Web cookies that allow advertisers to keep tabs on individual Internet users’ browsing habits are being co-opted by the National Security Agency to focus its cyberespionage – potentially reinvigorating the debate over consumer rights to online privacy, leaked documents show.;
Facebook shares will be added to the Dow Jones S&P 500 Index, a portfolio of stocks considered a barometer of the market and even the overall US economy.
The world's leading online social network will replace chip testing equipment company Teradyne after the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on December 20, S&P Down Jones Indices said Wednesday in a release.
Facebook shares rose nearly four percent to top $51 in after-market trades on Wednesday.
Being added to the S&P 500 comes at the end of a year in which Facebook climbed out from the wreckage of its much-hyped but quickly panned stock market debut early in 2012.
Facebook has been on an upward cycle since earnings showed a jump in mobile advertising revenue.
Facebook shares plummeted after the highly anticipated IPO last year and languished, primarily due to doubts about the California-based company's ability to make money from members using mobile devices to get online.
Facebook, based in the northern California city of Menlo Park, will be added to an S&P software and services category in the index.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
An outage at Yahoo Mail stretched into its second day on Wednesday, prompting the US Internet pioneer to apologize to unhappy users.
Yahoo would not disclose the number of email accounts knocked out of service since late Monday night California time.
"We are very sorry for recent difficulties with Yahoo Mail," the company's senior vice president of communication products Jeffrey Bonforte said in a short message posted at Tumblr.
He blamed the outage on a "hardware problem" at one of Yahoo's data centers.
"The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected," Bonforte said. "We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution."
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Former US national security contractor Edward Snowden hopes his leaks of classified documents will lead to greater transparency by governments, he said in rare comments published Wednesday.
The fugitive Snowden, Time's runner-up behind the pope for its person of the year, told the magazine he chose to defy his obligations when he learned the scope of surveillance programs conducted without being disclosed.
"What we recoil most strongly against is not that such surveillance can theoretically occur, but that it was done without a majority of society even being aware it was possible," he told Time in an email interview.
Snowden, who is living in Russia under temporary asylum and was branded "the dark prophet" by Time, has given few interviews since leaking a trove of secret documents from the National Security Agency.
He said he took the risk of publicizing the data because of the dangers he saw of a surveillance state.
"The NSA is surely not the (East German) Stasi, but we should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose," he told Time.
He told the magazine that he hopes his disclosures will help bring about changes by forcing a rethinking by the public, the technology community, the US courts, Congress and the executive branch.
"The president could plausibly use the mandate of public knowledge to both reform these programs to reasonable standards and direct the NSA to focus its tremendous power toward developing new global technical standards that enforce robust end-to-end security, ensuring that not only are we not improperly surveilling individuals but that other governments aren?t either," he said.
Snowden was given asylum in Russia in August, to the fury of the United States, where he could face espionage charges following disclosures that have provoked international uproar and strained US ties with allies.
Time wrote that Snowden has begun to settle into his new life in Russia, learning the language and reading Dostoyevsky?s "Crime and Punishment." The report said he uses the Internet through encrypted and anonymous connections.
Snowden said he believes encryption and the ability to be free of surveillance are fundamental rights.
"In general, if you agree with the (US constitution's) First Amendment principles, you agree with encryption. It's just code," he said.
"Arguing against encryption would be analogous to arguing against hidden meanings in paintings or poetry."
Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong before pitching up in Russia in June, added that he did not defend every story that has been written, but that he allowed journalists he worked with to be the final arbiters of what was published.
"There have of course been some stories where my calculation of what is not public interest differs from that of reporters, but it is for this precise reason that publication decisions were entrusted to journalists and their editors," he told Time. "I recognize I have clear biases influencing my judgment."
A California man who hacked into hundreds of Internet accounts and blackmailed women into stripping for him blames depression and marijuana use for his crimes.
Karen “Gary” Kazaryan, of Glendale, was sentenced Monday to five years in federal prison after he admitted to hacking into hundreds of Facebook, Skype and email accounts to steal personal information and nude or seminude photos to coerce.
