Privacy is Easy to Breach - Exposing an Undercover CIA Operative

January 6th, 2009 Hackers have penetrated popular social messaging utility Twitter hijacking the accounts of more than 30 celebrities that include President-elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears and CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez. This was confirmed by the company early on Today.

August 9th, 2006 Recently AOL released 20 million web search queries, over a period of three months, from 650, 000 AOL search engine users. The data anonymizes user identity by assigning them numerical id.

April 13th, 2008 Yahoo Instant Messenger is notorious for sending unsolicited commercial instant messages and from questionable sources. The yahoo instant messenger client doesn't provide an way, last I checked, to stop such spams.

December 11th, 2005 Google, Inc. has been sued by AIT, a "two-time" INC 500 Company, who has advertised with Google for years, as the representative plaintiff in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

April 12th, 2005 An investigation by the firm's Anglo-Dutch parent Reed Elsevier determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers. This is the second biggest breach after Bank of America incident.

January 3rd, 2006 In the new year lets look back to Apache Harmony, the much publicised effort to create "open source" J2SE announced in early May last year. After eight months there is still nothing to show, no downloads.

October 31st, 2005 Matt, author of WordPress blogging software, has released an anti-spam plugin for WordPress - Automattic Spam Stopper (now renamed as AKismet) Bad Behavior, a competing rather effective comment spam prevention plugin, author nicknamed IOError posted a review which points out some obvious downsides of such centralized spam filtering mechanisms like: 1. Privacy concern - all your comments are send to Matt's server for human inspection 2.

February 6th, 2008 Many of us have a distributed work force which often leaves people wondering what others are doing. Twitter is a great service for updating status.

May 6th, 2009 Phoenix-area mother helps bust Ecstasy ring PHOENIX — Police are crediting a Phoenix-area mother's tip for the dismantling of an drug ring that even had a price list posted on MySpace. The woman's call to the Maricopa County Methamphetamine Task Force last week helped authorities find the dealers' MySpace page.

August 21st, 2006 U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor said the spying program, which was authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the 9/11 terrorism attacks but remained undisclosed until late last year, violates constitutional rights of free speech, privacy and the separation of powers.

January 23rd, 2007 MySpace has filed suit against notorious spammer and self-proclaimed "spam king" Scott Richter and alleged cohorts for sending what could become known as MySpam. Yesterday MySpace filed a complaint in a District Court in Central District of California, USA demanding a jury trial against Richter's for sending spam messages disguised as communications from members to other MySpace members.

March 15th, 2005 A laptop from Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles was stolen with unencrypted data exposing personal information of more then 8, 900 Southern Nevada residents. By personal information I mean everything - name, age, DOB, SSN, photographs and signatures of residents who obtained drivers licenses between November 25th and March 4th.

June 26th, 2006 Free web browser - Browsezilla promotes itself as a tool for privacy protection. It is actually a click-fraud engine for pornographic sites, said security vendor Panda Software.

May 29th, 2006 Symantec's antivirus software, which protects some of the world's largest corporations and US government agencies, suffers from a flaw that lets hackers seize control of computers to steal sensitive data, delete files or implant malicious programs, researchers from eEye Digital Security said. Symantec is investigating the issue.

August 5th, 2005 I contemplated downloading Alexa Toolbar. Knowing its reputation I decided to check its privacy policy to understand what exactly I am compromising by installing this toolbar.