“Thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 MILLION more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before,” a Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak Wednesday.

On hearing the news a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that the measure will do very little to stop people accessing the site and predicted that “the free advertising” would only increase traffic levels.

It’s not possible to buy advertising “articles” from leading UK publications such as the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph, but yesterday The Pirate Bay news was spread across all of them and dozens beside, for free. The news was repeated around the UK, across Europe and around the world reaching millions of people. The results for the site were dramatic.

“We should write a thank you note to the BPI,” he added.

The Pirate Bay, of course, used their sudden extra publicity to write up more information on how to bypass blocks—including different domain names, IP addresses, TOR, and VPN services.

“Another thing that’s good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship,” the insider continued.

First, The Pirate Bay advises that people switch to a cheap, but well respected VPN service such as iPredator or similar service that houses no connection logs (important for privacy.) As you’ll see below, this is advise that a multitude of file sharers and even social media savvy moguls have taken to heart since 2009.

They go on to add that using the privacy-enabling TOR network will also function as a workaround, but only for the initial access to the .torrent file. The TOR network does function nicely for anonymizing connections and protecting privacy but it does not play well with torrents and if people used it for that. If people attempt to use TOR to torrent files it would slow them to terrible levels and affect everyone else using TOR so it’s a poor choice for torrenting itself.

Finally, it’s about time to start jumping out of the DNS provided by ISPs—oftentimes that can be used by the service provider to detect where users are visiting and even block them from sites (if provided for by law or whim)—so The Pirate Bay suggests that people switch to DNS offered by OpenDNS or even Google. As a result, if the ISP is redirecting or not responding to DNS queries to The Pirate Bay via their own DNS, this will circumvent that.

Young Internet Users Avoiding Prying Eyes with VPN Services

In the wake of the High Court’s decision, news media is hooking into surveys of Internet users and their privacy habits. In particular, the BBC reports from a survey via the Cybernormsl group at Sweden’s Lund University that there has been a 40% rise in the number of 15-25-year-olds using VPN services since 2009.

“VPNs could become the next front in the battle against piracy,” predicted independent music analyst Mark Mulligan.

He pointed to the growing popularity of VPNs such as BT Guard – in this case, BT stands for bit torrent not British Telecom.

Increasingly services such as the bluntly named HideMyAss have been taking extra measures to protect their users, he added.

“Some providers have already starting putting anonymity systems in place, such as not tracking IP addresses and deleting logs after seven days.”

Of course, sociologists and privacy experts see recent legislation that cracks open Internet privacy as vehicles towards even further users buying into paid VPN services.

Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law at Lund and study manager, has spoken out that more users will seek refuge in privacy and anonymization services. And pointed out that this will become even more true as further legislation breathes on the neck of Internet users.

“If the [recent] European Court of Justice opinion leads to an intensified hunt for file sharers, there is evidence that the use of these types of services for anonymity will grow even faster,” says Svensson.

While most of the researchers at Lund believes that legislation is a primary factor in pushing users to anonymity services, they are tracking many more factors involved especially revealing monitoring by extra-governmental sources. Legislation appears to be a big motivator because it gets picked up quickly by the media and has a global impact; but in the US the advent of censorship enabling bills (such as the now-dead SOPA) or privacy breaking bills (such as CISPA.)

All of these elements make the public more aware of their vulnerability online when a multitude of eyes could be peering in at them.

Since legislation will continue to make mistakes about censorship, puncture private citizens expectation of privacy, and expand powers to monitor—often for cynical private interests such as the music industy—citizens seeking better protections for their anonymity with endure and blossom.

The Pirate Bay Experiences Traffic Boost After Block; Youth Look into Privacy via VPN is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• The Pirate Bay Delivers Tongue-lashing to Anonymous over Virgin Media DDoS
• UK High Court Rules That ISPs Must Block The Pirate Bay
• The Battle Over The Pirate Bay Censorship Rages On Across Europe
• Comcast Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay, ISP Says “It’s Not Us”
• Holographic Airport Staff Introduced at London Luton Airport
• EU Sues UK for Breaching Internet Privacy Policies

The bill has been forwarded by supporters as a way for companies to take part in national cybersecurity by sharing information about “cyber threats.” It also enables ISPs and companies to secretly and voluntarily hand over confidential and private data to the government, NSA, FBI, and military. All of this would be done when a potential cyber threat is in play and the provider of that data is not required to sanitize any personally identifying material from the dump when they do so.

Critics cite the bill as dangerous because it shields from criminal or civil liability any ISP or company who hands over this information to government agencies under the provisions of the bill. Written into CISPA is also an immunity that quenches privacy laws and contracts in order to expedite the transfer of information on present or ongoing cyberattacks.

Wired reports that the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mike Rogers used patriotic language to urge the floor to a vote and accused detractors of obfuscation,

Moments before the vote was taken during a daylong hearing, Rogers urged his colleagues to “stand up for America. Support this bill.” He said those who were opposing the measure — groups that include the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation — were practicing “obfuscation.”

The bill is supported by many corporations, some of whom who were seen in the battle-lines of SOPA such as Microsoft and Facebook, and others in telecommunication such as AT&T, Verizon, and Oracle.

Mere moments after the bill’s passage, the ACLU and EFF stood up to denounce its current form:

“Cybersecurity does not have to mean abdication of Americans’ online privacy. As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back. We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity,” said Michelle Richardson, ACLU legislative counsel.

These concerns are mirrored by the current admiration as well. While executives in the White House had come out against CISPA last week, only yesterday did an official statement arrive stating in no uncertain terms that the President’s senior advisors would council him to veto the bill should it pass in its current form.

“Legislation should address core critical infrastructure vulnerabilities without sacrificing the fundamental values of privacy and civil liberties for our citizens, especially at a time our Nation is facing challenges to our economic well-being and national security…” an official from the executive office wrote. “[F]or the reasons stated herein, if H.R. 3523 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”

The next step will take CISPA to the U.S. Senate for a vote, but before then people might want to make themselves aware of what it will do to their personal privacy, and potentially the trust that they put in social media, search engines, and any other Internet service.

CISPA Passed by U.S. House of Representatives in Last Minute Vote is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• The ACLU is Filing Suit Over Warrantless Border Laptop Searches
• Understanding CISPA: How the Internet Must Take its Privacy Back
• Apple and Dropbox Join Hands for Electronic Privacy
• “Unethical and Greedy”: Free Software Foundation on Oracle vs. Google
• Cyberthreat Weekly: CISPA Passes House, New Hacker Group, Android Malware on the Rise, and More
• The Pirate Bay Experiences Traffic Boost After Block; Youth Look into Privacy via VPN

“[It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world,” Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, told the Guardian. “Even though the SOPA and PIPA acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the U.S. government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens.”

There’s a number of reasons to be concerned about CISPA as covered on SiliconANGLE last Friday in prelude to this upcoming House vote; but for a brilliant takedown of the problems that it might hand us, see an article published by Steven Hodson on Saturday:

With CISPA everything you do online, from email to blog posts, to Facebook status updates and picture posting, to Twitter status update, can be handed over to the government without your ISP, Facebook, Twitter having to notify you that there was even a request or what was handed over. In effect everything you do on the web can end up in the hands of the government and law enforcement just because they claimed the right to it under CISPA and you will never know it was done.

This one paragraph outlines the core of the problem that individual citizens should have with CISPA and outlines why corporate backlash wouldn’t happen.

Corporations such as Google, Facebook, etc. have no worries about the provisions under CISPA because they’re not forced to hand over any information to the government. This means that they’re relatively unaffected. However, the exemption from civil and criminal liability in the bill means that customers of these services cannot do anything but quit the services in protest after their confidential information has been handed over to the government.

