As the world celebrates Data Privacy Day while reeling from the latest revelations about the NSA using smartphone apps to monitor everything from your name to your sexual orientation - it may not be the best time for Facebook's Android app to request permission to read your text messages.

While people typically click Accept when presented with the permissions an app needs, in the current climate of heightened tension about privacy, people may begin to questions these permissions.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Northern District of California, alleges that the defendants posted links on a Blogger or Facebook page where “unauthorized copies of the performance can be downloaded.”

The court did issue a summons to the two people, Dan Chodera and Karina Jindrova, who reside in France and the Czech Republic respectively. Given their residency abroad, it may take some time for the defendants to be served.

Councilman Sam Liccardo's proposal, unveiled Thursday and set to be discussed by a City Council committee next week, would allow property owners voluntarily to register their security cameras for a new San Jose Police Department database. Officers then would be able to access the footage quickly after a nearby crime has occurred.

You don't have to be a police target to be nervous of what your energy use says about you – from the hours you keep to your TV tastes. That's why Google's acquisition of a company called Nest rings alarm bells.

Nest makes smart thermostats that learn your behaviour and adjust the heating accordingly. Convenient and helpful – and a potential invasion of privacy.

Princeton PhD students Joshua Spechler and Johan Cannarella used epidemiological modelling, traditionally employed to track the growth patterns of infectious diseases, to predict Facebook's imminent demise, citing the way that MySpace peaked in 2008 and then rapidly disappeared in three years.

“If the disease model holds, it suggests that Facebook will need to evolve/mutate in order to begin another curve or it will die out. It has to overcome the immunisation cycle,” he added.

Snapchat’s security troubles continue as a security researcher has managed to hack its account registration CAPTCHA system with a program of less than 100 lines that took 30 minutes to develop.

Hickson has detailed the basics of the logic he implemented to develop the program through a blog post. “With very little effort, my code was able to “find the ghost” in the above example with 100% accuracy”, noted Hickson.

To beat the FBI at its own investigative game, Police Chief Ray Kelly sent NYPD officers to various locations around the world to gather better, faster intel for the city's anti-terrorist division. As Kelly himself noted as he exited office, the FBI just "can't be trusted" to protect New York from terrorist attacks. That's why local police officers have been stationed overseas for more than a decade at this point.

Worse, though, is the fact that the NYPD's overseas deployments tend to show up uninvited, giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies one more thing to worry about when securing a scene or, in this case, hunting down four terrorists in a crowded mall.

At an AMC theater in Easton Mall in Columbus, Ohio, one Google Glass Explorer went to see Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, but got a rude awakening instead. An hour into the movie he was approached by a federal agent who, without hesitation, snatched the Google Glass off the man’s face and removed him from the theater.

The authorities eventually let the man go, but not without hours of intimidation and a frightening story that has him shaking – literally – even a day after the event. A Movie Association representative compensated the Glass Explorer with 2 free movie tickets for his night of troubles.

Spend a morning or two with "Sesame Street" and you should have all the skills you need to crack the passwords of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of online accounts worldwide. This according to a new list of the worst passwords of 2013 from security-focused developer SplashData that lists "123456" as the most common and new worst password on the Internet, unseating "password," which topped the previous year's list.

Holger Weiß, formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that 'Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by Nagios. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission.