From the article:

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a “walk in the park,” according to an interview published in the New Yorker’s print edition today.

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.

“Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search,” author Lawrence Wright pens.

“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,” Wright adds. “Giorgio warned me, ‘We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”

A zero-sum game is one in which gains by one side come at the expense of the other. In other words — McConnell’s aide believes greater security can only come at privacy’s expense. (more…)

The report can be found here on the Privacy International website and I’d recommend you take a look and see how your own country got on.

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It’s official: You have no right to the expectation of privacy when your computer is in for repair.

A recent Slashdot article told the story of a man from Pennsylvania who had his computer in for repair (a repair to the DVD burner of his PC). When the computer was in for the repair, technicians found illegal pornography on his hard disk, and he was reported to and arrested by the police. When it went to court, he successfully argued that the technicians had no right to be accessing data on his hard drive, but this decision was later overturned by a prosecution appeal.

In no conceivable way do I support his actions relating to the illegal material found on his computer, and I believe that people who make and access this material deserve to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The fact the the material in question was found on the computer, however, highlighted the issue: do you or can you trust computer technicians with your data when your computer is in for repair?

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The full story can be read at Wired.com, but I’ve summarised the main points in the quotes below:

“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”

“The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional reach when it demanded e-mail records from his internet service providers. Under the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), the government has regularly obtained e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know (ergo, no opportunity to contest).”

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A bit of history: the Hymn Project is one of the oldest methods for users to remove the copy protection from songs legally purchased through iTunes (prior to version 7). This has been heralded as a “consumer champion” since it allows users to play their purchased songs on whatever equipment they like. Legalities aside, it is widely used and liked by many users. One of the key points in the Hymn Project, however, is that it removes the copy protection, but retains all the purchaser’s details on the track tags. The removal of the purchaser’s details was possible according to the Hymn site, but they saw no justification to do so.  The makers of Hymn rightly state that they do not condone piracy, they are simply exercising their rights to use their legally purchased content how they see fit without being guilty of piracy.

Now, with iTunes Plus offering DRM free downloads, several sites feature complaints that this “hidden user information” is a major breach of privacy. I don’t think so.

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I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new Ignite Web Hosting Services website. We are now offering great value web hosting packages starting at just £1.50 per month (but you can save money by paying yearly - just £12.00 for our lowest-priced package!) that have cPanel, MySQL databases, PHP, PERL, PYTHON and very generous disk space and bandwidth allowances. However, the term “great value” doesn’t just mean “cheap”. Is a cheap hosting package that doesn’t work good value? I don’t think so.

IWHS is able to offer very low-cost hosting packages that are reliable (uptime of 99.9%), are fully-featured and have great levels of customer support. That’s “great value”. With several satisfied customers alread, we are confident that you’ll be more than happy with any of our packages. We are even able to offer custom-built packages especially for you if you find our standard offerings don’t quite fit your requirements. We can also offer benefits to existing members who introduce new customers.

So why not pay Ignite Web Hosting Services a visit today and see how we could improve your web experience.

Google have now announced that they will only retain this data for between 18 and 24 months before discarding it and making the historical data anonymous.  According to a Google spokesperson:

“By anonymising our server logs after 18 to 24 months, we think we’re striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google’s services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices”

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You can read the full article on Slashdot and make up your own mind. However, the gaining momentum of the anti-privacy movement is becoming alarming.

Well, you guys all know me by now - I’m always looking for a new project or new ways to make a little money. I decided to invest some time in creating a free web directory for everyone to submit their sites to. In turn, I’ll be updating a load of sitemaps to Google to help get pageranks of all the users up. Most of the directories I’ve found all want reciprocal links this, or pay me extra for that… I longed for the day I could go to a site, add my link and a bit of blurb about the site, then be on my merry way (hoping that my pagerank would increase).

Well, I launched it today and have been advertising hard through various forums, other directories and sites so hopefully, this will have a positive impact on the pagerank (currently zero) quite quickly. Within the space of about an hour and a half, I was inundated with about 80 site submissions! What do I get out of this? Well, partly I wanted to do something for the Frihost users (help them improve their site rankings), but I also wanted to do a little something for me: distract me from all the work I should be doing!!! Don’t fret though - I added a few advertising boxes to hopefully gain a little extra pocket money… although it is looking very much like a “little”

So get yourselves to the directory and start submitting some links:

http://ignite.frih.net/