Recent amendments to the bill narrow what government agencies can do with the information provided them by corporations and other departments—but it doesn’t narrow what information they can take. At issue here is that broad swaths of personal, confidential, and otherwise private information can be vacuumed out of social media, e-mail, and other sources under CISPA and handed over and this greatly decreases individual cybersecurity and privacy en masse.

According to Hodson, and I agree, the way we must combat bills like CISPA is going to be via grassroots campaigning not just to the legislators but to the corporations who hold our private and confidential information:

I hold out little hope that CISPA will be stopped as its predecessors were but if it is to be fought against it isn’t going to be because companies changed their minds, since there is no incentive for them to at this point. No, if there is going to be a successful fight against CISPA it once again is going to have to come from the grassroots. It’s going to have to be the loud and vocal opposition from those very people who helped create our online world. It is going to have to be the people on Reddit, and other services like that, who are going to have to once more rally the troops, bring sanity to an insane law.

It is going to have to be you and me doing more than clicking on some Like button on Facebook. Reddit may have helped us win one battle but this is a war of power over the Internet and this means we need to get involved, to be knowledgeable, to become an active participant by any means available to us.

The corporations supporting CISPA and the legislators who vote on would be best swayed by the wisdom of crowds and the strength of Internet lobbying, but it will take real communication.

As we’ve seen CISPA affects individuals much more so than it affects businesses so it will come down to the people who offer their private information to corporations and social media outfits to demand their privacy from them. Just like our government, they need to hear from their customers and clients as to what we think is acceptable—and while it’s in their self interest that they’re not held liable for bowing to warrants and subpoenas (the basic tools of the government to gather private information) it’s inappropriate for them to accept immunity for just handing over information even in violation of their own published privacy policy.

If you’d like to join the fray, take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundatioin’s information about current opposition then bring your voice and join in.

Understanding CISPA: How the Internet Must Take its Privacy Back is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• CISPA Passed by U.S. House of Representatives in Last Minute Vote
• Cybersecurity Bill CISPA With Massive Privacy-Flaws Goes to House Vote Next Friday
• RIM to Co-operate with Metropolitan Police Over BlackBerry Role in London Riots, Looter Networking
• Law Enforcement Seeks Legislation Requiring Providers to Keep Logs for 18 Months
• Department of Justice: Should the Government Compel People to Decrypt their Data?
• Cybersecurity Scholar Warns How Private E-mail in the Cloud Isn’t So Private After All

Placeme is the app that remembers every place you visit without having to check-in.  It was developed by Alohar  Mobile – the company that offers an ambient location platform for mobile app developers that automatically understands a mobile user’s behavior by analyzing the data collected using persistent sensing technology with long battery life.

Placeme works by accessing all your smartphone’s sensors to track your location, activities and environment.  The app also learns stuff about you as it records your activities or the places you go to.  As you continuously use the app, it can make recommendations like alternate driving routes or cheaper price of things.

All you need to do is download the app, it’s free for both Android and iOS, and just let it run on the background.  But of course there are a few requirements for you to be able to use the app.

• It’s compatible for use with an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 4s running the iOS 5 and smartphones with Android OS 2.2 or higher installed;
• It needs GPS and WiFi to work, GPS is for fine location and Wifi is for coarse location;
• It’s cloud-based so it needs an internet connection so it requires a monthly data plan (e.g. Edge, 3G, 4G); works well on ATT, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

Alohar Mobile was co-founded by Sam Liang who was part of the Google Location Server team responsible for the blue dot on the Google Map.

Privacy issues

Since Placeme curates all your activities and places you go to, people are concerned that it might violate their privacy, but Alohar assures users that none of your data will be broadcast, and it is encrypted.

Location-based apps like Placeme can be used by advertising agencies to deliver more targeted ads in the future based on your location or activity.  Though this might sound great as it eliminates ads that don’t really interest you, it might irk some users, knowing that someone monitors where they are or what they’re doing.

This app actually made me think about Google’s patent application for environment-based ads.  I’m just wondering, why are companies pushing for things that acquire people’s location?

It’s all about the contextualization of personal data, and it’s an unavoidable aspect of the future.  Data is being collected directly and indirectly, with manual user input as well as inferred activity based on things like your location and past purchases.   What this discussion boils down to is how our personal data is being used for business purposes, as well as the ways it’s being used for individual use cases.  Placeme seems to be straddling the consumer and business side of things, looking to provide data integration with other apps, and in turn delivering that data back to the user for practical use.

But the privacy discussion won’t go anywhere, and it shouldn’t.  As apps such as Placeme pop up on the scene, it’s important that they keep user privacy in mind, and set up the proper controls to maintain user privacy at all times.  Finding a way to comfortably deliver data back to the user is what will help in the long run, prompting user adoption instead of curbing it.

Placeme: Ingenious App that Makes You Think Twice About Privacy is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• The Pirate Bay Experiences Traffic Boost After Block; Youth Look into Privacy via VPN
• CISPA Passed by U.S. House of Representatives in Last Minute Vote
• Understanding CISPA: How the Internet Must Take its Privacy Back
• Facebook Arms Itself With IBM Patents, but Are Facebookers Safe?
• Connected Homes, Piracy Are Bread Crumbs for Organized Spies
• Facebook’s Updated SRR Favors Ads

The terms of the patent acquisition were undisclosed.  Representatives from both Facebook and IBM have yet to comment on the matter.

“This is a very big deal,” said  Erin- Michael Gill, chief intellectual property officer at MDB, an investment bank focused on intellectual property. While it’s not clear how strong the patents are, “Facebook is now where it’s supposed to be.”

Facebook currently has  56 issued patents and 503 applications as of December 31, 2011.  Bulking up on their patents will not only help them fend off the Yahoo! lawsuit, but also dodge future patent trolls.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! filed a case against Facebook alleging the social networking giant of infringing on 10-20 of their patents in advertising, the personalization of web sites, social networking and messaging.

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a long-time business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation,” Facebook said in a statement.

Facebook’s Updated RSS Omits “Privacy”

Aside from their Yahoo! dilemma, Facebook is facing scrutiny with their updated Statement of Rights and Responsibilities – an important document that describes their relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook.  The biggest deal regarding the update is the omission of  the word “privacy” in their policy.  People are now getting concerned that Facebook is out to expose and exploit their users.

Facebook claimed that the changes are administrative and users had until March 22nd to send feedback regarding the changes that will take place.  Many users were quick to antagonize Facebook’s proposed changes, most commented with just one line: “I reject the changes.”  You’d think Facebook would listen to users since they gave an open-invitation for subscribers to send their feedback, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  They just wanted to know what people thought about the change, but they still pushed forward with their plan yesterday.

Facebook Arms Itself With IBM Patents, but Are Facebookers Safe? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• How To: Go Green with Clean Tech for Earth Day
• Facebook Slaps Yahoo With Countersuit, Patent Wars Continue
• Facebook’s Updated SRR Favors Ads
• Yahoo Pokes Facebook With Awkwardly-Timed Infringement Suit
• Patent Wars: Yahoo Vying for Pre-IPO Facebook Shares?
• Yahoo Contemplates Hadoop Spinoff

CIA sees all

With the dawn of smart homes, you’d think that your life would be a lot easier.  Like your refrigerator telling you you’re running out of ice cream and ordering another pint of Chunky Monkey for you, or your washing machine telling you which laundry detergent to use for a particular garment’s type of fabric.    But what if all this extra data running through your home’s devices, your privacy ends up compromised?

While talking at a summit earlier this month for In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm, CIA Director David Petraeus expressed his excitement over having all your household devices being used for spying.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

These connected devices can be used for spying just by gathering geolocation data.  Though the CIA has restrictions when it comes to spying, gathering geolocation data is a different matter, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But that’s not the only thing intriguing Petraeus about the internet of things; he also wants to use this technology in creating new online identities for his undercover spies and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.

