Cameras, GPS, and always-on internet connections come with our cellphones, putting the all-seeing eye always within reach. Everyone is watching, not just Big Brother. So you’d better behave yourself. To a group of delayed travelers, a man who assaults an accused fare-dodger on public transport might be a hero. But the cold light of YouTube offers a different perspective . [TNW]

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Smartphones, the record of everything

This is a video of a pair of magic computer-viewing glasses made by removing the polarized film from an LCD computer monitor and applying it to a regular pair of spectacles . That way only you can see your monitor. Ooooooor get fired for staring at a blank screen eight hours a day. You don’t understand, boss, the screen isn’t actually blank — I was watching girls booty-dancing on Youtube. “That’s even worse.” What if I told you I was actually writing a blog on the clock? “As long as it’s not Geekologie.” *nervous laughter* Haha, that little-dick? No way man — I write celebrity gossip. Hit the jump for a short video of the glasses in action and a link to the Instructable to make your own.

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Bewbs!: Polarized Glasses For Private Computering

A lawyer for victims of News of the World phone hacking told the court that long after NotW knew of the police investigation of its newsgathering process, it put reporters’ laptops and hard-drives “through a grinder” and took them out and “smashed them up.” The destruction of the computers is understood to have taken place around October last year, prior to the launch of Operation Weeting, the London Metropolitan Police investigation into phone hacking which has led to the arrests of 16 journalists. The shredding of hard drives would have happened long after senior executives were made aware that phone hacking had spread beyond a single “rogue” reporter. Phone-tap tabloid’s computers destroyed, court told ( via The Inquirer ) ( Image: Responsible Hard-Drive Destruction - Let’s Get Real )

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News of the World shredded hard-drives, laptops

As the fight over the warrantless placing of GPS trackers on suspects’ cars continues, Americans continue to discover hidden GPS trackers. Wired’s looked at these before , and today they’ve got the story of “Greg,” a young man in San Jose, California, who found not one, but two warrantless trackers on his SUV. The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young mans girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car… Greg says he discovered the first tracker on his vehicle after noticing what looked like a cell phone antenna inside a hole on his back bumper where a cable is stored for towing a trailer. The device, the size of a mobile phone, was not attached to a battery pack, suggesting the battery was embedded in its casing… On Tuesday, Nov. 1, Wired photographer Jon Snyder went to San Jose to photograph the device. The next day, two males and one female appeared suddenly at the business where Gregs girlfriend works, driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows. A witness reported to Greg that one of the men jumped out of the car, bent under the front of the girlfriends car for a few seconds, then jumped back into the Crown Victoria and drove off. Wired was unable to confirm the story. There was no writing on the tracker to identify its maker, but a label on the battery indicated that its sold by a small firm in Farmingdale, New York, called Revanche. A notice on a government web site last June indicates that it was seeking 500 of the batteries and 250 battery chargers for the Drug Enforcement Administration. A separate notice on the same site in 2008 refers to a contract for what appears to be a similar Revanche battery. The notice indicates the batteries work with GPS devices made by Nextel and Sendum. Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV

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New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on Blue Coat, a US company whose “deep packet inspection” products are being used by the Syrian secret police with reportedly horrific consequences for Syrians who dare to express dissent online. Blue Coat denied knowledge of the products’ use in Syria, then changed their tune after incontrovertible evidence surfaced. Now they’ve told the WSJ that they don’t want their products used in Syria because it’s illegal to sell technology to Syria. But what they haven’t said is, “We don’t want our products used in Syria because they’re being used to figure out who to kidnap, torture, and murder.” And they haven’t said, “We’ll stop selling our products to countries like Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia” — repressive states (that are legal to sell technology to) where Blue Coat’s products are used in the same fashion as in Syria. In other words, Blue Coat is only concerned about breaking the law, not about helping in human rights violations. Depending on the program, criminal penalties for violating OFAC regulations can range from $50,000 to $10 million with imprisonment ranging from 10 to 30 years for “willful violations.” Given Blue Coat’s early denials, we’re skeptical that their violation wasn’t willful. As Andrew McLaughlin put it in a tweet, “Shame on Blue Coat. Their denials re knowingly assisting Syria censorship don’t ring true.” Blue Coat’s blatant lack of concern for human rights is alarming. There are far more repressive regimes in the world than there are embargoed countries. Several United States allies, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, are also using Blue Coat systems for censorship and surveillance. But Blue Coat is surely unconcerned; after all, exporting to those countries isn’t against the law; it just helps violate the human rights of the people living under those regimes. Meanwhile, the list of Syrians detained for blogging or other online activities continues to grow. Blue Coat: Concern for Criminal Penalties, Not Human Rights

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Blue Coat "deep packet inspection" tools used by Syrian secret police and other repressive regimes

