Exposing Computer Based Mind Control Of Private Corporate Governance.. The Theft Of Personal Identities And Public Data Of The World Has Ended.. Be Positive Life Is Just A Spiritual Journey (^^)// Love Mother Nature And Shine Bright Like A Super Star :) We Are Moving Towards A Dominated Female World Where Voluntary Non Profit Emotional Cooperation Is The New Way Of Living :D I Love You :X Unlock Your DNA With Love, Forgiveness And Spiritual Fire :D You Have The Right To Be A Sovereign Human :)
Showing posts with label mainstream media propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mainstream media propaganda. Show all posts
This video outlines how the media, government and the whole
establishment, killed the Ron Paul revolution that should have continued
into 2013. Thanks to the contributing users of this video, more info
coming soon.
Ron Paul, The Only Presidential Candidate That Wasn't A Puppet And Gary Johnson :)
On Friday 1st of February 2013, Amplicate will be wrapping up operations.
We are sad to have to shut down the service but despite some healthy stats: 900k page views and around 300k unique visits a month, we couldn’t find a model to pay the bills long term and at the same time keep the service free for our users.
In 2009 we set out to build a platform to help people make their
voice heard, with the idea of not only improving products and services,
but allowing people’s expression on any topic (around 2 million topics
currently).
We believe we achieved our goal: we have not only around 400 million opinions from 63 million
of people who left their public opinions on Amplicate, Twitter and
Facebook; but also became a reference point for users, bloggers,
journalists and anyone interested in public opinions.
We thank all our users, the people who believed in us and everyone who has supported us along the way. Please feel free to contact Juan at juan@amplicate.com, if you have any comments about this, or just want to say hello.
Update: We’ll update this space soon with the exact date/time.
New features, security concerns and policy fumbles among web giants
Facebook, Skype and Instagram each caused a significant amount of
concern among privacy advocates and the larger web community this past
month.
Facebook Graph Search announced
Facebook’s newly announced Graph Search
has caused large ripples among privacy and security commentators. The
product greatly enhances the specificity of search results on the social
network by incorporating powerful filtering mechanisms based on
people’s profile data, “likes”, and other activities. For example, a
satirical blog called “Actual Facebook Graph Searches” outlines some disturbing search queries,
such as “Family members of people who live in China and like Falun
Gong”, which highlight the product’s potential for malicious use. While
Facebook claims Graph Search conforms to existing privacy settings and does not expose any information previously unavailable, critics point out that it works to undermine a Facebook user’s sense of obscurity.
Currently, users have some perception that their activity on the site
will drift away into obscurity as new activities appear at the top of
people’s feeds. Graph Search, however, can efficiently dig up those long-forgotten posts, Likes and interests, bringing information to light that could be useful to stalkers, phishing operatives, or potential employers. In response to these risks, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a guide on “How to protect your privacy from Facebook’s Graph Search”.
Skype under pressure from activists
A recent open letter to Skype signed by Reporters without Borders, the EFF, and many other organizations calls on Skype’s owner, Microsoft, to clarify what information is stored when people use its service and make public any government requests for such data. Essentially, they are calling on Skype to issue a transparency report similar to those released Google and Twitter. The letter also demands Skype’s analysis of what data malicious third parties may be able to collect,
and to clarify the company’s relationship with TOM Online, the operator
of a licensed, modified version of Skype for the Chinese market. While
the letter asks that Skype explains what it knows about “the
surveillance and censorship” that users “may be subject to” while using
Tom-Skype, as was reported by the Information Warfare Monitor
— a public-private venture between two Canadian institutions: the
Citizen Lab and the SecDev Group, an operational think tank based in a
Ottawa (Canada) — in 2008, messages containing blacklisted words such as
‘“Taiwan Independence” trigger the application
to send chat logs to a Chinese server and block the transmission of
such messages to others. Skype’s owner at that time, eBay, had no comment on the message monitoring; Microsoft is currently “reviewing the letter” — how it will respond remains to be seen.
Aftermath of Instagram TOS debacle
After last month’s public outcry over language in Instagram’s update to its Terms of Service which may have permitted it or its affiliates to use user content in advertisements, independent analytics suggested that Instagram’s daily active users dropped by 50 percent in the weeks after the announcement. Although the company responded to the community uproar by reverting the advertising section of its Terms to the earlier language, the negative publicity seemed to have taken a large toll. However, since those reports, Instagram has released its own data indicating 90 million monthly active users, and claimed that it continues to see strong growth around the world.
While the company’s response may have helped to mitigate some long-term
damage to its user base, the backlash highlights that social media
users are keen to make their voices heard when it comes to perceived
potential misuses of personal data.
Privacy legislation updates, proposals and responses
The close of 2012 and the start of 2013 saw several key legislative
stories surface regarding the collection and disclosure of user data,
both in the United States and EU.
ECPA / VPPA shuffles
In the wake of last year’s Petraeus affair, manyprivacy activists in the United States called formodernizations to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act
of 1986 (ECPA) to better protect email privacy from law enforcement.
Late last year, the Senate Judiciary committee passed a bill to amend
ECPA that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant
before compelling service providers to hand over a subscriber’s emails.
However, when Congress considered the bill, they added an amendment to
the Video Privacy Protection act of 1988 (VPPA) to it, and later dropped
the ECPA reforms shortly before voting, after heavy law enforcement lobbying.
The VPPA amendment passed, and U.S. companies may now obtain distinct
consent via the Internet to disclose a consumer’s video viewing
information through electronic means. Netflix lobbied for the change in order for its users to legally be allowed to share their video watching habits on Facebook.
Google and others want to see a warrant
Perhaps as a response to the fizzled attempt to amend ECPA, Google announced late January that it requires a probable cause warrant in order to divulge the contents of a user’s Gmail messages to law enforcement. Authorities may still obtain registration information
such as name and IP address without a warrant, using only a subpoena.