Then the 27-year-old Kazaryan “forced (the women) to perform in a degrading manner under the threat of exposure,” said U.S. District Judge George H. King, often over Skype.
Kazaryan changed the victims’ passwords, locking them out of their own online accounts, and searched their computers for embarrassing or private information.
Then he posed as the women and sent instant messages to their friends or persuaded the friends to remove their clothing so he could take pictures of them, investigators said.
When the victims refused his demands, Kazaryan posted nude photos of some of them on their own Facebook pages.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Wilkison, who argued for a six-year prison sentence, said many of the 10 victims she spoke to compared the invasion to a sexual assault.
“The victims called it rape because it felt like rape,” Wilkison said.
One victim said she’d known Kazaryan since high school.
“It has made it difficult to trust anyone I meet when someone I know could do something so abominable,” the victim said in a statement read by Wilkison during the sentencing hearing.
Kazryan’s attorney had argued for no more than a 30-month sentence, saying that some of the victims still had online contact with him.
But the judge interrupted, saying that some of those same women had begged Kazryan to stop threatening them.
Kazryan was arrested in January after investigators found that he may have victimized more than 350 women, some of whom remain unidentified.
Federal agents said they found about 3,000 nude or semi-nude images of women on his computer.
Kazaryan did not address the court at his sentencing hearing, but he told the judge in a letter that his mental health issues and drug use had caused his “immature and mindless” behavior.
“The lines between digital life and reality were blurred and out of control for me,” Kazaryan wrote.
Watch this video report posted online by KABC-TV:
More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
They have urged the United Nations to create an international bill of digital rights that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the internet age.
Their call comes a day after the heads of the world's leading technology companies demanded sweeping changes to surveillance laws to help preserve the public's trust in the internet – reflecting the growing global momentum for a proper review of mass snooping capabilities in countries such as the US and UK, which have been the pioneers in the field.
The open letter to the US president, Barack Obama, from firms including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, will be followed by the petition, which has drawn together a remarkable list of the world's most respected and widely-read authors, who have accused states of systematically abusing their powers by conducting intrusive mass surveillance.
Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Hari Kunzru, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the British authors on the list.
It also includes JM Coetzee, Yann Martel, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Roddy Doyle, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and the Russian Mikhail Shishkin.
Henning Mankell, Lionel Shriver, Hanif Kureishi and the antipodean writers CK Stead, Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder are other globally renowned signatories.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the past six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Though Tuesday's statement does not mention these programmes by name, it says the extent of surveillance revealed by Snowden has challenged and undermined the right of all humans to "remain unobserved and unmolested" in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. "This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes," the statement adds.
"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."
Demanding the right "for all people to determine to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed", the writers call for a digital rights convention that states will sign up to and adhere to. "Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property, it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty."
McEwan told the Guardian: "Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can't resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it's resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost."
The intervention comes after the Guardian and some of the world's other major media organisations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and the National Security Agency.
The revelations have sparked a huge debate on the legal framework and oversight governing western spy agencies. Obama has launched a review of US intelligence operations, and earlier this month the UN's senior counter-terrorism official, Ben Emmerson, announced an investigation into the techniques used by both US and British intelligence agencies.
Civil liberties groups have criticised the UK government for putting intense political pressure on the Guardian and other media groups covering the leaks rather than addressing the implications of the mass surveillance programmes that have been uncovered. But campaigners hope Tuesday's statement will increase the pressure on governments to address the implications of the Snowden revelations.
"International moral pressure is what's needed to ensure politicians address the mass invasion of our privacy by the intelligence services in the UK and US," said Jo Glanville, from English Pen, which along with its sister organisations around the world has supported the Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. "The signatories to the appeal are a measure of the level of outrage and concern."
Tuesday's statement is being launched simultaneously in 27 countries, and organisers hope members of the public will now sign up through the change.org website.
Eva Menasse, one of the group of German writers who initiated the project, said it began with an open letter from a group of authors to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, when the first Snowden revelations came to light. "When we started, we did not know how far we would get. But more and more colleagues joined us and within the last weeks we were sitting at our computers day and night, using our networks as more people came forward. This started as an entirely private initiative, but now has worldwide support."
