storage has emerged has a possible solution. After Google researchers floated the idea of a USB stick or a ring that would generate login keys, it appeared the Web giant would lead the way. But a UK project recently closed a $380,000 Kickstarter campaign, promising delivery of 61,000 password-bearing rings in September. The company, NFC Ring, makes a simple silver ring with two near-field communication transmitters inside it, storing access information that can potentially be used to unlock phones, cars or houses or even to log in to websites. One transmitter faces out and stores information that the user may want to share, such as his or her contact information.

CA School District Announces It's Doing Round-The-Clock Monitoring Of Its 13,000 Students' Social Media Activities The Glendale School District in California is facing some backlash from the recent news that it has retained the services of Geo Listening to track its students' social media activity. The rationale behind the program is (of course) the students' safety. After collecting information from students' posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, Geo Listening will provide Glendale school officials with a daily report that categorizes posts by their frequency and how they relate to cyber-bullying, harm, hate, despair, substance abuse, vandalism and truancy.Glendale Unified, which piloted the service at Hoover, Glendale and Crescenta Valley high schools last year, will pay the company $40,500 to monitor posts made by about 13,000 middle school and high school students at eight Glendale schools. Glendale Unified Supt.

Facebook privacy and kids: Don’t post photos of your kids online Photo by Hemera/Thinkstock I vividly remember the Facebook post. It was my friend’s 5-year-old daughter “Kate,” (a pseudonym) standing outside of her house in a bright yellow bikini, the street address clearly visible behind her on the front door. A caption read “Leaving for our annual Labor Day weekend at the beach,” and beneath it were more than 50 likes and comments from friends—including many “friends” that Kate’s mom barely knew. The picture had been uploaded to a Facebook album, and there were 114 shots just of Kate: freshly cleaned and swaddled on the day of her birth … giving her Labradoodle a kiss … playing on a swing set. But there were also photos of her in a bathtub and an awkward moment posing in her mother’s lacy pink bra.

Obama can’t point to a single time the NSA call records program prevented a terrorist attack President Obama speaks during an end-of-the year news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Dec. 20, 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP) National Security Agency defenders, including President Obama, continue to cite the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 when defending the program that scoops up domestic call records in bulk. But asked specifically, on Friday, if he could identify a time when that program stopped a similar attack, President Obama couldn't. That's because the program hasn't prevented a second 9/11. At the end of the year news conference, Reuters's Mark Felsenthal asked: