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So here's something 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).

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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.

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Nothing like treating people like animals to be tagged and tracked. Of course, it's much easier to start by tracking kids because they don't have much choice in the matter and when they grow up, they'll be less resistant to the practice. Enter surveillance society…

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. They portray the tests as successful, but as Bruce Schneier points out, "So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere."

Or how about, "it's easy to get someone you hate in trouble by wearing their uniform for a few minutes while vandalizing the teacher's lounge."

Or "We had no idea that constantly bombarding students with radio frequencies in closed spaces during their formative years would lead to these kinds of mutations! Mrs. Johnson, you can't honestly expect us to pay to have Timmy's third arm removed can you?"

I love how companies start implementing RFID without any thought to the consequences.

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Comcast has been in the news recently for blocking high-bandwidth traffic in an attempt to keep people from using their Internet "too much". If we're lucky, this story about them possibly getting sued for it is true. As bad as Comcast is in service and customer service, it would be nice to hold their feet to the fire when they get caught doing bad stuff intentionally.

Oh, and if you missed it, Comcast has been trying damage control without much success.

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I already reported on Comcast blocking Peer-2-Peer filesharing traffic, but apparently they've extended the blocks to enterprise software (in this case, Lotus Notes).

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast's network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they're greeted with the error message, "Remote system no longer responding." Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast's reset packets are the culprit.

It should be noted that everything that has been reported as being blocked by Comcast are things that cause high traffic on Comcast's networks. Even though people pay for their high speed Internet, Comcast will be damned if they actually let you use it. I mean, I've never been dropped from Comcast service for using their Internet "too much" like some people, but I definitely can't get decent service to save my life.

For example, if I start one download at about 100kB/s, the rest of my Internet connection limps along like a two legged cat! So much for my 6 megabit connection speed.

Something is seriously wrong with Comcast and I hope some regulator comes down on them hard soon.

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One of my heroes is Paul Levy who spoke at the 2006 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference in DC. He works at public citizen and is one of their main guns when it comes to protecting people online. You see, companies have this bad habit of bullying people out of their domain names or first amendment rights. Public Citizen offers free legal services in defense of innocent people in the face of bad corporations everywhere.

Their latest: a situation where a company sent a cease and desist letter with an interesting twist. They claimed that the cease and desist letter was copyrighted and that posting it online would result in a lawsuit. This, of course, was to try and prevent someone from making the letter public in an effort to get public opinion on their side.

Well, Public Citizen has a copy of the letter and has posted it on their site along with their excellent response explaining why sending a letter like that is a waste of time.

Update 2007.10.12

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If you're a privacy nut and have a health dose of paranoia, you'll like this new website designed by the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG): CyberStreetSmart.org. It's a nicely designed site with easy access to information on major types of online scams. Unlike the paltry efforts of some other organizations, this site is easy to navigate and keeps the information short and simple.

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I'm not thrilled about Amazon since they are one of the worst privacy offenders on the web, but they are now offering music downloads without any DRM.

Though shopping with Amazon is like dancing with a hungry wolf, for now they may be one of the best places to get music content. Certainly if you had a choice between iTunes and Amazon for the same music, Amazon would be the better choice.

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Pudding Media offers calling without any toll charges.

The trade-off is that Pudding Media is eavesdropping on phone calls in order to display ads on the screen that are related to the conversation.

Did we really need any further invasion of privacy?

I hope this company falls flat on its face.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Google, trying to hold up their former image of being a rebel company who "doesn't do evil", has proposed a universal privacy standard that they say all companies should follow. The main idea is that there should be a minimum set of standards that everyone agrees to follow when dealing with private user data.

I sure hope it's not their standards since they hold your private data hostage for months.