Microsoft beefs up customer privacy policy

 

                                                                                                                                                                                               The Microsoft logo is seen at their offices in Bucharest March 20, 2013. REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp, under fire for accessing an employee's private Hotmail account to prove he was leaking computer code to a blogger, has said it will now refer all suspicions of illegal activity on its email services to law enforcement.

The decision, announced by head lawyer Brad Smith on Friday, reverses Microsoft's initial reaction to complaints last week, when it laid out a plan to refer such cases to an unidentified former federal judge, and proceed to open a suspect email account only if that person saw evidence to justify it.

"Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves," said Smith, in a blog post on the software company's website. "Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required."

Microsoft - which has recently cast itself as a defender of customer privacy - was harshly criticized last week by civil liberties groups after court documents made public in the prosecution of Alex Kibkalo in Seattle federal court for leaking trade secrets showed that Microsoft had accessed the defendant's email account before taking the matter to legal authorities.

The company said last week its actions were within its legal rights under the terms of use of its email services, but has now acknowledged that its actions raised concerns about customer privacy.

The issue is poignant for Microsoft, which routinely criticizes Google Inc for serving up ads based on the content of users' Gmail correspondence.

It has also been campaigning for more transparency in the legal process through which U.S. intelligence agencies can get access to email accounts following the revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

"While our own search was clearly within our legal rights, it seems apparent that we should apply a similar principle and rely on formal legal processes for our own investigations involving people who we suspect are stealing from us," said Smith in his blog. "Therefore, rather than inspect the private content of customers ourselves in these instances, we should turn to law enforcement and their legal procedures."

(source)

Good bacteria that protects against HIV identified

 Source:  University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Summary:  By growing vaginal skin cells outside the body and studying the way they interact with 'good and                         bad' bacteria, researchers think they may be able to better identify the good bacteria that protect                         women from HIV infection and other sexually transmitted infections.

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston by growing vaginal skin cells outside the body and studying the way they interact with "good and bad" bacteria, think they may be able to better identify the good bacteria that protect women from HIV infection and other sexually transmitted infections.

The health of the human vagina depends on a symbiotic/mutually beneficial relationship with "good" bacteria that live on its surface feeding on products produced by vaginal skin cells. These good bacteria, in turn, create a physical and chemical barrier to bad bacteria and viruses including HIV.

A publication released today from a team of scientists representing multiple disciplines at UTMB and the Oak Crest Institute of Science in Pasadena, Calif., reports a new method for studying the relationship between the skin cells and the "good" bacteria.

The researchers are the first to grow human vaginal skin cells in a dish in a manner that creates surfaces that support colonization by the complex good and bad communities of bacteria collected from women during routine gynecological exams. The bacteria communities have never before been successfully grown outside a human.

The research group led by Richard Pyles at UTMB reports in the journal PLOS Onethat by using this model of the human vagina, they discovered that certain bacterial communities alter the way HIV infects and replicates. Their laboratory model will allow careful and controlled evaluation of the complex community of bacteria to ultimately identify those species that weaken the defenses against HIV. Pyles also indicated that this model "will provide the opportunity to study the way that these mixed species bacterial communities change the activity of vaginal applicants including over-the-counter products like douches and prescription medications and contraceptives. These types of studies are very difficult or even impossible to complete in women who are participating in clinical trials."

In fact, the team's report documented the potential for their system to better evaluate current and future antimicrobial drugs in terms of how they interact with "good and bad" bacteria. In their current studies a bacterial community associated with a symptomatic condition called bacterial vaginosis substantially reduced the antiviral activity of one of the leading anti-HIV medicines.

Conversely, vaginal surfaces occupied by healthy bacteria and treated with the antiviral produced significantly less HIV than those vaginal surfaces without bacteria treated with the same antiviral. Dr. Marc Baum, the lead scientist at Oak Crest and co-author of the work, stated "this model is unique as it faithfully recreates the vaginal environment ex vivo, both in terms of the host cellular physiology and the associated complex vaginal microbiomes that could not previously be cultured. I believe it will be of immense value in the study of sexually transmitted infections."

