Few days back, the internet space was flooded with the Chinese cyber attack on Gmail. Google took a strong decision to stop the censorship of its search engine in China. To top it all, the entire world speculated if Google would withdraw all business from China all together.

The hacking was through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and a sophisticated Trojan virus named Hydraq. It is said that it is a sophisticated virus and requires a high level of technical expertise. A source in Reuters even claims that the hackers could have received help from the Chinese Google office itself. Media has reported that the Googlers in China have been denied access to the internal networks of Google post January 13.

Google is still unavailable for any comments on this. Investigations on this issue are still going on. The strong reaction from Google to stop business in China was only expected if the rumors are to be believed. After all, it would be a huge risk the company would have to take if the Googlers, the Chinese government and the hackers all work together. This high level hacking that came straight from China is indeed an eye opener for Google. Let’s wait and watch.
Via: Mashable

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social networking site Facebook, said in an interview with Mike Arrington from TechCrunch, that today’s privacy is no longer an essential item.

“The question that all make to me [on Facebook] was: why would I want to put any information on the Internet?” said Zuckerberg. The truth is that everything is shared currently all over the Internet, and Facebook’s founder believes he was a prophet to realize quickly the “new social rule” that does not give much value to privacy. “The social norm is something that evolved over time, and we are following this process.”

Zuckerberg claims that the changes in the privacy rules of Facebook – now publicly available information from users unless they specify otherwise – are in line with social changes.

But despite the “new belief” Zuckerberg, the change in the site was heavily criticized by journalists and many of Facebook users. Currently, there are over 500 groups in the social network discussing these changes, recalls site Electric Pig. For Chris Matyszcyk of CNET News, Zuckerberg’s statement is very controversial, since two years ago he told the Read Write Web that the control of users’ privacy was the principle “on which Facebook works”.

Via: Ustream.

Google launched this morning a new page that brings together all the information about the user, data from various Google services and, the most important, about your privacy settings. In the new Google Dashboard, you can control everything related to your account – or even delete it if you wish.

To access the Dashboard, the user must enter their credentials (even if already logged on the machine) and, thereafter, is a summary of use of many of the products / services such as Google Gmail, Picasa, Calendar, Docs, Alerts, Web History, etc.. Gradually, others will be placed on the Dashboard.

Although not specify this, it is clear that the creation of that page is related to concerns of users regarding their privacy and discussions which run through the web about how Google collects and handles data from many users.

It is a real answer for those people who always wondered “What does Google know about me?” because it associates various information from the giant search engine’ services that you use. It will show you, for example, your name, email address, number of contacts and conversations in Gmail, your profile on Google, searches made recently, and other data.

If you see a 404 error message when trying to open your Dashboard, it is because the feature is not enabled on your account.

Via: FT.

Looks like everything that a celebrity does becomes news. This time around it’s Miley Cyrus, the sixteen year old teenager who starred in “The Hannah Montana” is making news for such an insignificant reason of deleting her account from the famous social networking site, “Twitter”. Who is to be blamed now for this? The teenager clearly mentions this in a home rap video, which she uploaded on her Facebook account.

Apparently, anything that she tweeted on her Twitter account became a target for the media to blow it out of proportion and make serious issues. This has affected the teenager very badly and her personal life has always been intruded upon by the cruel media. In the rap video, the teenager says she is tired of living for people (probably referring to the media and her fans as well) and that she will now live for herself.

Most often celebrities become the soft targets for Medias to exploit their privacy. Miley Cyrus is no exception in this regard. Quite interestingly and much to the contrary, Miley Cyrus’ father is believed to have begged her to come back to the social networking site on his personal homepage. There is no news yet as to whether or not Miley will accept her dad’s proposal.

Although Miley would have disappointed millions of her fans by deleting her account from Twitter, she sure would her regained her much deserving personal space in the process. On the contrary, who can trust the notorious media who is perpetually looking for the slightest issues to put any celebrity in the news? So, Miley Cyrus you better watch out the media!

Via: DailyMail

After all the popular social networking sites – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc it’s YouTube’s turn. Over the next few weeks, YouTube is planning to launch the popular suggestion box “You may know these people” on the homepage, which will show you the channels of people who might be your friends or acquaintances. You can easily connect and subscribe to them.

Just in case you are wondering how YouTube decides on the list of people you might know. Here is an explanation to this. With the help of the information that YouTube already has about your friends when you sent videos to their e-mail address from your YouTube’s account, or if your YouTube account is linked to your Gmail account, Google can see which of your contacts have YouTube channels.

In case you find this very intruding and prefer to remain incognito, you can always do so by simply privacy section on your YouTube account, and uncheck the option “Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address”. This is quite cool to me. However, many think it differently as they believe it’s just a copy cat of Facebook.

Via: BlogSpot

Yesterday it was commemorated thoroughly around of the world the 40th Internet’s birthday. In this same site, an article was published in which the reader could see as the internet developed and the current problems that it faces: tyrannical governments, attacks, virus and the greed of the corporations that threaten more and more the individual freedom.

