The United States recently changed course and began open talks with Russia regarding the role of the United Nations arms control committee towards strengthening Internet security and limiting the use of cyberspace as a military platform. Although Russia and the US have engaged in dialogue about the subject, their interpretations vary. There has been a growing concern in the Obama Administration over the increasing development of cyberweapons and their use. The goal of the US is to increase international cooperation regarding cybercrime.

A private business called Internet Eyes encourages citizens to roam through live video clips taken from an extensive CCTV network in the UK and report crime. The website makes the process of video voyeurism into a game–awarding it’s top users cash prizes of £1,000 for catching criminals.

Source: Ironpaper: Current “Internet Game That Uses Surveillance To Stop Real UK Crime”

Facebook recently removed a poll that posed the question: “Should Obama be killed?”.  A total of  730 people took part in this poll prior to its removal. The poll provided a radio button selection between 4 choices: “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe,” and “If he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service has begun an investigation into the origins of this abhorrent question.

The Facebook a fun place to reconnect with friends, a replacement to email and vital marketing tool for businesses. Yet the social site is also becoming a popular place for hateful speech, extremism and rabble-rousing.

Idaho has become the top, most spammed state in the US. For instance, for September 2009, Idaho exceeded global spam rates by 7.4%. Global spam rates were 86.4 percent, and Idaho’s rate was 93.8 percent. This study was conducted by MessageLabs, a Symantec company.

It is worth mentioning that global spam rates have soared since the global credit crisis in 2008.

LegitScript.com reported that 89.7% of pharmaceutical category ads on Bing’s adCenter were from illegal pharmecies. Microsoft responded stating that the number of illegal ads was far lower than reported by LegitScript but admitted to the violations.

Microsoft adCenter has taken a number of security steps since to remove the bad entries, inlcuding: manually reviewing pharma-related keywords, investigating reports of hijacked and misused landing pages, documenting the process of how the illegal advertisers use the Bing/Microsoft ad system.

The multisearch extension to Firefox alpha 3 for Ubuntu Linux is being developed to help improve the default behavior of new tabs and  search capabilities. It was admitted by the company that there was one other purpose for the extension–to generate revenue by collecting user data unbeknownst to the user. The extension installs itself and offers no warning about potential privacy issues.

In order to get out of this, the user will have to disable the extension via the TOOLS > Add-ons menu.

Issues fixed in this extension:
1. Awesome bar does not do “feeling lucky” type search
2. The custom search results page is not aesthetically pleasing
3. The custom search page lacks useful functionality (images, videos, maps, etc…)
4. “Multisearch” is not a descriptive name
5. Search UI on New Tab pages is visual clutter, not useful
6. Currency conversions don’t work