• Psst – wanna know a secret? Secret is a hot new social network designed to permit people to share their secrets online in a completely anonymous setting, without letting anyone know who has made the post. But how secure is it actually? According to a Wired article, not very secure. “White hat” hackers – those who try to find the vulnerabilities of a network without doing harm – have repeatedly found out people’s supposed secrets by using basic hacking techniques. The best-known hack works only one way; the hacker can find a person’s secret if the hacker knows the person’s e-mail address, but can’t tie a posted secret to any particular individual. The Wired article raises an interesting question as to whether any app or platform can be truly social and truly secret at the same time.
  • Nyet. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently rejected an effort by prosecutors to use a profile page from a popular Russian social media platform, Vk.com, to link a defendant with the sending of an allegedly fake birth certificate from a particular e-mail address. The Vk.com profile page at issue included a photograph of the defendant and the name “azmadeuz,” which was part of the e-mail address in question. The trial court had admitted the page into evidence, but the Second Circuit reversed, finding that, although it doesn’t take much to authenticate evidence, the page at issue could not be authenticated. In particular, the Second Circuit found that there could be no “reasonable conclusion” that the page at issue belonged to the defendant and wasn’t bogus in some way. The truly interesting question is whether there should be a higher standard for authenticating social media and other Internet-based evidence; the Second Circuit, however, declined the opportunity to set such a higher standard; rather, the focus should remain on the specific facts surrounding the specific item of evidence to be authenticated.