Slashdot | Your Rights Online - No More Unrestricted Internet At Work.
Yahoo! News - Email, Web at Work - Is the Free Lunch Over?
Brace yourselves, corporate drones: one of the last bastions of work place relief -- sneaking in some online shopping or snickering over an email joke -- could be destined for universal banishment.
Major corporations are increasingly classifying employee email and Internet privileges as potential security hazards, distractions or worse, costly legal dangers in the making.
As a result, companies are considering dramatically curtailing, or even abolishing completely the freedoms, on which employees have grown increasingly reliant over the past few years.
Newsbytes - US Military Scours Windows Systems For Hacker Back Doors .
The United States Army and Navy are conducting a high-priority security review of their Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] Windows systems for the presence of an unauthorized remote-control program, sources familiar with the investigation have confirmed.
An unclassified memo, sent Mar. 6 by the Navy's Computer Incident Response Team (NAVCIRT), warned Navy computer administrators to scan their Windows systems for evidence of a popular commercial software program called RemotelyAnywhere.
"NAVCIRT received several computer incident reports involving the installation of RemotelyAnywhere on compromised computer systems which in turn enables scanning, probing, and compromising of additional DoD systems," said the memo, a copy of which was received by Rob Rosenberger, an independent virus expert who consults to the military on information security matters.
Officials from NAVCIRT, which is part of the Navy's Fleet Information Warfare Center in Virginia, were not immediately available for comment.
ZDNet |UK| - BT anti-spam drive backfires on users.
Measures to combat spam passing through BT mail servers are also trapping and deleting legitimate emails from BT's ADSL customers
A move by BT to cut out spam passing through its servers has ended up deleting valid emails sent out by some of BT's ADSL customers.
BT introduced the measures, which entailed filtering out and deleting emails that looked like spam, on Tuesday. But the company failed to tell its customers about the new policy and as a result some had their outgoing emails filtered and deleted too.
They get points for trying to cut down on SPAM but lose them all for not informing customers about what is going on and treating them like everything is their fault.
Technology News from Wired News - Fiber Optics, as Never Been Seen.
One of the challenges of fiber optics is protecting transmissions from snoops. "Chaotic behavior" could be the encryption system of the future.
[ ... ]
Liu has found that if he picks his lasers carefully, he can set up two such nonlinear (chaotic) circuits whose feedback behavior is the same.
Thus, if you have a message that needs to get from Albuquerque to Boston without being snooped on, you place a laser in each city. After the two lasers have been synchronized over an open channel, you add your message signal on top of the sending chaotic laser. And once the signal reaches Boston, you use the Boston laser to subtract off the chaos -- and to get the original message.
"Any eavesdropper who tried to tap your message would just receive noise -- akin to listening to static instead of the radio," he said.
Business News from Wired News - Filters Block 'Sinful Six'.
Wasting time on the Internet -- perhaps the favorite pastime of corporate America -- is increasingly coming under assault.
In the interests of creating a more efficient workplace (or simply preventing employees from spending the day looking online for better jobs), Internet filtering firms say that a growing number of companies have begun restricting access to non-work-related websites.
The restrictions -- which range from bans on instant-messaging programs to time limits on recreational Web surfing -- are an extension of the already commonplace practice of blocking access to offensive websites in the workplace.
"Most of this industry got started with a couple of categories: pornography and violence," said Craig Blessing, director of international sales at filtering firm N2H2. "But it's certainly evolved, and productivity is becoming the No. 1 mantra for companies."
Much of the push to clamp down on unproductive at-work surfing originates from the very companies that produce programs to monitor and filter Web activity. By convincing employers of the downside of idle surfing, companies in the so-called employee Internet management (EIM) business stand to drum up substantial new business.
Just as long as they stay with blocking and not tracking/monitoring its probably OK. Most might prefer that they don't do it, and it would be nice if they trusted their employees, but after all it is their dime. If they have any sense they will loosen the restrictions after the normal work day. After all its a good moral booster and makes the people available for more work.
CNN.com - Privacy group seeks DOT passenger-creening plans.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) hopes that a lawsuit it filed will bring oversight to the Department of Transportation's (DOT) efforts to track both transportation workers and airline passengers using computers and biometric ID cards.
[ ... ]
At the heart of the suit are three newspaper articles that were published in January and early February in the Washington Times and Washington Post.
EPIC says that in January, the Times published articles outlining DOT plans to have transportation workers carry biometric ID cards and to set up an ID card system for airline passengers. EPIC also cited a Post article in early February in which DOT sources said the department planned to set up a computer network for screening passengers. The network was to be created by linking government and private computer systems and databases.
"Where the basis of the request comes from is that the government itself has revealed nothing about these initiatives," Sobel said. "The objective here is to move beyond unnamed DOT sources to really make public on an official basis some of the details."
To get the details on the proposals in a timely fashion, EPIC has asked for the FOIA request to be expedited. This means that the DOT must either turn over the documents or refuse in a timely fashion. Sobel said he wants the request expedited out of concern that the DOT will release the documents in a couple of years, too late to have an impact on the policies now being created.
Sobel said he also wants to know about tracking procedures, created in the 1990s under a commission led by Vice President Al Gore, that were supposed to be in place September 11.
CNET NEWS.COM - Bus-tracking system links kids to parents.
A Canadian company on Monday launched a wireless tracking system in Singapore that will link school buses to schools and parents, thereby boosting safety for schoolchildren.
Sounds like a fluffy press release. No real details about the product/service provided. How does it track them? What information does it provide? How does it provide it? What security precautions does it have to keep the bad guys from using it to track these same kids?
Digital Speech Project.
The Digital Speech Project was founded in February 2002 to coordinate digital freedom activism and advocacy across the United States. If you are as steamed about our eroding rights as we are, get involved.
Press Release - Free Software Foundation Offers Resources to the Digital Speech Project.
Boston, Massachusetts, USA - Monday, March 18th, 2002 - The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today heralded the launch of the Digital Speech Project: an effort to encourage and coordinate activism to protect our digital freedoms in light of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and similar laws. The FSF has hired a Digital Freedom Organizer, Jonathan Watterson, to work actively on the the Digital Speech Project.
Bradley M. Kuhn, vice president of the FSF, explained FSF's interest in this project: "The FSF focuses on the fight for software freedom, but we realize that without related freedoms, software freedom can easily be eroded. The Digital Speech Project fights for the freedom of all users of all technology from legislative technology control measures like the DMCA and the proposed proposed Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). These laws do menace software freedom, but we hope to educate the public that these laws threaten many different and important freedoms."
Slashdot | FSF Offers Resource to Digital Speech.
The Free Software Foundation is offering resources, including an staff organizer, to the Digital Speech Project. This project seeks to organize people against technology control laws, like the DMCA and the proposed SSSCA. The Digital Speech Project has a website here.
Counterpane: Crypto-Gram: March 15, 2002 .
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