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The Webcam spy case in the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia has raised concern as to whether others with Webcams are vulnerable to remote spying. The school district admitted to activating the Webcams 42 times during a 14-month period, claiming that it did so only to track lost or stolen laptops.

But for anyone with a Webcam (and Webcams are now built in to many laptops and desktops), the question is whether you are vulnerable to having your Webcam remotely turned on. The answer is yes, though the newest version of the software used by the district to monitor its computers can no longer be used to activate Webcams or even track stolen computers.

According to Harriton High School student Phil Hayes, officials at the Lower Merion School District used a program called LANRev to manage and track the Macintosh laptops issued to students. The product was published by Pole Position Software, which was acquired last year by Vancouver, B.C.-based Absolute Software. An Absolute Software spokesman verified that it is also his understanding that the school used LANRev software.

Full Story ~ cnet news

Even if a school doesn’t do anything wrong or ever use their software to connect to the laptop webcams, spyware certainly could do so. Let’s take this a step further. Say that a spyware programmer knows of a school that is giving laptops to their students. The students could be specifically targeted in addition to accidentally (or ignorantly) being infected with spyware. This puts the students at risk to outsiders even if the school is responsible.

Are these computers thoroughly protected from spyware? Even if the answer is yes, it is not absolute protection and children are still at risk to predators using spyware to activate their webcam. The only acceptable answer to this webcam concern is for there to not be webcams in the school-provided laptops. As for laptop theft recovery, there are other methods and softwares that do not require webcams.

Additionally, I agree with the cnet writer about the microphone. That is also a potential weakness and would require a physical on/off switch on the laptop to disable (“muting” can be undone via spyware code). It wasn’t that long ago, it seems, that the concern was the government listening to us via our cellphones since the microphone could be turned on remotely. I’m sure that concern will show up again in the future.

For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

I still need to use some Google services–I have clients who share a couple of documents via Google Docs, I need to access one private blog on Blogger, and I will continue to use Google search (though I plan on exploring alternatives, such as Bing and Yahoo). But for the most part, I’m dropping Google wherever I can.

It was a combination of recent incidents that drove me to this point. One was the introduction of Google Buzz, which, in some cases, disclosed contact information that users thought was private. When Google launched Buzz, its “social networking tool,” the company didn’t let users opt into the program, but automatically applied it to all of the millions of users of the company’s free Gmail. Google quickly backtracked, but it is not clear whether the “turn off Buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail pages truly purges the links that Google created.

Full Story ~ PC World

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that from now on the company will post proposed changes to its terms of service and other policies for member input. If more than 7,000 people comment, the policy will be put to a vote and the result “will be binding if more than 30% of all active registered users vote.” Based on Facebook’s current 175 million user base, that’s nearly 53 million people. What isn’t clear is what happens if voter turnout is less than 30% which seems pretty likely given that not all Facebook users are as passionate about terms of service as the thousands who protested Facebook’s last attempt to change its policies regarding its rights to re-use user data.

Zuckerberg made it very clear, however, that he’s not turning over the keys to the boardroom. It affects issues like data ownership and privacy but not the company’s products and services. “There will be hundreds and thousands of product changes going forward, and that’s not what we’re talking about. This is about the rules and framework,” he said in a press conference.

Full Story

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By now, everyone has heard horror stories about invasions of privacy, cyber-bullying, photos taken out of context, embarrassing videos posted online and the mob mentality of some commenters.

Let’s take just one example: in 2002, a Canadian boy filmed himself swinging a golf ball retriever as if he were a Jedi knight. For a while, the tape lay forgotten. Then some of his friends saw it, and without his permission, placed it online.

Within two weeks, the video had been posted in many places and viewed millions of times. Spin-off videos were produced, adding soundtracks and extra graphics. People who encountered the video of the Star Wars Kid online happily forwarded it to friends – without considering the ethical implications.

