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Ad-Aware provides protection from known Spyware including: Data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components.

What’s New in 2008:
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* Less Resource Usage for optimal computer performance
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More feature details:
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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.

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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%

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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.

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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.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Still, hardly a month goes by without a news release from the industry’s lobby, the Recording Industry Association of America, touting a new wave of letters to college students and others demanding a settlement payment and threatening a legal battle.

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

“I couldn’t believe it when I read that,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. “The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation.”

RIAA’s hard-line position seems clear.

Evidence uncovered by retail store technicians (i.e. kiddie porn), is legally admissible as evidence in court because, “If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents…,” the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled December 5th. The case hinged on the question of whether kiddie porn a Circuit City tech found could be admitted as evidence, overturning a lower court’s decision. The Superior Court of PA also referred to codecs, computer video compression and decompression software, as “code X.”

Read more … Police Blotter: Can Circuit City techs legally peruse files?

Source

Earlier this month we wrote about the University of Oregon and Oregon Attorney General’s resistance to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) legal demands for the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded free music.
Now the Oregon AG has taken a step further, taking the offensive and filing legal papers demanding disclosure of the RIAA’s investigative methods. The filing alleges that the RIAA may have spied on students and illegally obtained their Social Security numbers and other personal information.

An RIAA spokesperson responded with indignation, accusing the University of protecting a wave of piracy. The Association now says that student pirates need to be stopped for their own good, lest they accidentally put files like their bank records and tax info into the folders they share on P2P services.

It’s good to know there’s some one, the Oregon Attorney General, taking an aggressive stand against such stupidity. While some record companies are changing their tune about suing customers, it’s hard to imagine what else the attack dogs at the RIAA would do if not things like this. I imagine they feel the same way when they show up for work each day. Readers interested in some smart discussion on the legal move should check out posts and their comments by Mike Masnick at TechDirt and New York City lawyers Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman at their blog Recording Industry vs. The People.

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A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people’s privacy without court permission.

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

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