Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they
felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated
415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to
disguise their identity or location.
On these figures, Tor could be regularly used by as many as 45.13
million people. Its biggest userbase appears to be in Indonesia, where
21% of respondents said they used the tool, followed by 18% in Vietnam
and 15% in India.
Indonesia also has the world's highest penetration of general
anonymity tools among its internet users, with 42% using proxy servers
or virtual private networks known as VPNs, which disguise the location
of the user's internet connection - their IP address - and therefore
bypass regional blocks on certain content.
The US, UK, Germany and Ireland meanwhile all report 17% penetration,
with Japan the lowest at 5%. The data includes those aged 16-64 for the
last quarter of 2013.
Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a
crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library
heard a crashing sound and rushed to the s
cience fiction section,
expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a
handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with
light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to
apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most
mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the
F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and
most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the
government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion
worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD.
This is the third post in our recent series for beginning Python programmers. In the first post, I detailed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers. The second post then laid out learning benchmarks for the project on the basis of MIT's Introduction to Computer Science course. Today's installment provides a categorized list of Python resources for beginner to intermediate programmers. Add any others you've found helpful in the comments and I'll update the list. Enjoy!
And here you thought you felt guilty because of what you were eating. A press release from Proofpoint:
outsideperception.wordpress.com
Proofpoint, Inc, a leading security-as-a-service
provider, has uncovered what may be the first proven Internet of
Things (IoT)-based cyberattack involving conventional household
"smart" appliances
. The global attack campaign involved more than
750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000
everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected
multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that
had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks. As the
number of such connected devices is expected to grow to more than
four times the number of connected computers in the next few years
according to media reports, proof of an IoT-based attack has
significant security implications for device owners and Enterprise
targets.
Why won't these children think of the children?! From the BBC:
Filters put in place by
parents to stop children viewing inappropriate content are easily
bypassed by the youngsters themselves, according to a nreport from regulator Ofcom.
It found that 18% of 12-15-year-olds know how to disable internet filters.
Almost half of children aged 12-15 know how to delete their
browsing history and 29% can amend settings to mask their browser
activity. Some 83% of eight to 11 year-olds said they knew how to stay safe online. . . .
According to the report, many parents feel their computing skills are far inferior to their children's. Almost half (44%) of parents with children aged between eight
and 11 say their child knows more about the internet than they do. That
rises to 63% for parents of 12-15-year-olds.
In other words, hysterical helicopter parents and safety fetishists have succeeded only in preventing themselves and their technophobic peers from accessing "objectionable" content online.
A group of Amazon warehouse workers in Delaware will decide Wednesday
on whether to create a union. The vote covers just a tiny sub-set of
the retail giant’s workforce but has heavy symbolic significance at a
time when Amazon faces ongoing criticism over its labor practices.
The vote comes after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers filed a petition
on December 6 on behalf of 30 equipment maintenance and repair
technicians in Middletown, Delaware. If a majority of the workers vote
in favor, it will be the first Amazon union shop in the U.S.
Mozilla has one critical advantage over all other browser vendors.
Our products are truly open source . . . As Anthony Jones from our New Zealand office pointed out the other month, security researchers can use this fact to verify the executable bits
contained in the browsers Mozilla is distributing, by building Firefox
from source and comparing the built bits with our official distribution . . .
To ensure that no one can inject undetected surveillance code into Firefox, security researchers and organizations should:
regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all effective means;
establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds from source;
raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official bits.
In the best case, we will establish such a verification system at a
global scale, with participants from many different geographic regions
and political and strategic interests and affiliations.
Security is never “done” — it is a process, not a final rest-state. No silver bullets. All methods have limits. However, open-source auditability cleanly beats the lack of ability to audit source vs. binary.
Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give
users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world
noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy
expectations.
