Australia Minister: Google’s Privacy Policy is Creepy

Australia’s communications minister Stephen Conroy isn’t happy with Google’s latest privacy blunders. He called Google’s privacy policy “a bit creepy;” specifically, he said that the recent incident, where Google was caught collecting private wireless data, was the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy.”

Google has apologized for collecting WiFi data from private households, and deleted all the data in its posession. Furthermore, Google claims that the entire incident was a mistake.

“In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data,” Google wrote in a blog post.

Stephen Conroy doesn’t buy that explanation. “It was actually quite deliberate… The computer program that collected it was designed to collect this information,” he said.

Conroy’s accusations stem from the fact that Google criticized Australian Government’s plan, spearheaded by Conroy, to apply a nation-wide Internet filter.

“They consider that they are the appropriate people to make the decisions about people’s privacy data,” Conroy said, adding a jab or two at everyone’s favorite target when it comes to privacy issues, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, Conroy said, is “corporate giant who is answerable to no one and motivated solely by profit”.

It’s true; handling over our privacy to private corporations, primarily motivated by profit, is dangerous. However, who can say that governments are any better than private corporations? One needn’t look further than China, whose policy of censoring Internet content created a rift between Google and the world’s most populous country. While governments and big corporations fight for the right to “protect” people’s privacy, for the rest of us it feels like being between a rock and a hard place.

How to use Encrypted Google Search from your Firefox Search Bar

Now that Google has released an encrypted Google web search (background info here), you’ll want to make it your default search engine in the Firefox “Search Box”. This tutorial will show you how to do just that.

Using the encrypted version of Google search will very likely become the “default” in the coming months. For the time being, you have to specifically visit https://www.google.com to run an encrypted search. Note the s in the https part of the URL. That means the data being sent back and forth is encrypted, using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). You may have noticed that Gmail has been using SSL for quite a while now (https://mail.google.com) and your Online Banking almost certainly uses SSL as well.

Following the instructions in this tutorial will allow you to change your default Search Engine in the Firefox Search Bar from Google (or whatever it is now) to the “Secure” Google search.

1-Start out by downloading and installing the Firefox addon Add to Search Bar. As with all Firefox addons, you’ll need to restart Firefox before the addon becomes active. Do so now.

 

2-Now open https://www.google.com in a new Firefox tab or window. Right-click (or ctrl-click for Mac folks) anywhere in the search box and select Add to Search Bar… from the menu.

  

 3-A window will pop up asking you to give this “new search engine” a name. I used Secure Google (as seen in the screenshot below). You can also assign it a keyword, but that’s not required. Click OK.

  

 4-Now take a look at your Search Bar – the name in the background will be whatever name you gave

your new search option (again, mine was Secure Google).

  

5-Every time you search for something from the Firefox Search Bar when Secure Google (or whatever you named it) is selected, you’ll be running an encrypted search.

  

6-You can make your new secure Google search the default option by clicking the small drop-down arrow in the Search Bar and then selecting Manage Search Engines… from the menu.

  

7-Select your new ’secure Google search’ entry by clicking on it once, and then click the Move Up button until it’s the top one. Click OK.

  

8-Now every single time you run a search from the Firefox Search Bar, it will use the secure and encrypted SSL version of Google Search. 

Microsoft throws a helping of vivacious onto Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 line

 

What good is a BlueTrack mouse in only pink and gray? Not nearly as good as one splashed in every pastel you can think of, and especially not as good as a new trio of varied ones. Microsoft's Wireless Mobile Mose 3500 family -- announced earlier this year as some of the most portable BlueTrack mice this planet has ever seen -- just gained three new vivid members, and each of 'em are on sale now at Best Buy for a penny under $30. If we had to guess, we'd say these are perfect for the KIN demographic. Hey, stereotypes don't just form from thin air, you know... 

