e-ignite

I discussed in a recent post about the US and its “Privacy Sledgehammer” where all ISPs have been forced to record web traffic and email data for a long period of time. This was recently appealed by a group of universities and libraries in the US. The US appeals court upheld the law, stating that the requirement was a “reasonable policy choice” – however it should be noted that the decision was not unanimous. One of the appeal judges claimed that the ruling was “convoluted” but did not voice privacy concerns.
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A recent Slashdot article discusses the abysmal US response to privacy concerns – this time over medical records. The US recently covered medical records by Statutory Privacy, allowing citizens to think their private health data was safe. However, since its introduction, the Bush administration have had thousands of complaints made regarding the privacy of these records. This is supposed to be protected by law!

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The US Government seem to be following in the footsteps of the EU and are planning on making ISPs retain all internet and email traffic of its users. The US claims that this data will not be actively monitored (my guess is they’re already actively monitoring you anyway!) but the information can be subpoenaed at a later date if required. This issue has been discussed in detail before with regard to the recently introduced EU law that means European ISPs have to do this. However, there seems to be a bit of a difference to the approach to the issue by the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, there was a virus that, when activated, encrypted all your files and tried to get you to pay money for the unlock code to the files. There’s a full story on the BBC News website, but if you have been affected by this virus, the code you need to recover your files is the following:

mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw