A journalist with connections to the hacking collective Anonymous is sentenced to five years in jail after posting online links to stolen data.
Category Archives: Digital Ethics
DEA Settles Fake Facebook Profile Lawsuit Without Admitting Wrongdoing
The Justice Department is agreeing to pay $134,000 to a New York woman to resolve an incident in which the Drug Enforcement Agency created a counterfeit Facebook profile and posted risqué personal pictures the agency obtained from her mobile phone without consent, according to federal court documents [PDF] filed Tuesday.
The woman, who at the time went under the name Sondra Prince, eventually was sentenced to probation and six months of home confinement. The DEA created a phony Facebook profile in her name and maintained it for at least three months in 2010 in a bid to nab other suspects connected to an alleged drug ring. At one point in the litigation, the government said the counterfeit account was for “legitimate law enforcement purposes.”
Richard Hartunian, the US attorney for the northern district of New York, said in a statement that the settlement “demonstrates that the government is mindful of its obligation to ensure the rights of third parties are not infringed upon in the course of its efforts to bring those who commit federal crimes to justice.” He said the deal “also takes into account emerging personal privacy concerns in the age of social media, and represents a fair resolution of plaintiff’s claims.”
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Shifting Politics of Net Neutrality Debate Ahead of F.C.C. Vote
A simple fight over big government versus small has put Republicans in the awkward position of defending cable giants, one of the nation’s most maligned industries.
Cory Doctorow and EFF Aim to “Eradicate DRM in Our Lifetime”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Tuesday that Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow has been commissioned to tackle digital rights management technologies (DRM) that the rights group says threatens security, privacy, and undermines public rights and innovation.
The group said Tuesday that Doctorow, a vocal DRM opponent, is to become a special consultant for what the group is calling the Apollo 1201 Project, “a mission to eradicate DRM in our lifetime.”
Doctorow, the EFF’s former European affairs coordinator and current Boing Boing editor, said in a statement:
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British Spy Agency Captured Journalists’ Messages Amongst 70,000 E-mails
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British sister agency of the National Security Agency, captured e-mails of some journalists out of 70,000 message intercepted in 10 minutes during a November 2008 test.
According to The Guardian, which on Monday cited some of its Snowden documents as its source (but did not publish them), the e-mails were scooped up as part of the intelligence agency’s direct fiber taps.
Journalists from the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC, and The Washington Post were apparently targeted.
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UK Prime Minister Wants Backdoors into Messaging Apps or He’ll Ban Them
David Cameron, the British Prime minister, is one-upping his Western allies when it comes to anti-encryption propaganda. Ahead of national elections in May, Cameron said that if re-elected, he would seek to ban encrypted online messaging apps unless the UK government is given backdoors.
“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Cameron said Monday while campaigning, in reference to apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and other encrypted services. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.'”
He said the Paris attacks, including the one last week on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, underscored the need for greater access.
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Experts Pledge to Control AI Work
Scientists including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk sign a letter pledging to ensure artificial intelligence research benefits mankind.
Alibaba to Join Microsoft’s Fight Against Pirate Software in China
Microsoft and Chinese online commerce giant Alibaba have signed a memorandum of understanding that will see the Chinese firm take measures to help protect Microsoft’s intellectual property in its online stores.
Microsoft has long struggled with software piracy in China, with then-CEO Steve Ballmer saying in 2011 that the company was missing something like 95 percent of potential revenue due to lax protection of intellectual property rights.
With the new agreement in place, Alibaba will remove counterfeit and unlicensed software from its eBay-like Taobao marketplace and its Tmall B2C site. The two companies will also work together to tell consumers that counterfeit software poses risks to their security and privacy, with Alibaba also helping the unwitting buyers of unlicensed software seek compensation from sellers. A Microsoft-sponsored study claimed that some 85 percent of PCs sold with pirated software in China were infected with malware.
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Google Handled 345 Million Copyright Takedowns in 2014
Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that Google removed 75 percent more URLs in 2014 than it did the previous year.
Google doesn’t tally up annual totals, but it does release weekly reports on DMCA notices, and TorrentFreak took it upon itself to add up the weekly reports. Most of the takedown requests are honored. Google has a longstanding tradition of supplying DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects, a website that archives such requests.
Just a few years back, the number of takedown requests could be measured in the dozens, not the millions. In 2008, Google handled 62 DMCA takedown requests, and, in that year, each request was over just one copyrighted work. In later years, DMCA notices came to ask for millions of URLs to be removed to protect multiple works.
