Waxy.org: Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds. appears there’s lots of stupid horny men in seattle and at least one at microsoft. via funkaoshi.

Old Cell Phones Spill Secrets - Forbes.com. it’s too bad they couldn’t find better solutions to include in the article that address privacy and the environment.

Google prosecuted in Brazil to hand over user data. the case involves child pornography on orkut (which google owns). google is defending it’s position by saying the orkut servers are in the US. this is even more interesting because orkut is HUGE in brazil.

data brokers and congress

The Washington Post has an article about a recent Congressional hearings into companies that buy and sell personal information.. Here’s my favorite quote from the article…

The committee subpoenaed representatives from 11 companies that use the Internet and phone calls to obtain, market, and sell personal data, but they refused to talk. All invoked their constitutional right to not incriminate themselves when asked whether they sold “personal, non-public information” that had been obtained by lying or impersonating someone.

the problems with racial profiling and airline security. that one dude must have really hated Fedex.

TechCrunch ยป Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content. what a terrible article title. basically, some researchers at google prototyped an app that can determine what you’re watching on tv by listening to room noise through your PC microphone. Though the privacy implications here are huge (it would technically also be recording everything you say while watching tv), it’s definitely cool.

EFF: AT&T forwards all Internet traffic into NSA. sweet jesus i hope this isn’t true.

Slashdot | Judge Orders Deleted Emails Turned Over. Google got an order to turn over someone’s gmail including their deleted messages. yiiiiiiiiiikes.

Slashdot | Torn-up Credit Card Apps Not So Safe. so this guy tears up a credit card application, tapes it back together, and sends it in with a wrong address and still gets a credit card. considering CapitalOne sends me a pre-approved credit card every week, i’m kinda glad i shred them at work.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: More On What Google (and Probably A Lot of Others) Know. Battelle spoke at Amazon recently. very interesting guy. Seemed to be completely jacked into the search engine world. Basically says that google can spit out a list of everything you ever searched for based on IP addr or a cookie. Time to start using Tor or stop searching for so much porno.

Slashdot | U.S. Government Wants Google Search Records. it’s too bad slashdot doesn’t have a ‘terrible fucking idea’ category to file this under.