That new real-time ticker in the corner of your Facebook page seems innocent enough — hey, look, your cousin posted a picture of her puppy!
But listen closely and you could hear the sound of a massive privacy invasion. Introduced last week, the ticker announces what your friends — and friends of friends — are doing in real time. Every article they read, every song they listen to, every wall post and picture comment and status update — when they share it, you hear about it.
The ticker gives Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users up-to-the-second access to the personal lives of their contacts. To Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant from the security firm Sophos, that’s an invitation to disaster.
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Who’s reading your email, besides you? If you send it from work, it’s probably your boss or some rogue tech admin. If you send it from home, it may be your spouse, your kids, or your nosy neighbors. (I told you not to write your password on a Post-it note and leave your Wi-Fi router open.) From an Internet café? Probably some slacker with a goatee, unless you remembered to log out first and/or encrypt your connection.
And if you send or receive email from any of those places, your Uncle may also be reading it — you know, the guy with the top hat, the snowy beard, and the fondness for red-white-and-blue ensembles? Him.
That goes double if you work for companies the U.S. government has a keen interest in, such as Wikipedia or the Tor Project. Jacob Applebaum works for both — as a volunteer for the notorious whistle-blowing operation and as a developer for Tor, a technology that anonymizes communications across the Web and is used by WikiLeaks leakers, as well as dissidents in repressive regimes around the globe.
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A wireless network offers lots of advantages over being tethered to your desk. But “no wires” doesn’t mean you can forgo security. These are the six most common Wi-Fi security mistakes people make when setting up a wireless network. Avoid them, and you can rest easier knowing that both your network and your data are safer.
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Browser makers are devising ways to protect people from a security protocol weakness that could let an attacker eavesdrop on or hijack protected Internet sessions. Potential solutions include a Mozilla option to disable Java in Firefox.
The problem–considered theoretical until a demonstration by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong at a security conference in Argentina last week–is a vulnerability in SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.0, encryption protocols used to secure Web sites that are accessed using HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol).
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Civil liberties groups are asking a judge to force the New York Police Department to turn over documents about its efforts to spy on and infiltrate the Muslim community.
The documents filed in federal court in Manhattan are based largely on reporting from The Associated Press that showed police monitoring all aspects of daily life in Muslim neighborhoods. Documents showed that plainclothes officers were being dispatched to eavesdrop inside businesses. Hundreds of mosques were investigated. Dozens were infiltrated. And police maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with “American Black Muslim,” were labeled “ancestries of interest.”
Lawyers said that could violate a longstanding court order prohibiting the NYPD from maintaining information on people not involved with criminal activity. The NYPD didn’t immediately respond to a message for comment.
