Technology

Privacy? What privacy? That attitude by Google in a recent court filing is causing a storm of controversy that shows at least some users have not yet given up on their right to privacy.

In a motion to dismiss a class-action suit in which Google was accused of violating federal and state wiretap laws because its ad service automatically scans e-mails to determine targeting, the technology giant seemed to have put its foot into it.

Google said that just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use Web-based e-mail today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery. ECS stands for electronic communications service — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The use of CAPTCHA to combat spam bots is also blocking people with disabilities and the feature should be removed from websites, argues a group of disability organisations.

The completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, abbreviated as CAPTCHA, is a popular measure deployed by webmasters around the world to prevent spammers from automatically sending unsolicited commercial messages to sites and users. It requires people to interpret characters and numbers that are difficult for machines to parse, and enter these as part of logging in to a site, for instance.

However, the dark side of CAPTCHA is that it hinders people with vision impairments to the point that they cannot use sites. Screen readers and other accessibility tools used by blind people often fail on distorted and illegible CAPTCHA text.

Now, disability groups such as Blind Citizens Australia, Able Australia, Media Access Australia and the Australian Deaf-Blind Council are calling on organisations to stop using CAPTCHA, setting up a petition with the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The biggest issue with audio CAPTCHA is actually the same as with the visual version: just as it’s often hard to see which individual letters are being used, it’s hard to distinguish individual sounds. One of the problems with audio CAPTCHA that I’ve found is similar to the visual CAPTCHA: there’s so much noise behind the words that are being spoken you can’t identify what they are, Hawkins said.

That noise is added to block automated recognition systems, but in this case the cure seems worse than the problem. I pride myself on being a pretty good listener, Hawkins said. Because I’m blind I need to use my hearing in different ways and I find even with that very acute hearing that these audio CAPTCHAs are really difficult to understand.

A secondary problem is that audio CAPTCHAs often use numbers, but doesn’t distinguish them, so it’s impossible to know if you have to type 1 or one or won.

The solution, as we said yesterday, is to ditch CAPTCHA altogether. Sending a verification email is one solution, though that adds an extra step. Another good alternative is asking site users to solve a simple maths problem — an option that works well with screen readers, Hawkins said — via Lifehacker Australia

Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy.

In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Much worse than Cablegate ever was.

Cablegate merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State Department. But Edward Snowden just strolled out of the Moscow airport, with his Wikileaks personal escort, one month after ripping the pants off the National Security Agency.

You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay The Blast Shack was about the basic problem of the NSA. Here was the takeaway from that essay back in 2010:

One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers — in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind.

Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. Yes, that was then, while this is now.

So, I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol.

This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean, sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials, surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being hilarious.

Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does — via redwolf.newsvine.com

How would you feel if the police stopped you on a whim, took your phone, your laptop, your digital camera, your MP3 player, your USB sticks and your memory cards then copied everything on them?

How would you feel if they told you they were going to keep all your photographs, your documents, your address book, your financial data, your browsing history, your emails, your chat logs, your electronic diary, your music and recordings and anything else they liked for at least six years — indeed maybe they’d keep them until you reached the age of a hundred in case they might prove useful one day?

How would you feel if they then demanded all of your passwords and threatened you with years in jail if you refused to hand them over?

Welcome to Britain.

These are the rights granted to the police at the border controls of this country.

Within the UK, police officers are authorized to seize phones and download information only after making an arrest. The border control officers have no such limitations.

Anyone entering or leaving the UK faces this possible treatment under port powers contained in Schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000. No prior authorization is needed to stop you and there does not need to be any suspicion. Your data can be kept even if you are not arrested and the police can find no evidence of any crime — via redwolf.newsvine.com