One week ago Google Reader's team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. Complaints haven't been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won't be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this 'feature.' Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can check a summary of complaints in my journal here or browse the whole thread in Google Groups.

The website of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NBCP) crashed on Tuesday, just hours after its launch, as droves of people logged on to complain about corruption among officials.

An NBCP official, who did not want to be named, confirmed the breakdown had occurred.

"The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations," he said.

"The corruption problem in China is a fatal illness. Establishing more institutions will not solve the problem," one comment read.

From January 20, 2008 new content laws introduced by the Federal Government will force sites to verify the age of users before accessing content intended for mature audiences (MA15+ and R18+).

ACMA (The Australian Communications and Media Authority) claims that adults will not be affected by the new laws, yet user-generated and even chatrooms are required to be assessed for classification and powers are granted to ACMA to send 'take down' notices to offending sites.

Cryptome reports that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has remote administrative access to several of the most popular Windows PC firewalls, and that it has also taken control of a number of supposedly "secure" email services within the past few months.

It writes that the personal computer firewall software products from MacAfee, Symantec and Zone Alarm all "...facilitate Microsoft's NSA-controlled remote admin access via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030... without security flag."

"Certain privacy [and/or] full session SSL email hosting services have been purchased [or] changed operational control by NSA and affiliates within the past few months, through private intermediary entities."

The so-called "secure" email services implicated by Cryptome's report include Hushmail, Safe-mail.net, and Guardster.com.

Just a reminder that, if you're not using strong encryption, the NSA is probably reading your email, if not also everything that's on your system's hard drive.

The activities uncovered by Wikileaks include deleting Guantanamo detainees' ID numbers from Wikipedia, posting of self-praising comments on news websites in response to negative articles, promoting pro-Guantanamo stories on the Internet news focus website Digg, and even altering Wikipedia's entry on Cuban President Fidel Castro to describe him as "an admitted transexual" [sic].

"The military's efforts to alter the record by vandalizing Wikipedia are of a piece with the amateurism of their other public relations efforts: [such as] their ridiculous claims that released detainees who criticize the United States in the media have 'returned to the battlefield'."

As befits a man who has spent years in DC, the MPAA's Dan Glickman has polished his share of folksy analogies to a shine.

His words yesterday revealed that movie execs are thinking about one thing in particular: the technology that can be used to halt film piracy, and that they expect ISPs to implement it.

The MPAA needs the support of those companies best in a position to implement filtering technology: ISPs.

ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high. Should such a system work, it could lower overall bandwidth usage, but whether that would make up for the cost and PR headaches of a filtering regime is unclear. It won't do much for liability issues, since ISPs are already protected under "safe harbor" provisions.

Two days ago an article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK revealed to the community that a service logs conversations of public IRC channels and put them into a public searchable database. What is especially shocking for the community is that the logging bots are very hard to identify. They have human-like nicks, connect via anonymous Tor nodes and authenticate as mIRC clients. IRSeeK never asked for permission and violates the privacy terms of networks and users.

As a result, Freenode, the largest FOSS IRC network in existence, immediately banned all tor connections while the community gathered and set up a public wiki page to share knowledge and news about IRSeeK. The demands are clear: remove all existing logs and stop covert operations in our channels and networks.

At a police convention press briefing, Joerg Ziercke, president of the German Federal Police Office, told reporters, "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us."

He said, "We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance -- that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

He also said that German police really need to be able to employ "Trojan horse" spyware.

Intercepting telephone conversations at the source or destination means using listening devices, that is, bugs. Sometimes the old methods are still really the best ones, after all.

In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P "freeloaders" are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn't focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications.

"If I was a Comcast customer, I would tell them, as I am now telling all the services I am a customer of: BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC, PLEASE. As a consumer, I want my Internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my Internet service down are P2P freeloaders," says Cuban.

"I wanted to offer the best alternative to P2P for audio and video..... Google Video. If you are trying to do distribution of audio or video, why in the world would you use P2P when Google Video will host and distribute it very efficiently and for free?"

A court document in a drug smuggling case has shown that the private email service Hushmail has been cooperating with police in handing over user emails..

Hushmail claims to offer unreadable email as it uses PGP encryption technology and a company specific key management system that it says will ensure only the sender and recipient can read the emails. However it seems the Canadian company has been divulging keys to the American authorities.

The news will be embarrassing to the company, which has made much of its ability to ensure that emails are not read by the authorise, including the FBI's Carnivore email monitoring software.

"Hushmail's security cannot be broken or weakened by this government sponsored snooping software," the company states.