Another author who helped set up the campaign, Juli Zeh, said writers around the world had felt compelled to act: "We all have to stand up now, and we as writers do what we can do best: use the written word to intervene publicly."
Winterson told the Guardian she regarded Snowden as a "brave and selfless human being"."We should be supporting him in trying to determine the extent of the state in our lives. We have had no debate, no vote, no say, hardly any information about how our data is used and for what purpose. Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do."
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image credit: fulya atalay / Shutterstock.com]
The makers of the Walking Dead games are bringing the world of Westeros to consoles, but plenty of other shows deserve the same treatment
It shouldn't surprise anyone that a new video game based on Game of Thrones is on the way. This time it's being produced by Telltale Games, who also made The Walking Dead, which proved it's now possible to make an expansive, emotionally involving game based on an acclaimed television show. What's more, the world of George RR Martin is so vast and varied that it arguably suits an interactive experience even more than it does a linear TV show. But if it works, we can expect several other video-game spin-offs from television shows to pop up. Here are five that deserve to be first in line.
The Returned
Perhaps The Walking Dead games are a little bit too mainstream for you. That's fine – why not play a video game based on French zombie drama The Returned instead? It's basically the same, except it's in French with English subtitles, the worst thing that the zombies do is suffer prolonged existential crises about how the world has moved on since their death, and you keep being forced into an unlit underpass even though you know that pretty much anyone who's ever used it has ended up being murdered horribly.
EastEnders
One of the main gripes about the GTA series is that, one top-down expansion pack aside, London has never really been a focus. But that all changes now, thanks to a partnership between Rockstar North and BBC Worldwide. EastEnders: The Videogame offers players a fully immersive sandbox experience like no other. Explore all of Albert Square and a bit of George Street. Visit the tube station, but never actually go anywhere. Stand outside the pub, or wash your clothes in the launderette. Why not buy an apple at the market, or soak up the all-pervading sense of gloom in the cafe? EastEnders: The Videogame has 28 full years of gameplay to enjoy, except not much really ever happens. Your character might be recast a couple of times, but that's probably about it.
Breaking Bad
In theory, the Breaking Bad game should slowly lead you through a set of impossible circumstances which darken your morality and transform you from a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into a murderous druglord. However, there's an online version of the Breaking Bad game and, because people who play games online are objectively several times more evil than even Walter White at the peak of his malevolence, you can pretty much just go round murdering people without consequence. Brock, Skyler, Walt Jr … kill them all. You may as well. It's just a game.
Mad Men
Press A to drink a cocktail. Press B to stare across the mid-20th-century Manhattan skyline for five minutes without speaking to anyone, as your face reflects the looming social chance that the 1960s will usher in. Press C to drink another cocktail. Congratulations! You have just completed the Mad Men videogame.
Top Gear
Have you ever wanted to race around the famous Top Gear test track? The Top Gear game lets you do exactly that. Have you ever wanted to race a skateboarder down a hill in a jeep? The Top Gear game lets you do that, too. Have you ever wanted to travel through the jungle with two annoying friends who don't appear to grasp the severity of the situation? Buy the Top Gear game. Ever wanted to make a series of alarmingly xenophobic jokes, and wear horrible shirts, and then say that women are awful, and then interview Mark Wahlberg in a cut scene that feel like it's about 15 minutes too long? Then you really need the Top Gear game in your life.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
It looks like the ideal location for a James Bond thriller: a massive underground bunker in a secret location in the Swiss Alps used for keeping data safe from prying eyes.
Housed in one of Switzerland's numerous deserted Cold War-era army barracks, the high-tech Deltalis data centre is hidden behind 4-ton steel doors built to withstand a nuclear attack -- plus biometric scanners and an armed guard.
The centre is situated near the central Swiss village of Attinghausen, but its exact GPS location remains a closely guarded secret.
Such tight security is in growing demand in a world still shaking from repeated leaks scandals and fears of spies lurking behind every byte.
