NSA secretly hacks, intercepts Google, Yahoo daily

The United States’ National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers worldwide. That’s according to documents released by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, The Washington Post reports.

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According to the documents, the agency and its British counterpart GCHQ, through a project called MUSCULAR, collected data stored on Google and Yahoo servers. That allowed both governments access to hundreds of millions of user accounts from individuals worldwide.

“From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants,” RT cites the Post’s Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani.

A January 9th document says that in the preceding 30 days, collectors had processed over 181 million pieces of information, including both metadata and the actual contents of communications.

The government can already request information from phone or data through the FISA Amendments Act but this data collection would ostensibly take place without Google and Yahoo even being aware of it.

When you send email or store files with an internet company, that data is regularly shared among servers around the world, in order to ensure quick access to your information from wherever you happen to be. Google and Yahoo run customized private networks to shuttle that information around, passing between and within countries, as the Post indicates in a graphic. To move that information, the companies use fiber optic connections, light-speed networks running over thin glass cables. According to the Post, it’s those connections that the NSA is able to monitor. None of Yahoo’s inter-server traffic is encrypted. Not all of Google’s is either.

The MUSCULAR program, according to Wednesday’s leak, involves a process in which the NSA and GCHQ intercept communications overseas, where lax restrictions and oversight allow the agencies access to intelligence with ease.

“NSA documents about the effort refer directly to ‘full take,’ ‘bulk access’ and ‘high volume’ operations on Yahoo and Google networks,” the Post reported. “Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner”.

The Post points out that company staffers were surprised and angry to hear that their their networks had been compromised. Google said that it was “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers”.

The report comes amid a storm of protest about NSA surveillance both at home and overseas of phone and Internet communications.

On Tuesday, US officials said reports that American spy agencies snooped on millions of Europeans were false.

Alexander told lawmakers that in many cases European spy agencies had turned over phone records and shared them with US intelligence.

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Google hit with $AUD200k defamation damages

Ad giant's own witness confessed removing dodgy search results is easy

An Australian man defamed by links on Google that associated his name with images of and articles about a criminal has been awarded $AUD200,000 damages.

Melbourne man Michael Trkulja argued that searches on his name, which brought up references to criminal Tony Mokbel, constituted defamation.

Trkulja asked for those references to be altered. Part of Google's defence suggested he had not properly completed forms that would have seen the ad giant alter its search results, but the end result was that Trkulja's name continued to appear alongside references to a nasty gangster called Tony Mokbel. A jury agreed that those results equated to defamation, and Supreme Court Justice David Beach today decided it was $AUD200,000 worth of defamation.

The judgment paints a fascinating picture of Google's response to the complaint, noting that a Google US employee, a 'Mr Madden-Woods', appeared on the stand but that the ad giant did not call anyone to the witness stand involved in handling the original complaint from Mr. Trkulja.

That became important because one piece of evidence offered by Mr. Trkulja was an email from help@google.com stating:

“At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal. Please contact the webmaster of the page in question to have your client’s name removed from the page.”

But the existence of the mail from help@google.com, Justice Beach writes, means the jury could easily “... infer that … Google Inc was well aware of what was being requested of it” and that a more nuanced response was almost certainly a sensible option.

Making matters worse, Justice Beach writes that Madden-Woods “ … conceded the obvious (perhaps somewhat begrudgingly) that it would not take very much effort to work out, from the page of photographs supplied to Google Inc, the identity of the website that linked the plaintiff’s name to Mr Mokbel and Mr Tanner. All one had to do was click on one of the images (the text beneath each image showing that the one web page was involved). At that point it would have been open to Google Inc to block the URL of that page from Google Inc’s searches, in compliance with the plaintiff’s former solicitors’ request.”

The amount of damages awarded seems to have been calculated in two ways.

Trkulja had already succesfully sued Yahoo! over the same matter and been awarded $AUD225,000, but that search engine had published nasty links for longer and that those links stated he was “so involved with crime in Melbourne that his rivals had hired a hit man to murder him”. Google's results stated only that Trkulja “was such a significant figure in the Melbourne criminal underworld that events involving him were recorded on a website that chronicled crime in Melbourne”.

