Interesting password trends

Privacy patterns are design solutions to common privacy problems — a way to translate "privacy-by-design" into practical advice for software engineering. We believe design patterns can help document common practices and standardize terminology and while we're starting with a set of patterns for location-based services, we hope to build a living, community space where all can contribute their own patterns.

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"Many introverts seem to know this instinctively, and resist being herded together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game development company in Emeryville, Calif., initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. “It was one big warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,” recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. “We switched over to cubicles and were worried about it — you’d think in a creative environment that people would hate that. But it turns out they prefer having nooks and crannies they can hide away in and just be away from everybody.”

Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the same companies performed at roughly the same level — but that there was an enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers at the top-performing companies wasn’t greater experience or better pay. It was how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly."

RT @sramji: Apple on Location & iPhone < one of the best pieces of corporate communication I've seen since Jobs ...

"A browser extension that stops major third parties and search engines <br />
from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do"

"Your Portability Policy is a plain-language document that tells your visitors what they can easily bring in and take out. Steve Greenberg, chair of the working group that developed the idea, describes it like this: “In the same way that your Privacy Policy tells visitors what you can do with information they provide, your product’s Portability Policy tells visitors what they can do with it. It should be clear enough that an average user can understand, and short enough that people can actually read it.” The new site, PortabilityPolicy.org, contains a series of questions that will help guide you in creating a Portability Policy as well as several samples."

"The Tor Project has been working very closely with Nathan Freitas and The Guardian Project to create an Android release. This is an early beta release and is not yet suitable for high security needs. The Android web browser is not protected by Torbutton and we have not yet developed an anonymous browser on the Android platform. Please be cautious with this release, it's probably pretty fragile and it's certainly not ready for serious use."

" after answering the first question, you learn that almost everything on your profile, even if you use privacy settings to limit access, is available to the quiz."

"Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people's pages. It's basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don't have control over the data -- someone else does. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it's basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don't have control over it, and 2) you didn't create it in the first place. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with."

"Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It's called "privacy salience", and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein – all at Carnegie Mellon University – demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behaviour – "Have you ever cheated on an exam?" for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning – designed to make privacy concerns more salient – while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information."

"Invite friends to the network by email. Useful for communities that are not open to public. Generates emails containing links with random codes for registering, includes modified walledgarden to enable access to the invitations registering form and the forgotten password pages."

"Jonathan Anderson and Joseph Bonneau have been researching Facebook privacy and publishing papers on its flaws. In a nine page report they provided a series of detailed criticisms of the minutiae of the policy. The general problems they identified were: 1. The voting process is full of loopholes, and was essentially a publicity stunt that they called "democracy theatre"; 2. Facebook absolves itself of any responsibility for data security, leaving user information at the mercy of third parties; 3. Simple principles at the start of the Facebook documents are later on, deceptively, overridden by detailed legal language that users are unlikely to understand. After a three week silence, Facebook has released a trivial reply to the criticisms raised by the Cambridge group and others. None of the substantive points has been addressed, and the revised document is effectively identical to the original version, with merely superficial changes."

"to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it. Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?"

"Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails to be beamed to a central computer. Beyond individual actions, the devices capture a moving picture of the dorm’s social network. The students’ data is but a bubble in a vast sea of digital information being recorded by an ever thicker web of sensors, from phones to GPS units to the tags in office ID badges, that capture our movements and interactions. Coupled with information already gathered from sources like Web surfing and credit cards, the data is the basis for an emerging field called collective intelligence."

"Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users. Data about aggregate usage of users of the tools is published freely. You can see, for example, that the three sites most visited by users of these circumvention tools are live.com, google.com, and secretchina.com. Aggregate data like this is a terrific resource for those of us interested in researching circumvention tool usage, and not much of a privacy risk for the circumventing users if it is only stored (as well as displayed) in the aggregate."

