The Open Digital Policy Organization reports that the Norwegian Data Inspectorate has effectively declared use of Google Apps in Norway to be illegal.
Open Digital cites a report dated 16 January which suggests that corporate use of Google cloud services under standard terms violates Norwegian data protection laws. In what it calls a ‘Notice of Decision’ the Inspectorate states that the EU-US Safe Harbor agreement does not adequately guarantee data protection in the face of the US Patriot Act. The Patriot Act gives the US government the right and ability to demand personal data on any person anywhere in the world if that data is held anywhere in the world by a US company – such as Google.
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Microblogging site Twitter has acquired Dasient, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of spam and malware protection services, for an undisclosed sum.
“Effective immediately, we will be bringing our technology, tools, and team to the revenue engineering team at Twitter”, Dasient wrote Monday on its blog.
“By joining Twitter, Dasient will be able to apply its technology and team to the world’s largest real-time information network. As part of this merger, Dasient is winding down its business and is no longer able to accept new customers”, the company wrote.
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The Feds put the smackdown on Megaupload and its whole executive team last week, charging them with criminal charges for copyright infringement and racketeering in addition to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and money laundering.
As a result, it appears that several other cloud locker companies have curbed their sharing ways to avoid similar DOJ entanglements. FileSonic and Fileserve have eliminated file sharing from their service menus, and Uploaded.to is no longer available to those in the US.
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CyberSource, a payment management company working in e-commerce and providing a fraud management system has published its latest report: UK Online Fraud Report 2012.
The report is a mine of statistics on the extent and breakdown of online fraud. One of the key and unsurprising conclusions that can be drawn from these statistics is that fraud is too high, and that fraud screening technologies should be better employed. For example, 61% of merchants have a manual review element to their transaction process. Where this exists, even with the existence of the automated fraud screening system, more than one in five transactions are taken out of the system for that manual review.
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The UK government has published its long-awaited cybersecurity strategy plan, detailing the gameplan for UK PLC and the internet over the next four years.
Entitled `The UK Cyber Security Strategy: Protecting and Promoting the UK in a Digital World’ the paper outlines the four main pillars of action it wants the private and public sector to adopt in the run-up to 2015.
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In this fantastic tutorial we are going to be looking at creating a function that deletes a directory that has contents.
Now we do have a function in PHP already which is called rmdir() so lets just take a minute and take a look at what this function would look like.
<?php
rmdir('directory_name');
?>
Inside the rmdir brackets between the quotes you would place your directory name of the folder you want to delete. Now this can be very useful if you are storing say images inside a directory for a particular user or some type of product line.
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Reported fraud in the UK during 2011 increased by 50% to stand at more than £2bn. Both the number and average value of reported cases also rose.
These are the findings of accountancy firm BDO’s annual FraudTrack report. It highlights the five primary types of fraud that account for more than 85% of the total: tax fraud (rising to 36%), supplier/customer fraud (rising to 30%), employee fraud (down to 10%), corruption (rising to 4%), and management fraud (down to 5.5%).
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Theresa Stevens, a resident of Beaumont, Texas, filed a class-action compliant in federal court in Louisville, Ky., against Amazon.com for failing to protect the personal information of Zappos’s customers.
“Defendant failed to adopt and maintain adequate procedures to protect [personal] information and limit its dissemination only for permissible purposes set forth in the FCRA [Fair Credit Reporting Act]. Defendant’s wrongful actions and/or inaction also constitute common law invasion of privacy by the public disclosure of private facts and common law negligence”, the complaint alleged.
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As SOPA’s aftershocks continue to ripple across the US, a slightly different brand of techno-political drama is unfolding over here in Europe, where the European Commission today announced a new set of online privacy regulations. The new legislation, unveiled this morning, was crafted with the intent of giving consumers more control over their online data, and places more pressure upon private companies to protect user information.
According to Reuters, offending firms could be fined at rates of up to two percent of their yearly turnover. The laws, designed to overhaul the 1995 Data Protection Directive, will also make it easier for users to access their data, giving them the power to demand that their personal information be deleted, as long as there are no “legitimate reasons” for a company to store it. Companies, meanwhile, will be required to inform authorities of a data breach as soon as possible, “if feasible, within 24 hours.”
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There’s an alarming rumor circulating that suggests that UK network O2 forwards your phone number to any website visited on a smartphone. Lewis Peckover built a site that displays the header data sent to sites you visit, finding a network-specific field called “x-up-calling-line-id” which displayed his number. Angry users who tested the site have flooded the company’s official Twitter, which is currently responding with:
“Security is our top most priority, we’re investigating this at the moment & will come back with more info as soon as we can.”
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Shaun is a man with a background in joinery, music, administration, management, web development and technologies. A devoted friend and father to his wonderful daughter, he is also a family man. He likes to create and produce things which has led him into a stronger, more passionate pursuit of development.
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