Justice Beach declares that a lesser imputation, but then tried to weigh the number of times each statement would have been read given the respective user bases of the two search engines.
His argument makes for interesting reading:

"While there was debate before me as to the relative popularity of Google and Yahoo search engines, neither side made any attempt to lead evidence of the precise number of publications brought about by a Yahoo search engine as compared to a Google search engine. That said, as was noted by counsel for the plaintiff, in support of a submission that I should find that there were more Google publications than Yahoo publications, while the word 'Googling' has entered the vernacular, there is no corresponding word in respect of Yahoo’s products.”

By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor
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Facebook comments, ads don't sway most users: poll

(Reuters) - Four out of five Facebook Inc users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows, in the latest sign that much more needs to be done to turn its 900 million customer base into advertising dollars.

The online poll also found that 34 percent of Facebook users surveyed were spending less time on the website than six months ago, whereas only 20 percent were spending more.

The findings underscore investors' worries about Facebook's money-making abilities that have pushed the stock down 29 percent since its initial public offering last month, reducing its market value by $30 billion to roughly $74 billion.

About 44 percent of respondents said the botched market debut has made them less favorable toward Facebook, according to the survey conducted from May 31 to June 4. The poll included 1,032 Americans, 21 percent of whom had no Facebook account.

Facebook's 900 million users make it among the most popular online destinations, challenging entrenched Internet players such as Google Inc and Yahoo Inc. But not everyone is convinced that the company has figured out how to translate that popularity into a business that can justify its lofty valuation.

Shares of Facebook closed Monday's regular trading session down 3 percent at $26.90. Facebook did not have an immediate comment on the survey.

While the survey did not ask how other forms of advertising affected purchasing behavior, a February study by research firm eMarketer suggests that Facebook fared worse than email or direct-mail marketing in terms of influencing consumers' purchasing decisions.

"It shows that Facebook has work to do in terms of making its advertising more effective and more relevant to people," eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson said.

Those concerns were exacerbated last month when General Motors Co, the third largest advertiser in the United States, said it would stop paid-advertising on Facebook.

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising can be tricky, particularly for brand marketing in which the goal is to influence future purchases rather than generate immediate sales.

And the success of an ad campaign must be considered in relation to the product, said Steve Hasker, president of Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen.

"If you are advertising Porsche motor cars and you can get 20 percent of people to make a purchase that's an astonishingly high conversion rate," said Hasker.

"If you are selling instant noodles, maybe it's not," he

WANING ENGAGEMENT

About two out of five people polled by Reuters and Ipsos Public Affairs said they used Facebook every day. Nearly half of the Facebook users polled spent about the same amount of time on the social network as six months ago.

The survey provides a look at the trends considered vital to Facebook's future at a time when the company has faced a harsh reception on Wall Street.

Facebook's $16 billion IPO, one the world's largest, made the U.S. company founded by Mark Zuckerberg the first to debut on markets with a capitalization of more than $100 billion.

It's coming out-party, which culminated years of breakneck growth for the social and business phenomenon, was marred by trading glitches on the Nasdaq exchange. A decision to call certain financial analysts ahead of the IPO and caution them about weakness in its business during the second quarter has triggered several lawsuits against Facebook and its underwriters.

Forty-six percent of survey respondents said the Facebook IPO had made them less favorable towards investing in the stock market in general.

While Facebook generated $3.7 billion in revenue last year, mostly from ads on its website, sales growth is slowing.

Consumers' increasing use of smartphones to access Facebook has been a drag on the company's revenue. It offers only limited advertising on the mobile version of its site, and analysts say the company has yet to figure out the ideal way to make money from mobile users.

Facebook competes for online ads with Google, the world's No. 1 Web search engine, which generated roughly $38 billion in revenue last year. Google's search ads, which appear alongside the company's search results, are considered among the most effective means of marketing.

The most frequent Facebook users are aged 18 to 34, according to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, with 60 percent of that group being daily users. Among people aged 55 years and above, 29 percent said they were daily users.

Of the 34 percent spending less time on the social network, their chief reason was that the site was "boring," "not relevant" or "not useful," while privacy concerns ranked third.

The survey has a "credibility interval" of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO  Newscribe : get free news in real time 

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