Slashdot Mirror

Subject: net neutrality, [violated privacy and security of Internet users] Date: Friday, December 14, 2012 at 11:53 p.m. To: "Mr. President Martin Schulz" Dear Mr. President Martin Schulz, This evening, i am here to tell you that Facebook with its own iLike button, is putting at risk the World Wide Web and is violating the privacy and security of each user who uses the internet. All the guys / girls think that the iLike button is a way to say: I Like it. Really the iLike button is a backdoor! What is a backdoor? It is an unauthorized access on the computers of users, so that Facebook can will acquire data from users, violating their privacy and their security, so i am here to ask you to discuss in this regard to the European Parliament, concerning this damage created by Facebook. In the past, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that was at risk the privacy of German Public Administration, and European Union Public Administration. In Germany the iLike button has been removed from any website. I know that in other European Union countries, have failed to remove the iLike button. Today I am here to tell you President Martin Schulz: please ask the Italian government to make remove the iLike button from any website, even from that of Facebook. https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/presse/20110819-facebook-en.htm I hope to receive your reply as soon as possible, Yours faithfully, Paolo Del Bene

I recognize there is a big difference between the "like" button and a simple link, but the article says "link." To be fair, I suspect it was the article's mistake. Still, I wouldn't trust that a government official knew the difference between javascript and a link.

Then you would be mistaken. The original report is pretty detailed and documents Facebook's tracking user techniques even at the Javascript level.

> I wish there was a way that I could view websites without giving any IP or client information.

Have a look at http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/ by the AN.ON project. They are running casades of mixes (based on the concepts by David Chaum, c.f. http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/chaum-acm-1981. html) and are also supporting TOR in their latest versions.

The project receives consulting from the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection (ICPP, http://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/), a leading German institution in both legal privacy protection and privacy-enhancing technology design. They have already won some court cases against German Federal Police who wanted their anon service not that anonymous.

The JAP service was not back-doored. It was forced to log access to a specific website (which was offering child porn), but now a court decided that the initial claims were not legal. It's true that they didn't mention the logging but the used software is open source, which is why the whole thing got unrevealed: JAP gave it to open source and the people found the logging functions. The whole subject is now extensively documented here (no translation, sorry).
In my opinion the JAP people did their utmost to keep this service as it was meant to be. There are laws which can't be ignored, in every country.
In fact, IP logging in germany has no consequences except if you're a german resident, which is why I don't really understand the problem.

Germany is a democracy, right? Well, a German law enforcement agency got a court order to force the JAP anonymity servers to install a back door to log traffic and IPs to a certain undisclosed website. The fact that JAP is a university sponsored project makes this rather scary. What's even scarier is that the JAP team delayed making the spying public until a couple weeks after it began, probably to protect their project. If the "Crime Logging" code hadn't been spotted in the sources, they might never have revealed this. If you can't trust a University sponsored project, who can you trust?

Anyway, the court order was suspended around August 27th. Let's hope permanently.

That's interesting, but have you heard the news about JAP having a back door? Now that's news. Run a fucking story about it already, slashdot!

"I'm a social scientist--I don't know the difference between good and bad, only the difference between difference."

with everyone whining about how 'useless' this guy's statement is, perhaps you should pause for a second and count your blessings. I'm much happier with him acknowledging that he isn't looking to make moral judgements or even define which behavioral patterns are 'better' than others. I'd much rather have someone making their factual (as factual as UseNet is...) observations and leaving it at that.
Then again I can say that while I detest Microsoft's foray into the arena of data-mining (because I think it's naive to think they won't look to use whatever knowledge about online inter-social/meme interaction for their own evil marketing gains...) I don't think that there are really any suprises here. 'They' can associate your online activities if you don't take active measures to prevent them. Everyone has their own kill-list and their own filters. I've got my friend, foes & freaks here on /. If you want to spout anti-american drivel or promote nazi-ism in France, you'd better not do it from your home or work account, duh... (c'mon, the PLO have known this for years)
Then again, with the recent police-led 'back-dooring' of the AN.ON service, where can you realy go for reliable web-obfuscation? How long do you predict that kind of 'untraceable' access will last?
The knowledge that Microsoft is going to get out of this research will not be earth-shattering, but I think it will provide MS with some new ammo to use in the onling realm of marketing and memes. I can easily imagine this evolving into a more successful (and possibly incideous) astro-turfing campaing along the lines of 7Up's dairy-drink.
You remember that one, don't you? When all the bloggers started to scream at each other like Emo kids taunting 'sell-out' and 'poser'.
This really should have been on your radar already, I know that I sure don't post to alt.sex.hello-kitty.underage from work, I hope you don't either.