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We've talked about why privacy matters in the internet age, but it's an ongoing battle. Glenn Greenwald—one of the first reporters to write about Edward Snowden's release of classified files—explains in this TED Talk why privacy is important, regardless of whether you do anything wrong or not.

Greenwald opens up with a perfect example of why privacy matters to everyone: There's nothing wrong with singing and dancing, yet you do it in private because you don't want to do it in front of others. You may have nothing incriminating to hide, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be allowed to hide when you want to sing and dance. The big problem, Greenwald explains, is that there is not only two types of people in the world. The world is not split into "good people" and "bad people." We are all just people, and we all do things that we don't want to be seen. Greenwald goes after those that suggest that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide:

"...the people that say that, that privacy isn't really important, they don't actually believe it. And the way that you know that they don't actually believe it, is that while they say with their words "privacy doesn't matter," with their actions they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy. They put passwords on their email and their social media accounts, they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors. All steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider their private realm and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know."

Greenwald believes that all of us have things to hide. We know what we want to keep to our self and what we want to share. But there's more to it than keeping our embarrassing secrets from others. Greenwald suggests that knowing you're being watched changes everything you do:

"The reason is that when were in a state where we can be monitored or can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically. ...Mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is a much more subtle, though much more effective, means of fostering compliance with social norms or with social orthodoxy, and is much more effective than brute force could ever be."

Greenwald believes that mass surveillance takes away our inerrant freedoms and breeds conformity. When we believe there's always a guard watching us, we'll never step out of line. Every time you say that you don't have anything to hide, you're merely sidestepping the real issues. It's not about whether you're a "good person" or a "bad person" with secrets to hide. It's about what privacy means as a whole, for everyone. So what can you do? For starters, re-think how you should fight for privacy and educate yourself about what's going on and why it matters. Be aware of changes, support companies that value your privacy, protect your own privacy whenever you can, and find a way to make your voice heard. Check out the full talk above—if you still aren't sure about why we fight for privacy, it's an eye opener.

Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters | YouTube

 Google may be tipping its hand with new Android advertisement spots, which were spotted and posted to YouTube by Droid Life. The ads feature an eclectic assortment of Andy the Android characters, wearing various costumes and rendered in various sizes. The Android mascot’s variety is also the main message Google is trying to promote with these ads, which tout the slogan “Be… Read More

 When your product streams pirated content, it’s safe to expect some complications along the way. The Time4Popcorn fork of the popular Popcorn Time project recently had to find a new domain following the sudden removal of time4popcorn.eu. But the developers tell me this latest kerfuffle won’t stop the development of the program and they have already found a new domain. Read More

 Anonabox is an open source plug and play hardware router designed to encrypt and route all the users’ web traffic via the Tor anonymizing network, so their browsing and location remains private. No additional software is required for the device to function. Read More

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Games

Ironclad Tactics

Android Police coverage: Civil War Steampunk Strategy Game Ironclad Tactics Jumps From PC To Android

In the 1990s, the History Channel showed nothing but WWII and Civil War documentaries.

27 Best (And 1 WTF) New Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (9/30/14 - 10/13/14) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Two new applications, Drop and Push, want to save you from having to download multiple news apps or browse dozens of websites just to keep up with the topics that interest you. But what makes these two apps different, when compared with news aggregators or other mobile news readers (aka RSS readers), is that they primarily function via push notifications. Read More

Acting on a lead from the entertainment industry, the U.S. Government shut down Megaupload early 2012.

Since then the case hasn’t progressed much. Kim Dotcom’s extradition hearing has been delayed until 2015 and most of the recent court proceedings dealt with how the seized assets should be handled.

Two months ago the Department of Justice launched a separate civil action in which it asked the court for a forfeiture of the bank accounts, cars and other seized possessions of the Megaupload defendants, claiming they were obtained through copyright and money laundering crimes.

Megaupload has now responded to these allegations at the federal court in Virginia, with a motion to dismiss (pdf) the complaint. According to Megaupload’s lawyers the Department of Justice is making up crimes that don’t exist.

One of the main arguments is that the Government accuses the Megaupload defendants of secondary criminal copyright infringement, a crime that doesn’t exist under common law.

“The crimes for which the Government seeks to punish the Megaupload defendants do not exist. Although there is no such crime as secondary criminal copyright infringement, that is the crime on which the Government’s Superseding Indictment and instant Complaint are predicated,” Megaupload’s lawyers write.

“That is the nonexistent crime for which Megaupload was destroyed and all of its innocent users were denied their rightful property. And that is the nonexistent crime for which the Government would now strip the criminal defendants, and their families, of all their assets,” they add.

In addition, Megaupload mentions another argument why the Court doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case. It’s a requirement that the infringements took place in the United States, but the DOJ’s compliant fails to back that up.

“Tellingly, the Complaint and the Superseding Indictment together fail to identify a single instance in which an act of infringement — particularly an unauthorized upload or download — occurred entirely within the United States,” the motion reads.

This is true for the alleged infringements committed by Megaupload users and also for the 50 Cent track Kim Dotcom allegedly distributed himself. There is no mention or proof that this infringement took place in the United States.

“Although the Complaint alleges that Kim Dotcom personally distributed a link to a copy of a copyrighted work on, and has received at least one infringing copy of a copyrighted work from, the Mega Sites, the Complaint never alleges where that occurred,” the lawyers argue.

Based on these and several other arguments Megaupload’s legal team has asked the Court to dismiss the DOJ’s complaint. At the very least, they want the case to be put on hold until the criminal case is completed.

TorrentFreak spoke with Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken who explains that this is the first time that they called out the Government for prosecuting “nonexistent” crimes.

“For the first time in the case, with this motion to dismiss, we are attacking the merits of the DOJ’s core copyright claims. We are optimistic that the Court will find that there is no such thing as criminal secondary copyright infringement,” Rothken tells TorrentFreak.

The Government’s efforts are no surprise to Megaupload’s legal team. The civil attempt to obtain possession of the assets fits a pattern of meritless claims according to Rothken.

“The DOJ is trying to win the Megaupload case on procedure rather than the merits,” Rothken told us.

“We are hopeful the US Court will finally decide the threshold copyright issues in Kim Dotcom’s and Megaupload’s favor and bring this global legal matter to a rapid end.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Tech firms adopt warrant canaries -- the Feds try to shut them up!

All of us need to go through our wardrobe and make some cuts once in a while. Apartment Therapy presents a good inventory and cleaning system to purge your closet effectively.

The process involves taking everything out of your closet and trying it on. Then, get help from a friend to use the one to ten scale rating system, detailed below:

Items that rate an "8" or above — say those articles that are in good shape, fit you well and make you feel good, get to stay. 5 to 8 ratings go in the maybe box. Anything lower (damaged items, items you haven't worn in years or things that just don't make you feel confident), goes directly into the donate box. Consider putting high rating clothes back by the "hanger trick."

We've mentioned the hanger trick before, and it's a great way to keep your closet organized. As you go, keep a running inventory list of the things you decide to keep. This will help you quickly see what articles you need to replace or buy. You should also make a "dream list" as you go, so you have one list of what you have, and one list of what you need or want. Use these lists to go back through the maybe box and help you make final decisions.

How to Do a Closet Inventory (And Why You Should) | Apartment Therapy

Photo by Rubbermaid Products.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Thunderbirds Are Go! as remake launches with a bang

London is getting ready to welcome new Tube trains for the next 40 years. Last week, London unveiled the new cars to the public for the first time, and when the trains finally hit the tracks starting in the mid-2020s, they'll bring an appreciable list of improvements to riders.

With the new design, you'll be able to walk the entire length of the train, which frees up lots of space that was wasted just from closing off individual cars in the past. The entrances are now all evenly spaced and...

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Early September news broke of another significant anti-piracy action carried out by City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

After traveling 200 miles from their London base, PIPCU officers were assisted by Greater Manchester Police in raid carried out on a residential address in the Cheetham Hill area.

Their target was Zain Parvez, a 27-year-old whom police believed was the operator of a series of websites (CoolSport.se, CoolSport.tv and KiwiSportz.tv) which allegedly offered unauthorized access to subscription-only TV services, including matches from the Premier League.

Following Parvez’s arrest, police used the word “industrial” to describe the scale of the operation, having seized 12 servers said to have illegally streamed sports globally. The picture below was released to the press to underline the gravity of the situation.

Instead of releasing him on bail, Parvez was kept in custody under suspicion of offenses under the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988, engaging in money laundering, conspiracy to defraud and possessing or controlling an article for use in fraud.

But now, six weeks later, a surprising development appears to have undermined the case. After an appearance before magistrates the case went to Manchester Crown Court, at which point it was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

“Following consultations with the CPS, a decision has been made to cease the initial charges put before the court in relation to a man arrested by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit on September 1 in Manchester,” a PIPCU spokesperson said.

PIPCU says the investigation into Parvez’s alleged operation is still ongoing but with all the main charges now dropped, it’s unclear where the case can now go.

Parvez’s detention marked the third occasion an alleged streaming site operator had been arrested in the UK, but to date there has been no news of a successful prosecution.

The domains previously operated by Parvez are now all redirecting to a suspicious-looking site promoting Alibaba share deals, not City of London Police’s ‘seized site’ banner as previously might have been expected.

TorrentFreak contacted Parvez for comment and will update this article with any response.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

 In what amounts to a wake up call directed at a British public generally considered apathetic on privacy issues, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that U.K. spy agencies are using digital technology to conduct mass population surveillance without any checks and balances at all — overreaching and encroaching on privacy rights in a way that he characterized as even worse than… Read More

I hear you. We have plenty of news curation apps on Android and we don't need yet another one. But despite the countless options, there's still room for an app that does its job well, looks good at it, and doesn't try to reinvent the wheel with algorithms and predictions that inevitably fall short of their promise.

Source might be this app. Coming from Jacob Klinker of Klinker Apps, the same guy who brought us the Talon Twitter client, the Blur launcher, and EvolveSMS, Source already has a reputation to live up to.

Source Is A Beautiful News Reader App From Jacob Klinker, Now Out In Beta was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The award-winning, fearless filmmaker's documentary on her work with Snowden premiered yesterday, and it's full of bombshells. Read the rest

Mike Weatherley, a Conservative MP and Intellectual Property Adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, has pushed various copyright related topics onto the political agenda over the past year.

Previously Weatherley suggested that ISPs should be held responsible for pirating users, that search engines should blacklist pirate sites and that persistent file-sharers should be thrown in jail.

Ideally, however, UK citizens shouldn’t be sharing or downloading content without permission to begin with. This is an issue the IP-advisor hopes to resolve with his latest set of recommendations, which center around copyright education and awareness.

In a 51-page report (pdf) that was just released Weatherley stresses the importance of copyright awareness and education, especially for the younger generation. This is needed as respect for copyright has declined in recent years and some even believe that sharing copyrighted material without permission is not a big deal.

“There is … a certain level of tolerance for the idea that IP infringements could be considered legitimate. Some believe that illegal activity online is a social norm, with no moral implications,” Weatherley writes.

“We are at risk of an entire generation growing up with different levels of respect for IP and copyright in particular. Should this social contract disappear, there could be longer-term consequences beyond the immediate, short-term negative impacts experienced by the creative sector,” he adds.

In his report the IP-advisor makes several recommendations for how this trend can be countered. Through a broad set of education measures he hopes that copyright will regain respect from the public.

“Education and consumer awareness programmes that seek to change current behaviour or influence future actions are essential for nurturing a greater culture of respect and value for the UK’s creative economy, and to negate the impact of infringement.”

The report mentions that several of the education efforts have already been set in motion. This includes PIPCU’s warning banners on pirate sites as well as the upcoming scheme to warn alleged copyright infringers through their ISP.

One of the future goals is to bring copyright into the classroom. To achieve this Weatherley recommends to add copyright education to the school curriculum, starting with the youngest kids in primary school.

“The school curriculum needs to prepare pupils – from early years through to the end of secondary school and higher education – for the 21st century knowledge economy. Interaction with IP is a daily occurrence for many young people, and yet it is widely ignored within the education system,” the report reads.

As a secondary form of public education, the BBC should also start broadcasting programming that stresses the value of copyright through various channels. This to ensure that the message reaches a wide audience.

“Given its reach and public service broadcasting remit, the BBC should create a copyright education programme using online, on-air and face-to-face channels,” Weatherley recommends.

With these initiatives and other changes, the IP advisor hopes to change people’s attitudes towards copyright. This should then lead to less online piracy in the long run which may reflect positively on the economy.

Unfortunately, the report doesn’t mention who should be involved in creating the educational messages, should they be implemented. The only stakeholders that have been consulted recently are the major copyright holder groups, which may lead to a biased perspective.

To avoid an unbalanced curriculum as we’ve seen in the United States, it may be wise to also involve representatives from the consumer side, library organisations, or alternatives to strict copyright licensing such as Creative Commons.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

 The NSA doesn’t like leaks. But it does like leaks when it chooses to leak, as then it gets to exert influence over the media, and thus potentially shape the public narrative. And as we have variously learned, not everything initially marked TOP SECRET//COMINT//NO FORN needs to stay that way, after all. Read More

Awww. (more…)

In 1996 journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of investigative stories about the connections between the South LA crack epidemic, and the CIA's Nicaraguan Contra fighters.

Read the rest

During the 1970s, when Northern Ireland was gripped by near-civil-war, British military intelligence staged the evidence of "black masses" in order to create a Satanism panic among the "superstitious" Irish to discredit the paramilitaries. Read the rest

Look, we'll talk about menstrual cycles, periods, and cramps in this post. If you feel uncomfortable discussing this topic, move along, but just remember that your entire existence hinged on this very thing. 'K? Now that that's settled, let's get back to our app.

Every couple of months, I spend hours — literally hours, i.e. multiples of sixty minutes — researching period trackers on the Play Store. And every time, I end up with the need to go to a garden to rip out every single flower, throw it on the floor, and stomp violently on it.

Ladies, Clue Is The Pink-Less, Flower-Less, and Butterfly-Less Period Tracker You May Not Be Ashamed Of Using was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 You can say one thing about Google, it sure knows how to push the Internet’s buttons. The company has figured out the perfect way to spice up a dry technology trial: by partnering with London Zoo to use the wireless tech in question — white spaces spectrum — to stream live footage of animals on to YouTube. Specifically meerkats. Otters. And Galapagos Giant Tortoises. Read More

Redeeming those UltraViolet codes that come bundled with Blu-rays and downloading digital copies of your movies isn't the hopelessly confusing mess it once was. Even so, the studio-backed cloud locker service is still failing to catch on with most consumers. At the very least, it's not posing much of a threat to Apple and the iTunes Store. But that could eventually change thanks to one of Apple's familiar foes: Amazon. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is finally considering throwing its hat in the ring and getting behind UltraViolet for digital movie purchases. The online retailer has held talks with Warner Bros. Pictures, Sony Pictures, and Universal Pictures, according to the report.

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He's in talks to direct the big screen version

First announced a couple of years ago, development on a film version of literary and TV perennial The Little House On The Prairie hasn't moved quickly. But gingham may be about to come back in style after all. The peculiar news this morning is that Sean Durkin, director of the indie psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene and producer of Simon Killer, is in talks to open the doors.

Most of us encountered the TV adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s classic book series on Channel 4 Sunday mornings, as it chronicled the gentle adventures of Ingalls family on the 19th century American frontier. We were introduced to Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their three daughters, Mary, Laura and Carrie.

The word you're looking for is "wholesome", but there's something interesting afoot with the new movie that nobody's quite telling us yet. Before Durkin, the Little House was on the radar of similarly idiosyncratic indie director David Gordon Green, equally at home with a serious drama or a stoner comedy. The screenplay is by Abi Morgan, who wrote Shame...

How do these sensibilities play into the adventures of the Ingalls? We don't know, but we're intrigued. Perhaps the plan is to allow a little more of the books' tragedies and dangers onto the screen, and cut back somewhat on the moralising.

Durkin has yet to officially sign on, but Scott Rudin (Inside Llewyn Davis, Captain Phillips) is installed as producer. We'll continue to scratch our heads and keep a beady eye on this one. 

Bad money habits can be hard to break. You decide to put something on a credit card once, and before you know it, you're in a downward spiral of consumer debt. In breaking a bad habit, it helps to understand the foundation on which it's built.

Cash Cow Couple outlines the process of building a bad habit. For example, they explain how "first decisions" work:

Most likely, the first time you went into debt, you knew it wasn't a great idea. You knew you'd pay for it later and that you'd have interest rates on top of the initial expense….You didn't see that these 2 decisions would lead to countless others just like it. In the words of Dan Ariely, in his fantastic book, Predictably Irrational, "You've already made this decision many times in the past, so you now assume that this is the way you want to spend your money." So, in order to take over the bad habit you want to break and to find a starting point for a new habit you want to develop, pay close attention to the very first time you make a choice.

They also point out that habits aren't just hard to break because we're used to them—they're also addictive. They use the example of eating out too much and how it fulfills the six basic human needs. For example:

1. Certainty: You know that when you go to a restaurant, you'll be satisfied. You have the certainty that if the restaurant is open, you'll go home full tonight.

2. Variety: You know that you don't have to go home and eat the same pot of soup you've been working on this week. You can choose something completely different than your pallet has been tasting lately.

3. Significance: When you eat out, you can associate yourself with those that can afford to eat out. You feel significant because you appear to have money.

They suggest reviewing the six needs (outlined in their post) to make a desired habit more "addictive." Check out Cash Cow Couple's full post on the subject. They go into greater detail and offer helpful tips on how to counteract the formation of a bad habit.

Bad Habits Die Hard (But You Can Break Them) | Cash Cow Couple

Photo by 401(K) 2012.

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Two Cents is a new blog from Lifehacker all about personal finance. Follow us on Twitter here.

It’s fall in the northern hemisphere. The sun is lower in the sky and dusk is earlier and earlier. Time to get out warmer clothes and pack away the summer ones. But the low sun and early dusk makes for some great opportunities to capture long shadows.

I’ve rounded up a few shadow images that I thought were particularly good to inspire you. Enjoy!

The post An Assortment of Shadow Images by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.