27 Aug 10 | Index Index, minipost
A proposed data privacy law could prevent companies from checking potential employees’ Facebook profiles. Employers will be allowed to search applicants on Google, but the use of social networking sites in the selection process will be banned. The new legislation will also require companies to notify employees about any monitoring of telephone calls or emails. The German cabinet is set to approve the law on 25 August.
24 Aug 10 | Uncategorized
Ph.D. student Sam Burnett has developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly.
The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr.
The landscape of internet censorship has changed drastically due to more refined and sophisticated censorship techniques. This has particularly been the case in China, over the last decade, where the infamous “Great Firewall of China” has been set up. He says this has been the impetus to a rise in techniques to try and circumvent internet censorship.
According to Feamster’s article, an infranet system can provide countries and companies with the capacity to work around censorship firewalls as it “uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous web browsing.”
However, he feels that these web proxies are easily discovered by censors and lack robustness and deniability, which he defines as “the users of the system must be able to deny that they were even using the system in the first place.”
This is where the new Collage tool comes in. Nick Feamster writes:
“Based on these observations, we designed Collage, which allows users to hide messages in photos that they post to user-generated content sites like Flickr and Twitter. The tool allows message senders to hide messages in photos and tweets and upload them to respective user-generated content sites. Its design has several advantages. First, it does not require users to set up fixed infrastructure (e.g., Web servers). Second, it uses erasure coding to “spread” any single message across multiple drop sites, making the system more robust to blocking than a proxy-based system. Collage appeared at USENIX Security Symposium last Friday (paper here) and has appeared in the press recently. Time will tell whether this tool sees more widespread adoption.”
You can read the full paper here.
20 Aug 10 | Index Index, minipost
South Korea has begun blocking access to a Twitter account opened by a North Korean website. The blocking appears to be aimed solely at @Uriminzok Twitter account’s main page address, which has provided North Korea with a platform for propaganda messages.
18 Aug 10 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, minipost
The website of the Russian Centre for the Protection of Forestry (Roslesozashchita) has been blocked since 13 August after it contradicted the official government line that brush fires had not reached areas contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The agency said fires were reported in the Bryansk region bordering Belarus and Ukraine, where radioactive residue covers large areas. Speaking on Russian television shortly before the website became inaccessible, emergencies minister Sergei Shoigu dismissed this as “unclear information from an unclear website”. Officials seem reluctant to comment on the radioactive threat, despite warnings from Greenpeace Russia. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) suggest the website may have been blocked because the information posted was embarrassing for the government rather than incorrect.
