In an attempt to remove all doubt that AT&T is a evil-infested, garbage-brained, scum-sucking, low-life, mucus-eating sot of a company, it has been recently discovered that they built a custom algorithm to: "crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls "communities of interest" — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom".

You may have noticed I don't talk about the War much, but this caught my attention. Blackwater, a private security firm (read: mercenaries) is in trouble for having shot some people (I apologize for the huge over-simplification).

Anyway, the State Department is offering them immunity. Here's the problem: immunity means that it doesn't matter if they're guilty or innoncent, there will be no consequences for their actions. Even if you were to assume that the Blackwater guards were put there with little actual training and couldn't be held to the same standards as our military, there should be consequences for the people who made the decision to send them there in the first place.

But judging on history, they'd get immunity too. No one will be held accountable while Bush is in office.

So here's somehting new: finding out the prices on an upcoming sale by looking online. This is particularly useful when the ad flyer happens to be for Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving).

This follows another recent story of a Walmart ad being leaked online (which has, of course, been taken down due to a legal threat from Walmart).

(H/T to Digg.com for the link)

A guy in Italy managed to get a refund from HP for Windows XP and Works 8 which were preinstalled on his system. Apparently, the license agreement states that if the customer doesn't accept the agreement, the vendor will refund the money.

This could be the start of a disturbing trend as far as computer retailers are concerned.

If you've been following this breach, the key problem here is two part:

1) TJX is the parent company of several other companies including TJ Maxx. Each of those companies shared data with TJX creating a massive database (and a single target for the hackers).

2) TJX (and others) shouldn't have stored the credit card data in the first place.

Seriously, what right does this company have for storing people's credit card numbers? What they hell are they going to do with my credit card number anyway? Show it to me on a web form the next time I buy something? It's my card! I know what the freaking number is, you don't need to store it for me!

Anyway. I hope something drastically negative happens to TJX because of this and I hope it encourages other companies to stop data-raping people.

In California, Sprint has been forced to unlock their phones to allow their customers to use their phones with other cell services. The main point here being that if someone has been using their cellphone for years wouldn't normally want to switch to another service even if Sprint was terrible since they might like their phone and have it customized and full of data they wanted to keep.

With cellphone unlocking, now that customer can drop Sprint like a bad habit at will. Bad news for Sprint, great news for us.

So much for CSI.

In actuality, this is only a ruling on partial fingerprint evidence. I'm not sure if I agree that a partial print can't be considered as one piece of the evidence though I do agree that you can't make a case solely on a partial print. In this case, the judge ruled that a partial print can't be used as evidence in a murder investigation.

The more disturbing part of this article is this:

… the FBI mistakenly linked Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, to a fingerprint lifted off a plastic bag of explosive detonators found in Madrid after commuter train bombings there killed 191 people.

So not only can your fingerprints be used to identify you as a criminal in this country, you might get nailed for crimes in completely different countries as well. Always be wary of providing fingerprints.

(H/T to Schneier's Blog for the link)

Here we go again. At least this time, it's only on the order of a few hundred thousand people.

Note: it's a little sad to have to say that.

Nothing like treating people like animals to be tagged and tracked. Of course, it's much easier to start by tracking kids because they don't have much choice in the matter and when they grow up, they'll be less resistant to the practice. Enter surveillance society…

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. They portray the tests as successful, but as Bruce Schneier points out, "So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere."

Or how about, "it's easy to get someone you hate in trouble by wearing their uniform for a few minutes while vandalizing the teacher's lounge."

Or "We had no idea that constantly bombarding students with radio frequencies in closed spaces during their formative years would lead to these kinds of mutations! Mrs. Johnson, you can't honestly expect us to pay to have Timmy's third arm removed can you?"

I love how companies start implementing RFID without any thought to the consequences.

Microsoft slipped another bomb into their "critical updates" in the form of a Windows Desktop Search. The reports say that besides being an unwanted feature, it has been slowing machines down considerably.

The worst part is that somehow Microsoft thinks they can change the way our machines work without our consent. But this wouldn't be the first time.

Well this is different. I knew that posting online can have severe negative effects on the poster, but I hadn't considered the effect on the parents.

"Whether we're talking about dad's work secrets or problems between mom and dad with their relationship," Sgt. MacDonald said.