Business for Switzerland's 55 data centers is booming. They benefit from the Swiss reputation for security and stability, and industry insiders predict the wealthy Alpine nation already famous for its super-safe banks will soon also be known as the world's data vault.
Revelations from former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden of widespread spying by the National Security Agency has served as "a wake-up call" to the dangers lurking in this era of electronic espionage, said Deltalis co-director Andy Reinhardt.
That danger is clearly something his company takes seriously.
To enter the 15,000-square-meter bunker that once served as the Swiss army's secret headquarters one must first hand over an ID card, leave a biometric scan, go through a hyper-sensitive security portal, and finally push past an anti-nuclear steel door.
From there, a maze of concrete tunnels and corridors covered with Cold War-era military maps and dotted with large pools storing underground water lead to the 600-square-meter Deltalis data centre.
Located 200 meters inside the mountain and 1,000 meters below the peak, the pristine, white, almost futuristic room in use since 2011 houses row upon row of humming data storage systems.
The machines continuously gather and store data from individuals or companies willing to pay an undisclosed price to ensure their precious information will not be lost to power cuts, earthquakes or terrorist attacks, and will remain safe from would-be intruders.
Snowden's disclosures that online behemoths like Facebook, Google, Skype and Yahoo have assisted the NSA and other agencies in their snooping by handing over user data have certainly proved a boon for companies like Deltalis.
"I have two positions: one is that I am a citizen of a European country and I find it unbelievable what the Americans are doing," said Christoph Oschwald, the co-director of Mount10, another data centre housed inside a Swiss mountain.
But from a business perspective, he added, "It's fantastic! ... It has tripled the business within a very short time."
While the global data storage industry is ballooning, companies in Switzerland, which has some of the world's strictest data protection laws, are especially reaping the benefits of the atmosphere of paranoia.
Under Swiss law, personal data is defined as a "precious good" that can under no circumstances be handed over to governments or authorities without authorization from a judge.
And although Switzerland's reputation as the land of tight-lipped confidentiality has taken a bit of a hit with the ongoing erosion of its bank secrecy practices, it remains miles ahead of most other countries in terms of data protection, according to Peter Gruter, the head of the Swiss Telecommunications Association.
"In other countries, all kinds of institutions have access to these data, but here you need permission from a judge. That is a great advantage compared to, for instance, the United States," he said.
Susanne Tanner, who heads Swiss data centre Greendata, said many of her company's customers certainly think the Alpine country is a safer bet for their data.
"Swiss companies using servers abroad want to return them to Switzerland, and companies from abroad have begun evaluating Switzerland as a potential place in Europe to conduct their data management," she said.
Fabien Jacquier, the head of Swiss IT security firm Kyos, agreed.
"Clients have become more sensitive to the issue of data protection. Several have asked us to bring their data back to Switzerland," he said.
The electronic spying revelations have also loosened many purse strings, according to Oschwald of Mount10, who is thrilled that people have finally stopped asking why they should pay for a data storage service they could get for free from the likes of Google and Apple.
For the past four months, he said he hasn't heard that question once: "Now people know that if it is free, I can?t complain if they are using my data for whatever they want."
Facebook unveiled plans Monday on a partnership with New York University for a new center for artificial intelligence, aimed at harnessing the huge social network's massive trove of data.
The California-based tech giant named professor Yann LeCun of NYU's Center for Data Science to head up the project.
"As one of the most respected thinkers in this field, Yann has done groundbreaking research in deep learning and computer vision," said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook?s chief technology officer. "We?re thrilled to welcome him to Facebook."
Facebook, the world's biggest social network with more than a billion members, is building the team across three locations -- New York, London and its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
The lab will work on "machine learning," -- a branch of artificial intelligence that involves computers "learning" to extract knowledge from giant data sets.
LeCun, a French-born mathematician and computer scientist, said in a blog post that he was pleased to head up the project with "the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in artificial intelligence."
"I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of director of this new lab," LeCun wrote. "I will remain a professor at New York University on a part-time basis, and will maintain research and teaching activities at NYU."
Facebook chief and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke of the plans during a call in October to discuss the company's quarterly earnings.
