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Browsing should be private' says NSA overlord Black Hat Barack has issued a Memorandum – an executive order in all but name, and an instrument the president has used more than any of his predecessors – to all Federal website sysadmins, informing them to deprecate HTTP and roll on with HTTPS. The HTTPS-Only Standard was proposed by the US' Chief Information Officer Tony Scott, formerly of VMWare. Though the standard has been criticised by a database admin at NASA as a "top-down solution", it has also been described as a "great first step" by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Memorandum [PDF] itself states that "all browsing activity should be considered private and sensitive". The standard is intended to eliminate "inconsistent, subjective determinations across agencies regarding which content or browsing activity is sensitive in nature", Tony Scott said. Source

Google is continuing to refine its Safe Browsing API and now is giving users warnings about not just malicious software on sites they’re attempting to visit, but also about unwanted software. Google’s Safe Browsing API is designed to help protect users from a variety of threats on pages across the Internet. The functionality is built into Chrome, as well as Firefox and other browsers, and when a users tries to visit a page that Google’s crawlers or other users have reported to be hosting malware, phishing links or other types of threats it will throw up a warning dialog. Depending upon the type of threat found on the target page, the browser will give the user various types of information and options. Google started showing Chrome users warnings about deceptive or unwanted software last month, but now that information will be fed into the Safe Browsing API so that other browser vendors, as well as app developers, can pull it into their offerings. “In addition to our constantly-updated malware and phishing data, our unwanted software data is now publicly available for developers to integrate into their own security measures. For example, any app that wants to save its users from winding up on sites that lead to deceptive software could use our API to do precisely that,” Emily Schechter, safe browsing program manager at Google, said in a blog post. “We continue to integrate Safe Browsing technology across Google—in Chrome, Google Analytics, and more—to protect users.” Deceptive, or unwanted, software is a fairly broad category of applications that includes things such as browser extensions that change your home page or modify the settings in your browser. These applications sometimes are bundled with other software or downloaded in the background, sometimes without a user’s knowledge. They can also include spyware or adware that collect users’ data and pretend to be something other than what they really are. Google defines deceptive software broadly as “programs disguised as a helpful download that actually make unexpected changes to your computer”. Image from Flickr photos of Parkesmj. Source

Consumers, hardware makers and even governments have never been more concerned about spying than they are today. It’s pretty much a given that most of the world’s superpowers have elaborate surveillance programs in place to monitor what we do online but who else is tracking your browsing? Internet marketing service NeoMam Studios recently put together a nice infographic on the topic that looks into who tracks browsing habits as well as the steps you can take to limit such activity in various browsers. Sursa: