messages

A European court says an employee shouldn't have been fired for sending private messages while at work. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) overturned a lower court decision and said the employee's right to privacy had been violated. However, ... the court said the verdict was largely about the specifics of the case and that it didn't constitute an absolute ban on monitoring staff computer use, or create a right to private Internet access while at work. The case involves Bogan Mihai Barbalescu, a Romanian man fired in 2007 after using Yahoo Messenger at work to send personal and intimate ... (view more)

More than 700 million email addresses and passwords have been leaked online. While many are bogus, enough appear to be genuine that security experts have advised users to change their email passwords. The collection of account details does not ... appear to have been used for identity theft or other fraud. Instead, the collection has been marketed as a way to send spam messages. The idea is that spammers can login to the compromised accounts in order to send their unsolicited emails. This effectively flies under the spam radar, as most spam comes from IP addresses without any reputation. In this ... (view more)

Google is to stop scanning Gmail messages for advertising purposes. The move was driven largely by a need to satisfy business customers. The company announced that "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after ... this change." A company spokesman said this would bring the consumer service into line with the G Suite service for businesses. Business Users 'Put Off' By Scanning Diane Greene said that although business customers "have never had their messages scanned for use in advertising, many potential customers were nonetheless put ... (view more)

A German court has upheld Facebook's refusal to let the parents of a deceased girl access her private messages. It's the latest attempt to deal with the tricky balance of dealing with social network history after people die. The sheer number of ... people on Facebook means that users dying has become a significant issue. An estimated 10,000 users die each day and more than 30 million have already passed away. Facebook deals with the issue by "memorializing" accounts. Once it has seen credible evidence that a person has died, it can put the account into a special mode in which ... (view more)

The National Security Agency (NSA) is to revise a controversial program that let it read emails from US citizens without a warrant. It also says it will delete many of the messages it collected in this way. The program has been dubbed "Section 702 ... activities", named after the relevant part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such activities are significant because they are an exception to the general principle that the NSA doesn't carry out surveillance within the US, something that would normally bring constitutional rights to privacy into play. Section 702 allowed ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Gale S. writes: " Dear Dennis, I read with great interest your series of articles on Mozilla Thunderbird. The last article I read was in regard to Thunderbird: One Inbox, Multiple Email Accounts . Near the end of that article you ... mentioned there would be another editorial piece to explain how to archive emails for offline viewing using Thunderbird. I would personally love to download my Gmail emails to my PC and store them locally. Can you explain how to do that? " My response: I've already written an article on how to do that , though I'd be happy to go over it again in ... (view more)

Stolen Yahoo account details could be changing hands for as little as three-hundredths of a cent according to security researchers. It follows a hack of more than a billion accounts. It's the second Yahoo breach reported this year. Back in September ... the news broke that details of more than 500,000 accounts had been accessed by hackers in 2014. Now Yahoo has confirmed a separate attack in 2013 involved the theft of data for more than a billion accounts, something security experts believe makes it a record breach. It's suggested that the stolen data includes email addresses and passwords, ... (view more)

This article will explain how to keep your email inbox clean, and how to sort and store your email messages locally (or by remote) using Mozilla Thunderbird. This article is the 6th article in a series of articles I've recently written on ... Thunderbird, including: How to Fix: Thunderbird: One Inbox, Multiple Accounts How to Fix: Minimize Thunderbird to Tray Bar (Not Task Bar) How to Fix: Thunderbird Paragraph Mode (Press Enter Twice) How to Fix: Disable Thunderbird Popup Notifications How to Fix: Disable Thunderbird Attachment Reminder How to Fix: Sort and Archive Emails with Thunderbird ... (view more)

Google has published eight letters sent by the FBI demanding details about its users. Normally the company isn't allowed to even acknowledge the letters exist. The letters, known as National Security Letters, are formal demands from the FBI for ... details about users - in this case, Google users. The letters are controversial for two reasons; first, the demands can be made without a specific search order, something that raises constitutional issues. The second is that Google isn't normally allowed to tell the user about the demand. While it's been argued that doing so may tip off a ... (view more)

Facebook users have been warned to watch out for bogus links in messages that appear to be from friends. While Facebook appears to be on top of the problem for now, it's an approach that could lead to personal data being siphoned off, or computers ... locked. The problem was highlighted by security researcher Bart Parys who became aware of the problem this weekend after a tip-off from a friend. It involves Facebook messages which appear to consist only of an image but are actually a type of file called SVG (scalable vector graphics). 'YouTube' Video Next Step In Scam Normally such ... (view more)