The latest article coming out of Ed Snowden's documents is reported in the German publication Spiegel and details how the NSA is able to access data from basically every popular mobile phone/operating system: The United States' National Security Agency…
Chinese Internet users could face three years in prison for writing defamatory messages that are then re-posted 500 times under regulations announced Monday amid a broader crackdown on "online rumours".
Web users could also be jailed if offending posts are viewed more than 5,000 times under the new rules, which appear to be part of a controversial campaign against online chatter, which has seen companies, bloggers and journalists targeted.
China has the world's largest population of Internet users and authorities seek to keep close control on the country's hugely popular weibo microblog sites, where a number of officials have been exposed for corruption.
The new guidelines announced by the country's most senior court and its top prosecuting body stipulate that netizens may be charged with defamation if "defamatory information" they post reaches the quotas on viewings or re-posts.
Posts will also be deemed defamatory if the information causes "suicide or self-mutilation... of the parties involved", the new law adds.
The maximum sentence for defamation in China is three years in prison, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The new regulations also contain rules against extortion, blackmail and provoking online arguments.
In recent months a wide-ranging clampdown on "online rumours" has been launched by Beijing, with hundreds of people questioned or detained as a result.
Last month officials told Internet celebrities with millions of online followers to "promote virtues" and "uphold law" online.
Among those rounded up in the clampdown are 27 people from the central city of Wuhan who were detained after police broke up an "online rumour speculation company".
Chinese-American billionaire blogger Charles Xue was also arrested this month for suspected involvement in prostitution and "group licentiousness".
Xue has attracted 12 million followers on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, regularly posting reform-minded comments on a variety of sensitive issues.
Last week Chinese official Yang Dacai was jailed after netizens posted pictures of him online with expensive watches, triggering a corruption inquiry.
But analysts questioned whether such widely-circulated revelations could be repeated as authorities rein in Internet chatter.
At a high-tech factory in the world's fastest growing auto production hub, industrial robots and white-suited workers put the finishing touches to hundreds of cars rolling off the assembly line each day.
It could be a scene from Toyota City or Detroit, but this is Thailand, a country better known around the world for its beaches and rice paddies.
With major car makers hit by a global economic downturn, the Southeast Asian nation has emerged as a rare bright spot in recent years.
Thailand's auto production surged 70 percent in 2012 from the previous year, to 2.48 million vehicles, according to the Paris-based International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers.
In contrast, China and India saw only single digit gains.
Thanks to major investment by Japanese producers as well as US giant Ford, Thailand is Southeast Asia's most prolific car maker, streets ahead of nearest-rival Indonesia.
Last year it exported about one million vehicles.
Domestic sales also continued to surge in the first six months of 2013, although they have since slowed as the number of first time buyers lured into the market by tax breaks tails off.
It is a general growth trend mirrored across much of the region as people switch to cars from motorcycles.
Despite worries about Thailand's wider economic fortunes, car makers remain bullish about the kingdom's long-term prospects and have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into high-tech new plants to prove it.
"There might be black clouds and there might be problems, but overall the car industry is driven by people... people with two wheels who want to get four wheels," says Uli Kaiser, president of industry analysts the Automotive Focus Group Thailand.
"I don't see that desire to stop, and I see Southeast Asia as the strongest growth territory in the world."
As the battle for market share intensifies, big car makers -- many from Japan -- are ploughing cash into new plants determined to sell more vehicles to Thailand's burgeoning consumer classes and take advantage of its location in the heart of Southeast Asia's export markets.
At a Honda factory on the outskirts of Bangkok, it takes three days to fully assemble a new car. Over 1,100 drive off the production line every day.
The Japanese maker is aiming to churn out 420,000 vehicles a year in Thailand by 2015, when a new $644 million car plant is expected to open outside Bangkok.
It is a far cry from 2011 when floods swamped much of the country and shuttered the industry for weeks, raising fears automaking behemoths could shift their operations.
"We were severely affected... if we were a small company we would have gone bankrupt," Pitak Pruittisarikorn, executive vice president of Honda Automobile Thailand, told AFP.
"But from the company that was affected most, we came back to be the company that has the highest growth. Now Thailand is the biggest Honda production base in the region (Asia) and will be in three or five years from now."
Last month rival Toyota started production at a sprawling $340 million assembly plant, its fifth in a country where it sold more than half a million vehicles last year.
The company says it will eventually make 770,000 vehicles -- from passenger cars to vans -- on Thai soil each year.
The group, which employs 13,500 people in Thailand and whose pickup trucks are ever-present on its motorways, is determined to stay in pole position.
"We have to keep our market share... we can keep between 35 and 40 percent," said Kyoichi Tanada, president of Toyota Motor Thailand, outlining his belief that Thai consumers will continue to buy around 1.2 million vehicle each year.
Nissan meanwhile has pledged to open a second factory costing $360 million next year, which will eventually produce 150,000 vehicles annually.
Thailand's car boom has been in part steered by the nation's government which gave the sector a shot-in-the-arm after the floods with its "first car" policy, garnering around 1.25 million orders for new cars qualifying for a tax rebate of up to $2,500.
The "Golden Year" of 2012, was followed by a record first half, but sales have since waned as fears over household debt mount and banks tighten credit lines, prompting many orders under the scheme to be cancelled.
Even so analysts see a bright future for the Thai car market, predicting 10 percent annual growth in the coming years.
It is a projection that will delight car manufacturers, but promises more frustration for Bangkok's traffic-weary motorists.
OS X Mavericks is shown on an Apple MacBook laptop. (Apple ) Back in June, Apple took the wraps off a new desktop OS called Mavericks, but stopped short of specifying an actual launch date, saying only that the software would arrive this fall. Today…
[Image via Agence-France-Presse]
Yahoo received some 29,000 government requests for data on its users this year, with almost half coming from the United States, according to the company's global transparency report released Friday.
Yahoo said in the report, covering the first six months of 2013, that 12,444 of the requests from worldwide governments came from the United States.
"At Yahoo, we take the privacy of our users seriously," general counsel Ron Bell said in a blog post.
"We also recognize our role as a global company in promoting freedom of expression wherever we do business. That's why we're issuing our first global law enforcement transparency report."
Bell said the government requests affected "less than one one-hundredth of one percent of our worldwide user base."
He added that the report includes US "national security requests" which have become a major issue in light of reports on secret government surveillance programs run by the United States.
"Our legal department demands that government data requests be made through lawful means and for lawful purposes," Bell said.
"We regularly push back against improper requests for user data, including fighting requests that are unclear, improper, overbroad or unlawful. In addition, we mounted a two-year legal challenge to the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and recently won a motion requiring the US government to consider further declassifying court documents from that case."
For requests made in the United States, Yahoo said it provided some content in 37 percent of cases. In 55 percent it provided only "non-content data" such as names, location other subscriber information.
The company rejected two percent of requests and found no data in six percent.
The report comes with US tech companies under pressure following revelations of a secret program which scoops up vast amounts of data from Internet firms.
Tech firms including Yahoo have been seeking to release more information on government data requests, in the belief that this would reassure customers.
The Yahoo report follows the release of similar information from other tech firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter.
Yahoo said the numbers reported "include all types of government data requests such as criminal law enforcement requests and those under US national security authorities, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and National Security Letters (NSLs), if any were received."
But it noted that the US government "does not permit us to disclose additional details regarding the number of requests."
In addition to the United States, Yahoo listed requests from 16 other countries or territories including Australia, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Britain, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.
The company said these are the countries where Yahoo has a legal entity that could be required to turn over data.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
New explorable images from the Japanese coast devastated by an enormous tsunami have been posted online, allowing web users to see how the disaster changed the area.
The images, on Google's Street View, include pictures of towns and villages near the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant where radiation levels are still too high for people to return.
They show a mixed picture of progress, with some areas in which rebuilding is well under way, and others where nature appears to be reclaiming land on which decaying shells of buildings sit.
Users can explore the region as it looked before the disaster and, in many cases, can compare it with how it looked in the immediate aftermath and how it looks now.
The Internet giant is offering views of the deserted streets of 12 towns and villages in Fukushima prefecture, including Futaba and Okuma, where the crippled plant sits.
They also include other evacuation zones such as Iitate, Katsurao, Kawauchi, Naraha, Hirono, and Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture.
The newly updated street views were taken between April and August this year, a Google spokeswoman in Japan said.
The images are part of a project named "Memories for the Future", which also comprises photos and movies uploaded by the general public.
More than 18,000 people died when a 9.0 magnitude sub-sea earthquake sent a towering tsunami barrelling into Japan's northeast coast in March 2011.
Cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear plant were knocked out, sending reactors into meltdown and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee.
Although no one is officially recorded as having died as a direct result of the radiation released, scientists warn some areas may remain contaminated for decades.
Google in March released panoramic views of Namie, a town located within the original 20-kilometre (12-mile) exclusion zone around the plant.
The street views can be seen at Mirakioku.com.
The National Security Agency (NSA) has compromised encryption software needed to ensure the privacy of Americans' day-to-day Internet activity, in part through a "breakthrough" in 2010 allowing for the mining of data through Internet cable taps, as well as secret backdoor access into commercial encryption programs, according to joint reports by The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times on Thursday.
The reports, based on thousands of documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, prompted immediate criticism from privacy advocate groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"Backdoors make all of us less safe and make US companies less secure, which come at a great expense of the reliability of American companies -- companies which have been at the forefront of the tech sector," EFF policy analyst Mark M. Jaycox told The Raw Story via email on Thursday. "When programs are less safe, customers will leave."
According to the reports, the program was highlighted in a 2010 memo by the NSA's British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), praising its "aggressive, multipronged effort" since 2000, when the NSA regrouped after losing the fight to openly install "clipper chips" in regular computers.
"Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online," the GCHQ memo stated. "Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."
The documents leaked by Snowden also revealed that the NSA has devoted around $250 million per year to a program designed to "covertly influence" tech companies' products, more than 20 times the budget alloted for the PRISM program that was the subject of numerous reports by the Guardian earlier in 2013.
"The encryption technologies that the NSA has exploited to enable its secret dragnet surveillance are the same technologies that protect our most sensitive information, including medical records, financial transactions, and commercial secrets," ACLU technologist Christopher Soghoian said in a statement. "Even as the NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of cybersecurity, it is making the internet less secure and exposing us to criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance."
ProPublica founding managing editors by Stephen Engelberg and Richard Tofel defended their decision to run the report in a separate column on Thursday, arguing that the information Snowden provided proves that the privacy expectations of thousands of regular Internet users are not being met.
"The potential for abuse of such extraordinary capabilities for surveillance, including for political purposes, is considerable," Engelberg and Tofel wrote. "The government insists it has put in place checks and balances to limit misuses of this technology. But the question of whether they are effective is far from resolved and is an issue that can only be debated by the people and their elected representatives if the basic facts are revealed."
[Image: "Hacker At Work" via Shutterstock]
Facebook is drawing fire from privacy activists again, after unveiling a new policy which could turn users' data and pictures into advertising.
The new plan would "dramatically expand the use of personal information for advertising purposes," said a letter this week to the US Federal Trade Commission by six privacy organizations.
The letter said the changes violate a 2011 consent order with the US watchdog agency and urged the FTC to "act to enforce its order."
If the changes take effect, the letter said, "Facebook users who reasonably believed that their images and content would not be used for commercial purposes without their consent will now find their pictures showing up on the pages of their friends endorsing the products of Facebook's advertisers."
"Remarkably, their images could even be used by Facebook to endorse products that the user does not like or even use," added the letter from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and three other groups.
Facebook unveiled the changes as part of a settlement of a class action suit over the use of user names and images in so-called "sponsored stories."
According to the letter, Facebook's existing policy allowed its users to limit how their name and profile picture may be associated with advertising.
Under the newly proposed policy, Facebook says, "You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content."
Activists said this allowed Facebook to turn virtually all user data into advertising.
"Facebook has long played fast and loose with users' data and relied on complex privacy settings to confuse its users, but these proposed changes go well beyond that," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy director.
"Facebook's overreach violates the FTC consent order that was put in place after the last major privacy violation; if the commission is to retain any of its credibility, it must act immediately to enforce that order."
Also endorsing the letter were the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, US PIRG and Patient Privacy Rights.
Facebook officials pointed out that its policies were not changed, but clarified under the new language.
"As part of this proposed update, we revised our explanation of how things like your name, profile picture and content may be used in connection with ads or commercial content to make it clear that you are granting Facebook permission for this use when you use our services," a company spokesperson said.
"We have not changed our ads practices or policies --we only made things clearer for people who use our service."
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Internet mogul Kim Dotcom said on Thursday he was resigning from his new venture Mega to focus on fighting extradition to the United States and his plans for a New Zealand political party.
Dotcom launched mega.co.nz in January, a year after his wildly successful Megaupload empire was shut down as part of a US-led investigation into online piracy.
