Today’s top tech stories

February 28, 2012

The Guardian features a report on the LulzSec and Anonymous splinter group, AntiSec, which targets ‘government systems, police systems and evil corporations’ in a bid to expose what it calls high-level corruption. The hackers – affiliated to cyber-activist network Anonymous – have in recent months expanded their targets, becoming increasingly unpredictable in a quest to expose what they see as a conspiracy of high-level corruption. The group breaks into servers, exposing security vulnerabilities while mining data, often including passwords and credit card numbers, that it ultimately places onto the web for anyone to download. Since December 2011, AntiSec has embarked on a seemingly unstoppable rampage.

Google’s major privacy shake up has only been read by one in ten British Google users. The Telegraph reports the new system comes into force on Thursday and despite heavy promotion and controversy over its “invasive” terms, a survey has found few users have read the new policy. Google will pool personal data from more than 60 Google services into a single file for each of its hundreds of millions of users. The move has been criticised by privacy campaigners and was described as “troubling for a number of reasons” by a group of state Attorneys General last week, who accused Google of invading consumer privacy. The firm has meanwhile argued it is “making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it”.

The BBC reports companies are now able to search and analyse up to two years of Twitter updates for market research purposes. Until today, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search however in order to plan marketing campaigns, firms are now able to search tweets back to January 2010, target influential users or even try to predict certain events. UK-based Datasift is the first company to offer the archive. Its existing customers will be able to use access “historical” tweets from today, the company said. Regular users can access posts from the past seven days.

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