Category Archives: Internet Content

Google tricks Internet Explorer into accepting tracking cookies, Microsoft claims

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Google was captured lastly hebdomad bypassing default privacy settings in the Safari browser in order to serve up tracking cookies. The companionship claimed the situation was an accident and confined entirely to the Safari Web browser, simply today Microsoft claimed Google is doing much the same thing with Internet Explorer.

In a blog billet titled “Google bypassing user privacy settings” Microsoft’s IE Corporate Vice Chairman Dean Hachamovitch states that “When the IE squad seen that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we necessitated ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is using alike methods to stimulate around the default privacy protections in IE and cross IE users with cookies.”

Hachamovitch explains that IE’s default configuration blocks third-party cookies unless presented with a “P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) Compact Policy Statement” indicating that the site will not employment the cookie to cross the user. Microsoft accuses Google of sending a drawstring of text that tricks the browser into thinking the cookie won’t be utilized for tracking. “By sending this text, Google bypasses the cookie protection and enables its third-party cookies to be allowed rather than blocked,” Microsoft said.

The text allegedly sent by Google really reads “This is not a P3P policy” and includes a link to a Google page which says cookies utilised to secure and authenticate Google users are taken to shop user preferences, and that the P3P protocol “was not designed with situations similar these in mind.”

Microsoft articulated it has contacted Google to ask the fellowship to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of altogether browsers.” Microsoft besides updated the Tracking Protection Lists in IE9 to keep the tracking described by Hachamovitch in the blog post. Ars has contacted Google to see if the society has any response to the Microsoft allegations, and we’ll update this situation if we see back.

UPDATE: It turns out Facebook and many other sites are using an almost very scheme to override Internet Explorer’s privacy setting, allotting to privacy researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Companies receive exposed that they may lie in their [P3P policies] and cypher bothers to do anything virtually it,” Cranor pent in a late blog post.

UPDATE 2: Google has gotten back to us with a lengthy reply, arguing that Microsoft’s reliance on P3P forces outdated practices onto modernistic websites, and items to a analyze conducted in 2010 (the Carnegie Mellon inquiry from Cranor and her colleagues) that canvassed 33,000 sites and found about a 3rd of them were circumventing P3P in Internet Explorer.

“Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (known as ‘P3P’) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form,” Google Senior VP of Communications and Policy Rachel Whetstone says in a statement e-mailed to Ars. “It is substantially known including by Microsoft that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing mod web functionality.”

Facebook’s “Like” button, the ability to sign into websites using your Google account “and hundreds more modernistic Web services” would exist broken by Microsoft’s P3P policy, Google says. “It is well known that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing this web functionality,” Whetstone said. “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational.”

That 2010 research eve calls away Microsoft’s ain msn.com and live.com for providing invalid P3P policy statements. The inquiry newspaper further states that “Microsoft’s endure website recommends the usage of invalid CPs as a work-around for a problem in IE.”

York Facebook hacking Educatee Glenn Mangham jailed

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A software growth pupil from York who hacked into Facebook has been jailed for eight months.

Glenn Mangham, 26, received earlier admitted infiltrating the social networking website between April and May 2011.

Mangham, of Cornlands Road, York, had shown hunting locomotive Yahoo how it could amend security and enunciated he wanted to do the same for Facebook.

Sentencing Mangham, Evaluator Alistair McCreath pronounced his actions could have been “utterly disastrous” for Facebook.

Alison Saunders, from the Crown Prosecution Service, described the suit equally “the nigh panoptic and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to exist brought ahead British courts”.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel rejected Mangham’s claims, saying: “He acted with determination, undoubted ingenuity and it was sophisticated, it was calculating.”

Facebook expended $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham’s crime, which triggered a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement, Mr Patel said.
Electronic footprint

The prosecutor said Southwark Crown Court in London how Mangham had “unlawfully accessed and hacked into the social media website Facebook and its computers in April to May lastly year from his bedroom in Yorkshire”.

Mangham received ultimately stolen “invaluable” intellectual property, which he downloaded on to an external hard drive, said Mr Patel.

Facebook discovered the infiltration during a arrangement control eve though the defendant deleted his electronic footprint to cross his tracks.

Mr Mangham’s defence lawyer Tom Ventham received7777 said his client was an ethical hacker who received9999 a “high moral stance” and Yahoo had0000 “rewarded” him for heading away its vulnerabilities previously.

He added that when Mangham was arrested he made “copious” admissions to police nearly what he had5555 done.

