Privacy and data protection

SpongeBob disappears from app store after privacy criticism

Anyone wanting to download the SpongeBob Diner Dash game from Apple's iTunes app store today is out of luck.

Nickelodeon has removed the app from the store after an advocacy group filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging the game violated children's online privacy rights by collecting their e-mail addresses without parents' permission.

According to the Center for Digital Democracy, which filed the complaint earlier today, cable network Nickelodeon and mobile game-maker PlayFirst are misleadingly marketing the game and are violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

SpongeBob Diner Dash is a free app … Read more

China reinforces its 'Great Firewall' to prevent encryption

China has begun reinforcing its infamous firewall with new tech designed to prevent encrypted communication.

To prevent the more enterprising citizens of China from exploiting holes in the country's firewall through the use of virtual private networks and circumventors, the Chinese government is using new technology to block encryption, according to The Guardian.

The publication reports that both consumers and businesses are being hit by the new Internet barrier, which is able to "learn, discover and block" encrypted channels provided by VPN companies. According to one company that has a customer base in the Asian country, one … Read more

How I dodged a bullet to take a pic of McAfee

I am currently on a psychiatrist-imposed company retreat in Miami.

I have been told not to engage strangers, nor those from or to whom I would like to become either estranged or engaged.

Sitting quietly at my beloved News Cafe this morning (yes, where Gianni Versace had his last coffee), I detected an increase in traffic but a block away.

There was the slamming of truck doors. There was a flurry of fetching TV presenters, pressing down their beige trousers by hand.

Not being an investigative reporter, I sidled over and asked a burly cameraman what was going on.

"It's John McAfee," he replied. "He's in there." … Read more

Facebook voting is gone, but privacy issues just get worse

Facebook has pulled the plug on community voting, following an anemic voter turnout, and today's new privacy changes in the aftermath of that decision bear ill tidings for consumer privacy.

For one thing, though not even 700,000 of the more than 1 billion Facebook subscribers voted, nearly 88 percent of those who did vote cast their ballot against the changes. But Facebook's not likely to listen to them.

Facebook is rewriting a lot of its policies to make them easier to understand, surely a noble act. Options like being able to ask somebody who's tagged you … Read more

Facebook privacy settings get reworked once again

Get ready -- Facebook is making changes to how users access its privacy settings, again. The social network hopes this latest overhaul will make the now bloated process easier to understand, according to a blog post today from Sam Lessin, a director of product for Facebook.

The changes, which come a day after Facebook implemented its new privacy polices, are mainly cosmetic. Facebook is not changing what settings you can set, except for the option to block searches of your profile within the social network. The network has already begun phasing out this feature and soon it will be removed … Read more

GhostShell claims breach of 1.6M accounts at FBI, NASA, and more

Team GhostShell, the hacktivist collective, said today that it has stolen accounts from a large number of government agencies, contractors, and security firms, posting information from 1.6 million accounts online.

Dubbed Project White Fox, the hacking project appears to have affected NASA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and Interpol, among many others. The hackers announced their work in a file posted on Pastebin.

Our colleagues at ZDNet report:

The file dump, upon closer inspection, seems to include a number of records obtained via SQL injection. A random selection of the files contain email and home addresses, defense material tests and … Read more

No password is safe from this new 25-GPU computer cluster

Your really, really strong password just became a little bit easier to break.

Jeremi Gosney, founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, a company that handles password-cracking, has unveiled a computer cluster boasting 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards. The cluster's horsepower allows it to make 350 billion password guesses per second against the NT Lan Manager (NTLM) security protocol Microsoft has used in Windows Server since 2003.

Ars Technica was first to report on the cluster.

Speaking to Ars in an e-mailed statement, Gosney said that his company's technology "can attack hashes approximately four times faster" … Read more

DoNotTrackMe: New name, same tracker-blocking game

While providing sharp teeth for the Do Not Track header has proved to be futile so far, Abine's DoNotTrackMe makes increasing your privacy online as easy as installing an add-on. The latest update, available exclusively today from Download.com, makes it much easier to use while making some important but small security changes.

Known as Do Not Track Plus when it underwent a massive overhaul at the beginning of this year, DoNotTrackMe remains available as a cross-platform, multibrowser add-on.

You can download DoNotTrackMe for Firefox (Windows | Mac), Chrome (Windows | Mac), Internet Explorer 32-bit (Windows only) | Internet Explorer 64-bit), and … Read more

Facebook users seek answers on advertising, privacy

When given the opportunity to question those who lead Facebook's privacy team about proposed changes to the social network's data use policy before voting on the matter, Facebook users were more concerned with how the site currently manages its data.

Questions during today's half hour live Web talk (archived here) included ones about how posts on Timeline are displayed, what information is shared with advertisers, online bullying, what happens if your account is hacked and, of course, what about that viral copyright post. (It's fake.) One user wasn't even sure there was a vote: "… Read more