News Roundup: US lawmakers propose privacy bill, Oracle issues further emergency update, and extent of Chinese censorship revealed

Privacy makes a comeback stateside
US lawmakers proposed a surprise privacy bill this week, in a move that would see the FBI’s current online snooping powers significantly curbed, much to the delight of privacy advocates across the country. The “Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act” appears to have cross-party support in the House of Representatives, and would require nosy law enforcement officers to seek a warrant before sifting through the email accounts or accessing the mobile location data of the American public.
Those behind the bill argue that it would be a logical extension of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches. While greater online privacy is certainly something to celebrate, the bill does seem to be at odds with the rightly criticised CISPA legislation, which is still making uneasy waves in the US.

Oracle caught out again 
Java has unfortunately managed to bolster its reputation as one of the most security-flaw prone pieces of software on the market, with Oracle forced to issue yet another emergency update to shore up its leaks. The latest update was rushed out of Oracle HQ earlier this week, following news of further critical flaws in the Java software. Issues with Java have been responsible for a series of high-profile hacking incidents lately, with companies including Apple, Facebook and Twitter all falling victim.
The latest blunder concerned a vulnerability that left users running Java software in their browser open to attack after visiting a malicious webpage, putting confidential information and system integrity at risk - nothing too serious, then!

Chinese censorship machine revealed
A group of researchers from the US believe that they have uncovered the full scale and sophistication of China’s online censorship regime, after studying the activity of Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. According to the team, controversial and undesirable “tweets” are generally deleted from the site within 30 minutes, with the majority disappearing within 5-10 minutes.
This is a shocking example of the growing trend for private companies to self-censor in China, evading the wrath of the state by employing huge censorship teams - according to the research, Sina Weibo would need up to 4,200 censors to keep up with the number of messages posted on the site that need screening.