We’re not sure what prompted the decision or if this will expand to other countries, though Spotify confirmed the shift to Digital Music News on Wednesday. ”We are introducing this new sign-up option in order to offer non-Facebook-connected users in Germany a choice of ways to access Spotify,” the company stated. “Spotify remains absolutely committed to our global strategic partnership with Facebook.”
Archive for 2012/06/14
Spotify is no longer requiring users to register with Facebook accounts – that is, in Germany
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reportsMicrosoft’s Social Connector Add-In For Microsoft Outlook Will Send Your Contact List To LinkedIn
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reports, Tech EvolutionThis enables LinkedIn to receive information about people who are not a user of LinkedIn’s services. The add-in is also sending information ‘about’ e-mail messages.
When the Social Connector Add-In is sending the contact list, the communication will not be encrypted, so third parties are able to eavesdrop.
LinkedIn admits that some unencrypted data is being distributed and that it is collecting information about e-mail addresses that have been used – in e-mail messages – by the user. The company states that it does ‘hash’ the e-mail addresses themselves and that it is not collecting the message body of e-mail messages.
Dutch language news article:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2835517/linkedin-plugin-outlook-verzamelt-ieder-e-mailcontact.html
Theresa May sets out plans to monitor internet use in the UK
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Legislation, Public Policy, Stats / reports, Tech EvolutionDetails of internet use in the UK will have to be stored for a year to allow police and intelligence services to access it, under government plans.
Records will include people’s activity on social network sites, webmail, internet phone calls and online gaming.
Home Secretary Theresa May said the change was needed to keep up with how criminals were using new technology.
The Communications Data Bill has been published in draft form - but the government faces a battle to get it through Parliament intact, with Lib Dem MPs and Conservatives such as Mr Davis calling for it to be watered down or abandoned altogether.
Restrictions are likely to be placed on the types of phone and internet data local councils can access in an effort to win over critics, but the proposals have still been branded a “snooper’s charter” by civil liberties campaigners.
UK’s highest court rejects Julian Assange appeal against extradition to Sweden
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, Jurisprudence, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reportsThe UK’s highest court has rejected a move by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to reopen his appeal against his extradition to Sweden where he faces sex crime allegations.
The announcement was made today by the Supreme Court.
It said in a statement that the required period for extradition “shall not commence until the 14th day after today”.
Seven Supreme Court justices unanimously dismissed the move as being “without merit”.
Retired Judge Joins Fight Against DOJ’s ‘Outrageous’ Seizures in Megaupload Case
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Illegal File Sharing, Litigation, Public Policy, Stats / reportsAbraham David Sofaer, a former New York federal judge, recently was presenting a paper at the National Academy of Sciences about deterring cyberattacks when he learned the feds had shut down Megaupload, seizing its domain names, in a criminal copyright infringement case.
Troubling him more than his paper on global cybersecurity (.pdf) was learning that the government had seized the files of 66.6 million customers as part of its prosecution of the file-sharing site’s top officers, and was refusing to give any of the data back to its owners.
“It’s really quite outrageous, frankly,” the 74-year-old President Jimmy Carter appointee said in a recent telephone interview. “I was thinking the government hadn’t learned to be discreet in its conduct in the digital world. This is a perfect example on how they are failing to apply traditional standards in the new context.”
A former State Department legal adviser, Sofaer has teamed up — free of charge — with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in urging a federal court to set up a system to allow Megaupload users to get back their legal content.
Much more:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/retired-judge-megaupload/
Lack Of Global Privacy Policy Is Perfectly Fine Says Public Policy Googler Anthony House
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, Google, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reportsFeels that differences in perspectives and cultures can be beneficial to Google. It does add to the overall workload but Google can handle complicated issues such as the privacy debate. House also said that the internet is less fraught with dangers as many believe it to be and at least one can always track and trace the cause of the malicious act when they happen online.
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/analyse/110834/google-wil-geen-wereldwijd-privacybeleid.html
Would fabulous performance and the greatest screen in computing history compensate for Apple blocking you from upgrading your rig and requiring professional repairs to it?
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Stats / reportsThe Retina Pro’s unified construction not only means damage to the screen requires replacing an entire half of the computer, it means you’d have to risk destroying the entire thing to make changes. The RAM? Soldered to the motherboard. The hard drives? Proprietary and impossible to change. With upgrading memory and hard drive space the two most common jobs you can do on a laptop, does the fact that these are now impossible make the Retina Pro less attractive to you?
More:
http://gizmodo.com/5918201/do-you-care-if-the-best-laptop-ever-is-the-most-impossible-to-repair
Popular link-sharing site Reddit reportedly bans a half-dozen prominent Web sites for spammy behavior
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Filtering, Stats / reportsThe popular link-sharing site has banned a half-dozen prominent sites, including TheAtlantic.com and BusinessWeek.com, according to a recently created subreddit. Other banned sites include Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, and GlobalPost.
Reddit users who try to submit links to these sites are greeted with a message that informs them that “this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.”
Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau are joining forces to keep Web surfers safe from ads that serve up malware or scams
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Blocking, Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Google, New Business Models, Stats / reportsThe companies will announce tomorrow the formation of the Ads Integrity Alliance, which will be led by Maxim Weinstein, executive director of StopBadware, a nonprofit focused on protecting consumers from sites that lead to viruses, spyware and other malware.
The charter members will share information about scams and malware in advertising and develop policy recommendations and best practices, Weinstein said. “Having formal channels for sharing information about specific threats, trends and bad actors can be a valuable weapon” in stopping criminals and scammers as they move their campaigns to different sites on the Web, he said.
