journalistguy - Slashdot User

Comment Long Time Sealander, First Time Caller: AMA (Score 3, Interesting) 43

by journalistguy on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:06PM (#59097636) Attached to: Dreams of Offshore Servers Haunt The Ocean-Based Micronation of 'Sealand'

(N.b.: I have visited Sealand on countless occasions, was involved in HavenCo, and know the Bates family.)

Urbina's Atlantic snippet is nothing more than a compilation and rehash of information long available in the public sphere. I hope his book has more original research than exhibited here: he's an excellent investigative journalist.

The secret to Sealand's longevity is a combination of the British sense of fair play and tolerance of eccentricity; combined with the Bates family's ability to stay on good political terms with the government of the day. Compare that to the massive overreaction of the Thai navy earlier in the year against a seastead off the coast of Phuket.

Submission + - Peeking Into Users' Web History (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 25, 2010 @04:12AM

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' search histories.
Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process.
But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers,
working with a researcher from the University of California, Irvine, found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search
suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories.

Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are
likely to have similar vulnerabilities. "The goal of this project was to show that personalized services are very dangerous in terms
of privacy because they can leak information," says Claude Castelluccia, a senior research scientist at the French National Institute
for Research in Computer Science and Control, who was involved with the work. The work will be presented this summer at the
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Berlin, Germany.

Comment Zap! (Score 1) 2

by journalistguy on Monday November 09, 2009 @02:31PM (#30036088) Attached to: Transfer files through human touch

Great! No more scuffing my feet on the wool carpet to shock my little sister.

Documents Reveal US Incompetence with Word, Iraq 419

Posted by Zonk on Friday May 18, 2007 @09:27AM from the see-there's-this-thing-called-covering-your-tracks dept.

notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"

Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle 204

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday May 17, 2007 @08:03PM from the over-for-now dept.

eldavojohn writes "Google is currently fighting many fronts in its ability to show small images returned in a search from websites. Most recently, Google won the case against them in which they were displaying nude thumbnails of a photographer's work from his site. Prior to this, Google was barred from displaying copyrighted content, even when linking it to the site (owner) from its search results. The verdict: "Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." This sets a rather hefty precedence in a search engine's ability to blindly serve content safely under fair use."

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