Zuckerberg said a working group was formed in September "to do world-class artificial intelligence research using all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook."
"The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people?s questions," Zuckerberg said at the time.
He added that one of the goals was "to build services that are much more natural to interact with and can help solve many more problems than any existing technology today."
LeCun is a professor at NYU?s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is the founding director of the university's Center for Data Science.
He is known for creating an early version of a pattern-recognition algorithm which mimics, in part, the visual cortex of animals and humans.
The algorithm helped allow AT&T's Bell Labs to deploy a check-reading system that by the late 1990s was reading about 20 percent of all the checks written in the US, according to NYU.
LeCun?s recent research projects include the application of "deep learning" methods for visual scene understanding and navigation autonomous ground robots, driverless cars, and small flying robots, as well as speech recognition, and applications in biology and medicine.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
The world’s biggest tech companies have filed court briefs recently supporting the appeal of a gossip website owner who was successfully sued by a former NFL cheerleader and teacher convicted of having sex with a teenage student.
Companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter signed on to briefs filed Nov. 19 with the 6th District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati warning that the ruling had the potential to "significantly chill online speech" and uncut a 1996 federal law that offers broad immunity to websites.
Former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones filed suit in December 2009 against Nik Richie, who operates TheDirty.com, which allows users to anonymously submit posts that pick apart the physical appearance or sexual habits of anyone – whether they’re a celebrity or not.
Richie screens each post, makes editorial decisions and often adds his own comments, but he argues that he’s not responsible for verifying the accuracy of the claims.
A jury awarded the 28-year-old Jones $338,000 in damages after finding that Richie had acted with malice or reckless disregard for the truth when posting two anonymous items in 2009 claiming that Jones had sex with every Bengals player and probably had two sexually transmitted diseases.
She had previously been awarded $11 million in damages in a default judgment after the website operator failed to respond to the original suit, but a court later determined that Jones had sued the wrong, but similarly named, company.
Her attorney amended the complaint to direct it toward the proper company, and in the meantime, Jones pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct and custodial interference in connection with her relationship with a former student.
Jones resigned in late 2011 from the Bengals cheerleading squad and as a teacher at Simon Kenton High School after investigation began in the sexual misconduct case.
Jones’ first defamation trial against thedirty.com ended in January with a hung jury, then she got engaged to the former student from her criminal case, and a second trial ended July 11 in her favor.
Richie’s attorney has filed an appeal that argues federal Judge William Bertelsman should never have allowed the defamation case to go forward, which would nullify the jury’s verdict.
"If websites are subject to liability for failing to remove third-party content whenever someone objects, they will be subject to the 'heckler's veto,' giving anyone who complains unfettered power to censor speech," argues First Amendment lawyer Jack Greiner in briefs filed on behalf of multiple Internet companies.
Greiner argued that the law was clear.
“You're either a content provider or you’re not; you either wrote the offensive content or you didn't. And if you wrote it, you could be liable; if you didn't, you can't be liable," Greiner said. "This ruling, we think and what we're arguing in our brief, is that it blurs those lines."
The ACLU, Buzzfeed, CNN, eBay, Gawker, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Yahoo and Yelp were among the companies or organizations that signed onto Greiner’s brief.
"It could have the effect that a website operator just won't take comments so there will be less speech, less dialogue, sometimes called a chilling affect," he said.
Richie’s attorney, David Gingras, said the prominence of the companies concerned about the ruling "really tell you how major of an issue this is."
The federal Communications Decency Act provides immunity from liability to websites for content posted by their users and helps encourage growth and freedom of speech online, and judges and appeals courts have upheld the law in hundreds of cases.
Thedirty.com recently broke the news of former New York congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s latest marital indiscretions, and former Arizona congressman Ben Quayle admitted to writing for the site under the “Brock Landers” pseudonym.
Oral arguments are expected to begin early next year, with a decision expected in the summer.
Internet law experts say Bertelsman’s ruling is based on his own personal dislike for thedirty.com and not on legal precedent.