And, exactly one day after the commemoration of the birthday of the internet we all can see an example of the threat that astonishes the internet.

The Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA, organization that represents the music recording industry’s intellectual property rights in the last years is more and more aggressive in the defense of their interests, suing internet users that share music with other people.

Recently, Joel Tenenbaum was condemned to pay USD 675 thousand to RIAA for having shared 30 music, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for that organization. The thirst of blood of RIIA is so big that decided to take an unprecedented initiative to prevent that Tenenbaum cannot make illegal downloads.

In other words, RIIA wants to end with the student’s privacy, limiting his individual freedom guaranteed constitutionally by the American law.

That action of RIIA can bring devastating consequences for the internet users. Let’s suppose that on behalf of the defense of the protection of the intellectual property rights the RIIA gets to convince some judge that preventive measures should be taken, as the monitoring of the content that internet users have access, through the identification of IP address of the computers or even forcing ISP to give personal information on their subscribers.

That would represent the end of the privacy and, still worse, it would open the possibility to internet users be banished from the internet as punishment (that is already almost happening in England).

Is that the future of the internet? The limitation of the individual freedoms and the predominance of the great corporations?

Via: Wired.

4sides4home is a unique interior option for those who value privacy but do not want to build walls. The four wall option has always been crucial to human beings need for privacy. The 4sides4home just solves it by being portable and modular in nature.

It offers the interior decorator the option to create walls where required without having to build new walls. It is great for small apartments and small families. You could decide where you want the room installed and for what purpose the space is going to be sued. It keeps electric networks to the minimum and there is also the advantage of easy Wi-Fi streaming.

It has been created by Studi Stanta and I am sure it would be a great idea especially if you are living in a small flat ad you would like to use it for many purposes. There would no more be problems if some guests should arrive, as you could create a room for them and offer them and yourselves privacy too!

The Facebook has created new privacy controls easier to navigate. The intention is that more users be able to use them.

The new controls allow the user to choose which contact groups or individually which friend can see your updates, as new posts in text, upload new photos or videos on the site, for example.

In particular, the issues will be reviewed on how people share and control their information.
With the growth of social networking and more people are connecting to each other, increase the chances of false photos appear, by mistake, for some friends, for example. The new options were designed to reduce this problem.

According to The New York Times, the new resources are available, as yet, only a limited number of users and in the future will be an option offered to over 200 million members of the network.

The changes are part of efforts to facilitate the Facebook privacy settings, which currently have more than six pages and 40 options. The company claims that less than one quarter of regular users adjust their privacy settings and this justifies the plans to condense the options on one page that is easy to navigate.

Via: NYT.

The new Firefox boasts of enhanced performance, new features and a long list of tools designed specifically for web developers. The browser is incorporated with over 5,000 new features that enhance every aspect of Firefox 3.5. One of the most astounding features of the new version is the support for HTML 5 videos, that enables the users to watch live streaming videos without the need of a third party plug-in such as Flash etc.

Enhanced Privacy.

The new Firefox 3.5 features an all new Privacy Browsing Mode that enables the user to surf the internet without leaving any digital imprints such as history, cache cookies etc. Even though this feature is readily available in other browsers as well, such as, Safari, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8, yet in Firefox 3.5 this feature is much more effective and reliable.

The option of activating or deactivating ‘Private Browsing’ is available in the Tools menu. Once chosen, the browser immediately ends the current session and enters into Private Mode. All the functions and features remain the same, except that, the the browser stops collecting information for the websites that you visit.

Another great privacy feature of Firefox 3.5 is “Forget This Site”. With this feature you can command Firefox not to keep any trace of individual websites that you visit. This come in handy, especially if you do not wish to erase your entire session history, but need to keep certain websites off the record.

An Updated User Interface.

The new version of Firefox 3.5 hasn’t been given a stunning face-lift, but it still has some new additions and a few tweaks here and there, when it come to user interface. The browser is now being shown with an open tab by default and a small button has also been added at the tab bar, that greatly simplifies the task of opening a new tab.

Moving of tabs has also been taken care of in the new version. With its predecessors, whenever you moved a tab, there used to be a forced refresh of the page that at times led to information loss.

Via Ars Technica.

Imagine your privacy is being intruded upon constantly by police without any permission from anywhere. Come Monday and a court ruling in Wisconsin is going to come up with their final decision on whether or not police should be allowed to track your movements with a GPS device without a warrant.

If this unprecedented law comes into practice then, the police can simply put a Garmin on your car and monitor your movements perpetually and that too without any permission from the courts. This doesn’t quite sound a very good idea. Just because you are being suspected of something doesn’t mean you would have to be stalked and spied on that too openly.

The police and the courts had better come up with better ideas to protect the people from criminals. ACLU, the privacy advocates are totally against this idea and they are of the opinion that this is a violation of one’s privacy. This is nothing less than an aristocratic rule. This somehow doesn’t fit the fast moving 21st century world. This would only prove that the police are tardy and inefficient if they have to depend on this warrant-less GPS to spy on somebody.

Via: ChicagoTribune\CrunchGear