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Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot

 

 

The tech giant wants to distance itself from the military research lab DARPA, and the feeling is mutual

 

 

Once upon a time, if you wanted money to build humanoid robots, you basically had to get it from the military — specifically, the high-risk, high-reward technology lab known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

 

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Google and DARPA are entangled in a shotgun marriage

 

 

That changed late last year when Google’s own high-risk, high-reward technology lab — Google X — bought a string of companies that make robot legs, arms, eyes, wheels, and brains, with the apparent goal of building something like an android. It’s a win for roboticists, who now have a nonmilitary patron with deep pockets. But two of Google’s new rock star robotics companies, Boston Dynamics and Schaft, still have obligations to DARPA — meaning Google and DARPA are entangled in a shotgun marriage, forced to share parental duties for at least a year.

 

 

Google and DARPA have a lot in common — they both try to anticipate the future and make big bets on emerging technologies. Google even has a history of snapping up DARPA-funded technology — the self-driving car came from a DARPA-sponsored competition — and poaching its employees.

 

 

That doesn’t mean the two innovation houses want to work together, however. Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, "What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?" DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with.

 

The tension came to a head over the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a $2 million competition for robot rescue workers that requires the machines to perform athletic feats like opening a door and going up and down a ladder. Google never signed up for the DRC, but it’s now intimately involved. Five of the eight teams that qualified through the DRC Trials in December are using Atlas, a humanoid made by Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics has a $10.8 million contract to provide Atlas robots and tech support for the DRC.

 

 

Google never signed up for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but it’s now intimately involve

 

 

 

Google also happens to own the team that is most likely to win the DRC. Schaft, a Japanese robotics startup that was founded explicitly to compete in the competition, got 27 out of 32 possible points at the qualifying round in December, beating the runner-up by seven. Schaft received $2.6 million from DARPA to compete.

 

It now looks like Google and DARPA are trying to extricate themselves from each other a little early, however. DARPA is considering adding more teams to a track in the competition where teams build their own robot without DARPA funding, and any newcomers will use a different platform such as NASA Johnson Space Center’s Valkyrie robot instead of Atlas, in order to prevent further entanglement with Boston Dynamics. Google will also move Schaft to the unfunded track and forfeit future DARPA money, which will be reallocated to non-Google-owned teams.

 

 

It’s also looking like the finals will be postponed to give the teams more time to get ready. DARPA has not decided on a date yet, but the event will take place some time between December 2014 and June 2015. Whenever that is, it's also likely to be the last day of Google and DARPA’s unhappy union.

 

(source)

Three Year's Back:Anonymous Targets Child Pornography Web Host in Latest Operation

 

The Anonymous hacktivist collective has taken responsibility for taking down a number of websites Thursday. Wikipedia

 

 

 

Anonymous has set its sights on a Web hosting service for refusing to take down child pornography as its next target with its Operation Darknet plan.

The operation is specifically targeting Web host Freedom Hosting for refusing to take down child pornography in a Hard Candy section of HiddenWiki. The group, known for hacking Sony, Visa, and recently the New York Stock Exchange, noticed that Freedom Hosting hosts the largest collection of child pornography on the Internet and demanded that it be taken down.

 

The Anonymous hackers, according to a statement on BGR, twice shut down the hosting service for refusing to cut ties with child pornographers hosting their illegal content through the service. The group also published a list of names of pedophiles it obtained through the Web site Lolita City, which Anonymous found to have more than 100 GB of child pornography.

 

 

On BGR, Anonymous detailed their demands as:

 

Remove all child pornography content from your servers. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target.

 

 

 

The operation, according to one source who asked to stay anonymous, is largely being run by Anonymous newcomers. The source noted that many of the older, experienced Anonymous veterans didn't know much about the leaders of the OPDark plan, but that Anonymous was 100 percent support for removing child pornography from the net.

The one issue is that the group could be making a few mistakes, the source told the IBTimes.


The source noted that the group has been to publish a list of alleged pedophiles posting child pornography and has made a few mistakes in the identification process. This source noted that it published a few of the wrong names in its Lolita City list, which unfairly identified persons that had nothing to do with child pornography. This may have annoyed some, but Anonymous as a whole -- as unwieldy and leaderless as usual -- ultimately supports the attack against Web servers hosting child pornography.


The group has been known to shut down Web sites that violate human rights or commit slights against ideas that Anonymous believes in. It recently briefly shut down the New York Stock Exchange's Web site in support of Occupy Wall Street and previously has shut down credit card companies in support of WikiLeaks.


The group doesn't have one main leader and anyone can call himself a part of Anonymous. In the past this has created issues when persons claiming to be Anonymous have taken down San Francisco transportation system BART's Web Site and Kanye's Web site just for the heck of it, much to the chagrin of the majority of Anonymous.


This has led to some disagreements within the group and public criticism, but the openness of Anonymous is unlikely to change anytime soon.

 

 

 

 



Facebook to Buy Drone Maker Titan Aerospace

 

Facebook is looking to enter the game of drones.

The social media giant is reportedly in talks to purchase Titan Aerospace, a company that makes solar-powered, near-orbital drones, which can fly for about five years nonstop. Facebook would use the drones to help deliver internet access to areas of the world that still lack connectivity, according to TechCrunch.

Citing an unnamed source "with access to information about the deal," TechCrunch on Monday reported that Facebook will pay $60 million for Titan Aerospace, a privately held venture with research and development facilities in New Mexico. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the report.

If the deal goes through, Titan would purportedly begin building 11,000 unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver Internet access to regions in Africa as a start to Facebook's ambitious global connectivity project.

The rumor comes after Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg in August spearheaded a new organization dubbed Internet.org aimed at increasing access to the Web, with the stated goal of bringing the Internet "to the next 5 billion people." At this point, an estimated 2.7 billion people—about one-third of the world's population—have access to the Internet.


"Any plan to make Internet access broadly available will require making significant technology and business model improvements that enable some access to be either very cheap or free for people who can't otherwise afford it," Zuckerberg wrote in a white paper about Internet.org.

Google is also exploring the expansion of Internet access via aerial means with its Project Loon, a venture that would provide Web connections to underserved areas via high-flying balloons.

Meanwhile, Facebook isn't the only tech giant interested in drones. Amazon in December announced it is experimenting with drones that could provide half-hour, same-day delivery of its products to customers. However, the online retail giant said a formal introduction of the service, dubbed PrimeAir, is years away.

For more, check out our slideshow above of 12 Non-Lethal Uses For Drones.
For more, check out PCMag Live in the video below, which discusses Facebook's reported acquisition. 

Gmail closes door on NSA:all email now encrypted

 

 

Remember when Google engineer Brandon Downey told the NSA to "&^%$ Off!"?

 

That may now be official Google Policy. Gmail has announced that they are "staying at the forefront of email security and reliability" by using an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email. The fact that the option to turn off HTTPS will no longer be available - will further help users thwart the prying eyes of any number of would be snoopers.
 

 

 

According to the recent blog post, Gmail says that they have supported HTTPS since the day it launched, and in 2010 they made HTTPS the default. Today's change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you're using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet.

 

 

In addition, every single email message you send or receive—100% of them—is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail's servers, but also as they move between Google's data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations.

Of course, being able to access your email is just as important as keeping it safe and secure. In 2013, Gmail was available 99.978% of the time, which averages to less than two hours of disruption for a user for the entire year.

Any agency requesting information through legal means would have access through the still open 'legal window' - regardless if the 'door' has been shut....so don't plan on getting rich by building silkroad@gmail.com or the like.....



 

How Much Microsoft Charges the FBI for User Data

 

It's no mystery that government agencies compel tech companies to give them (totally legal) access to user data. It's also pretty well known that the tech companies charge the government for the trouble. We've just never really known how much—until now.

 

Long story short, Microsoft charges the FBI (read: taxpayers) hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for access to information about you. And their rates are on the rise. The Syrian Electronic Army says it hacked into the FBI's super-secret Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), where they found the actual invoices from Microsoft detailing how much each request for data cost.

An invoice from December 2012 totals $145,100 which boils down to $100 per request. The rate had doubled by August 2013 when Microsoft charged the FBI $200 per request for a total of $352,200. The most recent invoice from November 2013 is $281,000. Remember: all of those six-figure sums (provided by taxpayers) are for one month's worth of user data requests. That adds up to millions of dollars a year.

 

A selection from the August 2013 invoice. View all of the hacked invoices here.

 

Don't get too mad about this. As many experts told The Daily Dot, who got to analyze the documents before the SEA released them publicly, it's actually a really good thing that Microsoft charges the FBI for these requests, if for no other reason than it leaves a paper trail. Actually, when companies like Google and Yahoo charge the government for access to data, that money can potentially go toward making free services—like email—better. Indeed, these services are getting better and more secure.

 

This is all assuming that the documents are real. While we know that the Syrian Electronic Army has hacked Microsoft before, it's always hard to tell if hacked documents are authentic or just another excuse for attention. However, Microsoft did announce a breach on its blog earlier this year. "It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen," reads the post.