But creating new identities for his agents is quite difficult, since proud parents are quick to announce that their sons will be CIA agents on social media platforms.  But social media isn’t such a downfall for the CIA, and it turns out Facebook’s new Timeline can help.  Petraeus is especially happy with Facebook’s Timeline since it tells almost the complete story of your life, including your activity in the various locations you’ve been to.  It helps to easily create a new identity by backdating or filling in new items for every year.

Organized spying? 

In July of last year, the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America and other copyright holders, have signed an agreement with AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon to curb piracy.  The agreement stated that the ISPs agree to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement.  Repeat offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

Most people laugh at the notion, but seriously, were they just giving out an empty threat to ward off pirates?  Apparently not.

According to RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, the ISPs are still on board with the program and it will be implemented by July 1, 2012.

“Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system,” Sherman said. They need this “for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion.”

So how does this work?  The “graduated response” program requires ISPs to send out one or two educational notices that informs their customers that they are being accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally.  If the customer ignores their warnings, the ISP sends out “confirmation notices” asking their customer to confirm if they have received previous notices, while also informing the customer of the risks they incur if they don’t stop pirating material.  If the customer doesn’t stop pirating materials on the web, the ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls “mitigation measures,” which include throttling down the customer’s connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating, pressuring the customer to comply.  If their customer complies, then the mitigating measures can be waived by the ISPs.

Previous anti-piracy measures were of course trashed, and it will be interesting how pirates, hackers and hacktivists will react to the RIAA and ISPs looking at their customers’ web activities.

Connected Homes, Piracy Are Bread Crumbs for Organized Spies is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• The Pirate Scene Nimbly Adopts New x264 Video Codec
• MPAA Bulldog, BREIN, Brags About Shuttering "a Dozen" US Torrent Sites
• SOPA and PROTECTIP Grumble in the Grave: Let’s Salt and Burn the Bones
• US Military Members Had More than 15,600 Accounts on MegaUpload
• The Ukraine’s Largest File-Sharing Site Ex.ua Goes Dark After Raid
• Digital Sales Continue to Bloom but Big Music is Stuck in the Past

Some of the changes are:

• Sharing Your Content and Information. We’ve updated this language to be clearer and consistent with what has long been reflected in our Data Use Policy and our practices – that when you, or friends you have authorized to see your information, use an App, you are sharing your info with that App, which is what you consented to when you installed the App.

• Safety. In this section, we have changed the language from “hateful” content to “hate speech” because we think the term “hate speech” better captures our policy on prohibited content, which hasn’t changed. This is also consistent with our new “Community Standards”.

• Special Provisions Applicable to Social Plugins. This section previously applied to Share Links, but those provisions also apply to the use of all Social Plugins. Therefore we have replaced references to Share Links with Social Plugins.

• Special Provisions Applicable to Software. We want to ensure our products, which may include downloadable products, are current. We have added this section to give you notice that we may provide upgrades and updates to your downloaded products as they become available. Additionally, we have included language that prohibits users from trying to extract protected source code from our products unless we have granted the user express permission.

“We think these updates will help you understand more about how Facebook works,” said the Facebook statement. “As part of our site governance process, you have a chance to review these proposed updates and give us feedback by commenting on them before we finalize the changes. Please review the proposed materials by using the links below.”

“Additionally, to view a document that highlights the changes, please view the “tracked changes” English version below. You also can read the current Statement of Rights and Responsibilities here. Please leave any comments you may have by 5:00 PM PDT on March 22, 2012.”

Change For Ads

Although Facebook stated that the changes happening are more administrative, you can’t help but think that these changes would favor the advertisers more than the users.  Just look at the change from “Privacy Policy” to “Data Use Policy”  it makes them look like a carrier network tracking how much data you consume.  And why would Facebook track your data consumption when it’s a free service?

A report from First Post suggests that “ the word play is interesting and it’s quite clear that the site has realised that users are sharing a lot of data such as links, videos and photos via the social networking site, which could be a big boon for advertisers who seek to understand how users interact on the web vis-a-vis the social networking site.”

It’s another point of integration for Facebook to take in consumer data, and until all the reasons are clear behind their intentions, concerns will continue to be raised over changes made to this popular network.

Change For A Cause

The change may also be good for certain user, as Facebook is doing something about cyber bullying.  Facebook is avidly against posting hate speeches on their platform, or putting up pornographic content, as well as spreading malware and using their service for denial of service attacks. They have a huge disclaimer for this, which reads,

“WE TRY TO KEEP FACEBOOK UP, BUG-FREE, AND SAFE, BUT YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. WE ARE PROVIDING FACEBOOK AS IS WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS BE AVAILABLE, ACCESSIBLE, UNINTERRUPTED, SAFE, OR SECURE OR ERROR-FREE OR THAT FACEBOOK WILL ALWAYS FUNCTION WITHOUT DISRUPTIONS, DELAYS OR IMPERFECTIONS. FACEBOOK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS, CONTENT, INFORMATION, OR DATA OF THIRD PARTIES, AND YOU RELEASE US, OUR DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS FROM ANY CLAIMS AND DAMAGES, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH ANY CLAIM YOU HAVE AGAINST ANY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.”

Way Confusing?

Despite all the updates and changes Facebook’s making to its terms, it still leaves some scratching their heads.  What confuses me about Facebook is that they say that you own the rights to your account, but then they have the right to terminate your account without your knowledge should any of their rules be violated. While Facebook maintains control over their platform, the processes behind limiting or blocking a user should be transparent as well.

Another point of contention is Facebook’s ability to keep your posted content, even after you delete your account, which also seems to go against the idea of user rights.  So even if you want to delete those embarrassing photos, Facebook has the right to keep them, according to their terms and conditions, and they will still be available in their database.

Privacy Issue

And the most talked about issue on Facebook’s platform is still privacy.  The topic only gets more interesting when you bring in app permissions, and their interaction with Facebook to spur their own on-site activity.  With changes made to Facebook user profiles, especially the new Timeline feature, the world must once again re-think the nature of the apps we use in a public forum, and how they benefit us in the long run.

Facebook’s Updated SRR Favors Ads is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Facebook Arms Itself With IBM Patents, but Are Facebookers Safe?
• Microsoft Wipes Privacy Sidestepping on Google, Why Not Facebook Too?
• Facebook Likes Jacked, Twitter Censored, Google+ Takes on Teen Rage
• Facebook Affiliate Marketing Scams Top the 2011 Malware Chart
• Privacy Wins with Fresh Facebook-FTC Agreement
• Facebook Gore-Porn Account Hijacking Epidemic Reaches a Fever Pitch

Those who attended the gathering provided their own unique insight and take on big data, even exploring the areas farthest away from Cloudera and its competitors. One example that stood out was that presented by Virginia Carlson of the Metro Chicago Information Center, who laid out the current state of the public sector in this regard. She highlighted that initiatives to make decision-related data more accessible are actually bad for historical information, which is the type that’s being used the most by organizations working for the common good.

As always, there were also plenty of updates coming from outside Strata as well. Not one, but two partnerships were announced between companies seeking to make analytics more visual and simpler for the data scientist. Pentaho and DataStax revealed their collaboration shortly before Tableau and Attivio debuted a project of their own integration of their offerings. Making things easier and closer to the business user has turned into a trend among business intelligence vendors, quite a few of which implemented this concept throughout the past few months.

Another trend that is emerging, and has been mentioned in Wikibon’s 2012 predictions for the big data market, is privacy – privacy advocates starting to take aim specifically at analytics. Target has been one such case and Google is another, after having stirred some concern over its latest policy change. The update essentially consolidates the data the company already possessed, but regulators are taking a lab at it nonetheless.

