” The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.
The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online communications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.”
” An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug that has exposed a collection of popular websites — from Airbnb and Yahoo to NASA and OKCupid — could be one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. If you have logged into any of the affected sites over the past two years, your account information could be compromised, allowing cybercriminals to snap up your credit card information or steal your passwords.
You’re likely either affected directly or indirectly by the bug, which was found by a member of Google‘s security team and a software firm named Codenomicon. The bad news: There’s not a lot you can do about it now. It’s the responsibility of Internet companies to update their servers to deal with Heartbleed, and once they do, you can take action (see below).
The issue involves network software called OpenSSL, which is an open-source set of libraries for encrypting online services. Secure websites — with “https” in the URL (“s” stands for secure) — make up 56% of websites, and nearly half of those sites were vulnerable to the bug. In theory, a cybercriminal could have exploited Heartbleed by making network requests that could piece together your sensitive data. The good news: There isn’t any indication that a hacker caught wind of this; it seems the researchers were the first to locate the problem.”
Read more at Mashable and learn how to save your data
” Today, there are full-page advertisements running in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, and The Hill. They all have the same message: big tech companies are calling on Congress to rein in the mass surveillance. You can read the full message on the newly-launched Reform Government Surveillance site.
This is a victory for users—with the companies taking a giant step forward in supporting their customers’ rights. The five basic principles they announced today include:
Limiting Governments’ Authority to Collect Users’ Information
Oversight and Accountability
Transparency About Government Demands
Respecting the Free Flow of Information
Avoiding Conflicts Among Governments
While these are all valuable, the first one particularly heartened us: “Governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications.” With these principles, the companies are joining digital citizens worldwide in demanding a stop to the unrestrained, mass surveillance of our digital lives.”
It’s about time . Don’t forget that these companies were very quick to roll over and give the government everything that it demanded as far as access to our personal data and while we commend them for their newfound love of privacy one can only wonder if this letter would have ever come about without the revelations from Edward Snowden being made public . For now color us cautiously optimistic regarding these corporations recently acquired respect for the fourth amendment .
It is also worth noting that there are no cell phone carriers/providers among the companies clamoring for renewed privacy laws and therein lies a major drawback to the entire effort to re-establish our right to protection from illegal search and seizure .
” But notably absent from the coalition are telecom companies, like Verizon and AT&T. These companies have long been considered the weak link when it comes to government access request. AT&T just announced that it would not respond to shareholder requests to be transparent about its relationship with the NSA.”
” The National Security Agency has been collecting contacts from people’s personal e-mail address books and instant messaging accounts in an effort to detect relationships that might be crucial to government security, the Washington Post is reporting.
The agency is collecting the data from overseas points and many of the contacts belong to Americans, the Post reports.
The Post bases its report on word from senior intelligence officials and top secret documents, including a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden..
The majority of the contacts harvested come from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, but others also come from Facebook, Google and unspecified other providers, the Post reports. The contacts amount to a sizeable portion of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts, according to the news organization.”
Despite the revolving door of new algorithms and search engine policies, the fundamentalsof getting your content found have remained pretty consistent.
So, let’s save the hand-wringing and future-predicting for another day and keep it simple. Here’s what you need to know to optimize your blog posts for search.
Optimize Blog Post Headlines and URLs
Once you have your list of blog posts, you’ll want to make sure you’ve optimized the headlines. Keywords do best when they’re at the front of the headline. So, for example, if we’re trying to rank our content to appear for searches about inbound marketing: “Inbound Marketing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started” will do better than “Everything You Need to Know to Get Started With Inbound Marketing.”
Keywords are important, but you also want to write the sort of headline that is likely to get clicked and shared frequently. The frequency with which a piece of content gets shared can positively impact its ranking on search engine result pages. In fact, in recent years, social elements have been increasingly important to search. We’ll touch upon that more below in the Social Search section.”
The countries look funny because each one is scaled to number of Internet users it has.
The results are fascinating: Google dominates most of North America, Europe, south Asia and the south Pacific while Facebook wins out in the Spanish-speaking parts of the America, the Middle East, and North Africa.”
” Tech companies alleged to be partnering with the U.S. government in a mass Internet surveillance program are losing business, AFP reports.
“The Cloud Security Alliance said 10 percent of its non-US members have cancelled a contract with a US-based cloud provider, and 56 percent said they were less likely to use an American company,” said the publication.
The survey was conducted online between June 25 and July 9.”
The filing with the secret court, which issues warrants for collecting foreign intelligence inside the U.S., is the latest effort by Google to ease restrictions on disclosing the information the government has asked for under the surveillance program code-named Prism.
“We have long pushed for transparency so users can better understand the extent to which governments request their data — and Google was the first company to release numbers for National Security Letters,” Niki Fenwick, a spokeswoman for Google in Washington, said in an e-mail. To promote greater transparency, the company is seeking “to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately,” she said.”
Google is late to the party .
” Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO), yesterday became the latest technology company to give details of government data collection, following disclosures by Apple Inc. (AAPL), Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp., all of whom have revealed thousands of warrants for data from government entities.
