“The Dark Web is used to sell stolen data, drugs, and weapons—but it’s also used by legitimate outfits, like news organizations and the UN. This ebook looks at what the Dark Web is and how it affects you. The Dark Web is a network of websites and servers that use encryption to obscure traffic. Dark… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: E-Commerce
Think your credit card is safe in your wallet? Think again.
Washington Post – …“Card-not-present” credit, debit and prepaid card fraud has ballooned in the United States in the last few years, reaching $4.57 billion in 2016, up 34 percent from the year before, according to the most recentFederal Reserve Payments Study. These shadowy crimes hurt both small businesses and the customer shopping experience. If you’ve… Continue Reading
Good reasons not to share your phone number
The New York Times – Our personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out. “For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number. We punch… Continue Reading
Tech Paging Big Brother: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
The New York Times – As fake and illegitimate texts proliferate online, books are becoming a form of misinformation.The author of “1984” would not be surprised. “I started browsing Orwell on Amazon after writing about the explosion in counterfeit books offered by the retailer. The fake books appeared to help Amazon by, for example, encouraging publishers… Continue Reading
The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets Not Enforcement Drive Down Copyright Infringement
Quintais, João and Poort, Joost, The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement (August 14, 2019). American University International Law Review, Vol. 34 , No. 4, pp. 807-876 (2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3437239 “This article deals with the acquisition and consumption of music, films, series, books, and games… Continue Reading
How Young People Consume News and The Implications For Mainstream Media
A report by Flamingo commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University: “Younger audiences are different from older groups not just in what they do, but in their core attitudes in terms of what they want from the news. Young people are primarily driven by progress and enjoyment in their lives,… Continue Reading
More Than Half of U.S. Adults Trust Law Enforcement to Use Facial Recognition Responsibly
But the public is less accepting of facial recognition technology when used by advertisers or technology companies: “The ability of governments and law enforcement agencies to monitor the public using facial recognition was once the province of dystopian science fiction. But modern technology is increasingly bringing versions of these scenarios to life. A recent investigation… Continue Reading
Today’s Firefox Blocks Third-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptomining by Default
Mozilla Blog: “Today, Firefox on desktop and Android will — by default — empower and protect all our users by blocking third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers. This milestone marks a major step in our multi-year effort to bring stronger, usable privacy protections to everyone using Firefox. Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection gives users more control –… Continue Reading
Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder
Scientific American – Our willingness to share content without thinking is exploited to spread disinformation – By Claire Wardle = “As someone who studies the impact of misinformation on society, I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies… Continue Reading
NYT – I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me.
Farhad Manjoo and Nadieh Bremer: “Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me… Continue Reading
The Internet’s Invisible Cleanup Crew
Jacobin – Review of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, by Sarah T. Roberts (Yale University Press, 2019). “Commercial content moderation, or CCM, describes one of the dirtier jobs on the corporate internet: reviewing and removing violent, racist, and disturbing content posted to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube… Continue Reading
Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection
Freedom to Tinker By Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan – “Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want… Continue Reading
