Leaks of Dragnet Surveillance Inspire Changes in Web Habits

People who first recognized the scope of the potential threats to their online data privacy following the NSA leaks last month are now beginning to change their habits.  Or so it appears.  From the Boston Globe:

News of the US government’s secret surveillance programs that targeted phone records and information transmitted on the Internet has done more than spark a debate about privacy. Some are changing their online habits as they reconsider some basic questions about today’s interconnected world. Among them: How much should I share and how should I share it?

Some say they want to take preventative measures in case such programs are expanded. Others are looking to send a message — not just to the US government but to the Internet companies that collect so much personal information.

‘‘We all think that nobody’s interested in us, we’re all simple folk,’’ said Doan Moran of Alexandria, La. ‘‘But you start looking at the numbers and the phone records . . . it makes you really hesitate.’’

First They Came for the Pornographers . . .

A coalition of self-appointed moral censors and fear-mongering hysterics in the UK are pushing forward with a plan to implement the first stages of internet censorship under the guise of – what else?  – protecting the children!  From BBC:

Most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it, David Cameron has announced.

In addition, the prime minister said possessing online pornography depicting rape would become illegal in England and Wales - in line with Scotland.  Mr Cameron warned in a speech that access to online pornography was "corroding childhood".

The new measures will apply to both existing and new customers.  Mr Cameron also called for some "horrific" internet search terms to be "blacklisted", meaning they would automatically bring up no results on websites such as Google or Bing.

He told the BBC he expected a "row" with service providers who, he said in his speech, were "not doing enough to take responsibility" despite having a "moral duty" to do so.
He also warned he could have to "force action" by changing the law and that, if there were "technical obstacles", firms should use their "greatest brains" to overcome them.

PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby

From Udemy, here's an interesting infographic comparing PHP, Python and Ruby according to a few different metrics:

Yahoo Removes Adult and Erotica Blogs and Tumblrs from Search

From ZDNet:

When Yahoo bought Tumblr, it suggested that its adult and porn blogs would be left alone.  Users found out this wasn't true when a new adult blog search policy went public on Thursday, capping Tumblr's quarantine on adult content, which now also includes excluding adult blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

The changes render an estimated 10% of Tumblr's userbase invisible and unfindable.  Now, around 12 million Tumblr blogs marked "adult" have been removed from Tumblr's internal search; this follows the revelation two months ago that adult blogs were no longer indexed by Google, and the pre-sale removal of Tumblr's "Erotica" category from its category index.

Tumblr's "Erotica" category had been launched in January 2010 with much sex-positive fanfare - it would appear that the days of Tumblr's tolerance are long gone . . .

Tech Firms Team Up to Call for Transparency in Government

From Time:

The largest Internet companies in the United States have joined forces with top civil liberties groups to call on the White House and Congress to increase the transparency surrounding the government’s controversial National Security Agency surveillance programs. Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter are among the tech giants that have signed a letter to the feds, asking for the right to disclose more information about national security data requests. Notably absent are the nation’s largest phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which have remained silent about their participation in the government’s snooping program.

Three Degrees of Separation from the NSA

If everyone is only six degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon, according to the rules of the old game, how many degrees of separation do you think you are from a terrorist?  Officials at the NSA have admitted to a Congressional panel that they claim the prerogative to spy on everyone within three degrees of communicative separation from an individual they believe (with 51% certainty) may have a connection to some kind of terrorist activity.  That's a lot of people.  From the Guardian:

The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.

John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.

"Hops" refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.

Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of "three-hop" analysis.

How Easy Is It to Hack a Cell Phone? Pretty Easy

From CNN:

An increasingly popular technology for extending cell-phone coverage ranges had a major security hole that went undetected for years, through which an attacker could eavesdrop on everything a target did on their phone, according to new research released on Monday.

The research brings to light previously unknown vulnerabilities in some models of femtocells, devices that mobile network operators use to bring wireless service to low-coverage zones. The compact boxes, which are typically as small as a standard cable modem, can be deployed in hard-to-reach spots like the top of an apartment building or a home in the mountains. Femtocells are also referred to as "network extenders," and analysts project that as many as 50 million of them will be in use by 2014.