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Twitter pulls lawsuit after feds back down

Credit to Author: Martyn Williams| Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2017 11:56:00 -0700

Twitter has withdrawn a lawsuit against the U.S. government after the Customs and Border Protection backed down on a demand that the social media outlet reveal details about a user account critical of the agency.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, contended that the customs agency was abusing its investigative power. The customs agency has the ability to get private user data from Twitter when investigating cases in areas such as illegal imports, but this case was far from that.

The target of the request was the @alt_uscis account, one of a number of “alt” accounts that have sprung up on Twitter since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The accounts are critical of the new administration and most claim to be run by current or former staff members of government agencies.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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U.S. lawmakers demand to know how many residents are under surveillance

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:33:00 -0700

Two powerful U.S. lawmakers are pushing President Donald Trump’s administration to tell them how many of the country’s residents are under surveillance by the National Security Agency.

In a letter sent Friday, Representatives Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers Jr. asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to provide an estimate of the number of U.S. residents whose communications are swept up in NSA surveillance of foreign targets. Goodlatte, a Republican, is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Conyers is the committee’s senior Democrat.

Committee members have been seeking an estimate of the surveillance numbers from the ODNI for a year now. Other lawmakers have been asking for the surveillance numbers since 2011, but ODNI has failed to provide them.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Six in 10 people believe their lives will improve with autonomous vehicles

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2017 03:00:00 -0700

Six in 10 people believe connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will improve their quality of life, according to a new study by Strategy Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The study, commissioned by the U.K.-based trade association Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, also found half of drivers age 17 to 24 would use a connected, autonomous vehicle (CAV) today.

Among all those surveyed, the biggest benefit from CAVs would be stress-free driving, with cars that brake and park themselves as top attributes.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Microsoft reveals what data Windows 10 collects from you

Credit to Author: Darlene Storm| Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2017 09:22:00 -0700

Microsoft has been under fire for its privacy practices since Windows 10 launched in July 2015, so the company finally caved to the pressure to be more transparent and revealed the type of diagnostic data it collects.

According to Microsoft, “One of our most important improvements in the Creators Update is a set of privacy enhancements that will be mostly behind the scenes.” Today Microsoft listed three new things about your privacy with Windows 10 after upgrading to the Creators Update. It clarified descriptions about privacy settings, updated its privacy statement and, best of all, it coughed up more information about the data Windows 10 collects from you.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Facebook loses appeal over New York search warrants

Credit to Author: John Ribeiro| Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2017 04:12:00 -0700

Facebook’s appeal against 381 warrants for information from the accounts of its users was rejected by a  court in New York  on the grounds that earlier orders refusing to quash the warrants issued in a criminal proceeding could not be appealed.

The decision by the New York State Court of Appeals did not address key issues of whether the broad searches were unconstitutional, and whether internet service providers like Facebook have standing to challenge such warrants on behalf of their users, particularly when they are served with gag orders that prevent providers from informing subscribers about the warrants.

“This case undoubtedly implicates novel and important substantive issues regarding the constitutional rights of privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and the parameters of a federal statute establishing methods by which the government may obtain certain types of information,” wrote Judge Leslie E. Stein, writing for the majority.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Politicians' web browsing history targeted after privacy vote

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2017 10:47:00 -0700

Two GoFundMe campaigns have raised more than $290,000 in an effort to buy the web browsing histories of U.S. politicians after Congress voted to allow broadband providers to sell customers’ personal information without their permission.

It’s unclear if those efforts will succeed, however. Even though Congress scrapped the FCC’s ISP privacy rules last week, the Telecommunications Act still prohibits telecom providers from selling personally identifiable information in many cases. 

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MalwareBytesSecurity
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Your ISP, browsing history, and what to do about it

Credit to Author: William Tsing| Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2017 17:17:02 +0000

In late March, Congress approved a bill lifting restrictions imposed on ISPs last year concerning what they could do with information such as customer browsing habits, app usage history, location data, and Social Security numbers. Given that the repealed restrictions hadn’t yet come into effect, the immediate impact of the new bill is somewhat unclear. But given what typically happens with massive stores of aggregated, location-specific customer data, the prognosis is not good.

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The post Your ISP, browsing history, and what to do about it appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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WikiLeaks’ Assange gets relief from left victory in Ecuador

Credit to Author: John Ribeiro| Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2017 04:18:00 -0700

The win in Ecuador’s presidential elections of leftist government candidate Lenin Moreno will likely provide relief to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, who had been threatened with eviction from the country’s embassy in London by the opposition candidate.

The election in the South American country had aroused interest in part because the conservative opposition candidate, Guillermo Lasso, had said that if elected he would evict Assange within 30 days of assuming power, because it was costing the country too much to keep him at the embassy.

The embassy is being constantly monitored by U.K. police ever since Assange slipped into it in 2012 and was granted asylum by the Ecuador government. Police say they will arrest Assange if he comes out of the embassy to meet an extradition request from Sweden in connection with an investigation into a sexual assault. Assange supporters are concerned that he may be moved from Sweden to the U.S. to face charges in connection with several leaks of confidential U.S. government information.

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