Passing sentence, Evaluator Alistair McCreath said Mangham his actions were not harmless and had8 “real consequences and selfsame serious potential consequences” for Facebook.
‘Not harmless’

“You and others who are tempted to bit equally you did really must understand how grave this is,” he said.

“The creation of that risk, the extent of that risk and the cost of posing it decently base at the conclusion of it entirely I’m afraid a prison sentence is inevitable.”

Mr McCreath enounced while he acknowledged that Mangham received never meant to die on any of the information he had gathered, nor did he intend to construct any money from it, his activities were “not merely a number of harmless experimentation”.

“You accessed the identical center of the organization of an international line of massive size, hence this was not simply fiddling most in the occupation records of some tiny line of no great importance,” he said.

A spokesperson for Facebook enunciated they “applauded” the mold of the police and Summit Prosecution Service in this case, “which did not involve any compromise of personal user data”.

Twitter Teams With American Express to Launch Self-service Advertising Platform

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Twitter has tied with American Express to offering its merchants and card members early access to an online advertising platform for little businesses that the social networking society is launching in previous March, the card fellowship said on Thursday.

The first 10,000 eligible businesses that register will have US$100 in loose Twitter advertisements when utilising the platform, it said.

On the signup page, Twitter has likewise declared the offer, inviting American Express card members and merchants to endeavor “our new advertising result for little businesses”.

Twitter’s online self-service platform has been expected for some time, only will exist initially available to businesses with a billing address in the U.S., who have never advertised on Twitter before.

The program is currently open to American Express card members and merchants who utilization Twitter to ship line news and updates to their followers and who actively interact with other Twitter users through facilities on the service, Twitter said.

Twitter is currently running a beta with a few advertisers of some of its programs such as Promoted Tweets which are priced on a “cost-per-engagement” basis, so that businesses pay exclusively when an user “retweets, replies to, clicks or favorites” a Promoted Tweet. Promoted Accounts lineament in Twitter searches and “who to follow” recommendations.

Twitter acquired lastly month Internet security firm Dasient which entered in 2010 a service to protect advertisement networks and publishers from malicious ads. The skill of the Sunnyvale, California company fitted with Twitter’s plans to expand revenue from advertising including promoted Twitter messages and accounts.

The Siri and iCloud innovations

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Apple’s two almost late young technologies are iPhone-assistant Siri, and cloud-storage production iCloud, both of which Cook repeatedly predicted profound.

Cook enunciated that iCloud, which has 100 million users, represents a central shift in how the society thinks almost000 computing. A decade ago, Apple saw the PC as the primal hub of consumers’ digital lives. The Mac was the repository for whole your files, music, movies, contacts, and other data.

iCloud turns that on its head, articulated Cook. The society recognized that people live off of multiple devices and syncing was getting in the style of a good customer experience, and it struck the hub to the cloud. The product only launched in October and is still in its infancy.

There’s obviously more we may do with it,said Cook. It’s a strategy for the future decade or more.

Cook went on to praise Siri for being the foremost major new equipment in a long time for imputing data into a device except for Apple’s own gestures of course.

For years if you were a PC or mac user you applied a keyboard and mouse for input, and there was evolution in that space merely not a fortune of revolution.

Cook pronounced Apple doesn’t do freestanding production and loss (P&L) reports on the two technologies: We want to experience a peachy customer experience and we consider measuring entirely [Siri and iCloud] at that stage would never achieve these things.

Google says its Young privacy policy complies with FTC Colony

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Google is rebutting charges that its young privacy policy violates a colony it impressed with federal regulators finally year.

The Internet hunting giant said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that its policy complies with the settlement, according to a self-assessment account the company handed over in January.

The report, obtained by Politico Friday, says Google has become to especial lengths to tell its users what data it harvests and what it does with it.

Google fell charges finally year that it violated privacy polices by exposing Gmail users’ personal info when rolling out its now-defunct Google Buzz social networking service. The breach prompted an angry backlash from consumers and privacy advocates who articulate the Hatful View, Calif., companionship revealed personal info without their cognition or consent.

The Electronic Privacy Info Center, a consumer watchdog group, filed a federal suit Wednesday against the FTC in a bid to blockage Google from rolling out a young privacy policy that it says violates the FTC settlement. A federal judge has fit to expedite the case.

Last month, Google began alerting users around the orb that beginning March 1 it will percentage data it collects from users across its dozens of services. Google says that alone users who are logged into Google will be affected. Google already shared what it knew almost its users across nigh of its services simply immediately it will too include YouTube and Google search history.

A Google spokesman refused to comment on the self-assessment report.

