This week's attention on the NSA's domestic surveillance has reminded me of an exchange from 2006 in which Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA, claimed that the Fourth Amendment doesn't require probable cause and, furthermore, "if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it' ( Read more... )

As you may have noticed, people on the Internet are upset about new TSA security measures. Broadly, there seem to be three objections ( Read more... )

Facebook announced this week that when you visit Pandora for the first time, they'll hand over all of your friend information so Pandora can set up your station with music your friends like. This is the sort of "What were they thinking!?!" news I hear about Facebook every six months or so. The frequency of such moments is the main reason I don't ( Read more... )

With Panopticlick, the EFF is pointing out how websites could track you even if you don't have cookies enabled. If JavaScript is enabled, website authors can figure out things like your set of plugins and fonts. But when I visited with NoScript enabled, my browser fingerprint was unique among the first 425,722 seen. I guess of the 35 visitors ( Read more... )

Even though I've been on the Internet for more than half my life and on the web for three quarters of its, I have some significant new tech and Web 2.0 luddite streaks. I don't have a cell phone, for instance, though that's as much because I don't want to pay lots of money to deal with the phone company's shenanigans as it is because I don't want ( Read more... )

I set up a GPG public key in February, but realized tonight that since I haven't used it in eight months I have no idea what the passphrase is. My mind went back to some ideas I came up with at the time, but none were winners. Since nobody's ever sent me any encrypted mail, I threw the old key away and made a new one. Feel free to send me any ( Read more... )