Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands.

If opponents of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) expect an encore Monday of the now legendary Internet blackout that brought down the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year, they should scale back those expectations.

Cloud content sharing firm Box has hired three industry veterans to help bolster its operations.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo are bitter rivals in their quest for your search engine affection, but they have at least one thing in common: They track your search history and tailor the results of your queries to your interests. Yes, they're attempting to improve your search experience, but that sort of surveillance is anathema to privacy enthusiasts and anyone who doesn't want to be stuck in an echo chamber of their own interests. DuckDuckGo is a different kind of search engine, designed to capitalize on the big shots' poor privacy practices by offering an alternative that's simple and anonymous.

Twitter has implemented DMARC, a standard for preventing email spoofing, in order to make it harder for attackers to send phishing emails that appear to come from twitter.com addresses.

The first half of 2012 was pretty bad - from the embarrassing hack of a conversation between the FBI and Scotland Yard to a plethora of data breaches - and the second half wasn't much better, with events including Symantec's antivirus update mess and periodic attacks from hactivists at Anonymous.