Hasta La Gadget!

Today, The Guardian reported that the Obama administration has permitted the NSA to collect large amounts of Americans’ online data — including email records — for more than two years. The government’s metadata-collection program, first started during the Bush presidency, was discontinued in 2011, but it appears that information-monitoring processes have since been going strong.

This news comes courtesy of “secret documents” obtained by the publication, and the source indicates that the NSA specifically collected information involving “communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” though the agency eventually received the green light to tap US residents as well. Earlier this month, reports surfaced claiming the NSA has been snooping on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon customers, and this latest leak only confirms what many already suspected: that there’s still plenty we don’t know about the details — and the extent of — the government’s surveillance activities.

Filed under: Internet

Comments

Source: The Guardian (1), The Guardian (2)

According to a report by Juniper Networks, mobile malware has grown by 614 percent over the last year. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, 92 percent of it is on Android…

Read more…

Google’s Transparency Report has long warned us about the dangers of government overreach, but that’s not the only threat online — there’s plenty of malware to go around. Accordingly, Google is expanding its report to show the volumes of virus-infected and phishing sites found through the company’s Safe Browsing technology. The data includes both attacking and victim pages, and it shows how well web hosts cope with successful infections. Combined, the new information doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Google spotted a total of 67,909 compromised sites just in mid-June, and it still takes over a month for most affected webmasters to scrub their servers clean. The Safe Browsing data isn’t very reassuring, then, but it is a friendly reminder to be careful on the web.

Filed under: Internet, Google

Comments

Via: Google Online Security Blog

Source: Google Transparency Report

It looks like all our Graph Search privacy concerns weren’t just the ravings of a paranoid, tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic. Using Facebook’s new comprehensive search tool, a tricksy little dev was able to compile a database holding thousands of Facebook users’ personal phone numbers.

Read more…

Two new top-secret documents related to PRISM and NSA data collection were published yesterday by The Guardian. Detailed within the documents are various stipulations and requirements related to the data collection as it relates to US persons. On the surface, such information is mildly reassuring, but a thoughtful examination illuminates several red-flag issues, which the

Read The Full Story