Ad serving systems are built to serve millions of targeted ads on Web sites in a scalable way, which makes it difficult to catch every bad ad before it hits the Net, according to Weinstein. “When you have really large scale automated systems and you also have a criminal element that wants to take advantage of that to deliver malware and commit fraud you need to find ways to balance the need for efficiency and automation with the need to protect users from bad ads,” he said. “That has to include some combination of automation and human intervention.”
“All complex ecosystems have parasites,” said Eric Davis, global public policy manager at Google. “No individual company or law enforcement agency can singlehandedly stop all the bad actors from the entire Web and we think it’s important to work with other companies, other parties and organizations, to share the information we can.”
Last year, Google disabled more than 130 million ads and 800,000 advertisers that violated policies on its sites and those of its partners’ sites, Davis wrote in a post on the Google Official blog.
More:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57452811-83/google-facebook-twitter-take-on-bad-ads/
Famed for allegedly targeting Fox, PBS, and Sony, the onetime U.K.-charged hacker Ryan Cleary is now facing charges in the United States
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Public Policy, Stats / reportsThe British man that allegedly hacked into the Fox reality TV show “The X-Factor” and the “PBS News Hour,” along with music companies and government security agencies, was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on conspiracy and hacking charges today, according to the Associated Press.
Ryan Cleary, 20, reportedly had ties to the well-known branch of Anonymous called LulzSec before he was arrested in London last June (although the hacktivist group denies his involvement with it). U.S. federal prosecutors said today that he worked to take down, deface, and steal personal information from Web sites, according to the Associated Press.
This isn’t the first time that Cleary has come up against the courts. A separate case was filed against him in U.K. last summer. British authorities charged Cleary on five counts of computer hacking activity, including denial-of-service attacks against the Serious Organized Crime Agency, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and the British Phonographic Industry.
According to the Associated Press, if Cleary is convicted of all charges, he could get up to 25 years in prison.
More:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57452849-83/u.s-indicts-brit-ryan-cleary-for-fox-pbs-hacks/
Dutch Ministry Of Justice Tries To Combat Human Trafficking And Sexual Slavery With YouTube Video
Posted: 2012/06/14 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Public Policy, Stats / reportsThe video calls on (potential) customers of prostitutes to notify authorities when they observe signs of forced prostitution, namely:
1. Fear
2. Bruises
3. Not ‘enjoying’ the work
One does wonder whether the producers of this movie and the associated website honestly believe that when these signs are not there, chances of sexual slavery will be much lower. One also wonders whether human traffickers and pimps will now go and make sure to prevent their prostitutes from showing any of these signs. It is therefore quite a paradox that the video is entitled ‘appearances are deceptive’:
And since De Wallen, the largest and best-known red-light district in Amsterdam, is a destination for international sex tourism, one can only hope that the (potential) customers will be able to read and understand the Dutch language.
Dutch language news article and campaign website:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2834102/bezoekers-sekssites-gewezen-dwangarbeid.html
http://www.meldmisdaad.nl/campagnes/gedwongen-prostitutie/nieuws_2/
Previously:
Dutch Child Sex Ring — Where’s the Justice?
http://vrritti.com/2012/06/13/dutch-child-sex-ring-wheres-the-justice/
and
The Netherlands is listed by the UNODC as a top destination for victims of human trafficking. Countries that are major sources of trafficked persons include Thailand, China, Nigeria, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Sierra Leone, and Romania.
Currently, human trafficking in the Netherlands is on the rise, according to figures obtained from the National Centre against Human Trafficking. The report shows a substantial increase in the number of victims from Hungary and China. There were 809 registered victims of human trafficking in 2008, 763 were women and at least 60 percent of them were forced to work in the sex industry.
Many victims of human trafficking are led to believe by organized criminals that they are being offered work in hotels or restaurants or in child care and are forced into prostitution with the threat or actual use of violence. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 1000 to 7000 on a yearly basis. Most police investigations on human trafficking concern legal sex businesses. All sectors of prostitution are well represented in these investigations, but particularly the window brothels are overrepresented.
At the end of 2008, a gang of six people were sentenced to prison terms of eight months to 7½ years in what prosecutors said was the worst case of human trafficking ever brought to trial in the Netherlands. The case involved more than 100 female victims, violently forced to work in prostitution. In December 2009, two Nigerian men were sentenced to 4 and 4½ years in prison for having smuggled 140 Nigerian women aged 16–23 into the Netherlands. The women were made to apply for asylum and then disappeared from asylum centers, to work as prostitutes in surrounding countries. The men were said to have used “voodoo” curses on the women to prevent escape and enforce payment of debts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands#Human_trafficking
In 2008, Karina Schaapman, a former prostitute and former member of the Amsterdam city council, produced a report about the Amsterdam sex trade. She offered the police a face book with 80 “violent pimps”, of whom only three were Dutch-born. She said that more than 75% of Amsterdam’s 8,000 to 11,000 prostitutes were from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.
A study released by TAMPEP in 2009 put the number of migrant prostitutes at 60% (a decrease from 70% in 2006), originating from: Central Europe (EU) 40%, Latin America 20%, Western Europe 12%, Eastern Europe (non-EU) 8%, Africa 8%, Balkans 4%, Asia 4%, Baltic states 3% (estimates for 2008).
Ten percent of all prostitutes were estimated to be drug addicts (in the late 90′s) the majority of these prostitutes being Dutch nationals or former Dutch nationals.
In 2011 Dutch authorities started asking sex workers to pay taxes on their earnings.
In 2008, city statistic showed 142 licensed brothels in Amsterdam, with about 500 window displays, and officials estimated that sexual transactions in Amsterdam account for about 100 million US dollars per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands#Demographics