This Week in Big Data: Strata Conference is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Big Data Visualization: Very Cool But Still Very Complex
• Public Data Still an Untapped Resource: VIDEO
• Strata Conference Day 1: Data Mining and Predictive Models
• A Map for the Strata Conference: Who Goes to a Data Conference About Data?
• What to Expect from Strata’s Big Data Event: Data for Today
• This Week in Big Data: from Strata Summit to Twitter Storm

That’s what a representative of LulzSec told CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince when he asked permission to tell the tale of rough water and a siege on the cyberseas that resulted from his company protecting the website of the now-infamous hacker group.

In June 2010, during the heyday of these Internet hackers and malicious pranksters, LulzSec used CloudFlare’s free Internet service to protect their leaks website from prying eyes and attempted DDoS attacks. Prince’s company provides a free, cloud-based solution that enhances the stability of websites by caching the pages across multiple servers spread out over the Internet that accelerates the load times, reduces latency, makes them more difficult to wash away with DDoS attacks, and even obfuscates the original server (enhancing site privacy)—all using cloud-based technology and DNS records.

When LulzSec took advantage of this service, CloudFlare came under intense scrutiny from the public for “protecting a notorious hacker group” and also massive cyberattack from other hackers who disliked what LulzSec were up to. Prince and CloudFlare stood up to all the criticism and refused to disconnect LulzSec as they had not broken the company’s terms of service and, as Prince noted, CloudFlare is not in the censorship business.

Prince is cited in an article on CSOOnline.com for a talk he gave at the RSA Conference, Tuesday, February 28^th 2012, where he spoke about the experience of protecting LulzSec with their service,

“Every type of hacker was trying to find out where LulzSec was posted and how they can knock them offline,” Prince explained in a RSA Conference talk on Tuesday in which he detailed the story.

During the time CloudFlare provided services to LulzSec, they saw a myriad of attacks from all over the globe that ranged from Layer Seven attacks that Prince described as “harmless,” to one he termed as “clever” — an IP scan and attack on CloudFlare’s router interfaces. None were successful in taking down LulzSec.

The peak day, according to Prince, was on June 16th when they saw 21 gigabytes of attack traffic. It was shortly after LulzSec had taken down several popular gaming sites, including Minecraft.

“You can’t pay for pen testing like this. Once we realized we were going to survive, it was actually kind of a fun experience for us,” said Prince.

In every statement about allowing LulzSec to use their free service, CloudFlare has been pointed about mentioning that while they had received queries from law enforcement—they had never been asked by any authority to terminate service. Of course, the company had very little information to provide about their free client because all that’s needed to sign up is an e-mail address, a username, and a password.

Prince describes the experience as causing several existential crises for his colleagues, after all, who wants to be described as the person who provided anonymity to a group of hackers? Still, in the end, they decided that it was not their job to act as censors when housing information on hacking subjects itself is not illegal.

He went on that CloudFlare does act in cases of people distributing malware, conduct phishing, or hosting child pornography—all of which are horribly illegal and immoral. However, beyond that, his company takes little heed to the content of the sites that they protect.

In recent history, CloudFlare also joined in with the protest against the censorship bills SOPA and PIPA by providing their clients the ability to “self-censor” their websites with an app that provided information about the bills.

CloudFlare Speaks Out About Their Experience Hosting LulzSec is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• The Anonymous Impact: Hacktivism in 2011 Exceeded Criminal Breaches
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The initiative forms part of the campaign “We cannot wait,” launched by President Obama to demonstrate the government’s willingness to act in favor of the people.

