Security Most Recent Posts

Will the capabilities of drones spying on Americans from above match what London's 'eye in the sky' cameras can see and hear? While monitoring for security threats from the air, London’s helicopter cameras can make out shoelaces from nearly a mile away! It also captures audio. If you don’t like the idea of your local police station spy-flying drones, then the EFF said local governments have the power to limit drone surveillance.

Do you ever feel like you are being watched when you drive? The ACLU believes that feeling of being watched is justified and not only while you're driving. The DEA is tracking Americans' movements by scanning license plates which go in a database. The ACLU believes there are plans to data mine those plate records to better track and build files on us for alleged 'suspicious' activity. If nothing is done about logging and data mining our every move, Americans will lose the freedom to drive around anonymously.

Corporate-level support pilot fish gets a call from a user who's having trouble logging in to a particular application -- he has just changed his password, but the new one isn't working. But with such a simple process, how could he get it wrong?

I have been on the road for the past few weeks, last week I was in the Middle East and this week I come to you from Scotland. These places would appear to the outsider as being very different places but not when it comes to IT. One topic that was common throughout most meetings that I attended was on the subject of the insider threat, something getting inside a network and causing a problem.

Cybersecurity experts begin research on a computer network that can detect and defend itself from attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration. The Air Force supplied $1 million to investigate applying intelligent adaptive techniques to cybersecurity. Will a moving-target defense applied to networks be a 'game-changer' or the start of Skynet?

User at this government agency calls IT pilot fish, saying that she needs to be able to access a particular website for a project she's doing with another agency. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

Newt Gingrich's Newt 2012 organization is aiding and abetting spammers. Hard to believe, I know, but it turns out his organization is providing targeted email addresses for spammers to use. Don't let your organization make the same mistake. I'll explain all in The Long View...

read more

The company where this pilot fish has just upgraded to a new email service, but one sales executive is having trouble -- and not being very technical, he has his wife call IT to ask for help in getting him logged in.

Netflix is ready to fight the U.S. Senate on frictionless sharing. Do you want to automatically broadcast what you watch? What happens now shapes the future of what is considered a "reasonable" expectation of privacy, or what a privacy law professor calls "intellectual privacy."

Has your Twitter account been hacked? An anonymous hacker has leaked the email addresses and passwords of 55,000 accounts. But Twitter says many are 'spam accounts.' In IT Blogwatch, bloggers work out what really happened.

read more

The Justice Department told a congressional committee that law enforcement and prosecutors would be crippled if they were required to obtain a search warrant for cell phone location tracking information. What happened to probable cause, the Fourth Amendment and a reasonable expectation of privacy?

[Updated with more condescending criticism of paper-billionaire Zuck and his soon-to-be-public 'anti-social' network] Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is under fire for privacy problems yet again. This time it's the new version of Facebook Messenger, which leaks additional information about you -- some of which is compulsory. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers can't quite believe that Mark Zuckerberg didn't learn from the last 37,905 privacy flaps.

Oliver North is back; this time in documentary-style clips for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 which show Guy Fawkes 'V for Vendetta' masks, thereby portraying Anonymous as cyber-terrorist enemies who hack military technology, hijack drones and start delivering death from the sky.

85% of vehicles are equipped with black boxes, like in airplanes, that constantly collect digital evidence and may be the star witness to testify against you. What if the software has a glitch and can't be trusted? What if law enforcement is using black box data to spy on you? All cars will soon be required to have EDRs, but does that captured data about your driving belong to you, to automobile manufacturers, to insurance companies, or to law enforcement?

The engineer who wrote the code that scooped up people's private Wi-Fi data for Google's Street View has finally been named -- and before his time at Google he wrote the groundbreaking NetStumbler Wi-Fi sniffing app.