Although the phone can now be rooted, the Droid X bootloader encryption hasn’t been cracked yet—meaning that there is still no way to install custom ROM images on the device
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/droid-x-rooted-bootloader-still-locked.ars
The Moscow Arbitration Court awarded a publishing house $249.6 million in damages in a copyright infringement case, an unprecedented sum, an attorney said
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2010/07/22/Russia-gets-tough-in-copyright-case/UPI-90711279815548/
Three quarters of illegal shipments stopped by EU customs officials in 2009 were shipped by post or air, suggesting that Internet sales of illegal items have increased, according to an annual report on illegal trade flows by the European Commission’s department for taxation and customs union.
The figures highlight that counterfeiters are concentrating increasingly on sales to individuals rather than dispatching bulk shipments to intermediaries that are expensive to send and could more easily be tracked
http://www.euractiv.com/en/trade/pirate-traders-exploit-internet-sales-model-news-496598
Indonesia is taking steps to block pornographic Web sites before the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, the country’s information minister said Thursday, defying local criticism that the plan amounted to censorship and was unworkable.
He said the filter would not be 100 percent effective but was a “first step to minimize the distribution of pornography.”
43.3% of BitTorrent torrents are movies, 29.1% are TV shows and 16.5% are music
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/42091
Report: http://www.afact.org.au/research/bt_report_final.pdf
See also:
Only 0.3% of files on BitTorrent confirmed to be legal
GM secrets allegedly offered to Chinese rival
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/23/hybrid_car_espionage_scam/
Dutch web magazine webwereld.nl has joined up with certifiedsecure.com to offer you the opportunity to win a 250 euro hacking course.
The only thing you have to do is enter a contest and hack Minobet.nl (Ministry of Obfuscation & Transparency) to recover a bunch of classified documents from their servers.
More details in Dutch: https://secure.webwereld.nl/zomerhack ( use http://translate.google.com/ )
Make sure to hack the right servers though because hacking other .nl sites or the wrong servers could get you into real trouble.
Article 138a Dutch criminal code (Dutch penal code) Hacking and aggravated hacking 1. A person who intentionally and unlawfully enters into (a part of) an automated work is liable to a term of imprisonment of not more than one year or a fine of the fourth category, as guilty of hacking. The act of hacking is committed when access to the work is obtained: a.By breach of security,The organization Bits of Freedom (BoF) is demanding that the Dutch government prohibits T-Mobile from having Google and Apple pay for deploying their services on T-Mobile’s network. T-Mobile is currently in talks with Google about the data-intensive service YouTube.
BoF is of the opinion that the Dutch government should ban such plans because T-Mobile should not be allowed to differentiate between sites and services. “Providers are the gatekeepers of the internet. They are not allowed to decide which sites or services we want to visit. (T-Mobile’s parent company) Deutsche Telekom is indicating that it does want to play such a role”, Bits of Freedom director Ot van Dalen stated. T-Mobile would be damaging the open nature of the net.
The Dutch Consumer Authority agrees with BoF: “We are in favor of absolute Net Neutrality” spokesperson Sandra de Jong stated.
It is not clear yet what will happen if the talks between T-Mobile and Google fail to deliver anything.
Meanwhile Telecom providers are already differentiating between various online services. Various providers limit the content streaming options and Vodafone is charging 5 euro per month for use of VOIP services.
Dutch language article: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/68738/overheid-moet-schenden-netneutraliteit-door-t-mobile-verbieden.html
See also:
DPI vendor says 90% of ISP customers engage in traffic discrimination
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/network-neutrality-dead-in-practice-as-most-isps-throttle.ars
and:
The ISP’s overbooking industry standard normally stands between 1:10 to 1:50 ratios. This means that for every 10 to 50 customers they promise X amount of bandwidth they can only provide X amount of bandwidth at any given time (instead of the promised 10X to 50X bandwidth). To put it differently 10 to 50 customers will be sharing X amount of bandwidth instead of having X amount of bandwidth dedicated to each one of them.
It might seem a horrible scam but surprisingly it works well for both the Airline companies and the ISP’s assuming they keep their ratios down to an acceptable level.
Sure you will always have a few disgruntled customers, ones that booked a flight only to find that there is not enough space on the flight or people that find their Internet connection unbearably slow.
So when does overbooking become a problem?
The problem starts when ISP’s start to get too greedy.
When this happens overbooking goes well beyond 1:10 to 1:50 ratios. During the past several years we have seen several ISP’s over the world that take the ratios up to 1:100 and even to 1:200.
What this means, at such high share ratios, that most customers in most hours of the day will suffer great delays, reduced bandwidth and an overall lousy internet connection.
Recent email communication between White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin (in photo), who is Google’s former head of Global Public Policy, and multiple outside individuals raise new questions about the official’s alleged circumvention of federal ethics and recordkeeping rules Click here for a 12-page pdf of the McLaughlin emails. (Topics: Net Neutrality, Internet Policy, Copyright, Intellectual Property)
http://nlpc.org/cached/white-house-emails-show-more-extensive-improper-contact-google.html
A majority of organizations have been the target of advanced threats – and they’re not doing a good job at defending themselves, according to a new report by the privacy research Ponemon Institute and network security firm NetWitness.
So far this year, Intel, Symantec and Northrop Grumman have joined Google in the list of companies who have publicly informed their investors about the risks of computer attacks in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
http://blog.seattlepi.com/techchron/archives/213361.asp?from=blog_last3
See also:
Ponemon Institute Discovers Majority of Business Leaders Underestimate Risk of Advanced Cyber Threats
Detection of advanced threats is low:
Changes are required across the board:
http://www.netwitness.com/resources/pressreleases/jul062010.aspx
See also
Googling the Google Lobbyists
http://www.fastcompany.com/1673004/googling-the-google-lobbyists
Recently, the Washington Post noted as part of a two-year investigation into America’s intelligence community that Google supplies special mapping and search products to the U.S. military and intelligence community, with some Google employees enjoying top secret clearance to work with the government. That news has consumer advocates and politicians asking exactly what information Google has collected — and why.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/22/national-security-google-wi-fi-spy-scandal/
See also:
Consumer Watchdog Repeats Request for Google Wi-Spy Hearing in Congressional Testimony About Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology
Apple can’t say it. Competitors won’t admit it. But I will: the iPad is a category-creating monster hit. Personal computing will never be the same
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/ipad-officially-a-hit/1008
Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has a “plausible” case against its U.S.-based domain registry for allegedly allowing a hacking attack that left the site disabled and defaced, a U.S. judge ruled Thursday
Going by these metrics—2GB a movie in particular—a Rogers subscriber will get about seven movie downloads per month on the ISP’s Light plan. The Evdoinfo.com site calculates a one-hour high definition Netflix stream as snarfing up 1.67 GB in data
Reports that the Internet will be at a loss for addresses within a year aren’t exactly correct, but over the next several months the shrink wrap will be taken off of the last batch of fresh, unused addresses. It’s the beginning of the end for IPv4
