NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web. If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here: But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine . And by now we all know that Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available, then here is a workaround
posted on Jan 20, 2006 - View this thread

Microsoft unleashes Palladium, an intrusive doozy of a feature involving specially secure AMD/Intel computer chips and cryptology provided by Microsoft. Newsweek's head-bobbing Steven Levy, the first to get the story, remains taciturn, failing to call into question Microsoft's security sins of the past. Geeks run scared while digital rights and GPL concerns are wholly ignored by the mainstream media. Is this yet another example of a malcontent media that will never possess the balls to actually question a new feature put out by Microsoft? Even Wired can't seem to read between the lines of a technology that "stemmed from early work by engineers to deliver digital movies that couldn't be pirated."
posted on Jun 25, 2002 - View this thread

Windows Media Player records your viewing and listening habits. But, it's ok cause Microsoft changed their privacy policy to reflect this. Does anyone get surprised by this sort of thing any more?
posted on Feb 21, 2002 - View this thread

Do you have a 'Super Cookie' ??? Another m$ screw-up... Very interesting since wmp just minutes before tried to access the net through my firewall that is set to block all except a few programs. If you're running mozilla his demo doesn't hit but using msie it sures pulls up the ID# of my wmp... time to tighten things down again!!! Another blasted waste of time to fix what m$ should not have let out in the first place!!! Link via... Inflight Correction
posted on Jan 17, 2002 - View this thread

Some good news about Internet Explorer 6? IE6, scheduled to be released in August, will be the first browser to support a new privacy standard called Platform Privacy Preferences, or P3P, which will allow surfers to automatically determine whether a Web site collects personally identifiable information and opt out of the data collection.
posted on Jun 17, 2001 - View this thread

Do you use Hotmail for email? If so, it looks like Microsoft owns all your messages and can reprint or repurpose them however they like. I'd assume the ToS could be extended to cover any content on a passport-using website as well. Scary stuff, considering all the Hailstorm services on the way...
posted on Apr 3, 2001 - View this thread

Linux no longer foolproof? And a smile descened upon Redmond...
posted on Jan 22, 2001 - View this thread

"Netscape is using SmartDownload to eavesdrop," I thought Microsoft was the ONLY evil!
posted on Jul 6, 2000 - View this thread