Free Republic

An FBI cybersecurity guide instructs local police officers on how to avoid surveillance and harassment online amid ongoing protests against police brutality throughout the U.S. The instructions include a range of advisories for smaller police agencies, ranging from ways to avoid harassment on Facebook to the best methods for removing personal information from publicly available databases.

Web surfers battling "spyware" face a new problem: so-called spyware-killing programs that install the same kind of unwanted advertising software they promise to erase. Millions of computers have been hit in recent years by ads and PC-monitoring software that comes bundled with popular free downloads, notably music-swapping programs. The problem has attracted dozens of companies seeking to profit by promising to root out the offending software. But some software makers are exploiting the situation, critics allege, turning demand for antispyware software into a launch pad for new spyware attacks. A small army of angry Web users has set up a...

Dodgy goings on backstage By Andrew Busigin: Monday 21 April 2003, 11:10 RESTING IN SUNNY FLORIDA, I was Running Opera on a nephew's system, specifically ver 7.03 US - the adware version. I didn't mind ignoring the ads too much, and even occasionally clicked on a few to feed the clikthru hungry bannerati. Lo and behold, without entering any voluntary location data, and always entering such info in a dodgy fashion when it was a "required field", the banner ads started getting personal, or at least - local, advertising businesses very close by. It seemed as if the browser might...