Archive for 2010/12/17

by accepting two complaints from Germany, one involving a powerful group of newspaper and magazine publishers and the other, a mapping company, officials said on Friday.

“We appreciate that the E.C. is now investigating the case as it could be one of the most important topics for the digital press in the coming years,” the publishers said in a joint statement. “From our point of view Google is no longer a mere search engine but filling the result pages with more and more own content,” they said. “Thus Google is no longer an intermediary but direct competitor.”

Euro-Cities had complained that maps from Google Maps were being integrated on other Internet sites for free, saying the practice is destroying its business model.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/technology/18google.html

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/12/17/what-wikileaks-might-reveal-about-you.aspx

http://www.bangaloremirror.com/article/12/20101217201012172340487197978f1f4/Oz-PM-WikiLeaks-did-not-break-law.html

On the first full day of Julian Assange’s release from imprisonment, we now learn that some members of the United Nations want to introduce some sort of worldwide Internet regulation. That’s nice. But don’t worry: this isn’t a “takeover,” or anything scary like that. It’s simply to ensure that we never see something like Wikileaks ever again. A bit late for that, no?

All of this went down on Wednesday, with Brazil’s UN delegation proposing “global standards” that would, in effect, regulate the Internet.

The proposal in the obtuse verbiage of the UN would:

convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues.

More: http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/12/17/un-prepares-global-internet-%E2%80%98standards%E2%80%99-in-wake-of-wikileaks-actions/

In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Julian Assange said his organization plans to release information about banks some time in January.

The WikiLeaks founder did not say which firms would face leaks or what type of data or information that would entail. But in recent weeks, speculation has swirled that Bank of America is the prime target. Those assumptions are largely based on an October 2009 interview that Assange gave to Computer World, in which he said, “At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem.”

More & video: http://tinyurl.com/22s9uxw

 More ominous threats are application-layer DDoS attacks, which target the database server and cripple or corrupt the applications and underlying data needed to effectively run a business, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Chelmsford, Mass.-based Arbor Networks Inc.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1525260,00.html

  • Google Is Not Invincible
  • Timing Is Everything
  • Location, Location, Location
  • Being First Doesn’t Mean First Place
  • You Can’t Close Pandora’s Box

More: http://www.revenews.com/ctmoore/google-wikileaks-and-location-wars-lessons-learned-from-2010/

http://gawker.com/5714434/wikileaks-banned-in-antarctica

If you needed any more proof of WikiLeaks’ extremist agenda, look no further than Israel Shamir, the Holocaust denier who is in charge of distributing the organization’s documents to the Russian media. The involvement of Shamir, who also supports Ahmadinejad and refers to Palestinian terrorists as “martyrs,” should put to rest any doubt (…). It has also been discovered that Shamir’s son, Johannes Wahlström, acts in a similar capacity as his father for WikiLeaks in Sweden. He has been accused of making up quotes and expressing anti-Semitism.

More: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/17/wikileaks%E2%80%99-jew-hating-staff/

“I had never heard of the name Bradley Manning before it was published in the press,” Assange told ABC as he made the rounds of U.S. breakfast television shows.

“WikiLeaks technology (was) designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never know the identities or names of people submitting us material. That is, in the end, the only way that sources can be guaranteed that they remain anonymous.”

More: http://tinyurl.com/25kdyxz

A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.

  • (Assange) selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that.
  • The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
  • But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
  • Most important, the 250000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,1 and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.2
  • The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets
  • What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet.

More: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/US_Con_Job/us_con_job.html

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikileaks-and-espionage-act/

It’s a three-way relation­ship: us, the IT service provider, and the advertiser or data buyer. And as these noncustomer IT relationships proliferate, we’ll see more IT companies treating us as products. If I buy a Dell computer, then I’m obviously a Dell customer; but if I get a Dell computer for free in exchange for access to my life, it’s much less obvious whom I’m entering a business relationship with. Facebook’s continual ratcheting down of user privacy in order to satisfy its actual customers­—the advertisers—and enhance its revenue is just a hint of what’s to come.

Much more: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/security_in_202.html

Having released a 19-year-old pro-Wikileaks Anonymous supporter after a day, the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s Office now reports that it has released the first Anonymous supporter they arrested, a 16-year-old individual from The Hague who has attacked the websites of VISA and MasterCard.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office explains that “the investigation does not require him to remain in custody any longer.” He has been released on the condition that he will not engage in criminal activities in the future.

(my summary and translation)

http://gizmodo.com/5714085/facebook-adding-facial-recognition-to-its-list-of-frightening-features

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20025926-17.html

The Wall Street Journal has a full report on the whole scheme. Turns out one of the men indicted today, Walter Shimoon, worked for Flextronics, a supplier to Apple. In the papers unsealed today, the FBI caught Shimoon on tape allegedly relaying super-secret details about the yet-to-be-released iPhone last year as well as the internal code name for the project that turned into the iPad. Fortune found the details in the 39-page indictment, and called them out today.

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20025918-260.html

If you’re going to make this a wearable device, the next stop is cutting the cord. Just do it.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-20025889-82.html

MasterCard, is willing to stop processing transactions from sites trafficking in pirated music, movies, games, and other digital copyrighted content.

Lobbyists working for MasterCard have told trade groups from the entertainment sector that the credit card company is supportive of The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, an antipiracy bill introduced into the Senate last September, sources with knowledge of the talks tell CNET.

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20025879-261.html

The music industry is pressing Google and others to censor their search results in favor of ‘legal’ music services.

http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-blame-google-for-piracy-hint-at-censorship-101216/

Three months ago, TorrentFreak discovered that the Motion Picture Association were about to make an unprecedented move against file-sharing in the UK. Their targets were ISP BT and Usenet indexing site Newzbin.com. In discussions the MPA refused to confirm our suspicions. Yesterday, however, the MPA went to court to obtain an injunction to have BT block Newzbin in the UK.

http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-takes-legal-action-to-force-isp-to-block-newzbin-usenet-site-101216/

See also: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2010/12/16/film-industry-calls-on-broadband-isp-bt-retail-uk-to-block-newsgroup-website.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101215/02571612282/another-reminder-that-you-dont-own-your-ebooks-amazon-removing-more-ebooks-you-bought-archives.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101213/23520512263/mpaa-pharma-demanding-us-push-other-countries-to-have-significantly-more-draconian-ip-laws-than-us.shtml

How does an artist convert all of that popularity into cash? In this case, by offering a limited edition of ONE print of every single frame of the movie, signed and numbered, for sale. According to the gallery website, 335 prints have sold so far, leaving 1761 available out of 2096 total.

More: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101213/13543912257/her-morning-elegance-artists-create-elegant-reason-to-buy.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101216/00384912296/us-looking-to-use-computer-hacking-law-against-assange.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101215/02391012281/how-wikileaks-operation-payback-have-exposed-infrastructure-that-should-be-decentralized-isnt.shtml

Greek police have reportedly arrested a web designer whose name appeared in a press release issued by online hacktivists Anonymous last week.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/16/anonymous_arrests/

See also: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/16/met_anonymous/

But nearly 75 per cent of online population are law-abiding

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/16/bpi_digital_music_survey/

Internet-connected HDTVs could be used by hackers to infiltrate home networks, according to a firm that markets device security software for smartphones, VoIP devices and TVs.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/16/nettv_hacker_warning/

ISPs can prioritize all ‘Net traffic by application, charging you more for low-lag gaming connections and putting all P2P traffic in the “best effort” category. Sound like the future? Nope, it’s happening now.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/can-isps-charge-more-to-make-gaming-work-better-they-already-do.ars

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/onlive-awarded-important-patent-on-streaming-gaming-content.ars

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/residential-broadband-prices-falling-but-not-in-us.ars

T-Mobile and Nokia Siemens plan to keep 3G HSPA alive and moving at a faster pace. The companies are pushing a new standard called Long Term HSPA Evolution that offers speeds of up to 650Mbps.

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/12/t-mobile-keeps-pushing-3g-into-4g-territory-up-to-650mbps.ars

The Department of Commerce is proposing the extension of the Federal government’s own “Fair Information Practice Principles” to the commercial Web, to be dubbed an online consumer “Bill of Rights.”

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/12/us-calls-for-online-privacy-bill-of-rights.ars