We asked him to show us just how easy it is to find incriminating posts. It didn't take long.

"Not only do I have to live with my nagging mom, my dad does drugs. This person, Tara, says her parents are lazy alcoholics," reads Sgt. MacDonald.

He says it's not hard for police, or employers, to uncover the identity of teens from the details in their profiles

While those people might deserve to get fired (if the teen poster is telling the truth and not just venting), the article lists another example of a mortgage broker finding out that one of his customers lost his job.

Privacy is starting to become harder and harder to protect, but also more important at the same time.

(H/T to Digg.com for the link)

Comcast has been in the news recently for blocking high-bandwidth traffic in an attempt to keep people from using their Internet "too much". If we're lucky, this story about them possibly getting sued for it is true. As bad as Comcast is in service and customer service, it would be nice to hold their feet to the fire when they get caught doing bad stuff intentionally.

Oh, and if you missed it, Comcast has been trying damage control without much success.

This is a nice article explaining the five major monthly bills you should be ditching until you are debt-free (on your credit cards and accounts anyway). Included is the whining they know you'll do when you hear their recommendation:

5) Cable. Your Excuse: "But, but, but I need cable! I get a good deal! It's only $100 a month! I use it a lot! It's bundled with my phone and my internet. I'll only save $30 a month if I cancel it."

It's really sad how well the marketing has worked that people believe they really need and use this stuff. I have never had cable TV service. You can rent the best shows in the stores, borrow them from friends or just watch it with a regular antenna (for stuff that comes on the major channels). A lot of new shows are available from the networks directly on the Internet anyway.

The one service they forgot to mention was cellphone. Most people probably forget that it's just a convenience, not a necessity.

Due to the data breaches and high profile cases of laptops gone missing, people can easily forget that ID theft is easy to pull off without high technology skills.

[the study] found that, by and large, much of today's identity theft is still carried out using old-school methods, such as mail theft and dumpster diving. Thieves also used information from public records to piece together an individual identity, and many stole information from retail outlets like stores and gas stations.

Be sure to read my Identity theft/Identity protection guide for more information about preventing people from getting and using your data.

I already reported on Comcast blocking Peer-2-Peer filesharing traffic, but apparently they've extended the blocks to enterprise software (in this case, Lotus Notes).

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast's network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they're greeted with the error message, "Remote system no longer responding." Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast's reset packets are the culprit.

It should be noted that everything that has been reported as being blocked by Comcast are things that cause high traffic on Comcast's networks. Even though people pay for their high speed Internet, Comcast will be damned if they actually let you use it. I mean, I've never been dropped from Comcast service for using their Internet "too much" like some people, but I definitely can't get decent service to save my life.

For example, if I start one download at about 100kB/s, the rest of my Internet connection limps along like a two legged cat! So much for my 6 megabit connection speed.

Something is seriously wrong with Comcast and I hope some regulator comes down on them hard soon.

Hellgate, a soon-to-be-released video game includes a license agreement that forces players to accept the harvesting of identifying information from their machine. This is part of an in-game advertising scheme that, so far, doesn't quite reach the level of what the Penny Arcade cartoonists prophesied, but it's getting closer.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

Finally! Some guts!

Senator Chris Dodd will block the FISA renewal bill as long as it grants retroactive immunity for their involvement in the illegal spying. Of course, the FISA bill should have been blocked anyway. Not that I read it, but if Bush agreed with it, then it definitely didn't go far enough.

Vista apparently runs out of memory when copying over 13,000 files in one go without any warning. While that is a lot of files, this seems to be a fairly large bone-head mistake. First of all, why can't Microsoft figure out that file transfers should be pausable and resumable (same as when downloading from the Internet). Of course, even that was something they had to steal from Mozilla rather than figure out on their own.

Adding another nail to the coffin for citizen trust in Verizon (assuming there was any to begin with), it turns out that they did in fact participate in the illegal spying program.

Let the lawsuits begin…

We all mourned the trial loss where the RIAA won a judgement of over $200,000 against a woman who claims she didn't even download anything. Whether she did or not, I support her appeal on the basis that $200k is excessive. Assuming she downloaded songs and shared them too, the amount of her penalty should be far closer to real damages, not some made up number.