The US National Security Agency has tapped into key communications links from Yahoo and Google data centres around the world, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The Post, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with officials, said the program can collect data at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, including from Americans.
The report said the program dubbed MUSCULAR, operated jointly with NSA’s British counterpart GCHQ, indicated that the agencies can intercept data flows from the fibre-optic cables used by US Internet giants.
The Post report suggests this is a secret program that is unlike Prism, which relies on court orders to obtain data from technology firms.
According to a top secret document cited by the newspaper dated Jan 9, 2013, some 181 million records were collected in the prior 30 days, ranging from metadata on emails to content such as text, audio and video.
The document shown by the Post indicates that the NSA intercept takes place outside the United States, and that an unnamed telecommunications provider allowed the secret access.
A graphic in the document suggested that the interception at Google came at a point between the public Internet and Google “cloud” servers. The hand-drawn graphic depicted an image of the two Google servers and a smiley face with a note saying, “SSL added and removed here”. SSL refers to secure sockets layer, a cryptographic protocol.
Acting outside US territory would give the NSA more latitude than within the United States, where it would require court orders, the Post noted.
NSA chief General Keith Alexander, when asked about the allegations during a Washington conference, said he was unaware of the report but argued that the allegations appeared to be inaccurate.
“That (activity) to my knowledge, this never happened,” he said at the conference sponsored by Bloomberg Television.
“In fact, there was this allegation in June that the NSA was tapping into the servers of Yahoo or Google, that is factually incorrect.”
He added that the NSA gains access to data “by court order” and that it would not be “breaking into any databases”.
Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said the Internet giant was not involved in any such activity.
“We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide,” Drummond said in a statement.
“We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”
Yahoo said in a statement to AFP that “we have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centres, and we have not given access to our data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency”.
The report comes amid a storm of protest about NSA surveillance both within the United States and overseas of phone and Internet communications.
On Tuesday, US officials said reports that American spy agencies snooped on millions of Europeans were false.
Alexander told lawmakers that in many cases European spy agencies had turned over phone call records and shared them with US intelligence.
A “likely service disruption” struck Facebook on Monday, preventing its 1.15 billion members from updating their status on the social media website.
Users trying to do so were met with an error message that stated: “There was a problem updating your status. Please try again in a few minutes.”
“Facebook status update issues are not uncommon, but this one seems global — we’ve tested it from several IPs and received the same message,” technology website Mashable.com reported.
Downrightnow.com, which monitors service outages on major websites, reported at 9:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) that Facebook had encountered a “likely service disruption.”
There was no immediate comment from Facebook, but the problem was sufficiently widespread for #facebookdown to become a trending hashtag on Twitter.
Microsoft has pulled a Windows update from its website after it caused some customers’ devices to crash.
The company said it removed the RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store during the weekend.
In place of the update, Microsoft posted an apology for the problem and said it’s trying to resolve the situation quickly. The company says it will give updates as soon as possible. It says the problem affected only a limited number of users, some of whom had difficulty downloading the update.
Microsoft says RT 8.1 is an operating system for tablets and light, thin personal computers. It only runs built-in apps or apps downloaded from the Windows Store.
Facebook is now allowing teenagers to share their posts on the social network with anyone on the internet, raising the risks of minors leaving a digital trail that could lead to trouble.
The change affects Facebook users who list their ages as 13 to 17.
Until now, Facebook users falling within that age group had been limited to sharing information and photos only with their own friends or friends of those friends.
The new policy will give teens the choice of switching their settings so their posts can be accessible to the general public. That option already has been available to anyone 18 and older.
As a protective measure, Facebook will warn minors opting to be more open that they are exposing themselves to a broader audience. The caution will repeat before every post, as long as the settings remain on “public”.
The initial privacy settings of teens under 18 will automatically be set so posts are seen only by friends. That is more restrictive than the previous default setting that allowed teens to distribute their posts to friends of their friends in the network.
In a blog post, Facebook said it decided to revise its privacy rules to make its service more enjoyable for teens and to provide them with a more powerful megaphone when they believed they had an important point to make or a cause to support.
The question remains whether teens understand how sharing their thoughts or pictures of their activities can come back to haunt them, says Kathryn Montgomery, an American University professor of communications who has written a book about how the internet affects children.
“On the one hand, you want to encourage kids to participate in the digital world, but they are not always very wise about how they do it,” she said.
“Teens tend to take more risks and don’t always understand the consequences of their behaviour.”
Giving people more reasons to habitually visit its social network is important to Facebook because a larger audience helps sell more of the ads that generate most of the company’s revenue.