Yahoo!, the largest U.S. Web portal, said it got as many as 13,000 requests for information from U.S. law enforcement agencies in the six months ending in May, with the most common types related to fraud, homicides and criminal investigations, Yahoo said in a posting on Tumblr. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said it can’t lawfully break out FISA requests, and it urged the U.S. government to reconsider its stance on the issue.”
” The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
London’s Guardian newspaper reported Friday that GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by the NSA.
According to documents obtained by The Guardian, PRISM would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required in Britain to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside of the country.”
Despite the spate of corporate denials it would appear that they are all willing participants … shame .
” In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”
In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry, said a lawyer with experience in bridging the gaps, neither side wants to risk a public fight. The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.“
The money quote …
“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.
” The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
If document requiring company to submit phone records for millions of Americans is authentic, it would be the broadest surveillance order known to date
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” “
Editor’s Note : This story first appeared a year ago but we missed it . However , in light of recent revelations regarding what seems to be normal procedure for various agencies of the federal government we thought it would be of interest to our readers .
” In a story appearing earlier today on the U.K’s Daily Mail website, it was reported that the DHS has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor various social networking sites. The list provides a glimpse into what DHS describes as “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.”
The list was posted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, before suing to obtain the release of the documents. The documents were part of the department’s 2011 ’Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.”
” (Update 1: Reading through the Desktop Binder, I discovered the DHS Twitter account is @dhsnocmmc1 and DHS appears to be using tweetdeck to monitor the various keywords. See Page 38 – Also interesting to note they seem to be using a Mac Mini as a server, and no password vaults. All Passwords appear to be shared in a plain text word document.)
(Update 2: On page 37, DHS instructs analysts to accept invalid SSL certificates forever without verification. Although invalid SSL warnings often appear in benign situations, they can also signal a man-in-the-middle attack.Not a good practice for the security conscience. Thanks to @obra on twitter for the tip.)”
Here are some of the keywords DHS is monitoring . Go here to see the whole list and read the DHS Desktop Binder.
” Reports say the Yahoo board has approved a $1.1 billion cash deal to acquire Tumblr. Yahoo’s board reportedly approved the deal in a meeting on Friday.
According to All Things D, the deal was a unanimous vote and it will be announced Monday morning.
Part of the deal stipulates that Tumblr CEO David Karp, will stay with Yahoo for at least four years and retain control over day-to-day management of the online service allowing the Tumblr brand to continue, but Yahoo will be helping to develop advertising.
The Wall Street Journal notes that Tumblr had just started focusing on building its advertising revenue after concentrating on building its user base as an easy-to-use blogging platform.
Tumblr has experience fast growth in recent years. According to WSJ, it had a worldwide traffic of about 117 million vistors in April, compared to 58 million the previous year, about 12 million unique visitors on smartphone, compared to about four million in the previous year. The site claims 108.4 million blogs and 50.9 billion posts. It had a US desktop traffic of 37 million in April, comparable to LinkedIn and Twitter although Twiiter has much more mobile traffic. “
” The folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation do such good work. Everyone who cares about freedom in the online world should send them a check (or some bitcoin.)”
” The phishers and on-line scammers are getting both more sophisticated and more determined, but you can still stay one step ahead of them.
Which ISP do you use? I’m with British Telecom, the largest ISP in the UK. BT as it is known – sometimes affectionately, sometimes not so – has partnered with Yahoo! so my BT Yahoo! account has a nifty protection gimmick developed by the American giant, the sign-in seal. If you’re not with Yahoo! or are unfamiliar with the concept, basically you upload a photo, scan or screengrab of your choice to your account, and whenever you sign in, you will see that seal. If you don’t see it, you have arrived at a fake website and are in the process of being scammed. How likely is that? The sad answer is very; here is what happened to Yours Truly today.”
” The billionaire founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has launched a new initiative to push for immigration reform, describing America’s current system as “unfit for today’s world.”
The group, called FWD.us, (pronounced Forward US), is backed by other Silicon Valley leaders including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer and Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of Linkedin.
“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world,” Zuckerberg wrote in an editorial for The Washington Post to launch the lobby group.
Zuckerberg said FWD.us would push for:
● Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.
● Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.
● Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.
This year demand for skilled-worker visas, known as H-1Bs, outstripped the entire year’s supply in the first week that companies were allowed to file applications.”
” Excerpted from The Hill: Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) wants to create a “virtual Congress,” where lawmakers would leverage videoconferencing and other remote work technology to conduct their daily duties in Washington from their home districts.
Under a resolution Pearce introduced on Thursday, lawmakers would be able to hold hearings, debate and vote on legislation virtually from their district offices.
While Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer may have recently nixed the Web company’s work-from-home policy to boost its performance, Pearce believes a remote work arrangement may benefit Congress and make lawmakers more accountable to folks in their home districts.
Pearce says the resolution would eradicate the need for members to jet back and forth from their districts to Washington each weekend. This would allow lawmakers to spend more time with their constituents rather than the armies of lobbyists from K St., he argues.”
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