Privacy

How many times have you been going about your usual business of cheating on your spouse, being an idiot around your boss, or drunkenly harassing fellow party-goers when some wildly irresponsible person tags you in a photo and posts it online? What's that? "Never," you say? Well congratulations on being an alright human being then. You can feel good about the fact that you don't need the Norte Photoblocker to ruin any potentially damaging photos of your night out as they're being taken. Read More

At the end of October, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched its Shredder Challenge contest. The objective: create a system for reconstructing shredded papers, then demonstrate it by piecing together five documents, the shredded remains of which were posted on the contest’s website. Although the contest had a December 4th deadline, the “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” team correctly reassembled all five documents with two days to spare. Read More

Fingerprints have been used to confirm or determine peoples' identities for over one hundred years now, but new technology is allowing them to be put to another use - drug testing. Intelligent Fingerprinting (a spin-off company affiliated with the UK's University of East Anglia) has just unveiled a prototype portable device that can detect the presence of illicit drugs or other substances in a person's system by analyzing the sweat in their fingerprints. Read More

If you're looking for a reason to buy an iPhone 3GS as opposed to an iPhone 4, besides the lower price, here's one: it's technically possible that malware on an iPhone 4 – if that phone were placed beside its user's computer keyboard – could be used to deduce what the user was typing. Once that data was stored on the phone, it could then be transmitted to another party. According to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who were able to use one of the phones for this purpose, any smartphone made within the past two years should be capable of doing so. Read More

We brought news of Eric Butler's Firefox extension for HTTP session hijacking called Firesheep back in October last year, but if you haven't already taken steps to ensure your privacy and security online, we hope this does the trick - FaceNiff is a new Android app that can be used to hijack sessions on public or private Wi-Fi networks without needing to lug around a laptop. Read More

While fans of Android mobile phones may be taking some satisfaction in the current location-tracking controversy surrounding Apple’s iPhone, they perhaps might not be aware that their own phones are also tracking their movements. Although users reportedly must opt into the Android feature, Detroit-area residents Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski believe that the average user wouldn’t grasp the implications of doing so. To that end, last Wednesday (April 27, 2011) the pair filed a US$50 million class action lawsuit against Android’s parent company, Google. Read More

The ongoing kerfuffle over Apple devices allegedly tracking their users’ locations has taken yet another turn. It all started on April 20th, when tech bloggers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden reported their discovery that iPhones and 3G iPads running iOS4 were supposedly maintaining a stealth file of locations that the devices had traveled to – with their users. Apple responded on April 27th, stating that the devices were simply anonymously contributing to a database of local Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers, that helped to triangulate the phones’ location faster than GPS alone. Now, however, a just-discovered patent application filed by Apple in 2009 has some people doubting that claim. Read More

While most of us know it is theoretically possible for our movements to be tracked by detecting which tower our mobile phone is connected too, it might come as a shock to see just how much of a digital footprint we leave as we go about our daily lives. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz and German newspaper Die Zeit have provided a frightening insight into just how much information can be gleaned from the digital breadcrumbs we drop every day by creating an interactive map showing Spitz's movements and activities over a five month period based on mobile phone data and information freely available on the internet. Read More

Hot on the heels of a call for a user-controlled tracking prevention mechanism from the FTC comes news that Microsoft is introducing a new privacy feature to the next version of its browser - Internet Explorer 9. The Tracking Protection tool is aimed at helping netizens take control of online tracking from within the browser. Read More