Meanwhile, experts think these invoices are legit. "I don't see any indication that they're not real," EFF attorney told The Daily Dot. "If I was going to fake something like this, I would try to fake it up a lot more sensational than this."

What if Netflix switched to P2P for video streaming?

 

 

 

 

Could Netflix change its video streaming service to use a P2P architecture, in order to save money on content delivery and sidestep peering conflicts with ISPs like Comcast?

 

 

That’s a possibility raised by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in a blog post Thursday, which urged the FCC to make peering part of new net neutrality regulations. ISPs want Netflix to pay for delivering traffic to their customers because the company doesn’t consume as much traffic as it delivers — to which Hastings replied

 

“Interestingly, there is one special case where no-fee interconnection is embraced by the big ISPs — when they are connecting among themselves. They argue this is because roughly the same amount of data comes and goes between their networks. But when we ask them if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download (in other words, moving to peer-to-peer content delivery) — thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic — there is an uncomfortable silence.”

This brings up an interesting question: Could Netflix actually do that?

Could a service like Netflix stream videos via P2P?

 

 

P2P is best known for file sharing — think Napster’s MP3 swapping and movie downloads from the Pirate Bay, or even licensed torrent downloads, courtesy of BitTorrent Inc. At its core, it just means that users don’t access data from a central server, but instead exchange it between one another — and that same technology can easily be used for video streaming as well.

In fact, Chinese video services used P2P as their primary distribution mechanism for video streams for years. The Chinese internet was traditionally fragmented, with infrastructure being centered around a few major state-owned telecommunications companies. Reaching consumers with adequate speeds to stream video would have required significant investment from video service providers, which is why many of them decided to distribute P2P streaming clients instead.

Services like PPStream, PPLive and Xunlei all used their own P2P software, and even major broadcasters like CCTV used P2P to reach millions of viewers during major sporting events with higher reliability and lower costs than a server-based architecture could have afforded them. Only in recent years has there been a trend toward central architectures for some of these offerings.

In the U.S., P2P was also used for some time to power video streaming for CNN and others, but falling bandwidth costs and the unwillingness of consumers to install plugins or clients for streaming led most services to switch to a central architecture. Most recently, BitTorrent shut down its efforts to bring P2P live streaming to desktop PCs, and decided to focus on mobile devices instead.

Would P2P really double Netflix’s traffic?

 

Hastings suggested Thursday that P2P would “nearly double” Netflix’s traffic. That assessment was obviously meant to put pressure on ISPs, and a closer look shows that the math isn’t all that clear.

When a Netflix subscriber watches an episode of House of Cards in HD, he consumes about 3GB of data. If that same subscriber were also to upload that very same data to someone else to distribute it in a P2P fashion, it would lead to a total consumption of 6GB. Right?

Well, not so fast. First of all, by getting the data from the first user, the  second subscriber wouldn’t access House of Cards from Netflix’s servers, which would mean that in total, about the same amount of data would change hands. And in reality, there wouldn’t just be two people watching the same content, but likely thousands, ideally leading to only incremental data consumption increases for each consumer. With a slightly larger overhead, there would be some traffic increase, but it’s very unlikely that this number would approach 100 percent.

Peering and the last mile: So close, yet so far

 

The real question here isn’t whether the total amount of bits caused by Netflix viewing would increase, but what the impact on peering as well as the last mile would be. Hastings suggested that switching to P2P could essentially lead to a world in which Netflix viewers would send as much traffic from an ISP’s network to other networks as they would consume. The real impact on peering would largely depend on the P2P architecture used.

Back when BitTorrent and other file-sharing technologies had a larger impact on ISP networks, some P2P developers banded together to propose a technical solution for this very problem. Dubbed P4P, it gave ISPs a way to steer the flow of file sharing traffic to make sure that users connected to geographically closer peers, or peers on networks that allowed them settlement-free peering. So if Netflix and ISPs cooperated, they could make P2P work — but given the current situation, that’s a big if.

The other pain point is the last mile. Back in 2008, Comcast admitted to throttling BitTorrent. It argued that file sharers were consuming too much bandwidth on the local level, causing network congestion for their neighbors. Comcast eventually moved away from these measures and towards data caps, and BitTorrent changed the protocol of its clients to be more aware of the state of the network and yield to other traffic. But if Netflix flipped the switch on P2P tomorrow, it could put lots of stress on the last mile, which could be the real choke points for ISPs.

What about mobile and TVs?

