data

Chances are you've never told your Facebook friends which brand of toilet cleaner you use. But if you buy a bottle at the grocery store, you might see an ad for it the next time you log in to Facebook. The social networking company has announced ... deals with four companies to supply data to make Facebook advertisements more relevant. This means that, for the first time ever, the ads you see on the site won't be based on your activity on the social networking site. The four companies collect data in a variety of ways. Two maintain a database of purchasing activities in retail stores. Another ... (view more)

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has agreed to pay Amazon $600 million over the next ten years. However, the CIA isn't purchasing books or DVDs -- instead, it's buying access to Amazon's massive, private data system. The deal is with Amazon's ... Web Services department, which already offers cloud computing to individuals and businesses. Cloud computing doesn't simply mean offering online storage, but also online data processing. The Amazon cloud service works on a pay-as-you-go basis. This makes it ideal for organizations that need data processed intermittently rather than all the time. ... (view more)

A man who illegally accessed personal data stored on Apple iPads has been sentenced to a 41-month prison term. However, defenders of Andrew Auernheimer believe the sentence is unduly harsh and question whether his actions should even be considered a ... crime. Auernheimer was among a group of computer enthusiasts who discovered a flaw in AT ... (view more)

Hacktivist group Anonymous is preparing to wage a new and expansive war on America's major financial institutions. In what it calls "Operation Wall Street," Anonymous says it will carry out attacks designed to expose "the crimes of Goldman Sachs" ... and other, similar firms. "It should be the duty of any Anonymous, any hacker, in solidarity with Occupy, to release the Dox on the CEOs ... (view more)

A US government contractor has produced software that can track a person's movements and predict their behavior. The software hasn't yet been sold to commercial firms but has been tested, with success. The project is the work of Massachusetts-based ... Raytheon and the US government. The software is called "Rapid Information Overlay Technology," or RIOT for short. RIOT doesn't do anything that humans couldn't do themselves -- it just does it much quicker. It works by gathering together data from people's online activities. Location-Tagged Photos Help RIOT Software One of the keys to the ... (view more)

StartMenu8 1.0.0 Final You might have seen SmartMenu8 on Infopackets before -- but that was the beta version. Now, developer IObit has released the final edition of this very popular tool, which adds the traditional Start Menu to Microsoft's new ... Windows 8 operating system. http://www.iobit.com Data Crow 3.9.19 Data Crow is designed to help you organize your favorite media files. This program allows you to attach all kinds of useful information to your media files, thereby creating a full-fledged media library. This program easily connects to online databases to retrieve relevant data. http:// ... (view more)

Google has, for the first time ever, detailed exactly what it does when a government agency or court demands to see a user's personal data. That data includes the terms someone has used for an online search and the content of Gmail messages. Google ... says that it's reporting on this issue in an attempt to show that it aims to protect privacy wherever possible. The search giant has for several years produced statistics about how many requests for personal data it gets in each country and what percentage of those requests it complies with. This publication is an attempt to draw attention to the ... (view more)

European researchers have made it possible to store coded data in the form of DNA, officially creating the most compact form of digital storage ever in existence. UK-based EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) recently announced the ... successful storage of encoded data in DNA format. The files include an MP3 of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, a .jpeg photo, and several other text files. Millions of Data Stored in a Cup of DNA The innovative encoding method makes it possible to store over 100 million hours of high-definition video in just a cup of DNA. Among its ... (view more)

United States officials believe Iran is responsible for a string of recent cyber attacks on American banks. They say the sophistication of the attacks and the hacks' aim of disrupting services rather than stealing cash both suggest government rather ... than private activity. The attacks have been coming since September and have disrupted the online services of many U.S. banking institutions, including Bank of America, BB ... (view more)

Facebook has implemented changes designed to simplify users control over their privacy on the site. The move follows complaints about, and even a government investigation into, the site's treatment of its members' personal data. According to ... Facebook, the changes are intended to improve privacy three ways: giving information when most needed; showing how data will appear; and improving removal of data that is already online. (Source: fb.com ) Privacy Information Easy to Find Because of the changes, you need no longer hunt through settings pages to find the most relevant privacy options. A ... (view more)