Digit_al Society

"Drug and insurance companies will from later this year be able to buy information on patients - including mental health conditions and diseases such as cancer, as well as smoking and drinking habits - once a single English database of medical data has been created."

"No one stepped forward to claim these bitcoins, which were found in electronic "wallets" used to store the digital currency. An additional 144,336 bitcoins, worth more than $128m today, were also discovered, but the government's claim on them is being disputed by Ross William Ulbricht, 29, who US authorities say was the founder and main operator of Silk Road. They had been stashed on his laptop."

""Kids forget passwords all the time," says Alexander Cole, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Peekabu. "They're often unfamiliar with the concept of logging in, there is often no username or social media account to remind them of their password when they forget it. And it's a real problem because the BBC's really keen to have children creating accounts, making friends with one another, and playing multiplayer games with their friends from the real world."

"User information, including passwords, email addresses, usernames and geolocation data, was unencrypted - making it readily accessible to anyone who plugs the handset into a PC, according to a report detailing the vulnerability."

"An automated process is better-suited for a variety of other machine-readable forms of identification, said Vahid Motevalli, a professor at Tennessee Tech University and a flight security expert. For example, a person can't read bar codes, but even if they could, they wouldn't be as efficient as an automated process. A machine can almost always check in more people per hour than a security official, meaning security lines would move much faster."

"Emma Carr, the deputy director general of Big Brother Watch, believes that the technology ignores customers' privacy, and branded it "disproportionate". "This is a clear example of profit trumping privacy," she said. "The use of surveillance technology by shops, in order to provide a better or more personalised service, seems totally disproportionate.""

"Intentions aside, the app seems to cross some pretty serious privacy boundaries. Generally speaking, people like to choose who they identify themselves to, and having your online information freely available to anyone who sees you in public seems an uncomfortable prospect. Google seems to think so, too; the Web giant does not currently allow facial recognition apps on the MyGlass app store. "

"This study therefore concludes that file sharing has not reduced the creation of new original music. It may have led to fewer works as a result of fewer new artists entering the field, but it was also associated with an increase in output by those artists who chose, despite the lower returns, to devote their talents to making music. Given that file sharing undeniably promotes the broad dissemination of existing works, this conclusion suggests that file sharing is both fully consonant with copyright's constitutionally-delimited purposes and welfare enhancing."

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

""We were sitting on metadata [information about emails, such as sender, recipient and time of delivery], so we knew it was only a matter of time before someone would come to us," says Mike Janke, Silent Circle's co-founder and chief executive. "Email was different - the rest of our products have no metadata, no IP logging, no way - but email was fundamentally broken.""

"It's an interesting wrinkle on the problem of information-leakage, and implies that future privacy-filters will have to scrub photos of reflective surfaces (especially eyes) of identifying faces before they're posted. "

"The global volume of electronic waste is expected to grow by 33% in the next four years, when it will weigh the equivalent of eight of the great Egyptian pyramids, according to the UN's Step initiative, which was set up to tackle the world's growing e-waste crisis. Last year nearly 50m tonnes of e-waste was generated worldwide - or about 7kg for every person on the planet. "

"A cautionary tale: Back in 2009, government contractor Jeffrey Kantor was browsing online, seeking to make a radio-controlled airplane for his son. He began to type his search into Google: "How do I build a radio-controlled"-[enter autocomplete]-"bomb." That's right, before Kantor knew it, he had accidentally asked Google how to make an explosive device. And his life would never be the same."

"Now that we have finalized our systems for the acquisition and processing of Americans' location data (using data from cell phone and license plate readers as well as other sources), I wanted to give you a quick taste of our new system's capabilities in the domestic policing context."

"More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter."

"India has started using a system that allows security agencies and income tax officials to directly intercept phone calls and emails without any court or legislative oversight, Reuters reported this summer."

"Malwarebytes points to desktop app whose EULA includes clause getting you to agree to Bitcoin mining - from which you won't benefit"

"Bitcoin Internet Payment System (BIPS), a Denmark-based Bitcoin payment processor, suffered a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack."