TrustMeSecurity.com

Susan Kuchinskas has an article at internetnews.com about Flickr’s GuestPass. The article discusses the self-described “casual privacy” approach to keeping information secure.

[Flickr developer Kellan Elliott-McCrea] identified four models for sharing: share nothing, share everything, manage a crowd or casual privacy. The manage a crowd is the traditional model, it’s about assigning roles, giving permissions. “The problem is, those models are insufficiently complex and yet too complex at the same time,” he told the crowd.

Check out the full article here.

Slashdot tipped us off to an article in the New York Times today that spells out the lengths inwhich some lawyers are going to protect their client confidentiality.

Mr. Nelson says he does not dare to phone this client or send him e-mail messages because of what many prominent criminal defense lawyers say is a well-founded fear that all of their contacts are being monitored by the United States government.

Secure email would be much easier and more cost effective than flying around the world. Click here for the full story.

CNET reports:

The FBI director and a Republican congressman sketched out a far-reaching plan this week for warrantless surveillance of the Internet.

During a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, the FBI’s Robert Mueller and Rep. Darrell Issa of California talked about what amounts to a two-step approach. Step 1 involves asking Internet service providers to open their networks to the FBI voluntarily; step 2 would be a federal law forcing companies to do just that.

Check out the full article here, it’s disturbing.

Natalie from HighRoad sent me a fantastic article from the Globe and Mail this morning and unfortunately I’ve just now gotten around to posting it.

People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they’re set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that’s not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to “know who I am and access my information,” which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online.

For the full article, click here.

The Guardian has a story about how Christopher Tarnovsky, a hacker who was hired by NewsCorp, is denying hacking into a rival’s satellite networks.

EchoStar claims that Tarnovsky was actually trying to hack into the Dish satellite network to steal its codes and then flood the market with pirated smart cards that would allow viewers access to its encrypted channels.

Full story available here.

You can grab the latest versions of TrustMe Desktop for Windows and our Outlook plug-in available free on our download page. The latest versions are required to take advantage of our recently upgraded service infrastructure and includes another layer of security and protection which won’t affect users.

This download is a mandatory upgrade. If your client has stopped working please upgrade now to solve the problem.

Feel free to leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions you may have. We appreciate them!

NJ.com, your source for everything New Jersey, has released a pretty good summary of a case that saw the state’s Supreme Court rule that, under the New Jersey Constitution, an Internet user has the right to privacy in the subscriber information maintained by the individual’s Internet service provider.

… The court holds that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information they provide to Internet service providers,” the Supreme Court held. “Accordingly, the motion to suppress by Reid was properly granted because the police used a deficient municipal subpoena. Law enforcement officials can obtain subscriber information by serving a grand jury subpoena on an Internet service provider without notice to the subscriber. The state (law enforcement) may seek to reacquire the information with a proper grand jury subpoena because records of the information existed independently of the faulty process used by police, and the conduct of the police did not affect the information.

Check out the full summary by clicking here.

UPDATE! Here’s a better article on the ramifications, in my opinion.

Some of you may experience some intermittent service outages when connecting to TrustMe for authentication over the next twenty-four hours. We apologize for the disturbance we waited until after peak traffic hours to start upgrading our infrastructure in anticipation of releasing an updated version of TrustMe Desktop that will fix most (if not all) of the problems some users have had connecting to the service.

Inviting new users to groups and decrypting messages may be temporarily unavailable. Thanks so much for your patience, we appreciate all the great feedback.

ZDNet UK has a great article about the Greater Manchester Police’s presence on Facebook.

The Greater Manchester Police established an application called GMP Updates on Facebook, providing users with crime news, appeals and missing-persons stories. They claim that witin a day 750 people had downloaded the application.

Greater Manchester Police pitched the tool as a way of helping raise public awareness about crimes, and encouraging users to submit relevant information. However, users who add the application to their Facebook profile may be sharing more information about themselves with the police than they realise, according to Guilherme Roschke, a fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Read the full article here. I found it really interesting.

Apparently Facebook’s troubles over their much criticized Beacon feature isn’t over yet. For those who don’t recall, there was a backlash back in the fall when Facebook launched the new feature, which interfaces with popular web sites like Amazon and Blockbuster and shares details of your purchase with your friends on Facebook.

Cathryn Elaine Harris of Texas has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook and Blockbuster stating that Blockbuster violated the federal Video Privacy Protection Act when it shares its rental information. Harris is seeking $2500 per violation by Blockbuster and Facebook, as stated in the act.

The problem was that Beacon was originally set up as a opt-out service instead of opt-in, so many users began finding their off-Facebook activities published on their Facebook profiles for all to see, automatically (and opting out was difficult). Since Beacon was launched close to the holiday shopping season, many users not only complained that their privacy was being grossly violated, but that Beacon had also ruined surprise presents that had been purchased online by publishing them to Facebook.

Click here for the full story.