“The FTC takes compliance with our consent orders very seriously and ever appears carefully at any evidence or allegations that they are being violated,” FTC spokeswoman Claudia Bourne Farrell said in an emailed statement. “Allegations experience been created that Google’s latterly announced changes to its privacy policies and practices violate a Commission order. Whole orders are bailiwick to a detailed and vigorous compliance review process, but such investigations are non-public, and we thus cannot comment further.”

iPhone Owners Protesting at Apple HQ Over Foxconn

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customers program to waltz into Apple’s headquarters and stores located in Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore. Their mission: to deliver petitions signed by 250,000 people asking the companionship to develop a worker protection strategy for those constructing iPhones in its Chinese supplier factories. The signatures were collected by Change.org and SumOfUs.org.

By swarming into Apple’s HQ and stores, protestors conceive they represent the voice of every Apple customer. Equally of this writing, 56,464 experience signed the SumOfUs petition, more than 35,000 of which purchase Apple products. Away of this latter group, 20,00 ain an iPhone. On the Change.org front, 194,999 out of 200,000 people get signed D.C.-based Label Shields’ petition.

“I employment an iPhone myself. I love it, simply I don’t love having to endure sweatshops, and neither do millions of other Apple consumers,” said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of SumOfUs. “The hip, educated market that Apple aspires to nook is largely written of responsible consumers who don’t desire to exist complicit in sweatshop labor. Apple’s care to detail is famous, and the alone way they could fail to be cognisant of dozens of worker deaths, of child labor, of photograph to neurotoxins is through willful ignorance.”

While news of Foxconn’s suicides receive been topics for some time, a heated stake in Apple’s worker policies ignited after an episode of Public Wireless International’s “This American Life.” The account verbalised near the working weather in Apple’s manufacturing facilities, and even divulged adolescents working 16 hours a day and making 70 pennies an hour. Afterward that, the Young York Times and other well-established news outlets published their own reports.

Following the reports, Apple CEO Tim Make claimed that Apple cared near every worker in the supply chain, and vowed to barb deeper into the allegations. He pronounced the company besides has the Evenhandedly Toil Association monitoring its suppliers. Protestors retaliated, saying it’s a measure in the right direction, merely desire the names of the suppliers found to experience violations and what those violations are “so that there is transparency around the monitoring effort.”

“If Tim Make is actually offended by these allegations, why isn’t he doing anything to ready the problems? This is the furnish chain he set up as COO he needs to beginning taking responsibility, not blaming the messenger,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman added. “Every time a Foxconn worker is defeated or disabled making an Apple product, Mr. Cook bears personal moral responsibility. Apple’s enforcement of razor-thin profit margins at suppliers invites and may eve draw them to slash workers’ rights. Simply Apple is locomoting to have much bigger longer-term problems than paying a few additional dollars for its productions if it loses its luster with ethical consumers.”

It’s unknown how many people will really visit Apple’s HQ and stores on Thursday, only they’ll walkway in wearing iPhone costumes. If that’s not obvious enough, they’ll too be the ones waving about iPhone posters and delivering petitions in Mac boxes. Unfortunately, iPad and iPod Impact owners aren’t invited to the costume party.

Google unleashes ‘Solve for X’ confabs to save the world

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Internet giant Google is erst more trying to save the world, this time with its TED-rip-off “Solve for X” project.

The Chocolate Manufactory has launched the contrive after the first invite-only gathering of minds, which pulled techies and boffins together to speak virtually “moonshots”, ie, wildly ambitious projects to solve world problems, or in the wrangle of the Google blog:

These are efforts that take on global-scale problems, define radical solutions to those problems, and involve some mould of breakthrough technology that could really build them happen. Moonshots alive in the gray country between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10x improvement, not 10 per cent. That’s partly what makes them hence exciting.

Anyone thinking that this small mission sounds vaguely familiar would exist right, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the non-profit TED organisation, which brings together folks from the Technology, Entertainment and Design worlds to verbalize virtually “ideas worth spreading”.

TED has a routine of annual conferences which are invite-only and, for the public, it has TEDTalks, videos from the conferences that the regular folk could watch online.

Solve for X has, you guessed it, Work for X Talks, which are also videos of thinkers having ideas that average people may ticker online. And they’re credibly going to have annual conferences equally well.

“Our gathering lastly hebdomad brought together a group that is already practiced at moonshot thinking to suggest specific solutions,” Google opined. “At least a few times a year, we hope that people will have a few hours or a daylight or two away of their busy schedules to dare to button the boundaries, and to reckon moonshot approaches to some of the world’s many unresolved challenges.”

