Endpoint Security

Netflix has agreed to pay $9 million to settle a suit over its illegally long retention of customer rental records. It is now redoubling efforts to get law changed that keeps it from posting to Facebook lists of the things its customers are renting right now.

Members of Anonymous are claiming credit for a DDOS attack that took down CIA.gov about 3:10 p.m. ,Eastern time. Few other details are available, but it's likely the attack is related to the massive retaliatory strike Anonymous launched in the wake of the MegaUpload raids.

Box office losses in U.S. are negligible and would be overseas if movie studios were quicker about shipping out copies of new movies. Like the music industry, movie execs wanted new laws that reduce the rights of others when they had the tools to fix the problem themselves.

Confusing censorship of digital content with import of fake pharmaceuticals? Saying site owners wouldn't be responsible for policing copyrights even though they could lose their sites because of it? RIAA's CEO twists reality in sour-grapes parting shot at lost SOPA/PIPA fight.

Between 30 percent and 40 percent of all file-sharing traffic went through MegaUploads until it was shut down. Since then the number of files being downloaded has remained steady, but from different sites, many of which use data centers in the EU or Asia rather than the U.S.

FBI and Anonymous have become so involved that it's possible within a short time that neither will have time for anything but investigating the other. Cracking, recording and posting the audio from an FBI/Scotland Yard conference call is the best shot in the game by far.

Unlike most successful factions in American politics, on the heels of success in opposing the Internet-censoring SOPA and PIPA bills, members of Reddit are developing a solution they can propose to address the content piracy problem without SOPA's no-rights-for-pirates approach to enforcement.

It's not true that it's not possible to opt out of Google's new policy of combining all customer data from almost all its services. It's possible, but not easy. The point is to build more realistic profiles for ad targeting and marketing; if Google let you opt out, how could it sell your soul?

Scientists researching how information is imprinted on the brain found a way to decode functional MRI patterns and replay them onto the brain. Could it lead to learning by data dump the way Keanu learned Kung Fu in The Matrix? Only if our brains decide to cooperate. So: no.

New studies show SharePoint continuing to grow as a tool to let end users share documents securely. Unfortunately, most of them seem to feel entitled to take those documents out of SharePoint security and even mail them to third parties, removing all security permanently.

The number of employee-owned mobile devices used on corporate networks continues its inexorable rise despite yawning and known gaps in security, a Check Point survey has found.