Archive for 2011/02/07

International Conference ‘Computers, Privacy and Data Protection’

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Online advertising, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy

According to its mission statement, the annual conference “Computers, Privacy and Data Protection“ in Brussels aims to create a bridge between policy makers, academics, practitioners and activists, and aims to become Europe’s most important forum for the discussion of data protection and privacy issues.

The conference was held on the occasion of the annual Data Protection Day on January 28, celebrated in Europe to commemorate the signing of Convention 108 in 1981, and coopted in 2009 in the US as the annual “Data Privacy Day“, even though the US is not a signatory to convention 108.

The theme of the convention was: “European Data Protection: In Good Health?” and the first day of the three day conference was indeed entirely devoted to eHealth privacy issues.

Much more:
http://ediscoverymap.com/2011/01/computers-privacy-and-data-protection-international-conference-european-data-protection-in-good-health-part-1/

Part 2

About the panel on Bahavioural Targeting and Profiling, where technologists, privacy advocates and attorneys each presented their own take and solutions for this very pertinent privacy issue:

Privacy activist Alexander Hanff of PrivacyInternational proposed that, regardless of the claimed billions at stake for the ad industry, privacy is a human right and not for sale. He proposed straightforward opt-in for all.

Jeff Chester of The Center for Digital Democracy stated that in the US, leading brands have built a pervasive commercial surveillance society and that they are selling individuals to the highest bidder. Jeff conveyed how the ad industry is afraid of the EU data protection model, and instead is pushing towards a “make believe” regulation and self-regulation.

Much more:
http://ediscoverymap.com/2011/01/computer-privacy-data-protection-european-data-protection-in-good-health-part-2/

Security company Certified Secure has provided technical support and training to Dutch 15-year-old girl who was under threat by hackers while sailing around the world

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness

Dutch language article:
https://www.certifiedsecure.com/newspage/40

Previously:

Dutch 15-year-old girl who is sailing around the world, begs hackers to stop wreaking havoc on her computer systems

http://vrritti.com/2011/01/19/dutch-15-year-old-girl-whos-sailing-around-the-world-begs-hackers-to-stop-wreaking-havoc-on-her-computer-systems/

FCC to update phone subsidy program for broadband

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Tech Evolution

The federal government spends more than $4 billion a year, collected from phone bills, to subsidize phone service in rural and poor areas. Now, it’s considering ways to give those places more for the money: high-speed Internet connections instead of old-fashioned phone lines.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote Tuesday to begin work on a blueprint for transforming a subsidy program called the Universal Service Fund to pay for broadband.

More:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110206/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_fcc_broadband_subsidies

NTT DoCoMo to Chase 1Gbps Downlinks with LTE-Advanced

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Mobile tech, Tech Evolution

NTT DoCoMo will begin testing a new data communications technology in the next few months that promises speeds many times faster than the LTE service recently launched by it and carriers such as Verizon


http://tinyurl.com/4d6prxt

William Hague reveals hacker attack on Foreign Office in call for cyber rules

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Network Security, Organized Crime, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy

The foreign secretary wants countries to agree on a code of conduct to avoid all-out cyber wars breaking out


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/06/hacking-william-hague-munich

Gizmodo.com ‘surprising’ its audience with ‘daring’ new site layout

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models

I Think I’m Gonna Cry

http://ihackmyi.com/forum/index.php?topic=42605.0


http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fgz4n/wtf_just_happened_to_lifehacker_and_gizmodo/


http://boards.ign.com/teh_vestibule/b5296/199872345/r199873549/


Can we just shoot Javascript and pretend it never happened?
http://sikritinfo.blogspot.com/2011/02/can-we-just-shoot-javascript-and.html

Brad Lovering, a former Microsoft Technical Fellow who left the company in October 2010, has a new gig. Lovering is opening the Seattle office for San Francisco-based Splunk, a company that indexes real-time and historical IT data

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/former-microsoft-tech-fellow-brad-lovering-to-open-r-d-office-for-splunk/8619

Ofcom UK Says ISP Internet Copyright Infringement Code is Six Weeks Away

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Illegal File Sharing, Legislation

The UK communications regulator , Ofcom , has informed us that its controversial Code of Practice for tackling internet copyright infringement by file sharing (P2P) customers of broadband ISPs, which is a requirement of the Digital Economy Act (DEA), is now just six weeks away from being published.

More:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/02/07/ofcom-uk-says-isp-internet-copyright-infringement-code-is-six-weeks-away.html

Greek police close down one of the country’s most popular Internet forums with hundreds of thousands of members in an operation which involved INTERPOL

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Illegal File Sharing

Five individuals were arrested with claims they had made 230,000 euros from advertising and membership fees. Police are claiming that they have shut down one of Greece’s largest Internet forums. TheGreekz.com, which authorities say had hundreds of thousands of members and 15 million hits per day, is ranked by Alexa as the country’s 61st most-popular site.


http://torrentfreak.com/police-arrest-five-in-operation-to-shut-down-popular-file-sharing-forum-110206/

A new study that surfaced last week came to the incomprehensible conclusion that two thirds of all BitTorrent traffic is likely to be related to copyright infringement

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, File Sharing, Illegal File Sharing, Stats / reports

Even more shocking, it seemed to suggest that music piracy on public BitTorrent trackers is a thing of the past. But is this really the case? We’re afraid we have to disappoint the music industry once more.

A few days ago the piracy research firm Envisional published an elaborate study into (unlawful) file-sharing traffic on the Internet. Commissioned by NBC Universal the researchers combined older Internet traffic estimates with their own research on the use of various file-sharing platforms.

More:
http://torrentfreak.com/arrr-the-music-pirates-are-still-here-110207/

Falsely Putting Your Wife On The Terrorist Watch List May Hinder Your Chances For Promotion

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness


http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110204/01392212963/falsely-putting-your-wife-terrorist-watch-list-may-hinder-your-chances-promotion.shtml

AOL buys Huffington Post: the beginning of the end?

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models


http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2011/feb/07/aol-buys-huffington-post

A vocal chorus of lawmakers and policy wonks are decrying the US government’s practice of seizing large numbers of internet domain names without first giving the owners a chance to defend themselves in court

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Public Policy


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/federal_domain_seizure_slammed/

With video streaming in its many different forms hogging an increasing chunk of bandwidth out there on the Intertubes, networking giant Cisco Systems wants to be dominant in IP TV – whatever that might be some day. That is why it has ponied up $95m in cash to acquire Inlet Technologies

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech Evolution


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/cisco_munches_inlet/

As Google and Facebook fight over Silicon Valley’s top talent, it’s a good time to be an engineer. According to one report, when Facebook tried to lure one engineer away from Google, Mountain View counter-offered with a 15 per cent pay raise and $500,000 in restricted stock. And he left for Facebook anyway

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness

All this financial one-upmanship can make life difficult for smaller Silicon Valley startups that rely on similar talent, according to Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/04/cloudera_caught_between_facebook_and_google/

“In Palo Alto, the IP lawyers almost outnumber the software engineers”

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Public Policy

Hargreaves reports:

‘It’s the expansion joint in the American system’, one Palo Alto lawyer told me. Google’s search technology is based upon a form of mass copying on the internet. Facebook’s user-generated content risks routine violation of copyright if the home video posted on a family site includes a copyright[ed] song.

In so far as these boundaries are unclear in American law, they get resolved through the courts and business moves on. ‘The system gives us the confidence to invest and grow,’ said the lawyer.

More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/hargreaves_on_tour_2011/

Sony Ericsson confirms PlayStation phone

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Mobile tech, New Business Models, Tech Evolution

promising a full revelation set for 13 February, just ahead of Mobile World Congress


http://www.reghardware.com/2011/02/07/sony_ericsson_playstation_phone/

Glasses-free 3D TV sales stumble

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reports


http://www.reghardware.com/2011/02/07/toshiba_3dtv_sales_are_poor/

BT is offering a private cloud option to data centre customers

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, The Cloud


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/bt_virtual_data_centre_private/

Google keen to settle antitrust investigation

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Google, Public Policy


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/google_negotiating_with_eu_over_antitrust_investigation/

FBI, Justice Department investigating NASDAQ hacking attempts

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Organized Crime


http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/02/fbi-justice-deparment-investigating-nasdaq-hacking-attempts.ars

If governments can block top level domains, is .gay doomed?

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Public Policy


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/if-governments-can-block-top-level-domains-is-gay-doomed.ars

Meet Evan Stone, P2P pirate hunter

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Litigation

In the last year, one lawyer from Denton, Texas, has filed every P2P lawsuit in the state. Evan Stone, scourge of gay porn lovers and anime fanatics alike, talks to Ars about his business and why file-sharing lawsuits aren’t making him rich.


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/meet-evan-stone-p2p-pirate-hunter.ars

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a cryptic computer scientist, was WikiLeaks’ best-known face after Assange himself. Perhaps in true WikiLeaks style, his insider account is being published later this week simultaneously in 16 countries

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness


http://tinyurl.com/6yuwast

Forget Wikileaks. The CIA has decided that there is a virtue in openness. Sort of. The Agency has retooled its website, offering readers a broadened “public glimpse inside the agency”

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, Public Policy

“The idea behind these improvements is to make more information about the Agency available to more people, more easily,” CIA Director Panetta said in a statement. “The CIA wants the American people and the world to understand its mission and its vital role in keeping our country safe.”