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Uber Responds to Senator Franken’s Privacy Concerns
The hail-a-ride start-up responds to concerns that it does not handle its rider data seriously enough.
Lawyers Say Sony Can’t Keep Media From Reporting Hacked Details
NPR’s David Folkenflik talks with Melissa Block about the discussion within media circles about the legality and propriety of publishing information stolen in the hack attack against Sony Pictures.
Sony Pictures Demands That News Agencies Delete ‘Stolen’ Data
A letter sent to news media outlets warned against using the information revealed by hackers who attacked the studio’s computer systems.
Vietnam arrests anti-China blogger for posting ‘bad content’
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Man Jailed For Facebook Revenge Porn
A man is jailed for posting revenge porn to Facebook, making him the first person to be imprisoned under a new Californian law.
Feds Want Apple’s Help to Defeat Encrypted Phones, New Legal Case Shows
OAKLAND, CA—Newly discovered court documents from two federal criminal cases in New York and California that remain otherwise sealed suggest that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing an unusual legal strategy to compel cellphone makers to assist investigations.
In both cases, the seized phones—one of which is an iPhone 5S—are encrypted and cannot be cracked by federal authorities. Prosecutors have now invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ, or order, which compels a person or company to do something.
Some legal experts are concerned that these rarely made public examples of the lengths the government is willing to go in defeating encrypted phones raise new questions as to how far the government can compel a private company to aid a criminal investigation.
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Facebook’s Auto-playing Videos in an ISIS Era
A few months ago, Facebook changed its default settings to enable auto-play of video content on the social network’s news feed, whether users accessed the site on a desktop browser or through its mobile app. Even though the latter has auto-play enabled by default with an “only on Wi-Fi” asterisk, the change has swept through millions of news feeds, perhaps as a way to ease users into Facebook’s video advertising initiative.
Now, users are calling that default video-play toggle into question thanks to a rise in disturbing content distributed via social media. Should an ISIS beheading or similarly disturbing content find its way to someone’s Facebook news feed while that user hasn’t opted out of the site’s video feature—a process possibly more complicated than it needs to be—they’re in for a rude awakening.
It’s tough to catalog exactly how many gore-filled videos have been successfully circulated via Facebook without the site intervening or taking them down. Publicly, Facebook representatives have argued that such content isn’t subject to removal. And as an example of video auto-play gone wrong, Ars readers directed us to a gory video posted to Facebook that had yet to receive any form of takedown in over a week. Its opening moment features the mass execution of children, all shot by a machine gun, and we chose not to watch the entire video (nor link to it) to see how much worse it got.
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The Challenge of Unmasking Net Users
How might the UK identify individual internet users?
New Web Data Powers Plan for Police
A law forcing communications firms to keep details that could help identify criminals using the internet is being planned by the home secretary.
In Wake of Uber Privacy Scandal, Lyft Announces Data Restrictions
Days after a BuzzFeed journalist revealed that an Uber executive floated the idea of using its “God mode” ability to snoop on journalists who write about the ridesharing service, rival firm Lyft has changed its policy to prevent most employees from doing something similar.
Erin Simpson, a Lyft spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement by e-mail that the company’s “longstanding policy prohibits employees or contractors from accessing any user personal information except to the extent such use is necessary to do their job.”
As of Thursday, the company has “proactively made additional updates to further safeguard our community members’ privacy, including the development of tiered access controls that further limit access to user data to a smaller subset of employees and contractors. Ride location data is restricted to an even smaller subset of people.”
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“We Are Going to be Sued.” FCC Chairman Speaks on Net Neutrality
It won’t be a surprise if the Federal Communications Commission gets sued when it issues net neutrality rules. In fact, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler expects it.
Since November 10, when President Obama called on the FCC to reclassify Internet service as a utility and impose strict net neutrality rules, the FCC has been urged to act quickly. But it appears the commission won’t issue final rules before the end of 2014. When reporters today asked Wheeler when he’ll act, he said he’s taking his time because he wants to make sure the commission’s net neutrality rules aren’t overturned in court.
“We are going to be sued,” he said in a Q&A after the FCC’s monthly meeting. “That’s the history. Every time in this whole discussion any time the commission has moved to do something, one of the big dogs has gone to sue… We don’t want to ignore history. We want to come out with good rules that accomplish what we need to accomplish, an open Internet, no blocking, no throttling, no fast lanes, no discrimination, and we want those rules to be in place after a court decision. So we want to be sure we’re thoughtful in the way in which we structure them and we’re thoughtful in the way we present what will ultimately be presented to a court.”
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