GIMPS has released a statement indicating that the 45th and 46th Mersenne primes were recently found at Sun by Tom Duell (right here in Burlington, MA) and Rob Giltrap (Wellington, New Zealand). Both ran on Sparc based systems. Congratulations!

tags: mathematics prime numbers

    Amazingly enough, it took less than 24 hours to see the first massive privacy issues flaring up with Google Chrome. In a CNET interview, Peter Eckersley of the EFF says:

"We're worried that Chrome will be another giant conveyer belt moving private information about our use of the Web into Google's data vaults," Eckersley said. "Google already knows far too much about what everybody is thinking at any given moment.

    Now this is a total surprise, is it not? Not only can Google read all your mail, knows what you are looking for on the web, and has your financial information through Googlc Checkout or Adsense. With the Omnibox (or the mysterious "one or more unique application numbers"), they now also see all the places you go to -- on the internet and any possible intranets.

    Now, I do not know exactly how this will play out legally, but as far as I am concerned, the internal structure of an Intranet is usally some I'd rather not expose to outsiders. Beyond privacy concerns, there are clear security and intrusion concerns, and allowing Google to obtain this data for free and without any binding contract between Google and my company does not seem very prudent. If I had any say, I would strangle recommend to prohibit the use of Chrome in any enterprise environment. This should obviously extend to government agencies, and among them law enforcement and military. How embarrassing would it be, if--by honest mistake--the DNS or CA infrastructure of the combat command and control systems of say, the Airforce or the CIA would suddenly appear on a Google search result.

    Do not get me wrong: I do like Open Source, and adding competition to the market is always a good thing. I simply see the ugly face of monopoly lurking around the corner, and this time it also has a big file on any internet user. This is a little too much power in the hands of a single entity. If Google was part of a government, people would be a lot less eager to submit their most private data (with the exception of Germany, of course--there it works the other way round).

tags: google chrome privacy

  Germans usually do not tire to remind the rest of the world that data privacy is most important to them, and the German supreme court recently confirmed a human right to "informational self-determination", which limits the means and circumstances under which authorities (or private parties) may obtain and use data about residents. This right is supposed to be the base for the privacy laws in Germany. Privacy protection goes so far to limit the ability of courts to authorize law enforcement to tap criminal's homes or gain access to their computers, including most heinous crimes such as pedophilia, genocide, or terrorism.

  Well, those laws and rights do not necessarily apply to goverment itself. There is a growing list of current and future blatant privacy violation practices, that all Germans are objected to by law:

• The federal tax authorities are finishing the creation of an universal tax ID number scheme, that is pretty much as invasive as the social security scheme in the US.
  
• Since 2005, employees of the German IRS may obtain bank account information on any tax payer without a warrant, and without informing the tax payer or their bank. This is done automatically, and the banks (as thus the banks customers) have to pay for this warrent-less scheme.
  
• Current plans for extending the national ID card to also include biometric identifiers will create a national database on all residents older than 16 years. 
• The GEZ (a semi-private collection agency for public broadcast fees) has to be provided by the municipal authorities with any address changes of residents within Germany. In addition, the GEZ has bought information through dubious channels, and correlated this data with their officially obtained information. It is believed that the GEZ has one of the most complete lists of households in Germany.
  

  In addition there have been outright illegal actions:

• Earlier this year, the German foreign service (BND) bought stolen financial data on suspected tax evaders from a criminal in Liechtenstein. This data has been admitted in tax courts as regular evidence.
  
• The lastest installment is a scheme where Bochum municipal authorities have sold their address change data to professional data merchants, resulting in more than € 200,000 revenues. Neighboring Gelsenkirchen made about € 170,000 by selling the data that residents have to provide to city and state government by law.
  

  These list could be continued for some time, so I think it is time to dedicate a section in the Hypocrisy article on Wikipedia to the German right to "informational self-determination".

germany privacy informational self-determination

Just in time for First Beam, the LHC staff has released a video. It's geeky, but quite funny:

Watch First Beam on September 10 at http://webcast.cern.ch/

  No, I am not talking about Google Chrome (yet). But it is related: if you look at

it seems that Germany has already conquered Denmark, Benelux, Switzerland, and Austria-Hungary. It could also be a the EUSSR with its capital in Brussels...

  Or maybe this is a completely new country call "Googleland", where every citizen deposits all their data in a save datacenter, identified by a unique id. "Information Self-Determination" is a basic human right, and any data merchant will get shot on sight. 

  The only exception is the operator of the datacenter (that would be Google, being compensated for their services by an unalienable right to use any of the data for targeted advertising campaigns), or any data thief that offers information on citizens suspected of being involved in terrorism, sedition, or tax evasion.

humor privacy google chrome