Dalai Lama Uses Twitter to Circumvent Chinese Government

The Dalai Lama, having only been a Twitter user since late February, is already using
 the platform to circumvent Chinese censorship.Today the Tibetan spiritual leader held a one-hour
  question-and-answer session via Twitter to respond to questions submitted by Chinese web users. The Twitter chat was hosted by Chinese writer Wang Lixiong who met with the Dalai Lama in a New York hotel room. The Dalai Lama’s Twitter responses were translated by a Chinese interpreter and tweeted on Lixiong’s Twitter account. A translated portion of the conversation from Lixiong’s Twitter profile can be seen below.

The Twitter chat was a strategic maneuver on behalf of Wang and the Dalai Lama to communicate directly with the Chinese people despite long-time opposition from Chinese officials.

According to the AFP’s report, “Nearly 12,000 people selected the 250 questions by online voting done on a Google Moderator site, which was blocked in China on Thursday.”

Another report writes that, “the Dalai Lama tweeted messages of criticism about the Chinese government’s policies in Tibet and words of welcome to Chinese citizens.”

It’s not known how many Chinese people were able to follow the tweets as Twitter is blocked in China. Still there are an estimated 150,000 people in China who use Twitter, and access to the Dalai Lama’s responses were accessible via third-party Twitter applications.

Is Google Discriminating Against “Cougars?”

A website called CougarLife, a dating network targeted toward “women in their prime,” has called Google out for sexism because the search engine has classified CougarLife ads as not safe for families. But CougarLife’s CEO says Google doesn’t make the same distinction for “sugar daddy”-type dating sites, whose ads can be seen by anyone.

A Google rep told the National Post today that the classification of CougarLife ads as for-adults-only was “not just about the ad, it’s about the ad and the landing page of the site[...] Anything that’s considered non-family safe will not run on the Google content network at this point.”

But defining “family-safe” is a confusing exercise in community standards, it seems.

HOW TO: Get Notified When Someone Hacks Your Facebook

Facebook just announced a tool that notifies you by e-mail or SMS text message when someone logs into your Facebook profile from an unknown computer.

The idea is to help you recognize when a hacker has broken into your account so you can respond quickly by either changing your password (if that’s still possible) or contacting Facebook.

Once you enable the notifications, you’ll be required to identify each computer you use to log in when you first use it and choose whether or not it’s a private or public machine. You’ll be able to see a history of registrations from machines potentially used by hackers, and of course those hackers will be forced to type something into the identification field to get in, so you should be able to tell whether it was just a login that you forgot or not.

Here’s a quick guide to turning this feature on and using it.

Step 1: Go to Account Settings and Enable Notifications

 When you’re logged into Facebook, you’ll see the word “Account” in the top right corner of the browser window. Click there to get a drop-down menu of options, then click on “Account Settings,” as pictured below.
You’ll end up looking at a page that lists ways you can customize your account, including “Name,” “Password,” “Linked Accounts” and “more.” As long as you don’t navigate away from the “Settings” tab, you’ll see “Account Security” close to the bottom of the list. Click “change” on the right to show the following option:

Check “Yes” when you see the prompt, “Would you like to receive notifications for logins from new devices?” Then click “Save.” The feature is turned on. Now we’ll show you how to use it.

Step 2: Log In and Register Your Computer 

The settings won’t be customizable until you register the computer you’re logged in with, so you’ll have to first log out and then log back in. You can do this from the “Accounts” button in the top-right corner, as we mentioned before. When you log in again, you’ll see a screen titled “Register this computer.”

  

 Type the name of the computer in (it can be anything you want as long as it’s something you’ll recognize and remember), and choose whether you want Facebook to remember this computer or not.

Facebook suggests a good rule of thumb: If the computer is a public one (like one you’d use at a library, a shared work computer or a machine in your school’s computer lab), leave the box unchecked so it will have to be registered each time a new login occurs, leading to an email or text notification.

If it’s a machine you use every day, then go ahead and check the box; you probably don’t want to receive an email every time you log into Facebook from a safe place!

 

 Now that your computer is registered, you can see more options when you revisit the “Account Settings” page where you first enabled the notifications. You’ll see a history of registrations; it won’t record every time you log into a computer that’s already registered, but it will record every new registration, which should include at least the first time any hacker logs in.

You can check or uncheck the option to have the immediate notifications sent to your cell phone via text message in addition to the basic email option.