China's home grown firms are not only grabbing domestic businesses but also venturing to different countries across the world. On the other hand, foreign players face regulatory walls that make it difficult to tap businesses in China." Saibal Dasgupta reporting today in VOA more
A team of Internet activists including co-founder and ex-spokesperson of the Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, today announced the launch of a unique domain name service, called Njalla, designed to act as a "privacy shield" for registrants.
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Data breaches are the oil spills of the digital economy. Over 429 million people were affected by reported data breaches in 2015 -- and that number is certain to grow even higher in 2016. These large-scale data breaches along with uncertainties about the use of our data, cybercrime, surveillance and other online threats are eroding trust on the Internet. more
In the past seven years, the number of people online has essentially doubled, from 1.7 billion in 2009 to about 3.4 billion today. New and innovative services have also emerged and people and companies around the world are using the Internet in ways barely imagined at the turn of the decade. Looking ahead to the next five to seven years, there are many forces at work that could have a significant impact on the Internet. more
As you probably know, the FBI has gotten into Syed Farook's iPhone. Many people have asked the obvious questions: how did the FBI do it, will they tell Apple, did they find anything useful, etc.? I think there are deeper questions that really get to the full import of the break. How expensive is the attack? Security - and by extension, insecurity - are not absolutes. Rather, they're only meaningful concepts if they include some notion of the cost of an attack. more
Encryption is key to commerce online. Anything that weakens it is a threat to the digital economy, so the FBI vs Apple case is something that a lot of people are watching very closely... The most recent development is that Apple has filed "Motion to Vacate the Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search, and Opposition to the Government's Motion to Compel Assistance." Legal filings aren't light bedtime reading, but this one explores the legal issues as well as the privacy and security implications from multiple angles and underlines why this case is so important. more
Digital Civil Rights in Europe reports: "During an investors day on 10 May 2011 in London, Dutch Internet service provider KPN admitted to using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, to determine the use of certain applications by its mobile internet customers. Vodafone soon followed with an announcement that it used this technology for traffic shaping. The Dutch minister of Economic Affairs within days announced an investigation into KPN's practices and promised to publish the results within two weeks." more
WikiLeaks shook the internet again on March 7, 2017, by posting several thousand documents containing information about the tools the CIA allegedly used to hack, among others, Android and iOS devices. These classified files were obtained from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, although they haven't yet been verified and a CIA official declined to comment on this incident. This isn't the first time that the U.S. government agencies were accused of crossing the line and undermining online security and civil liberties, as it's been only a year since the infamous FBI-Apple encryption dispute. It's like "1984" all over again. more
When the scale of global surveillance carried out by the NSA (USA) and by the GCHQ (UK) was exposed by Edward Snowden through The Guardian, people around the world were shocked to discover how two established democracies routinely resort to methods that they have long deplored -- and rightly so -- in dictatorships, theocracies and other single-party arrangements. In a previous article, I lamented the fact that by carrying out this surveillance on an unprecedented scale, the US and the UK are, in fact, converging with the very regimes they criticize. more
Turkey's Parliament has passed a bill that includes controversial arrangements concerning the protection of online privacy despite concerns raised by the European Union as well as Turkish NGOs and opposition parties, according to a report today by Turkey's Daily News. more
"The digital information ecosystem farms people for their attention, ideas and data in exchange for so called 'free' services," says Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor. more
The smartphone has effectively transformed us into cyborgs, we have in our hands a highly efficient computing device equipped with a photo and video camera, microphone, GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, light and proximity sensors, as well as other features that allow creation of increasingly useful, impressive and addictive applications. more
Privacy problems are an area of wide concern for individual users of the Internet -- but what about network operators? Geoff Huston wrote an article earlier this year concerning privacy in DNS and the various attempts to make DNS private on the part of the IETF -- the result can be summarized with this long, but entertaining, quote. more
Here in the United States, we recently celebrated Thanksgiving and with that, we now enter the last weeks of 2018. I've spent much of this past year involved in ICANN's Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) for gTLD Registration Data and I'm happy to say our group has reached a historic milestone. Just last week, the group published its initial report for public comment. more
"The US Senate today voted to eliminate broadband privacy rules that would have required ISPs to get consumers' explicit consent before selling or sharing Web browsing data and other private information with advertisers and other companies," Jon Brodkin reporting in Ars Technica. more
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