In an attempt to remove all doubt that AT&T is a evil-infested, garbage-brained, scum-sucking, low-life, mucus-eating sot of a company, it has been recently discovered that they built a custom algorithm to: “crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom”. Tags: Big Brother, Data Abuse

You may have noticed I don’t talk about the War much, but this caught my attention. Blackwater, a private security firm (read: mercenaries) is in trouble for having shot some people (I apologize for the huge over-simplification). Anyway, the State Department is offering them immunity. Here’s the problem: immunity means that it doesn’t matter if they’re guilty or innoncent, there will be no consequences for their actions. Even if you were to assume that the Blackwater guards were put there with little actual training and couldn’t be held to the same standards as our military, there should be consequences for the people who made the decision to send them there in the first place. But judging on history, they’d get immunity too. No one will be held accountable while Bush is in office. Tags: Accountability MIA, Bushiness

So here's somehting new: finding out the prices on an upcoming sale by looking online. This is particularly useful when the ad flyer happens to be for Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). This follows another recent story of a Walmart ad being leaked online (which has, of course, been taken down due to a legal threat from Walmart). (H/T to digg for the link) Tags: Retailers

If you’ve been following this breach, the key problem here is two part:

1) TJX is the parent company of several other companies including TJ Maxx. Each of those companies shared data with TJX creating a massive database (and a single target for the hackers).

2) TJX (and others) shouldn’t have stored the credit card data in the first place and when they did, they should have used better security.

Though they’ll blame “clever hackers” for the breach, the fault instead lies squarely with TJX who’s business practice of storing credit cards against people’s will along with negligent use of outdated wireless encryption (WEP) first created a giant target and then then left a gaping hole for the bad guys to be able to go and get it.

Tags: Data Abuse, Identity Theft, Negligence, TJ Maxx, TJX, WEP, Wireless Security

A guy in Italy managed to get a refund from HP for Windows XP and Works 8 which were preinstalled on his system. Apparently, the license agreement states that if the customer doesn’t accept the agreement, the vendor will refund the money. This could be the start of a disturbing trend as far as computer retailers are concerned. Tags: Microsoft, Windows

In California, Sprint has been forced to unlock their phones to allow their customers to use their phones with other cell services. The main point here being that if someone has been using their cellphone for years wouldn’t normally want to switch to another service even if Sprint was terrible since they might like their phone and have it customized and full of data they wanted to keep. With cellphone unlocking, now that customer can drop Sprint like a bad habit at will. Bad news for Sprint, great news for us.

So much for CSI. In actuality, this is only a ruling on partial fingerprint evidence. I'm not sure if I agree that a partial print can't be considered as one piece of the evidence though I do agree that you can't make a case solely on a partial print. In this case, the judge ruled that a partial print can't be used as evidence in a murder investigation. The more disturbing part of this article is this:

… the FBI mistakenly linked Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, to a fingerprint lifted off a plastic bag of explosive detonators found in Madrid after commuter train bombings there killed 191 people.

So not only can your fingerprints be used to identify you as a criminal in this country, you might get nailed for crimes in completely different countries as well. Always be wary of providing fingerprints. (H/T to schneier for the link)

Here we go again. At least this time, it’s only on the order of a few hundred thousand people. Note: it’s a little sad to have to say that. Tags: Identity Theft, lost laptop

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn’t considered the effect on the parents.

“Whether we’re talking about dad’s work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship,” Sgt. MacDonald said.

We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn’t take long.

“Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics,” reads Sgt. MacDonald.

He says it’s not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles.

While drugs and underage drinking are likely problems that should be dealt with, some other things should remain private:

even innocent-sounding news can do damage. “They may be talking about how their father is losing a job, and perhaps a neighbor who’s the mortgage broker for the father isn’t aware that the father’s job is in jeopardy,”

Tags: Blogging, For Parents, Kids, Police, SNS

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn’t considered the effect on the parents.

“Whether we’re talking about dad’s work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship,” Sgt. MacDonald said.

We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn’t take long.

“Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics,” reads Sgt. MacDonald.

He says it’s not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles

While those people might deserve to get fired (if the teen poster is telling the truth and not just venting), the article lists another example of a mortgage broker finding out that one of his customers lost his job.

Privacy is starting to become harder and harder to protect, but also more important at the same time.

Tags: For Parents, Kids and Computers, Posting Online, Things you need to know, Web Publishing and Kids