Free application GPass helps you bypass censorship and blocked web sites by tunneling network traffic through encrypted proxy servers. After you install GPass, launching an application using the proxy is as simple as double-clicking the app from inside the GPass interface. GPass will launch the program with all the necessary tunneling in place. (via:lifehacker)

"It’s a stirring call to arms when Doctorow writes: “Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.” The framers of the American Constitution were in a sense a bunch of political science nerds too, pulling all-nighters to hack together the code for a government without tyranny. “Little Brother” argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

"After nine months, we will change some of the bits in the IP address in the logs; after 18 months we remove the last eight bits in the IP address and change the cookie information. We're still developing the precise technical methods and approach to this, but we believe these changes will be a significant addition to protecting user privacy.... It is difficult to guarantee complete anonymization, but we believe these changes will make it very unlikely users could be identified.... We hope to be able to add the 9-month anonymization process to our existing 18-month process by early 2009, or even earlier."

1st hand account of traveling without an id. excellent points about why requiring id isn't protecting anyone.

controversial online searchable database of criminal records that have privacy advocates (and people with speeding tickets on their record) completely freaked out. (via lifehacker)

The record industry will not be in charge of the characteristics of filesharing systems. They may get remunerated for their use, but they won't be able to dictate their functionality... If they want to cash in on filesharing, they'd better do it soon, bef

a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere

A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube

"Publishing content into a third party proprietary application is nothing more than sharecropping. You don’t truly own what you are doing, and you are not the primary beneficiary of your actions."

The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

Good overview here. interesting bit on how TC undermines the GPL.

"There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated.

the new monitoring, known as "deep-packet inspection," enables a far wider view -- every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered

Firefox extension which automatically switches an internet connection across one or more proxy servers based on URL patterns you define.

"seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones."

"connections being discoverable will drive the next wave of adoption of connection creation tools, just like content being discoverable is driving the current wave of adoption of content creation tools. "

"We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us." (also a good Kubrick observation)

The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.

It’s not just the passport that’s government property, but the particular form of identity it instantiates.

professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, handed out about 100 Nokia cell phones to MIT students and faculty. The phones were equipped with software that helped Pentland's team log interactions between the people carrying them.

Big shops are using elaborate technology to monitor and influence the behaviour of their customers

Whether SSN disclosure optional What law authorizes them to ask How it will be used if you give it to them Consequences of failure to provide

The cards contain two authentication keys, and a unique personal email address which is designed to be valid for life. It is used to forward communications to an individual’s ‘real’ email accounts.

The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.

"AdBlockPlus for Firefox will also block Beacon if you add a pattern for http://*facebook.com/beacon* to the list of filters"

the government is arguing that the contents of your emails have been voluntarily conveyed to your ISP and that you therefore have no privacy rights to it anymore

helps you to remove your name and personal information from thousands of marketing lists, data brokers and other organizations that send you unsolicited mail.

This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest

ated as such by the FTC, while ironically navigating the privacy minefield caused by its now defunct online toy retailer Toysmart. Toysmart has the distinction of being the first entity charged (versus successfully prosecuted) with a COPPA violation, beca

post a link to a notice of its information practices on the home page of its Web site or online service and at each area where it collects personal information from children.

provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 Minutes

send emails without your email address or any information about your identity

and hanging out with my friends, and we actually ended up sleeping together that night... And then the next day, she came over again, and ended up meeting the girl who she ended up becoming long-term girlfriends with.

a Mozilla Firefox browser extension that protects your privacy by silently defending against cache-based tracking techniques. It allows embedded content to be cached, but segments the cache according to the domain of the originating page.

Pages Ed Felten found interesting

Analyze logs data to refine search quality and build helpful new services Analyze logging patterns to identify, investigate and defend against malicious access and exploitation attempts Comply with legal obligations to retain data

"how the architecture that frames social life is changing and what it means for a generation growing up knowing that this shift is here to stay"

Enigmail is an extension to the mail client of Mozilla / Netscape and Mozilla Thunderbird which allows users to access the authentication and encryption features provided by GnuPG

Our Attention data has real value and needs to be protected. AttentionTrust is a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their Attention data. Until now, only companies on the other side of our clicking captured the value.

Opt-Out of lists supplied by Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion for firm offers of credit or insurance

AKA Private Browsing

In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program.

secure VoIP phone software, which lets you make secure phone calls over the Internet

With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

is easily extensible without having to visit the site. gives infinite aliases that forward to your real address. can choose 3-20 emails allowed from each alias

Disposable, single-serving email addresses

The RFID-Zapper is a gadget to deactivate (i.e. destroy) passive RFID-Tags permanently.

Virtual-Browser is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely. Unlike other proxies, there is no software to install or complicated instructions to follow.