Full Story (Times Online)

Blockbuster Inc. (BBI) is being sued for its participation in a Facebook advertising program, which highlights the difficulties for social networking companies in using customer data to build advertising revenues.

Dallas resident Cathryn Elaine Harris’ filed a lawsuit April 9 that alleges Blockbuster distributed her rental and sale records to third parties without appropriate consent.

The suit strikes out at Facebook’s Beacon advertising program, which it launched last year. Beacon allowed Facebook to track users’ activities on certain outside Web sites, including online purchases, and in certain cases published updates in online news feeds.

In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Texas, Blockbuster violated the Federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing Harris’ information with Facebook.

Beacon was met with protests by Facebook’s users, and was quickly modified to let users select which of their friends get access to information.

“To this day, Facebook still receives personal identifiable information from participating Web sites with the Beacon javascript; whether the Facebook member has chosen to distribute the information or not,” Harris said in her complaint. “To this day, Blockbuster online members remain unsuspecting victims.”

A spokesman for Blockbuster, Randy Hargrove, on Thursday denied the allegations.

He said Blockbuster’s alliance with Facebook included “numerous levels of privacy protection,” for users.

“We can’t discuss the specifics but we intend to vigorously defend the company,” the spokesman said.

Source

GreenRoad, based in Or Yehuda and with offices in the US and Britain, has developed a monitoring system, called the GreenRoad Safety Center, which supervises drivers’ habits behind the wheel.

Information is gathered into a device installed in the car and transmitted in real time using cell phone technology to a database, where it is collated and analyzed – available for review later on by the driver or other relevant parties.

Data upload is possible anywhere your cell phone has reception, and when it’s not, the in-car “black box” device stores information and transmits it later. When a driver “violates” proper driving policy, they are gently “reminded” by the system that they need to adjust their driving attitude.

The system takes measurements on 120 different driving behaviors, taking into account different circumstances and situations, and is able to describe not only what happened during a driving session, but also build a profile that can predict how drivers will react when faced with a specific situation…

“Until now, estimates of who was likely to be a safe or unsafe driver were determined on the basis of age, experience, etc. There was no real mechanism to examine drivers’ actual habits behind the wheel and correlate them with a safety profile,” he tells ISRAEL21c…

And the system is effective, Fleischman says. “For fleets that use GreenRoad, accidents are down by about 50%,” he explains.

From Greenroad’s website:

* Reduced crashes by 54%
* Reduced at-fault crashes by 42%
* Reduced high risk driving behavior by 50%
* Decreased fuel costs by 7%

Source

The Internet and free-speech advocacy group Public Knowledge has posted a video clip from the State of the Net Conference put on by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus.

During the clip, RIAA president Cary Sherman appears to be calling for some type of infringing content filter placed on consumer’s PCs or on networking devices that would thwart infringing content.

“One could have a filter on the end user’s computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work,” added Sherman, who said such technology could be a “tangible benefit” to consumers.

Nor does Sherman see these filters as invasive. He seems to regard them much in the vein of virus scanners, which most Internet users readily accept.

As much as I am pro-copyright, the civil libertarian in me cringes when a narrow interest group like the RIAA even thinks of ways to force me to have an infringement filter on my PC.

What’s on my PC is my own business.

Source

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.

In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.

But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a “human error” in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

The MPAA says that’s still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn’t account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren’t necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks.

“The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry,” Luker said. The new figures prove “any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself.”

The original report, by research firm LEK, claims the U.S. motion picture industry lost $6.1 billion to piracy worldwide, with most of the losses overseas. It identified the typical movie pirate as a male aged 16-24. MPAA said in a statement that no errors had been found in the study besides the percentage of revenue losses that could be attributed to college students, but that it would hire a third party to validate the numbers.

“We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report,” the group said in a statement.

Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents higher education in Washington, said the mistakes showed the entertainment industry has unfairly targeted college campuses.

“Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total,” he said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn’t necessary.

Source