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been investigating Silk, the web browser built into Amazon’s new Android-derived Kindle Fire. Silk is billed as being a very fast browser, thanks to acceleration achieved by funneling all requests through Amazon’s cloud servers. This may speed up network sessions, but it creates many privacy questions, since it means Amazon gets a view into your network sessions that it wouldn’t otherwise have — a copy of all the web-pages you receive. But as Dan Auerbach reports, Amazon made some very good privacy choices in the design of Silk. First, the “acceleration” is user-configurable, and you can just turn it off if you’re worried. Further, SSL connections are never intercepted, and Amazon only lightly logs your network sessions, and expires those logs after 30 days. The service isn’t perfect, but it’s got a lot to recommend it. It is good that Amazon does not receive your encrypted traffic, and does not record any identifying information about your device. And there are other benefits to user privacy that can result from cloud acceleration mode. For one, the persistent SPDY connection between the users tablet and Amazons servers is always encrypted. Accordingly, if you are using your tablet on an open Wifi network, other users on that network will not be able to spy on your browsing behavior. Amazon does not act like an anonymizing proxy, because it does not shield your IP address from the websites you visit or strip unnecessary information out of the outgoing request. Indeed, because the XFF header is set for HTTP requests, your IP is still passed through to the websites you visit. Other headers, such as the HTTP referer header, are set as normal. Thus, the website you are visiting using Silk has access to the exact same information that it would if you were using a normal browser.

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EFF: "We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been investigating Silk, the web browser built into Amazon’s new Android-derived Kindle Fire. Silk is billed as being a very fast browser, thanks to acceleration achieved by funneling all requests through Amazon’s cloud servers. This may speed up network sessions, but it creates many privacy questions, since it means Amazon gets a view into your network sessions that it wouldn’t otherwise have — a copy of all the web-pages you receive. But as Dan Auerbach reports, Amazon made some very good privacy choices in the design of Silk. First, the “acceleration” is user-configurable, and you can just turn it off if you’re worried. Further, SSL connections are never intercepted, and Amazon only lightly logs your network sessions, and expires those logs after 30 days. The service isn’t perfect, but it’s got a lot to recommend it. It is good that Amazon does not receive your encrypted traffic, and does not record any identifying information about your device. And there are other benefits to user privacy that can result from cloud acceleration mode. For one, the persistent SPDY connection between the users tablet and Amazons servers is always encrypted. Accordingly, if you are using your tablet on an open Wifi network, other users on that network will not be able to spy on your browsing behavior. Amazon does not act like an anonymizing proxy, because it does not shield your IP address from the websites you visit or strip unnecessary information out of the outgoing request. Indeed, because the XFF header is set for HTTP requests, your IP is still passed through to the websites you visit. Other headers, such as the HTTP referer header, are set as normal. Thus, the website you are visiting using Silk has access to the exact same information that it would if you were using a normal browser.

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EFF: "We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk"

I typically try to avoid peepin’ at knobs but I have been known to glance over a urinal divider if I hear an unusually powerful stream. Curiosity aside, this is a doorknob that allows you to see what’s on the other side . Which, SPOILER!: your brother masturbating. Hideyuki Nakayama’s “A Room in the Glass Globe,” developed in conjunction with door handle manufacturer LEVER, shows you a reflection of what’s going on in the room behind it, cast in a sort of strange, dreamlike haze. I dig it. And all you have to do for privacy is put a sock over your end. Unless you’re an exhibitionist, in which case you should probably take all your doors off the hinges and sell them back to Home Depot anyway. Except for the bathroom. I don’t care how big a pervert you are, no bathroom should ever go doorless. That’s disgusting. One more picture after the jump.

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I See You!: Through The Looking Glass Knob

Barbie Video Girl is a new $50 doll with integrated video camera so girls can make movies of themselves playing in their bedrooms from Barbie’s point of view. This is going to end badly. You dun goofed, Mattel! The Barbie Video Girl Doll ($50, Mattel, for ages 6 and up) looks just like a regular Barbie, but a closer look reveals a camera in her pendant, and a postage-sized color screen on her back, peaking through her blouse. Powered by two AAA batteries (one in each leg), the doll can record up to 30 minutes of Webcam quality AVI video, with a three-button interface. You can watch your recordings on the doll’s screen, but with no sound. Or you can transfer them to your Macintosh or Windows computer by way of the included mini-U.S.B. cable. Granted I would have killed for a He-Man cam growing up so I could have filmed myself playing naked Master of the Universe, but you know what? So would’ve my uncle. Product Site via Lights, Camera, Barbie? [gadgetwise] Thanks to Kate, who sent me a stuffed dino with a camera in the eyes. Nice try, Kate, but I always blindfold him.

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Bad Ideas: Barbie Video Girl Has Integrated Video Camera

Claire Rowlands is a British woman who’s ultra-pissed after the Google Street View car inadvertently captured a shot of her 3-year old son’s bare asscheeks . Pfft, I played in the front yard naked till I was 17. She said: ‘I just felt sick to my stomach when I saw the naked picture of Louis on the internet. I’m angry, disgusted and upset about it - they should be checking every image before it goes up . ‘ They should be extra careful on warm days because this is what children do - he was just playing in the garden and we didn’t expect in a million years he’d have his picture taken and put on the internet for anyone to see. ‘It’s such a clear image, I see it as an indecent photograph - my concern is that paedophiles could see it and there’s no way I ever wanted my son to be seen naked all over the world. Google has now apologised and said it has blurred the image. Two Three words: throw some pants on the kid and stop complaining. Nobody wants to see the little bastard running through the sprinkler naked anyways. Except the ice cream man, and he has his own camera. Mother’s fury after Google Street View publishes naked picture of her son, three, online [dailymail] via Woman’s Horror at Google Street View Photo of Child’s Bottom [gizmodo]

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Woman Pissed After Google Street View Captures Her 3-Year Old’s Naked Booty