The following is from the satire site, “The Onion“.
Are you tired of Google knowing your every move, every thought, want, purchase, opinion? Then Google’s new opt-out village is for you…as long as you know how to farm and bury a dead body…
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There is a lot of talk going around, about the privacy issues in Internet. But no one seems to have pressed the panic button yet. There is always a possibility of a government or an organization with an evil intent to gather as much as data as possible about Internet users. A anonymous proxy can protect users from the big brother from knowing your net activities from their ISP’s, it is of no use if they are able to get it from the user’s web browsers.
“Start Panic” is a website that basically shows the proof of concept of how websites can find out about anyone’s browsing history, just by adding some scripts. Although this site requires a button to be pressed for it to gather the browsing history, some other site can be using a code that can do it automatically. Start Panic aims to raise public awarness for this privcay issue.
This issue is little alarming for the reason that it is cross browser. It works in all major web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. Eventhough this issue has been around for a while from 2007, none of the browsers seem to have noted or tried to fix this issue. Another alarming factor is that normal users do not clear their browser history or cookies regularly. This makes it even more a bigger privacy issue.
For now usage of add-ons like NoScript etc will protect you.
There is a small country called “United Arab Emirates” in the one of the most troubled regions of the world (Middle East). It is rich in Oil and censorship fanatics. In the name of political, religious, moral and cultural values, the state sponsored ISP’s go around blocking and censoring the web content. There is no basis or policy by which this stone age practice is governed.
Last month, Etisalat silently blocked Shelfari (a social book cataloging website). Reason stated was that it was a social networking site. I really don’t understand what this country has against social networking. Orkut and many other similar sites face the same music.
After representation from few netizens this ban seems to have been lifted for now. I have been able to access Shelfari…
So do you think censorship is justifiable in the name of maintaing the community values ?