More:
http://voices.nationaljournal.com/2011/02/original-document-open-source.php

Anonymous takes over security firm in vengeful hack

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Network Security, Organized Crime, Privacy / Data Protection

Hoglund said he first learned of the attack after attempting to login to his work email after spending much of Sunday afternoon doing work in his garage, purposely avoiding being around his computer.

“I have a ridiculously long password, so I thought I mistyped it,” a noticeably distraught Hoglund recalled in a telephone interview. When it didn’t work after a couple of tries, “That’s when I realized there was a problem.”

Anonymous also was able to hijack a web server for rootkit.com, a domain owned by Hoglund that provides a forum to discuss rootkits, he said.

Hoglund said the timing of the incident couldn’t be worse, considering the RSA Conference in San Francisco is taking place next week, and HBGary was planning a major product release at the show.

“They are causing me a great deal of pain right now,” he said. “What they’re doing right now is not hacktivism, it’s terrorism. They’ve really crossed a line here. I’ve worked so many years on HBGary, and I don’t deserve this. I never did anything to those people. They completely overreacted to [the Financial Times article]. Why did they need to do that?”

Much more:
http://www.scmagazineus.com/anonymous-takes-over-security-firm-in-vengeful-hack/article/195837/

Previously:

Right now you can download a 4.7 gigabyte file full of about 50,000 emails stolen from a computer security expert named Aaron Barr. That’s what happens when you cross the hacking collective Anonymous

http://vrritti.com/2011/02/07/right-now-you-can-download-a-4-7-gigabyte-file-full-of-about-50000-emails-stolen-from-a-computer-security-expert-named-aaron-barr-thats-what-happens-when-you-cross-the-hacking-collective-anonymous/

Anonymous attacks US security company – HBGary chief Aaron Barr’s Twitter account hijacked and personal details leaked in revenge for infiltration of hacking collective

http://vrritti.com/2011/02/07/anonymous-attacks-us-security-company-hbgary-chief-aaron-barrs-twitter-account-hijacked-and-personal-details-leaked-in-revenge-for-infiltration-of-hacking-collective/

An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed

http://vrritti.com/2011/02/06/an-international-investigation-into-cyberactivists-who-attacked-businesses-hostile-to-wikileaks-is-likely-to-yield-arrests-of-senior-members-of-the-group-after-they-left-clues-to-their-real-identities/

(Video) Wikileaks’ Julian Assange ‘would be denied justice’

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12387094

Right now you can download a 4.7 gigabyte file full of about 50,000 emails stolen from a computer security expert named Aaron Barr. That’s what happens when you cross the hacking collective Anonymous

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness

Their rage was further stoked when they discovered in Barr’s email account a document containing the real names and personal information of suspected Anonymous members, along with indications he was going to sell it to the FBI. According to our source, the hackers decided to confront Barr directly.

More: 
http://gawker.com/5753570/anonymous-hackers-pay-back-fbi-snitch-with-50000-leaked-emails

Anonymous attacks US security company – HBGary chief Aaron Barr’s Twitter account hijacked and personal details leaked in revenge for infiltration of hacking collective

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness

The loose hacker collective Anonymous says it has taken revenge on a US security company whose principal claimed to have penetrated the group and identified some of its key people.

They hacked the Twitter account of Aaron Barr, the chief executive of HBGary, and sent out a series of angry tweets while many Americans were watching the Super Bowl match on Sunday night, allegedly including Barr’s social security number and address, and his mobile phone number.

The tweets link to torrents of the company’s emails. Members of the group also put up a brutal set of claims: “Anonymous has:

“entire control of all emails for the company of hbgary.com. we have full admin control of

“hbgaryfederal.com. we have wordpress control of hbgary.com

“all emails will be put up in a torrent.

“full access to all their finincials

“their ssns [social security numbers]

“their w2s [US tax reporting statement]

“their 1099s [US tax identification certificate]

“their software products

“their malware data (although Anonymous rm’d [deleted] their entire terabyte of data sorry)

“their backup server was wiped.

“access to their pbx system via 8×8.com

“control of their support server and their clients logins

“root access to rootkit.com, personal website of greg hoglund

“aaron barr’s ipad is now wiped”

More: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/07/anonymous-attacks-us-security-company-hbgary

Previously:

An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed

http://vrritti.com/2011/02/06/an-international-investigation-into-cyberactivists-who-attacked-businesses-hostile-to-wikileaks-is-likely-to-yield-arrests-of-senior-members-of-the-group-after-they-left-clues-to-their-real-identities/

“The high quality of Film1 broadcasts is the main reason people prefer Film1 over downloading movies”

Posted: 2011/02/07 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models

Film1 and Sport1 seem to have found a formula for success in the past three years. This Friday, they reported a growing number of paying subscribers for the third consecutive year


http://www.futureofcopyright.com/index.php?page=news&id=1622