"Some people made some really terrible comments frankly -- they're vulgar and completely inappropriate -- and they made them on TheDirty.com," Greiner said. “(But) thedirty.com didn't make the offensive statements. It’s the people who uploaded to thedirty.com."
Bertelsman ruled four times in the case against arguments over the Communications Decency Act, finding that the site’s name, Richie’s management of the site and the personal comments Richie adds all encourage offensive content.
Watch this video report about the case posted online by WLWT-TV:
Eight leading U.S.-based technology companies on Monday called on Washington to overhaul its surveillance laws following revelations of online eavesdropping by fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL and LinkedIn wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress calling on Washington to lead the way in a worldwide reform of state-sponsored spying.
"We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer's revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide," the letter said.
"The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual -- rights that are enshrined in our Constitution.
"This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It's time for a change."
They added: "We urge the U.S. to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight."
Since June, newspapers across the world have revealed the wide scope of government spying by publishing classified documents leaked by Snowden, a former US National Security Agency (NSA) contract analyst now on the run in Russia.
The letter ran in full-page ads in several newspapers, including the New York Times.
The group, which include companies that are often fierce rivals, further detailed their security concerns on the website Reform Government Surveillance.
Statements posted on the site show that top company officials fear the public does not trust that tech giants will -- or can -- keep their online activities private.
The tech companies may also fear that increased security concerns will hurt their own ability to track customers for marketing purposes.
"People won?t use technology they don?t trust," said Microsoft's Brad Smith. "Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it."
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that revelations of government surveillance meant "it is time for the United States government to act to restore the confidence of citizens around the world".
"Unchecked, undisclosed government surveillance inhibits the free flow of information and restricts their voice," wrote Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
For Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, reports of government surveillance show "there is a real need for greater disclosure and new limits on how governments collect information".
"The security of users? data is critical," wrote Google CEO Larry Page. "This is undermined by the apparent wholesale collection of data, in secret and without independent oversight, by many governments around the world."
Leaders of the tech giants have five principles that guide their request.
They are: limiting government authority to collect user information; increase oversight and accountability of intelligence activities; more transparency concerning government demands for information; respect for the free low of information across borders; and a call for a framework to govern information requests between countries.
President Barack Obama earlier in the year ordered a sweeping review of US intelligence community procedures.
Russia has granted Snowden temporary asylum. He is wanted by US authorities for leaking thousands of classified documents.
Over the past six months Snowden's leaks to selected newspapers have shown a massive scale spying by US and other intelligence agencies, often eavesdropping on their own allies.
In the latest in a long list of travesties carried out by the US government in the Megaupload case, apparently it went to the US court handling the case, and without letting Megaupload know, got an ex parte order allowing the government to share evidence…
Cloud storage startup Box, launched from a college dorm in 2005, has raised $100 million in new capital to help fund a global expansion.
The latest funding gives Box, which competes with firms like Dropbox as well as Google and Microsoft, a value of some $2 billion, according to the news blog TechCrunch.
Box said in a statement late Thursday that the new capital comes from Japanese partners Itochu Technology Ventures, Inc., Macnica, and Mitsui USA and MKI; European firm Telefonica; Australia's Telstra, and other investors.
"The combination of cloud and mobile technologies creates an entirely new way of working that will fundamentally reshape the IT industry," said Aaron Levie, co-founder and chief executive of Box.
Levie said in a blog post that the company is "working to support and reach enterprises everywhere in the world."
It currently is offered in 13 languages in addition to English and some 40 percent of its activity is outside the US market.
"In 2012, we opened our first international office in London," he said.
"Today, we have a team of 90 people throughout Europe... Next up is Japan."
He said Box partners will also help expand into Latin America and Australia.
"The coming year will be an exciting one for Box," he added.
"In addition to expanding our global presence, we?ll be doubling down on creating amazing new experiences for end users, solving the most complex IT challenges simply and elegantly, and building a more powerful platform and ecosystem."
Levie founded the company in his dorm at the University of Southern California in 2005 with his friend Dylan Smith, who is chief financial officer.
Box claims more than 20 million users worldwide including 180,000 businesses.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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