What does this mean for you? Well, if need be, the government can read your email, Facebook messages, forum postings, web history, pretty much anything you’ve ever done on the internet. You may believe that as you’re not a terrorist or child pornographer, the government should have no reason to, but the problem is the language in this bill is so loose, they can access your information for almost any reason at all. Ever visited a torrent site or watched an unofficial YouTube video of copyrighted material? Ever reposted a picture without the explicit permission of the rights holder? Well, you’re now tangentially related to a cybersecurity crime, and your entire internet history is fair game for careful examination. And don’t think Google Chrome Incognito mode will save you.

So what exactly did we achieve? Our research has dramatically increased the number of authors that can be distinguished using writing-style analysis: from about 300 to 100,000. More importantly, the accuracy of our algorithms drops off gently as the number of authors increases, so we can be confident that they will continue to perform well as we scale the problem even further. Our work is therefore the first time that stylometry has been shown to have to have serious implications for online anonymity.

Even though Android is mostly Free Software, devices usually come with proprietary software and services that prevent people from using them in an independent and autonomous way. Liberate your Android device: learn how to regain control of your data, with a free operating system and free apps!

När politiker i Sverige och andra västländer stiftar övervakningslagar skapas en marknad för teknik som sedan blir farliga vapen i händerna på diktatorer. Det menar Evgeny Morozov, ett av de tyngsta namnen i den internationella debatten om politiken kring internet. DN.se har träffat honom.

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– Varför finns det en marknad för de här teknikerna? Jo för att USA och Europa anser att man behöver dem och beställer dem till sina underrättelsetjänster och polis. Diktaturerna är en slags andrahandsmarknad för verktyg som kommit till i väst, säger Evgeny Morozov till DN.se.

Ahead of the anniversary of Iran’s revolution Saturday, the country’s government has locked down its already-censored Internet, blocking access to many services and in some cases cutting off all encrypted traffic on the Web of the kind used by secure email, social networking and banking sites. In response, the information-freedom-focused Tor Project is testing a new idea: Encrypted connections that don’t look encrypted. To skirt the so called “deep packet inspection” filters Iran’s government has deployed to block all Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL and TLS) encryption that protesters might use to communicate privately, Tor is trying a new kind of bridge to the Web, one the group is calling “obfsproxy,” or obfuscated proxy.

Last week, Google announced a new, simplified privacy policy. They did a great job of informing users that the privacy policy had been changed through emails and notifications, and several experts (including Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian) have praised the shift toward a simpler, more unified policy. Unfortunately, while the policy might be easier to understand, Google did a less impressive job of publicly explaining what in the policy had actually been changed.

In fact, it took a letter from eight Representatives to persuade them to provide straightforward answers to the public about their new policy.

Here’s what you need to know about the substantive changes in the new policy:

Serval enables mobile communications no matter what your circumstance: mobile communications in the face of disaster, in the face of poverty, in the face of isolation, in the face of civil unrest, or in the face of network black-spots. In short, Serval provides resilient mobile communications for all people, anywhere in the universe.

Serval technology bridges the digital divide. We have proved that it is possible, using open source technology to create a mobile communications platform that benefits everyone, for all time, and changes the nature of telecommunications forever.

There’s a big difference in how activists and bureaucrats view the world. In the view of bureaucrats, anything lawful is right by definition. In contrast, activists don’t care whether something is lawful, they care whether it’s good and just. Bureaucrats generally do not understand the difference.

In other words, Bitcoin’s alleged privacy benefits mostly reflect the fact that the government isn’t really trying to spy on Bitcoin users. It hasn’t built the kind of surveillance infrastructure the government has for tracking dollar-denominated transactions. And to be clear, I would rather that infrastructure not exist. But if Bitcoin becomes popular, the government will build precisely the same infrastructure for spying on the Bitcoin network. And when they do, it will become clear that for ordinary users, Bitcoin is, if anything, less surveillance-resistent than traditional cash.

Security researchers presenting at the Where 2.0 conference have revealed a hidden, secret iOS file that keeps a record of everywhere you've been. The record is synched to your PC and subsequently resynched to your other mobile devices. The file is not transmitted to Apple, but constitutes a substantial privacy breach if your PC or mobile device are lost or seized. The researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, have released a free/open application called "iPhone Tracker" that allows you to retrieve the location data on your iOS device and examine it. They did not discover a comparable file on Android devices.