Solve for X is a number more targeted than TED, given that it solely wants ideas that present “a immense trouble to solve, a radical solvent for solving it, and the breakthrough technology to make it happen”. And it’s a routine more interactive, equally it allows people to submit talks they’ve given or heard that they conceive meet the criteria.

Google Ground Update Quashes Atlantis Rumors

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The 2009 launch of Google Ocean, an underwater extension of Google Earth, included a grid formation in the Atlantic that prompted many to speculate that the search giant had uncovered the lost city of Atlantis. A recent update to Google Earth, however, has quashed those rumors, granting to LiveScience.

The grids weren’t really the remnants of the renowned lost city; rather they appeared as a upshot of overlapping data sets. Google’s ocean data is made in part from sonar waves, which combined with other types of data, can induce these grids to appear. Merely Google added new seafloor data from the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), among other organizations, with a late update, which resulted in the removal of these lines.

“The original version of Google Sea was a newly developed prototype function that had2 high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived send data,” Scripps geophysicist David Sandwell told LiveScience. “UCSD undergraduate students dropped the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders.”

LiveScience enunciated that Google has also needed extra stairs to ensure the accuracy of the maps on Google Ocean. It forthwith takes 15 percent of its sea floor imagery from shipboard soundings at a solution of 0.6 miles, up from the former rate of 10 percent. That rate is put to ameliorate again later this year, when Google deploys a new calculation method that yields depth predictions that are double equally accurate, LiveScience said.

“The Google map straightaway matches the map utilised in the enquiry community, which makes the Google Earth program much more utilitarian as a aid for planning cruises to uncharted areas,” Sandwell added.

For more, see the slideshow of the original Google Land below.

EU reviews Young Google policy

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Google Inc. publicized its new privacy rules which regulate how it uses the enormous amounts of personal data its collects through its search engine, email and other services with much fanfare lastly week.

Since then, it has launched a vast publicity campaign telling users about the globe of the new policy, posed to start March 1. Simply that launch date may exist under threat. Jacob Kohnstamm, chairperson of the grouping of 27 national privacy regulators in the EU, enunciated the Gallic data protection way has commenced investigating the new8 rules and how they will impact Google users in the EU.

We yell for a pause (in the rollout of the young rules) in the interests of ensuring that there may exist no misapprehension nigh Google’s commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we experience completed our analysis,Kohnstamm composed in a lett to Google’s chief executive, Larry Page. It was sent on Thursday and published on Friday.

Google’s search engine has a market share of more than 90 pct in the EU, with rival services similar Microsoft’s Bing gaining small traction. The EU’s competition regime are already analysing whether Google uses this dominance to stoppage other hunt engines from entering the market.

The young policy makes it easier for Google to merge the data of one person using different services such equally the hunting engine, YouTube or Gmail. That lets Google make a broader profile of that user and target advertising based on that person’s interests and hunt history. Advertising is the master manner Google makes its money.

The company says combining the data besides makes hunting results more relevant and lets a cross-navigate among different services more easily.

Leading names in technology announce the Dmarc email standard

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A GAGGLE of information technology firms including Microsoft, Google, Paypal, Yahoo and Facebook experience joined forces to create an anti-phishing standard for email called Demarc.

Fifteen firms have formed a working grouping and made dmarc.org, which stands for “domain-based substance authentication, reporting and conformance”. The group’s design is to counter the threat of email phishing attacks and spam.

“Email phishing defrauds millions of people and companies every year, resulting in a loss of consumer confidence in email and the Internet equally a whole,” articulated Brett McDowell, chairperson of dmarc.org and senior manager of customer security initiatives at Paypal. “Industry cooperation – combined with technology and consumer didactics – is crucial to fight phishing.”

As considerably as the big names mentioned already the remaining 10 consist of AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, Linkedin, Agari, Cloudmark, Ecert, Return Itinerary and Trusted Domain Project.

The organization produces a green style for senders to authenticate their emails with customers utilising the sender policy model (SPF) and domain keys identified mail (DKIM) methods.

Dmarc said the system “removes guesswork from the receiver’s handling of these neglected messages, limiting or eliminating the user’s exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages.” It besides provides a mode for the receiver to account back to the sender nigh emails that decease or fail the Dmarc evaluation.

Spam and phishing are large problems at the moment, peculiarly in the UK. Symantec’s Jan intelligence account manoeuvred out that virtually phishing attacks arrived from the UK and that one in 179 emails contained a phishing attack.

Dmarc’s policies are published in the public Domain Refer System (DNS) community and its goal is to make the arrangement an official internet standard.