Group items tagged

We have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site's users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.

There is as much misinformation as information, and social websites are the perfect supporting tools

The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. Update: Facebook's Barry Schnitt contests this interpretation of the document, says the company is resistant to illegitimate government requests for user information and offers one example of that resistance in a comment posted below. The document also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.

Face recognition technology can be used to gain access to a person's private data, according to a new study. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University combined image scanning, cloud computing and public profiles from social network sites to identify individuals in the offline world. Data captured even included a user's social security number.

The office is an area of evolving legal issues for digital rights. What postings on social media can get you fired? Who owns the email and what are your rights to privacy? These are only a few legal issues faced by employees.

Class Website of 91.113.207 Exploring the Internet, Spring 2011, by Beibei Yang

Facebook appears to have U-turned on plans to allow external websites to see users' addresses and mobile phone numbers. Security experts pointed out that such a system would be ripe for exploitation from rogue app developers. The feature has been put on "temporary hold", the social networking firm said in its developers blog.

Facebook has apologised for the way it rolled-out a new system that recognises users' faces. The social network said that it should have done more to notify members about the global launch. Its Tag Suggestions feature scans photos and automatically picks out existing friends.

Google hacking, which has been on the rise this summer, is a bit of a misnomer. Also known as Google dorking, Google hacking refers to cybercriminals' enterprising use of Google's advanced search functions to find caches of valuable data ripe for the taking.

jokes going "Viral" at the turn of the century

What is the future of the Internet? Where will the bandwidth be in 5 -10 years be and how will it effect the convergence of mobile devices? What apps will it allow not possible at today's communication networks? With the advent of cloud computing and storage capability rapidly expanding what information and or data bases become possible.