 

One of the challenges for Netflix would be that more than 80 percent of its traffic comes from mobile and connected devices. Distributing a P2P plugin to PCs is relatively simple, but making it work on the Xbox One could be significantly more challenging. P2P has been done on mobile devices, and adding a P2P component to Netflix’s mobile apps should be possible, even though issues like data caps on mobile plans as well as battery life would have to be addressed.

But the real issue could be making this work in the living room, where Wi-Fi could become another choke point. Consumers frequently use older networking equipment they got from their ISPs, and getting adequate bandwidth for HD video streaming is already a challenge for many. Now imagine that their smart TVs were also uploading bits and pieces as they streamed Orange is the New Black, and you can see that they’d frequently end up with congestion in the home. Some consumers might go out and finally buy a new router, but many would just blame Netflix if their streaming looked worse.

In the end, Netflix switching to P2P is nothing more than an academic exercise. Yes, it would be possible, and yes, it would save the company some money. But with the large number of Netflix users and the wide variety of devices they use to watch Netflix, P2P would also bring up a whole range of new problems.

North Korea joke slips over China's Great Firewall

AP 10:20 p.m. EST November 28, 2012

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un waves from a balcony at the end of a mass military parade in Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung Square on April 15

Story Highlights

• Spoof article named Kim Jong Un sexiest man alive
• Hong Kong media picked up the piece
• Story made it to Communist Party flagship paper

 

BEIJING (AP) — How did a spoof article about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un being the sexiest man alive end up as a real news item in China? Turns out it was a case of telephone, or Chinese whispers, in the digital age.

Hong Kong media picked up the piece by U.S. satirical website The Onion a week ago while explaining to readers in Chinese that it was a farce. But from there, it jumped over the Great Firewall and landed into the official, irony-free Chinese media.

When Hong Kong's Phoenix TV website, ifeng.com, ran its story on its fashion channel on Nov. 21, the story's second paragraph clearly stated: "The Onion is a satirical news organization."

But, when state-run Yangtse.com picked up the Phoenix piece a few hours later, it had morphed into straight news. The piece never mentioned that the original was a joke, instead plucking comical reader comments attached to the Phoenix story and running those.

"A man with so much fat on the face, and the double chin, and the excessively white skin. And they call him the sexiest. They do deserve the name Onion. I can't help but shed sad tears."
The editor cited for the story, Yang Fang, could not immediately be reached — and two employees who answered the phone at the Nanjing media outlet said Wednesday they weren't even sure if Yang still worked there.

Five days after the Yangste piece, Beijing's Guangming Daily website took the story for a spin, trimming its length and citing Yangtse.com as its source. The Guangming piece was still online Wednesday and the story's editor told The Associated Press that she had not realized it was a joke until the AP called.

The editor, Wang Miaomiao, said she wasn't worried about the gaffe.
"Even if it was satire, the report itself was true. The content is not made up. Also, we have to go through a procedure to take something down from the website," Wang said. "In addition, it is not a fabricated report, and it does not jeopardize society."

The story next made it to the flagship paper of the Communist Party, the People's Daily, on Tuesday along with a significant upgrade: a 55-photo slideshow of Kim. An editor at the People's Daily website who refused to give his name said the story was picked up from the Guangming Daily site, running on three channels in Chinese and English.

Upon realizing it was a spoof, the People's Daily decided to take down their versions on Wednesday. But not before The Onion updated their original piece with a link to the People's Daily and a shout-out: "For more coverage on The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive 2012, Kim Jong-Un, please visit our friends at the People's Daily in China, a proud Communist subsidiary of The Onion, Inc."
"Exemplary reportage, comrades," The Onion wrote.

It is not the first time China's heavily censored media have fallen for a fictional report by the just-for-laughs The Onion.

In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the capital's biggest tabloids at the time, published as news the fictional account that the U.S. Congress wanted a new building and that it might leave Washington. The Onion article was a spoof of the way sports teams threaten to leave cities in order to get new stadiums.

Jeremy Goldkorn, director of Danwei.com, a firm that researches Chinese media and Internet, said that one of the peculiarities of the Chinese news business is that stories can be freely shared by any other media outlet in their entirety, or edited, as long as the original source is credited somewhere on the page.

"It does mean that stuff gets circulated a lot more widely because you don't have intellectual property restrictions on articles that you would in the U.S. for example," he said. "So when you mix that up with this culture of no fact-checking and not really having a news editor whose main job is seeking truth, then what you get is The Onion being taken seriously in the People's Daily."

(Source)