Who spies on your browsing history?
We’ve written before about the security vulnerability that allows websites to sniff your browsing history. A paper from UC San Diego computer science department researchers, “An Empirical Study of Privacy-Violating Information Flows in JavaScript Web Applications,” surveys which websites use this invasive technique against their users. YouPorn tops the list, but PerezHilton, Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users’ browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.
Google to Enter Ebooks Market
Google is set to enter the ebooks market. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google Editions, the new ebook store is set to open by the end of 2010 for the U.S. and in the first quarter of 2011 for international editions. The venture was supposed to launch this past summer, but there were technical and legal issues that led to the delay. The new venture could shake up the ebook market. Google will sell ebooks on a new open, “read anywhere” model. Consumers can buy the books many places, including at independent book stores and on many websites. The WSJ reports:
What?s behind YouTube and Mechanical Turk?
This is the second provocation on the theme of digital labor from me and Ramesh Srinivasan. To warm up, check out Saskia Sassen at last year?s Internet as Playground and Factory as she warns us about how financial logicians uses networked technologies to manipulate human ingenuity:
Google to Block Piracy-Related Terms from Autocomplete
from Mashable! by Jolie O’Dell
What Google?s Acquisition of Groupon Would Mean for LivingSocial
from Mashable! by Lauren Indvi
Russia: Leading Activist Blogger on How Internet Changes Politics
from Global Voices Online by Gregory Asmolov
Google is polluting the internet | Micah White | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
New Facebook Profiles Now Available [SCREENSHOTS]
from Mashable! by Brenna Ehrlich
European Commission Opens Antitrust Investigation Against Google
from Mashable! by Christina Warren
RESULTS: Cyber Monday Facebook Usage
While Cyber Monday is a big day for online retailers, it appears as though Facebook isn?t yet the primary source for finding out about cyber monday deals.
Location, Location, Location: Three Recent Court Controversies on Cell Phone & GPS Tracking (and a Congressional Hearing, Too)
Welcome to the 21st century, where we all carry tracking devices in our pockets and where one morning you might find an FBI-installed GPS tracking device on your car. In this age of location-based-everything, the legal question of whether or not the government has to get a search warrant based on probable cause before secretly tracking you becomes all the more important. Three recent court developments from across the country ? and a Congressional hearing ? put a fine point on this key privacy controversy for the mobile era.
Egyptian Court Gives Six Month Sentence To Facebook Poster
from All Facebook by Jackie Cohen
FTC’s New Privacy Report Endorses “Do Not Track” Mechanism to Empower Online Consumers
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission released its long-anticipated privacy report. The report is the final result of a series of FTC privacy roundtables held earlier this year that solicited comments from leading scholars, industry figures and nonprofits including EFF about the consumer privacy challenges posed by new technologies.
Secrets of the “New Music Industry” that the “Old Music Industry” Doesn’t Want to Know
This week’s news that the feds seized 82 websites based on allegations of copyright infringement demonstrated that government website seizures can silence innocent speech. But let’s take a broader view for a moment. The domain seizure debacle, the COICA Internet censorship bill, ACTA, and many other short-sighted efforts to eliminate copyright infringement all depend on (a) the traditional entertainment industry’s yowling wail that “piracy” on the the Internet is injuring the livelihoods of artists and (b) the US government’s chronically uncritical acceptance of those complaints.
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