According to officials from the White House, the new rules should ensure the privacy of users on the Internet. They are based on the following principles:

• Individual control: You have the rights to control the data collected about you and company should informed you as how they have used your data.
• Transparency: The companies are going to be more clear and understandable on their privacy and security policies, which can be understandable by average person.
• Preserve the context: You have the right to know what companies will collect, and the companies will use and disclose information in a manner that is consistent with the context in which data has been delivered to them.
• Security: The user has the right to expect that data will be stored in a safe and responsible manner.
• Access and accuracy: You have the rights to access and correct their data.
• Precision: You have the rights to limit the amount of information that companies would collect from you to store on their database.
• Responsibility: You have the rights to expect that the data will be collected only by companies that have a mechanism to ensure that the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights will be respected.

Transparency and the environment

Attention is also paid to transparency and the environment. Consumers have right to know which of their data are collected, why and how they are used, when they will be canceled and for what reasons they are shared with other companies, as well as the right to expect that those groups will use and share their data in a consistent manner with the context in which data are collected.

“The president’s privacy framework assures that as new Internet services develop privacy rules will keep up with, and not hamper, the pace of innovation,” the statement said. “This framework takes advantage of the flexibility of self-regulatory processes but assures that new codes of conduct are guided by a comprehensive, forward-looking set of privacy principles and that all interested parties such as consumer advocates have a voice in the process.”

An industry effort to placate consumers

This effort is also part of the agreement with the major web companies – including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL, which represent almost 90% of the behavioral advertising market – to allow users to have more control over the monitoring of their activities online. This does not mean that the web company will not pursue any type of monitoring, but will undertake efforts not to use the data on surfing habits of users to package and customized ads for insurance or health.

But the data will continue to be used for purposes such as market research and product development.  The information will also be accessible to law enforcement and the “do-not-track” also does not block the functions of some sites – such as ‘I like’ on Facebook.

The initiative is the result of an official study of several years on how to regulate the privacy of online companies for commercial purposes that use online services.

The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights is one of the 4 elements of the report “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy,” published this week by the White House.

Privacy concerns by internet companies

The announcement comes after several giants like Facebook and Google recognized publicly in recent weeks that some of their business practices have not been respectful of the privacy of its customers.

Internet companies have faced months of opposition by the general establishment that would prevent the user’s personal information to be shared with other sites and customer lists.

Just this week Microsoft complained that Google is circumventing the privacy settings of its Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft claims new findings on how Google bypasses IE protections to place cookies that track users’ activities across the web.

Perhaps prompting Microsoft’s complaints, an earlier report published in the Wall Street Journal claimed that Google and other advertising companies have found a way to bypass the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari, the top mobile browser used these days. The report explains how Google and the other companies used a special computer code that tricks the Apple browser into letting them monitor the browsing activity of iOS users.

Privacy agreement from large companies

As reported today by The Wall Street Journal, a coalition of large companies, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, HP and RIM, came forward to the future regulation in this area and agrees to incorporate a “button” on almost all browsers, giving the user the ability to prevent tracking of your data.

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris reached an agreement with these companies in the mobile-device market that could put a privacy rule on how companies use personal data.

“We have populations without knowledge of mobile technology’s potential uses who are potentially vulnerable,” Harris said. “We seek to give them tools to protect themselves.”

Once a company agrees to abide by a code of conduct on privacy, compliance with this commitment will monitor the Federal Trade Commission.

Coinciding with the official announcement of the proposals to be made today, called Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), a coalition of media and marketing associations will undertake to meet user requests for not “keep track” of user data in web browsers.

Nearly 90 percent of U.S. companies that use targeted advertising are affiliated with the DAA.

What Obama’s “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” Means for Google, Facebook and Mobile Users is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• The Pirate Bay Experiences Traffic Boost After Block; Youth Look into Privacy via VPN
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• Understanding CISPA: How the Internet Must Take its Privacy Back
• Placeme: Ingenious App that Makes You Think Twice About Privacy
• Facebook Arms Itself With IBM Patents, but Are Facebookers Safe?
• Connected Homes, Piracy Are Bread Crumbs for Organized Spies