Privacy

Start-up NebuAd had hoped to build a business on monitoring broadband customers' Web browsing and delivering relevant ads. Then its partners began dropping out, its chief executive resigned, and earlier this month the company suspended its business plan.

Never let it be said that politicians are quick on the uptake. The Senate Commerce Committee nevertheless is holding a hearing on Thursday morning to investigate the NebuAd-ish privacy practices of broadband providers. (Who, remember, aren't using NebuAd.)

One noteworthy development is that Verizon -- which, we should point out, has never been a NebuAd partner -- is going to suggest … Read more

Updated:This post originally contained incorrect information about Sentinel's products. That has been corrected (see below).

Attorneys general from a number of states have given their support to a collection of weak and ineffective age verification technologies, all of which aim to protect children on the Internet. At a meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard University on Tuesday, the consensus seemed to be that while none of the technologies actually work, doing anything at all was better than nothing. Simply put, no one wants to be blamed for inaction against online child predators.

Kicking off … Read more

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Bush administration on behalf of AT&T customers to halt what it called the "massively illegal" warrantless surveillance of Americans' Internet and telephone communications.

In addition to suing the National Security Agency, the nonprofit Internet advocacy group also names President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as well as others.

"For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and … Read more

Google announced on Monday that the company will be reducing the amount of time that it will keep sensitive, identifying log data on its search engine customers. To the naive reader, the announcement seems like a clear win for privacy. However, with a bit of careful analysis, it's possible to see that this is little more than snake oil, designed to look good for the newspapers, without delivering real benefits to end users.

In a post to the company blog on Monday, the company announced that it will be significantly reducing the amount of time that it hangs onto … Read more

If you thought that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping was limited to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, think again.

While these household names of the telecom industry almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty-work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of.

A recent … Read more

Silicon Valley start-up NebuAd has suspended plans to deploy a controversial program that displays ads based on the monitoring of Web activity while Congress reviews privacy concerns, according to a report in The Washington Post.

The secretive company, which intercepts and performs deep-packet inspection of what's flowing through a company's network in hopes of delivering relevant ads, announced earlier this week that co-founder and CEO Bob Dykes was resigning. His departure comes as several Internet companies canceled or suspended trials of the tracking technique.

"Our platform was architected to be a multi-channel ad system," spokeswoman Janet … Read more

q&a James Powderly didn't trek from New York City to Beijing during the 2008 Olympics to watch table tennis. The artist was plotting to laser-beam a billboard-size, pro-Tibet message at the Bird's Nest Stadium. Instead, he spent six days locked up and interrogated by Chinese police under conditions he likens to torture. He was joined by other American would-be protestors sentenced to prison without being charged of a crime, then released early following U.S. pressure.

The Graffiti Research Lab co-founder and former engineer has helped pioneer open source, digital graffiti techniques, like L.A.S.E.R. tag projections of words and icons onto public walls, as well as LED bulb "throwies" that stick to surfaces to spell out messages in light.

Originally Powderly was invited to participate in a show at the National Art Museum of China, until he says organizers, fearing political controversy, kicked him out. Instead, he collaborated with Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).

Powderly says his high-tech gear--including a cell phone, green laser, laser printer, laptop, camera, tripods--may have tipped off Chinese authorities. And he suspects that if Twitter stops working in China, you might blame him and his collaborators.

Q: The last time we were in touch, you'd mentioned the upcoming Green (Chinese) Lantern project, which you didn't detail for obvious reasons. What happened? How did Chinese authorities find out what you were planning to do? Powderly: When I entered the country on the 15th of August I had a cell phone that might have already been compromised. It had already been used by protesters in the country...We don't know. They weren't telling.

It's safe to say I'm much more like Dr. Strangelove than like James Bond. I stick out like a sore thumb in Beijing. I'm about a foot taller than everybody. I'm wearing a fedora, camos, and sleeveless vest...

These people were still kind of bumbling but resourced and numerically outnumbered adversaries, in terms of the Chinese secret police. There are just so many of them and they're working with so much citizen support, meaning there are 300,000 people in the city just looking constantly and reporting, from taxi drivers to people on the street, undercover cops, policemen in uniforms, soldiers.

Whatever clued them into us, by the afternoon of the 18th I was being tailed by a woman. I spotted her, but I'm in a city of 20 million people. No way they're on me, I hadn't done anything. I was literally at the Wal-Mart superstore buying supplies..I doubted what I was seeing...

What happened next? When did you know for sure? How were you arrested? Powderly: I spent the day of the 17th scouting locations, buying a new laser printer. I went to kind of a safe house to build this laser stencil thing...They'd snuck a new laser in to me and I'd snuck in LED throwies for the LED banner for another group of activists...

I went to Tiananmen Square to scout that location because we'd planned to do two projection events. If we got away with the first one at the Olympic stadium, then we were gonna do the second one in Tiananmen Square...We were gonna project "Free Tibet" or "Tibet will be free" or "6/4/1989."

What worked and what didn't go forward? Powderly: None of them worked. We did nothing. We were arrested and detained in China...for doing nothing except for thinking about it.

On the 18th...I did my one and only laser projection that evening out the window on some torn-down buildings...way out in the outskirts of Beijing, literally the last stop of the "One" line...It worked better than any had before, and I'd come up with a new technique for making the stencils to do transparencies with a normal laser printer.

I'd printed out one test message, a little computer inside joke, just the words: "Free Beer." It's a quote from a renowned hacker (Richard Stallman) that refers to free software...… Read more

By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

That's probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known … Read more

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States.

A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out."

"Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for … Read more