With all the banking problems, the growing distrust of big business, downfall of some economies due to their bad banking practices, and now the forced removal of funds in Cyprus means things for banks are not looking to bright. People are looking for other ways of transferring currency with less overhead, more trust, and a way of storing their money without just shoving it under their mattress. Bitcoin says they are the answer (to some […]

CISPA, the Privacy-Invading Cybersecurity Spying Bill, is Back in Congress It’s official: The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was reintroduced in the House of Representatives yesterday. CISPA is the contentious bill civil liberties advocates fought last year, which would provide a poorly-defined “cybersecurity” exception to existing privacy law. CISPA offers broad immunities to companies who choose to share data with government agencies (including the private communications of users) in the name of cybersecurity. It […]

Twitter says it turns over user data to government agencies in the U.S. in 69 percent of the requests made for such information, according to a new transparency report released by the microblogging site. “It’s our continued hope that providing greater insights into this information helps in at least two ways: first, to raise public awareness about these invasive requests; second, to enable policy makers to make more informed decisions,” writes Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s manager of […]

Google has been stealing more and more of your privacy for years,  with some simple work arounds, but those were always guesses. Now advertisers have access to not simply what you have looked at, but actually purchased. Google built its $38 billion business selling ads based on how people search and browse the Web. Facebook, too, uses what it knows about its one billion users to sell targeted ads. But when it comes to what many […]

The Department of Homeland Security says despite some fixes to Java, it continues to recommend users disable the program in their Web browsers, because it remains vulnerable to attacks that could result in identity theft and other cyber crimes. The Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the DHS, first took the unusual step last week of issuing an alert, warning users to disable Java, saying the program could be manipulated by criminals to trick users into visiting […]

If you were worried about an employer seeing those pictures from the big New Year’s party on your Facebook, don’t fret — a new law that’s taking place this year will prevent employers from requesting Facebook passwords. The law took effect at 12:01 a.m. January 1st in both California and Illinois. It states that employers can’t request social networking passwords or non-public account information from current or potential employees. Now if you are like me, you […]

As displayed at the Chaos Communication Conference on December 29th, the most popular Cisco IP phone is vulnerable to an easy hack that allows full control of the phone. This means not only listening to conversations on the phone, but using its mic to listen to what is going on in the room. The hack, demonstrated for NBC News, allows the researchers to turn on a telephone’s microphone and listen in on conversations from anywhere around […]

Honestly, I knew little about Snapchat and only recently had begun to research Poke. The idea of message “self destructing” after 10 seconds or so sounded interesting, and as most of you know privacy is kind of a big issue to me (and beginning to be for many on the internet). The only problem is, they may not be so private. First problem I thought of, and at least they had as well, was screen […]

“Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.” (Cnet) Well, glad I never had an account with them. I had to do some research into this one to make sure it was no Urban Myth, and I unfortunately found out it is true. In a recent blog posting by photo giant Instagram, they basically laid claim to selling full rights […]

The wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that hit U.S. banks in October was next-to-nothing compared to what could happen if cybercriminals actually carry through with their plans for next year. Imagine Office Space but on an international level. A few dollars from a few people in each country all around the world a few times a day, and it adds up real quick. According to a report (PDF) released today by McAfee Labs, an impending […]