From Pine View Farm

Running Naked through the Internet category archive

No Place To Hide 0

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The Internet Is a Public Place 0

Buried deep in a longer story about Twitter’s trading travails (the stock is down a bit) is this nugget (emphasis added):

Compared with mature rivals like Google and Facebook, Twitter doesn’t know as much about its users, and it is more difficult to measure results.

Facebook has so much data on its users, “you could actually target a premium credit card to a businessman you know is traveling all the time,” said Bryan Wiener, chairman of 360i, a digital marketing agency that works with brands like Capital One, NBCUniversal, Spotify, Oreo and Oscar Mayer.

In other words, Twitter needs to up its spying game to up its stock price.

Story via my local rag, print edition.

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Facebook Frolics 0

Testing the TOS.

A class action lawsuit over alleged breaches of EU privacy law, mass surveillance and involvement in the NSA’s Prism snooping programme has been filed against Facebook in Vienna.

The lawsuit, which was officially filed in a Vienna court on Thursday, is being spearheaded by 27-year-old Austrian law graduate and privacy campaigner Max Schrems.

(snip)

The case has been brought against Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, which registers all accounts outside the US and Canada, accounting for approximately 80% of Facebook’s 1.35 billion users.

Schrems was able to file his action against the Irish subsidiary in a civil court in Vienna because he claims Facebook is in breach of European law on users’ data.

Wonder whether this will go anywhere?

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Unwelcome Celebrity 0

As far as Google is concerned, the sequence may have been a random clip from the inner webs, but the man in the clip is not amused. Indeed, according to the story, he did not know that the clip existed until he saw it on his telly vision.

Timothy Werner of Norfolk filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Google, claiming the multinational corporation behind the popular Internet search engine and Android operating system used his likeness without his consent to sell smartphones.

The lawsuit said the ODU adjunct professor and Norfolk city employee “in no way placed himself in a position such that it could be reasonably anticipated that he would be featured as comic relief in a national television commercial for one of the world’s largest corporations.”

I am not a lawyer (TM), but Google may not have many legs to stand on.

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Facebook Frolics 0

More fraternity hi-jinks.

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Facebook Frolics 0

This could get interesting. Facebook, after all, is a business built on snooping.

Facebook Inc must face a class action lawsuit accusing it of violating its users’ privacy by scanning the content of messages they send to other users for advertising purposes, a U.S. judge has ruled.

(snip)

Facebook had argued that the alleged scanning of its users’ messages was covered by an exception under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act for interceptions by service providers occurring in the ordinary course of business.

But Hamilton said Facebook had “not offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary course of its business.”

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Did Kim Jong-Un Get a Sony of His Owny? 0

As my two or three regular readers know, I’ve long said that the internet is a public place and that those who forget that do so at their peril.

In addition, there is no such thing as absolute security. If someone wants to break into any ole house, your good security system will send them to your neighbor’s house. If he or she absolutely positively wants to break into your house regardless of the cost, your house is breached.

Before I get to my list of links, I must remind you that Sony has a history of poor security practices and incompetent response to the resulting breaches. They have also attempted to infect their customers’ computers with malware. As regards security, note that “big” and “bumble” both start with “b.”

The last reminder is this: Don’t believe the gee-whiz reportage on network security from the establishment press. For all their good will (and sometimes their lack thereof), most of those folks know nothing about how networks work and are not competent to evaluate the statements of the persons they interview. If some bozo in a three-piece suit were to tell them that Uncle Fester’s phase-lock loop light bulb represented the next breakthrough in physics, they would report it without question.

I’ve rounded up some posts about the Sony kerfuffle from persons who usually know what they are talking about.

Bruce Schneier, preeminent network security expert, says it’s important to know who you are dealing with. A snippet:

Your reaction to the massive hacking of such a prominent company will depend on whether you’re fluent in information-technology security. If you’re not, you’re probably wondering how in the world this could happen. If you are, you’re aware that this could happen to any company (though it is still amazing that Sony made it so easy).

To understand any given episode of hacking, you need to understand who your adversary is. I’ve spent decades dealing with Internet hackers (as I do now at my current firm), and I’ve learned to separate opportunistic attacks from targeted ones.

China Hand (I don’t know who he is, but he seems to be a reasonable sort of guy) is skeptical of the North Korean connection; he’s suspects it’s a knee-jerk reaction (more at the link):

Unfortunately, cyberattacks don’t lend themselves to quick attribution or, for that matter, even ultimate attribution. And for a government that does not want to make a spectacle of its impotence, waiting on due process and evidentiary niceties to produce the conclusion, “Well, the circumstances argue this, but we could never prove it in a court of law” doesn’t really cut it.

I have a suspicion that the United States has an app for that: blame somebody, preferably somebody unpopular, as quickly and categorically as possible.

George Smith thinks that Sony didn’t know when to hold them, didn’t know when to fold them and has composed a ditty in Sony’s honor.

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Network Security Theatre 0

Notice that it’s “opt out,” rather than “opt in.” The hope, natch, is that you won’t notice it at all.

Twitter said it is now tracking what other apps its users have installed on their mobile devices so it can target content and ads to them better.

Twitter Inc. said Wednesday that users will receive a notification when the setting is turned on and can opt out using settings on their phones. On iPhones, this setting is called “limit ad tracking.” On Android phones, it’s “opt out of interest-based ads.”

And people worry about the NSA.

(More details at the link.)

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