The 39-year-old, who was arrested when armed New Zealand police involved in the US probe raided his Auckland mansion, confirmed that he had resigned as a director of Mega at an August 29 board meeting.
"Mega is in excellent hands," he tweeted. "I resigned as managing director to focus on my copyright case and a new political party."
Dotcom, who is free on bail in New Zealand pending an extradition hearing expected to take place in April next year, said he was still working on development of a web-based music service called Megabox.
The extradition case has dragged on in the courts and is subject to numerous appeals, with Dotcom estimating earlier this year that his legal bills could exceed US$50 million.
He announced plans this week to launch a political party to contest next year's New Zealand election, which will attempt to prevent conservative Prime Minister John Key winning a third term.
Dotcom has been a fierce critic of Key, whom he accuses of bowing to Hollywood pressure by pursuing the piracy case against him.
The party is set to be launched on January 20 next year, the second anniversary of the raid on Dotcom's home. He cannot stand for parliament directly because he remains a German national, but intends to serve as the party's president.
Amid growing fears about online surveillance and data theft, Americans are increasingly taking steps to remove or mask their digital footprints on the Internet, a study showed Thursday.
The Pew Research Center report said 86 percent of US Internet users have taken some steps to avoid online surveillance by other people or organizations.
Despite these precautions, 21 percent of online adults in the survey have had an email or social media account hijacked and 11 percent have had information like Social Security numbers or financial data stolen.
The report said 12 percent of those using the Internet have been stalked or harassed online, and six percent have been the victim of an online scam and lost money.
Another six percent said they have had their reputation damaged because of something that happened online, and four percent said they were in physical danger because of something that happened online.
According to the study, 50 percent of Internet users say they are worried about the amount of personal information about them that is online -- a figure that has jumped from 33 percent in 2009.
"Users clearly want the option of being anonymous online and increasingly worry that this is not possible," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet Project and an author of the report.
"Their concerns apply to an entire ecosystem of surveillance. In fact, they are more intent on trying to mask their personal information from hackers, advertisers, friends and family members than they are trying to avoid observation by the government."
The survey found some 64 percent of online adults clear "cookies" which store information, or their browser history and 41 percent have disabled cookies.
Some delete material they have posted in the past, create usernames that are hard to tie to them, use public computers to browse, or give inaccurate information about themselves.
Roughly 14 percent of the users survey said they at times encrypt email and 14 percent say they use services like virtual networks that allow them to browse without being tied to a specific Internet protocol (IP) address.
"Our team's biggest surprise was discovering that many Internet users have tried to conceal their identity or their communications from others," noted Sara Kiesler, an author of the report and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University.
"It's not just a small coterie of hackers. Almost everyone has taken some action to avoid surveillance. And despite their knowing that anonymity is virtually impossible, most Internet users think they should be able to avoid surveillance online -- they think they should have a right to anonymity for certain things, like hiding posts from certain people or groups."
Most Web users said would like more control over their personal information, saying in many cases it is important that only they or the people they authorize should be given access to their emails, their contacts, their locations and the content of what they download.
"These findings reinforce the notion that privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition for internet users," said Mary Madden, a Pew researcher. "People choose different strategies for different activities, for different content, to mask themselves from different people, at different times in their lives. What they clearly want is the power to decide who knows what about them."
The researchers surveyed 1,002 adults, including 792 Internet and smartphone users, from July 11-14. The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points for the full survey group and 3.8 percentage points for Internet users.
The Ecuadoran government has proposed legal changes to punish libel disseminated over social networks like Twitter or Facebook, a top official said Wednesday.
Alexis Mera, President Rafael Correa's secretary for legal affairs, said the move aimed not to control content on social networks, but to extend to them the same rules that apply to other media.
"The same penalty that exists for defamation in the communications media, or in any other situation, is applicable in cases of defamation on social networks," Mera said.
Under Ecuador's penal code, slanderous libel, which involves a false accusation of a crime, carries a punishment of between six months and two years in prison.
Libel that simply impugns a person's honor is considered a lesser offense with lighter penalties.
The proposal, which has been presented to a congressional committee, comes against a backdrop of hostile relations between Correa and the country's privately owned media.
Correa has used the courts to sue for libel newspapers and journalists who have written critically about him.
The courts are currently considering a constitutional challenge brought against a controversial new communications law that would reduce the private sector's share of radio and television frequencies.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
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