GoDaddy Bleeding Domains Thanks To SOPA Support
From Drew Olanoff at TheNextWeb regarding the GoDaddy SOPA support fiasco:It’s going to get worse before it gets better for domain registration company Go Daddy. Yesterday, we reported that Go Daddy had reversed its decision to support SOPA. Its customer service reps are even taking to the phones to beg you to keep your domains with the company.
It looks like these PR moves to save face, and business, are completely futile. According to TheDomains, 21,054 domains were transferred away from Go Daddy on Friday alone. At $6.99 a pop, that would make for a loss of $147,167, not taking future renewals into account. The day before wasn’t a good one for the company either, with 15,000 people taking their domains elsewhere. That means that even though Go Daddy changed its stance, people have had enough.
I have never liked GoDaddy. They always seemed pretty shitty, like they were trying to scam their customers and take advantage of people. Even if they never did any of that, the perception I get from their site, their advertising and their corporate image is that they are in the game for abuse. It is nice to see karma working the right kind of wonders for a change. (via TBR)
American Censorship Day: November 16
On 11/16, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. This bill can pass. If it does the Internet and free speech will never be the same. Join all of us on the 16th to join together to stop this bill.
Everyone who runs a web site owes it to themselves to participate.
HOWTO Setup Secure and Private Facebook Browsing
A nice HOWTO guide for properly securing a Facebook account for those who do not understand the myriad of complex options. This guide shows how to enable improved privacy settings, disable Facebook information sharing with third-party web sites, as well as configuring a browser for private surfing. If you have ever been confused by the settings, this is the guide your mother told you to read week ago.
US Department of Homeland Security developing system to predict criminal intent
From Donald Melanson of Engadget:
According to a new report from CNET based on documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the US Department of Homeland security is now working on a system dubbed FAST (or Future Attribute Screening Technology) that’s designed to identify individuals who are most likely to commit a crime. That’s not done with something as simple as facial recognition and background checks, however, but rather algorithms and an array of sensors and cameras that can detect both physiological and behavioral cues that are said to be “indicative of mal-intent.” What’s more, while the DHS says that it has no plans to actually deploy the system in public just yet, it has apparently already conducted a limited trial using DHS employees — though no word on the results of how well it actually works, of course.
Minority Report is currently in the alpha stages of development. Beware of the thought police otherwise you may find yourself behind bars or worse.
They appear to be devices that mimic mobile phone towers. The feds use them hoping to have the phones of people they’re tracking connect to the device (instead of a real mobile phone tower), and then using signal strength to figure out how far away they are. Do that a few times and you can triangulate someone’s location, even if they’re not making a call, and without having to ask the telcos for any location info (which, so far, they’ve been more than happy to turn over anyway).
Details Emerging On Stingray Technology, Allowing Feds To Locate People By Pretending To Be Cell Towers from Techdirt.
Although you own a cell phone, apparently the feds believe you have no expectation that your cell phone will only connect to the cell towers used by your mobile service provider. Forget surreptitiously planting a GPS tracker on your car, the government can track you via your cell phone, without a warrant, without probable cause and without having to ask a mobile service provider for any data. This is all performed in real-time.
This stingray technology sounds somewhat similar to a man-in-the-middle attack but instead of malicious attackers accessing your mobile device its the government. As our liberties and privacy continue to erode thanks to the police state our government seems to be migrating towards, is it any surprise the feds are using these types of tactics?
Welcome to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It’s not that we fear saying things that we don’t want anyone to know, it’s that we fear saying something without knowing who will hear it. We want to be able to say something online without fearing that a future employer may see it and count it against us. We want to complain about the country we live in without fear of reprisal. We want to share pictures of our kids without wondering who else will see them. We want to share with only the people we choose to share with.
Nick Bradbury on why privacy is important.
This is exactly why people are wary of Facebook placing more emphasis on less privacy. This is why people are increasingly more worried about Google.
Today we’re announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that “who can see this?” could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward. The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends’) in any context. Here’s what’s coming up, organized around two areas: what shows up on your profile, and what happens when you share something new.
Facebook just announced an assload of new, necessary privacy controls to make users’ lives easier and less complex. These changes are very smart and should help people better understand how to keep their data private.
As with anything Facebook does, you can rest assured the vocal minority will be screaming with their spittle-filled mouths, complaining about how this change turned the sky red, grass blue and will make apples purple, among other things.
When you want to take something out of the Facebook borg — well, that isn’t going to happen. And when you do get access to the data, it is in a limited fashion for a select few companies. I have been around long enough to know that companies have a way of putting on a happy face. Just as I don’t buy into the “do no evil” nonsense from Google, I have been skeptical of Facebook and its friendliness.
Facebook & its double standard on sharing.
This is one of the reasons I am rooting for Google+ to succeed. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Facebook scares me a whole lot more than any other social networking or internet-based company right now.
Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):
New research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that an overwhelming majority of web browsers have unique signatures — creating identifiable “fingerprints” that could be used to track you as you surf the Internet.
The findings were the result of an experiment EFF conducted with volunteers who visited http://panopticlick.eff.org/. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of configurations collected from almost a million other visitors. EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser “fingerprints.” Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.
So much for all the hoopla and fuss about cookies tracking your every online movement. ☁
