Rental store installed spyware on laptop

It even took pictures through the webcam without the renters knowledge and consent. This really is an outrageous invasion of privacy, whatever the justifications offered. Looks like my mother wasn't being excessively cautious when she asked me to physically disable her rented laptop's camera (I cut out a piece of black paper from an envelope and taped it over the camera using transparent tape).

Steve Gibson said a little while ago on Security Now being recorded right now that laptop camera's ought to have a physical shutter that the user must open and close manually. I second that. But what about the microphone? Would a shutter work for that or is that something no one can fix without cracking the laptop case? It doesn't seem that the microphone was used in this case--maybe that would've broken wiretapping laws--but built-in microphones are even more of a privacy risk both inherently and because they are harder to completely thwart.

A Princeton Undergrad on running a TOR exit node

This is a fascinating read. Personally, I'd never run one, certainly not unless the EFF's legal position that Tor exit nodes are covered by the DMCA's safe-harbor provision gets backed up by the Supreme Court. On the one hand you have the .1% of traffic that really is people legitimately wanting to voice their opinions without fear of retribution (probably .01% when you filter out the paranoids), on the other you have the 95% of Tor traffic that's music and video pirates that don't want to pay for their own VPN service plus the 4.9% of traffic that's genuinely criminal all tied to my IP address. No thanks.

Full-body Scans on the Street Outrageous

What's next? Google Full-body Streetview?

This has got to be against the fourth amendment. Making people submit to a full-body scan to get on an airplane and randomly scanning people on the street are two very, very different things (and I'm not saying the former is right to begin with). In the one case you are voluntarily trying to board an airplane (i.e., if you chose to go by car, train, or boat you could avoid it), in the other you're being virtually strip-searched at random on the public street with no reason to suspect you've done anything wrong at all.