News

Ever since the take down of Napster the copyright industry has taken a much more aggressive stance on piracy. This stance had taken the form of new laws, increased lobbying and a push to make ISPs responsible for policing everyone’s activities on the internet. They have even sought for, and are still trying to get, trade agreements that allow the US to push their laws onto other countries in the form ACTA and the TPP. Now all of these measures have their seedier side to them, but so far none are exactly illegal (immoral and potentially unethical? That is another question)… At least not until you start looking at some of the trials and arrests that have happened in the last few years.

We have more news from the Snowden front as Der Spiegel reports one a joint NSA, GCHQ program dubbed treasure map. Although the program was originally revealed by the NY Times in late 2013 it was originally described as a network mapping program with no surveillance application. This claim is no longer holding up as more and more information come out about the two agencies plans to map the entire internet in real time.

It is not often that we can write about a big company like Microsoft and say they are doing “the right thing”. This is even more true in light of the Snowden revelations that showed the close cooperation that Microsoft (and others) had with many data collection programs run by the NSA. Any trust that people had in Microsoft and their drive to protect their customer’s data vanished in an instant. Since those days Microsoft has been working very hard to rebuild consumer trust. They have put SSL and TLS encryption on their email service and have put a few privacy (pronounce that security if you are in government) features in place to help change the public opinion.

Since the beginning of 2014 the IT world has been rocked by more than a few major breaches. The number of credit cards and user information now up for sale is staggering. So how have these attacks managed to get in and make off with so much data so quickly? Of course there are the usual suspects in these cases, weak passwords and users downloading malware on their systems that allow a potential attacker into their system.