TEHRAN: Iran has arrested a man accused of opening fake Facebook accounts in the names of some cabinet ministers, judiciary spokesman Gholam
Hossein Mohseni-Ejeie said on Monday. In recent weeks reports suggested some ministers were active on Facebook, but the ministers denied they have any social media accounts, Mohseni-Ejeie said, cited by IRNA news agency.
An investigation was launched and a man was arrested for having opened “these fake accounts, and he is now in prison,” the spokesman added.
The man’s identity was not immediately known nor was it clear how he managed to open the accounts as access to social media websites is blocked by the Iranian authorities.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is the only member of the government to have official accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is the only member of the government to have official accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
Iran blocks access to such networks, as well as political blogs and pornography sites, to stop people from surfing content that might be immoral or undermine the Islamic regime.
The authorities provide some private or state-owned companies a “national VPN” service which allows them to access to the world wide web.
On September 17, however, Facebook and Twitter became briefly accessible due to what an Iranian official said was a “technical glitch”.
According to official figures, of the total population of 75 million in Iran, more than 30 million people use Internet.
European regulators appeared to be nearing a settlement with Google in their probe over whether the Internet search-and-advertising giant is unfairly stifling competition.
Joaquin Almunia, the top antitrust official at the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said there had been a “significant improvement” in the concessions Google was willing to make in order to avoid a fine. The Commission has been investigating Google since 2010 over complaints that it gives undue preference to its own services in search results and negotiates unfair advertising deals.
Among the most notable of Google’s proposed concessions – which Almunia briefly explained for the first time publicly Tuesday – is a move that would allow Google’s competitors to display their own logos next to their services and take up more space on Google result pages.
Google made a first round of concessions in July 2012, but the EU found them to be insufficient after a year of debate.
“Now, with the significant improvements on the table, I think we have the possibility to work again and seek to find an effective solution,” Almunia told EU lawmakers at a conference in Brussels.
A settlement is not a foregone conclusion, however.
Google is now testing the impact that its changes will have when introduced, and the Commission and competitors such as Microsoft and Yelp will have the opportunity to respond.
Alumunia will then decide whether to continue working on a settlement, which he said would come in early 2014, or to make formal objections, which would likely mark the beginning of a lengthy court battle and possible fines for Google.
Microsoft paid around 2.2 billion euros (currently $3 billion) in fines during a decade of conflict with the Commission over abuses of its market dominance – many of which now appear irrelevant, given the fast pace of technological change.
Thomas Vinje, Legal Counsel and Spokesman for FairSearch Europe, an umbrella group of companies lobbying against Google that includes Microsoft and Oracle, said it was difficult to comment until the full details of the Google proposal were known.
“It is essential…that Google applies the same rules to its own services as it does to others when it returns and displays search results,” he said in an email.
He said he hoped the Commission will give competitors a chance to examine Google’s proposal thoroughly so they can conduct their own assessments of what the market impact will be.
From the start of his appointment, Almunia has said he prefers negotiation rather than lengthy court battles and fines.
“(My job is about) consumer welfare, innovation and choice, not about protecting competitors,” Almunia said Tuesday. He said consumers deserve having choice in online search and advertising “now, and not after many years of litigation.”
Google lawyer Kent Walker said while the company thinks its system is already fair, the Commission had “insisted on further, significant changes to the way we display search results.”
“While competition online is thriving, we’ve made the difficult decision to agree to their requirements in the interests of reaching a settlement,” he said.
Earlier this year, the US Federal Trade Commission closed an investigation into Google after the company agreed to remove restrictions on its AdWords program that were making it difficult for marketers to manage Internet advertising campaign across various platforms. The FTC found that Google’s search result displays – even if they harmed competitors – were aimed at pleasing users, not stifling competition.
But Google’s dominance is even stronger in Europe, where it controls around 80 percent of the total market and more than 90 percent in some countries, compared with just 67 percent in the US, according to data from comScore.
Almunia also mentioned other concessions Google has offered, which include giving websites more control over what parts of their sites turn up in Google results. In the past, Google had insisted that websites either opt out of inclusion in its search results or allow Google to determine what a site’s most relevant content is and how it is displayed in Google search results.
There are about 1.2 billion users of Facebook which are collage together by making it one big picture. Its shocking, amusing and for some threatening but it’s not.
A programmer Natalie Rogers has bought all the pictures of Facebook user into one big picture by giving it the name “The Faces of Facebook”. From this picture you can select any area of the picture and can widen it and by clicking on the picture you can view the user’s profile pages.
Proceeding forward Rojas mentioned in the article that this profile has been marked as private. It means that no information publicly will be shown to any unknown user who is checking out the profiles or following your link. Rojas in the article further said that we won’t break any kind of privacy rule on Facebook as nobody’s personal information, pictures and name would be stored.
The Faces of Facebook is a sign to merge all the users into one platform to form a community.
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