Stories by Ms. Smith

Amazon launched a new Underground app for Android devices; it offers $10,000 worth of 'actually free' Android apps.

GitHub has been hammered by a continuous DDoS attack for three days. It's the "largest DDoS attack in github.com's history." The attack is aimed at anti-censorship GreatFire and CN-NYTimes projects, but affected all of GitHub; the traffic is coming from China as attackers are reportedly using China's search engine Baidu for the purpose of "HTTP hijacking."

When you signed up with your ISP, or with a wireless carrier for mobile devices, if you gave it any thought at all when you signed your name on the contract, you likely didn't expect your activities to be a secret, or to be anonymous, but how about at least some degree of private? Is that reasonable? No, as the law currently suggests that as a subscriber, you "volunteer" your personal information to be shared with third-parties. Perhaps not the content of your communications, but the transactional information that tells things like times, places, phone numbers, or addresses; transactional data that paints a very clear picture of your life and for which no warrant is required.

Although NSA officials were not sure about what all documents Edward Snowden took with him, they've changed their tune a few times after some new leak proves their previous proclamations to be false...like when former NSA Chief Keith Alexander admitted to lying about phone surveillance stopping 54 terror plots. Despite a year of NSA officials claiming that Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, but no access to actual surveillance intercepts, that ends up being lie too.

Microsoft brought the hammer down on No-IP and seized 22 of their domains. They also filed a civil case against "Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi, and a U.S. company, Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC (doing business as No-IP.com), for their roles in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software--harming Microsoft, its customers and the public at large."

We previously looked at the huge demand for ProtonMail, an easy-to-use and free NSA-proof email service created by CERN and MIT scientists. It is based in Switzerland, meaning the U.S. government can't just hoover it up without an enforceable Swiss court order, which is hard to come by since the Swiss legal system has "strong privacy protections." The demand for the end-to-end encrypted email service was so high that ProtonMail ran out of a month's worth of server capacity in three days.

Bright minds from Harvard University and Boston University collaborated on a new research paper that looks at how the government can exploit legal loopholes as well as "technical realities of Internet communications" to get around Americans' Fourth Amendment rights and hoover up their electronic communications.

If you are exposed to negative person, then that negativity might bleed over to infect you. If you are exposed to a positive person, then those positive emotions might put you in a more positive frame of mind as well. Since you likely have experienced that in real life, then you probably don't need research to back that up. Facebook's data scientists were out to prove if emotions expressed digitally would also be contagious.

In huge win for digital privacy that will help pave the future of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Johnny Law needs a warrant before he can search the cellphone a person he arrested.

Like everything in life, there are a plethora of varying opinions when it comes to protecting privacy, freedom and civil liberties. Even when just looking among different privacy advocates, it's painfully clear that not everyone agrees. While I'm personally not a fan of finger-pointing or name-calling, and I do not know either of the authors concerned with privacy, there are bits and bytes from each that are worth pondering.

If you've ever been entranced by maps showing data in real-time, such as a lightning strike map, then it's likely a global map with "live" cyber attacks might hold you spellbound too.

Microsoft announced Interflow, a new platform for sharing cybersecurity threats in near real-time. Although it's currently available only in "private preview" for Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) members, security threat information will be shared faster, creating a "collectively stronger cybersecurity ecosystem." In the long run that means protecting people better and more quickly.

It was only a couple days ago when Microsoft released its Internet Explorer Developer Channel, "a fully functioning browser designed to give Web developers and early adopters a sneak peek at the Web platform features we're working on." Any chance IE might have gotten some long-term social media love was dashed after a clueless "social strategist on behalf of Microsoft" invited the wrong person to write something positive about Internet Explorer.

You might think that people participating in illegal or unconstitutional activity would know better than to leave any digital footprint evidence at all; if folks failed to follow how-not-to-be-nailed-as-a-criminal 101, then destroying electronic evidence so it cannot be forensically recovered would likely be the next move. Although a person could blame missing data on a computer "glitch" or crash, getting rid of every digital trace would be a huge undertaking in this world of redundant backups and cloud storage. Considering the data that supposedly went poof is two years' worth of email from the director of a government agency division, it's little wonder that no techies believe it.