Hacking Team Shows the World How Not to Stockpile Exploits Wired Top Stories by Kim Zetter Zero-day exploits are like gold to hackers. Keep them all in one place and you’re asking to get robbed. Caspar Bowden: NSA Hearing LIBE European Parliament, 24 September 2013 open Democracy News Analysis – by Caspar Bowden As a tribute to … Read more
XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications The Intercept by Morgan Marquis-Boire Illustrations by Blue Delliquanti and David Axe for The Intercept One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is … Read more
Europe: The Next Front in the Battle for Net Neutrality EFF.org Updates Americans won big on net neutrality in February, when the FCC voted to adoptnew rules that would allow it to rein in the abusive and discriminatory practices of big telecommunications operators, such as blocking or throttling of Internet data, and charging content providers for … Read more
The Sunday Times’ Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst — and Filled with Falsehoods The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald (updated below) Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to … Read more
How Richard Stallman does his computing kottke.org by Jason Kottke Richard Stallman, the free software activist and author of some of the world’s most used and useful software, probably uses his computer and the Internet a lot differently than you do. For starters, ethics and privacy concerns trump his need for convenience. EZTV Shuts Down After Hostile … Read more
Pirate Party Becomes Iceland’s Most Popular Political Party TorrentFreak On January 1, 2006, Rick Falkvinge founded the Swedish and first Pirate Party. The party has survived more than nine turbulent years while provoking heated discussion on copyright reform, privacy and freedom of speech. Icelandic Pirates soar: citizenship for Snowden? Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow The Icelandic Pirate … Read more
Wikipedia Sues NSA Over Dragnet Internet Surveillance The Intercept by Cora Currier Wikipedia is suing the NSA over surveillance programs that involve tapping internet traffic en masse from communications infrastructure in the U.S. in order to search it for intelligence purposes. Which VPN Services Take Your Anonymity Seriously? 2015 Edition TorrentFreak By now most Internet users are … Read more
The Pirate Bay Is Back Online! TorrentFreak Early December The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm. The Pirate Bay returns from the dead, comes back online The Next Web by Owen Williams Following a raid on a Swedish data center late last year, … Read more
Italy Launches Largest Ever Pirate Site Blockade TorrentFreak Alongside the United Kingdom, Italy is the most aggressive country in the world when it comes to blocking websites on copyright infringement grounds. Data-Driven Web Survival Guide The Purple Box by Andy Kahl If we’re going to make it through what’s sometimes described as a data-collection … Read more
Is Jetpack Misleading Users to Promote WordPress.com? WPBeginner by Editorial Staff Are you using Jetpack’s publicize feature on your site?Recently while browsing through Facebook, we found several folks sharing links where WordPress replaced the site domain. Along with that, the status also read like this: Michelle Schulp published an article in WordPress. Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi Flogged … Read more
Leak Exposes Hollywood’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy TorrentFreak The Sony Pictures leak has caused major damage to the Hollywood movie studio, but the fallout doesn’t end there. Contained in one of the leaked data batches is a complete overview of the MPAA’s global anti-piracy strategy for the years to come. Google moves engineers out of Russia BBC … Read more
President Obama writes his first line of Javascript Mashable! by Stan Schroeder The U.S. now has a “coder-in-chief:” President Barack Obama has written his first line of code Peter Sunde: The Pirate Bay Should Stay Down TorrentFreak A few weeks ago Peter Sunde was released from prison where he’d been serving a sentence for his involvement in … Read more
Finance media’s hottest club is Ello Nieman Journalism Lab by Caroline O’Donovan By now, you’ve probably heard of Ello, the anti-Facebook social networking site founded by a handful of graphic designers. Though initially meant to be a closed experiment in network building, Ello grew popular due to its anti-advertising, anti-data mining stance. As Kyle Chayka … Read more
EFF Relaunches Surveillance Self-Defense EFF.org Updates by Jillian York We’re thrilled to announce the relaunch of Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD), our guide to defending yourself and your friends from digital surveillance by using encryption tools and developing appropriate privacy and security practices. The site launches today in English, Arabic, and Spanish, with more languages coming soon. The Younger … Read more
The FBI Director’s Evidence Against Encryption Is Pathetic The Intercept by Dan Froomkin FBI Director James Comey gave a speech Thursday about how cell-phone encryption could lead law enforcement to a “very dark place” where it “misses out” on crucial evidence to nail criminals. To make his case, he cited four real-life examples — examples that … Read more