Eve.com today temporarily shut down its Web site after a security breach exposed customer order information on thousands of orders dating back to last year.

Discovered by San Francisco Bay Area software developer Jonathan Khoo, the breach allowed customers to view other people's orders by simply changing a number in the URL. The breach exposed customers' names and addresses, products and the dates on which they were ordered, the types of credit cards customers used, and the last five digits of the cards' numbers.

CNET.com - News - Entertainment & Media - Microsoft quietly shadows Web surfers across MSN sites .

Days after acknowledging a privacy problem with its Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft said today that it does not disclose how it identifies people who travel across its network of Web sites.

A complaint that Microsoft was tracking Web surfers across its multiple properties raised the privacy bugaboo of the moment: the ability of companies to uniquely identify people as they traverse domains.

In response to an advisory posted by PCHelp, a Washington state Internet technology consultancy, Microsoft said it redirects its various Web properties' visitors to a single server that assigns them a unique identifier. That identifier, an "MSID," lets Microsoft chart a single person's visits and activities over the company's Web sites, which include MSN.com and dozens of affiliated sites like Hotmail, CarPoint, Expedia, bCentral and LinkExchange.

Microsoft said its method of identifying surfers across various sites is not addressed in its privacy policy, but that a version in progress will explain the practice. That new privacy policy is due at the beginning of October.

Root Prompt -- Nothing but Unix - They Can't Crack What They Can't Find . "The Internet today is a jungle full of predators. Some of these predators are trying to crack your machine others are just looking for a machine to crack. By using the firewalling tools built into the Linux kernel it is possible to make a desktop machine virtually disappear from the crackers view."

Root Prompt -- Nothing but Unix - Amateur Fortress Building in Linux. "I'm (ed. the author of the linked WWW site, not me, at least not in this statement) weird. If I want to keep the bad guys away from services I've intended for local use only I don't want to do it by having a firewall shooting off the incoming packets or by a source host validation mechanism kicking them out after the connection has been made. I want to do it by simply not listing to public ports in the first place. There will be a firewall in front and access control after the connection is made, but they are extras, not the main mechanism."

Slashdot | Making Your Linux Box Secure.

Business 2.0 - Exterminate! Exterminate!: . When a Thai engineering professor announced that his students had created the "world's first armed robot guard," controllable via the Internet, the global scientific community shuddered in unison. Its inventors, however, swear it's a useful security device. Would the robot ever be sold commercially?

Business News from Wired News - Prisoners Forced to Give DNA. Corrections officials in New York give convicts a choice: give up your genetic information or go to solitary. The state now requires DNA samples from people convicted of attempted murder, sodomy, and criminal use of firearms. The trick here is what law was in effect when they were convicted. While I might like to have DNA samples of the entire convicted prison population. You can't just randomly change the rules after the fact. Now if it was part of the parole process that would be another story. After all how many crimes are commited on the general population by folks already in prison? If it was a one of the conditions for parole, it would get samples from the appropriate part of the population without violating their rights.

Culture News from Wired News - Private Folks Really Tell All.

Nearly all Internet users say they are concerned about privacy online, but despite those fears nearly two-thirds of Web surfers have transmitted such highly personal information as a credit card number, according to a study released Wednesday.

The study, published by the Andersen Consulting Institute for Strategic Change and the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University, said 95 percent of consumers have significant concerns about their privacy online.

Redherring.com - Pro sports anti-Napster. "Powerful entities are trying to gain control of the Internet," says ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen. "Intellectual property law is being used to restrict speech on the Internet. Whether that should be allowed or not is the huge question."

EPIC and Amazon.com.

Recently Amazon announced that it could no longer guarantee that it would not disclose customer information to third parties.

Because of this decision, and in the absence of legal or technical means to assure privacy for Amazon customers, we have decided that we can no longer continue our relationship with Amazon. Over the next several weeks we will take steps to sever our ties with Amazon. This will mean finding a new way to distribute our publications and other publications on privacy, free speech, and related topics.

Slashdot | IE 5.5 Tracking Default Bookmarks. I am a Mac user at IE 4.5 (haven't upgraded to IE5) so I can't check this out. But if they only do this with the default bookmarks you should be able to remove the redirection. It still stinks. Just go into the favorites editor and enter new bookmarks or edit the existing ones to remove the redirection prefix.

I hear Netscape is doing the same thing
The redirection URL is http://home.netscape.com/bookmark/(version)/(bookmarkname).html

Take a look at http://home.netscape.com/bookmark/ to see all supported versions.

Slashdot | Too Much Corporate Power?.

Network World - Cashing in on privacy. For the last few months, we've brought you a lot of bad news about privacy. Everywhere, it seems, Web sites are capturing your data, spammers are intruding and employers are snooping (hi boss). But a new class of vendors is trying to change all that, developing software that will let us shop anonymously, or control what our employers know about us (bye boss).