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Security & Privacy
The most popular blog posts about security & privacy on Hacker News. 41 posts.
What is Traitorware?
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy...
It's Your Data, It's Your Bot: It's Not A Crime
Can public websites decide who is and is not a criminal through their terms of service? A brief EFF filed yesterday argues no. The amicus brief is a follow-up to one we filed last month in Facebook v. Power Ventures. Facebook claims that Power breaks California criminal law by offering users a tool...
Zero-day Flash exploit on all platforms, fix two weeks out
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Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment
In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its...
Copyright troll lawsuit blows up in face of Righthaven
Righthaven is attempting to make a business out of suing Internet websites for copyright infringement. It has filed 180 copyright actions so far —without ever first asking that a work be removed from the target website—in each case alleging “willful infringement” and attempting to extract...
EFF: Online Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Intermediary
Co-authored by Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn't help if the censorship doesn't come from the government. The controversial whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, which has begun...
New Adobe Flash 0day, have a nice weekend
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Bringing Down a Copycat Site
Dec. 24, 2004: I received an e-mail from a former colleague in the shareware industry saying he had received an e-mail from a company selling our MailList King software and was surprised to hear we had sold it?
An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee
(Update: we've added a few engineers who asked to sign on right as the letter was going out; the final count is 96 signatures) Today, 87 prominent Internet engineers sent a joint letter the US Senate Judiciary Committee, declaring their opposition to the "Combating Online Infringement and...
Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections
Yesterday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to renew three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, after the Senate abandoned the PATRIOT reform effort and approved the extension by a voice vote on Wednesday night. Disappointingly, the government's dangerously...
Microsoft patent trolls Salesforce
Microsoft has filed suit against Salesforce for infringing the following patent: Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display Aut…
Default HTTPS access for Gmail
Posted by Sam Schillace, Gmail Engineering Director In 2008, we rolled out the option to always use https — encrypting your mail as it trav...
Indian Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested
Updates:8/28Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody 8/26Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody 8/24Ed Felten: It’s Time for India to Face its E-Voting Problem 8/22Rop Gonggrijp: Hari is in jail :-( About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about…
Apple's secret "wispr" request
When an Apple iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod) connects to a WiFi network, the first thing it does is make a request to the URL http://www.ap...
EFF on Apple's iPhone Developer Program Agreement
The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer...