Russia's blogosphere reacted with anger today after a regional court banned YouTube because it carried a single video containing "extremist" content. The court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Khabarovsk region in the Russian far east ordered Rosnet, a local internet provider, to block YouTube as well as three online libraries and a website that archives deleted web pages. The regional ban was made because YouTube hosted Russia For Russians, an ultra-nationalist video which was added to the justice ministry's federal list of banned extremist materials after a separate court decision in Samara region in November. The other four sites – Web.archives.org, Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru – all carried copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Guardian 

 

A questionable Android mobile wallpaper app that collects your personal data and sends it to a mysterious site in China, has been downloaded millions of times, according to data unearthed by mobile security firm Lookout. That means that apps that seem good but are really stealing your personal information are a big risk at a time when mobile apps are exploding on smartphones, said John Hering, chief executive, and Kevin MaHaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, in their talk at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today. “Even good apps can be modified to turn bad after a lot of people download it,” MaHaffey said. “Users absolutely have to pay attention to what they download. And developers have to be responsible about the data that they collect and how they use it.”

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication. But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has announced what it claims is the biggest upgrade to the internet's infrastructure since the introduction of the World Wide Web. Domain owners will be able to certify themselves under the DNS Security Extensions system to ensure that a web page is from the stated provider, and eliminate many popular attacks. Rod Beckstrom, chairman and chief executive of Icann, told V3.co.uk that Vint Cerf, chiefinternet evangelist at Google, had called the new system the most important change in the internet since the development of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Beckstrom held a press conference at Black Hat 2010 with Dan Kaminsky, the hacker who broke the existing DNS system, to explain the change."What DNSSec allows is that each party online can say not only am I sending you a mail but I can put a stamp on it so you can see it's real," said Kaminsky. "This isn't something we've had the ability to do on a wide scale."

The Information Commissioner has ruled that Google is unlikely to have collected "significant amounts of personal data" with its StreetView mapping cars. The decision was described by privacy campaigners Big Brother Watchas "farcical". The independent information watchdog has been looking at the data collected by Google to see whether it infringes personal privacy, and has now judged that there is "no evidence as yet that the data captured by Google has caused or could cause any individual detriment". In a statement to the press, the Information Commissioner's Office said: "While Google considered it unlikely that it had collected anything other than fragments of content, we wanted to make our own judgment as to the likelihood that significant personal data had been retained and, if so, the extent of any intrusion. The information we saw does not include meaningful personal details that could be linked to an identifiable person. As we have only seen samples of the records collected in the UK we recognise that other data protection authorities conducting a detailed analysis of all the payload data collected in their jurisdictions may nevertheless find samples of information which can be linked to identifiable individuals.

 

Wolfram has announced a beta release of Wolfram|Alpha widgets, bringing the computational engine to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. The widgets offer the chance to build a mini-app on top of Wolfram Alpha queries – so you can do those oft-repeated computations more quickly. The Wolfram Alpha widgets given as a examples include the 'essential kitchen unit converter' which, as you may expect deals with units and measures and a mathematical derivative solver.

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