Author: CarolineC

Via EFF.org Nov. 11, 2014 Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1 By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully...

By Willie Nelson via Huffington Post Last month at Farm Aid 2014, I was lucky to meet Phillip Barker, a Black farmer who, like many minority farmers, lost much of his farmland as a result of discriminatory lending practices by banks and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today, Phillip and his wife Dorathy farm the 20 acres they were able to hold on to in Oxford, North Carolina. Their farm is one of two Black dairy farming operations in the state of North Carolina. They also operate a nonprofit organization, Operation Spring Plant, which provides resources and training to...

Via ITV.com Thousands of people have attended a rally in the centre of Glasgow in support of Scottish independence. The five-hour ‘Hope Over Fear’ event in George Square was aimed at maintaining the momentum of the Yes movement, following its defeat in the referendum just over three weeks ago. Former socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan, who is now the co-convenor of Solidarity Scotland, rallied the crowd and called for similar events to be held in Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife and across...

Via Star Tribune PHILADELPHIA — A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ruled that prosecutors can use evidence gathered after a GPS device was put on a suspect’s van without a warrant. The decision is a blow to three Philadelphia brothers charged in a series of pharmacy robberies, and for civil rights lawyers concerned about the reach of police power in the technological age. “It’s disappointing that today’s decision lets law enforcement agents off the hook in a broader range of circumstances,” said Catherine Crump, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley who argued the case in May...