This announcement coincided with the release of Google’s latest transparency report, which for the first time breaks down U.S. government requests for data by legal justification. The report shows that 68 percent of U.S. requests were made with only a subpoena, which is similar to the 60 percent figure released by Twitter in its latest transparency report.
After the news about Google’s policy broke, The Hill newspaper reported
that Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo! also require warrants before
divulging the contents of their user’s communications. The companies all
reportedly justified their policies based on case law arising from United States vs. Warshak,
a ruling that found police breached an individual’s constitutional
(fourth amendment) rights against unreasonable search and seizure when obtaining email contents without a warrant.
EU data privacy law proposal draws responses from lobbyists, activists
A draft of a new EU Data Protection Regulation would significantly broaden
the definition of personal data to include a variety of persistent
online identifiers such as cookies, IP addresses, “and other unique
identifiers”. The law would also mandate that users provide explicit (opt-in) consent
to data processing activities before online service providers utilize
their data in such a manner. Furthermore, consent would be invalidated
if a platform’s terms of service change in such a way that a person has
no option other than to accept the change or cease using the platform he
/ she has devoted significant time to. Der Spiegel claims this provision could refer to Facebook’s strategy of continually expanding the scope of “public” items on the platform.
In response to the proposed law, a lobbyist representing U.S.
companies such as Facebook, Google and Zynga posited that if they were
not legally able to monetize user data, Gmail and Facebook may be compelled to start to charge customers for the services. In opposition to such lobbying, U.S. data privacy advocates
such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Consumer Federation of
America, and the Center for Digital Democracy wrote to the EU in favour of increased consumer protections.
States’ social media employment laws
California and Illinois have both passed laws that bar employers from demanding social media login details from job applicants and employees, while Nebraska and Vermont are considering similar legislation. These laws are aimed at curbing employers’ practices of managers and other authority figures snooping
on their employee’s activities on social networks. The California law
furthermore protects university students in a similar manner and prohibits retaliation in the case that someone refuses a request to disclose such social media information.
COPPA rule revised
The FTC issued a decision this month that amended the Commission’s rules
regarding its enforcement of the Child’s Online Privacy Protection Act
(COPPA). The ruling will enable websites to obtain verifiable parental
consent to the disclosure of children’s personal information through newly approved methods
such as the electronic submission of scanned consent forms or video
conferencing. The ruling is intended to make it simpler for web services
to obtain proper consent and comply with the law. It furthermore adds
new forms of personally identifiable information to its scope, including
physical location, a child’s image or his/her voice.
Mobile App Privacy
Mobile applications continue to introduce new privacy challenges; and
policy makers and watchdogs are following suit by releasing guidelines to help developers to protect their users’ data.
California issues mobile app privacy guidelines
The state of California has released “Privacy on the Go (PDF)”, a guide for mobile app developers to approach privacy by design when building their applications. Some highlights from the guidelines
include a call for readable privacy policies, notice when data is
shared with third parties, and for apps to only collect the minimum
amount of personally identifiable information required for system
functionality. Onlookers point to this as an example of the growing awareness of mobile privacy issues, and an important step in protecting user privacy. The recommendations are not enforceable by law, but they may be signposts indicating the direction the the law will take in the future.
SSL Implementations
SSL is an encryption layer that secures normal web communications
using the http standard. It is increasingly being adopted as the default
by social media sites, which previously only utilized the protocol when
dealing with usernames and passwords (such as during registration or
log-ins).
Yahoo! Mail now under https following XSS vulnerability
Yahoo! Mail now joins other major webmail providers by offering users the ability to use SSL connections during use sessions. This follows a call by the EFF and other rights groups last year for the company to do so. Yahoo! Mail was also recently compromised by an XSS vulnerability
that could have provided attackers with backdoor access to millions of
accounts. In the wake of that incident, Yahoo!’s chief information
security officer was dismissed. The move to implement SSL as an option still leaves Yahoo behind Microsoft Live and Gmail, which implement the secure protocol by default.
Nokia server decrypts HTTPS data en route to mobile browser
Nokia’s mobile browser “Xpress” drew criticism
due to an intermediary server’s decryption of secured data during
transmission. The browser routes all incoming web traffic through a
centralized server that pre-processes content to reduce filesize and
save bandwidth. This preprocessing is a fairly common practice among
mobile browsers, but Nokia’s servers temporarily store encrypted data in plain text form,
leaving the data in an accessible format, and circumventing the
security expected by its users. Nokia assured the public that it wasn’t
using this decrypted data to spy on its users; however, critics call on
the company to be more transparent in its use of user data.
Post written by Andrew Hilts
Tagged: Internet Security, Law and Policy, Mobile security, Privacy, Social Media
A political analyst tells Press TV that the US values are very strange
values that do not jibe with the Declaration of Human Rights, with the
UN or any other civilized country.
The comments came after
Hillary Clinton gave a farewell speech to US citizens on Friday after
sending a letter of resignation to President Barack Obama as her last
act in the US State Department in Washington, DC.
Press TV has
conducted an interview with Dr. Randy Short, member of Dignity, Human
Rights and Peace organization, to further discuss the issue.
Graph Search conforms to existing privacy settings and does not expose any information previously unavailable, critics point out that it works to undermine a Facebook user’s sense of obscurity.
Currently, users have some perception that their activity on the site
will drift away into obscurity as new activities appear at the top of
people’s feeds. Graph Search, however, can efficiently dig up those long-forgotten posts, Likes and interests, bringing information to light that could be useful to stalkers, phishing operatives, or potential employers. In response to these risks, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a guide on “How to protect your privacy from Facebook’s Graph Search”.
