Archive for 2011/09/20
The Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel has announced Tuesday that its director has stepped down after serving the network for eight years. Wadah Khanfar’s resignation follows release of documents by Wikileaks, purporting to show he had close ties with the U.S. and agreed to remove some content in response to American objections
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness“The breathless embrace of social media as some sort of panacea that will somehow auto-generate and, more importantly, sustain engaged communities mobilized toward massive social change is largely misguided”
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / AwarenessDale Bradley, Professor of Popular Culture at Brock University and an expert in Internet culture:
“A quick scan of various discussion groups indicates a certain degree of sophomoric pseudo-political jargon and alt-machismo.”
“These will be the people who end up on the news rather than the more thoughtful and engaged participants (whose tendency toward informed analysis is anathema to today’s media).”
According to Bradley, the organisers may have overestimated the reach of the social media sites they had coordinated through. Twitter has seen frequent use, with organisers often referring to the event by its hashtag: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.
Bradley said that the comparisons between the Wall Street protest and the Arab Spring demonstrations that toppled the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are misapplied. He argued that social media was useful because it was an easy and accessible communication tool — a “mundane tool for organizing” — and not because of some inherent power particular to it.
“It seems to me that the Wall Street protest is based on the idea that ‘if you text it, they will come.’ [. . .] I have a feeling that the protest itself — the actual ‘occupation’ of Wall Street — will fizzle.”
Demonstrators came with backpacks, passed out food and set up tents and sleeping bags. They stayed overnight and, as of publication, they are still there.
“I just met a young organizer [. . .] who arrived from Madrid four hours ago,” said the Twitter account on Sept. 16, “on a ticket bought yesterday”.
http://www.brockpress.com/news/external-news/internet-activists-occupy-wall-street-1.2600047
Police Arrest Occupy Wall Street Anonymous Media Team as Protest Intensifies
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, EnforcementSeven Arrested in Occupy Wall Street Protest: Some for Wearing Anonymous Masks
http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/216748/20110920/seven-arrested-in-adbusters-occupy-wall-street-protest-one-for-wearing-anonymous-v-mask.htm
Is Yahoo Blocking People From Sending Any Email That Mentions OccupyWallSt.org?
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, FilteringFirst off, it’s troubling enough that Yahoo has apparently decided that merely mentioning a URL can have your messages blocked from being sent entirely. But almost as bad is claiming that it’s to “protect” the user.
Protesters continue to flood Wall Street
http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/20/7859191-protesters-continue-to-flood-wall-street
In a large online advertising system, adversaries may attempt to profit from the creation of low quality or harmful advertisements. In this paper, we present a large scale data mining effort that detects and blocks such adversarial advertisements for the benefit and safety of our users
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Google, New Business Models, Online advertising, Tech EvolutionThe problem of detecting adversarial advertisements is complicated by scale. With millions of advertisers and billions of advertiser landing pages, automated detection methods are clearly needed. However, unlike many datamining tasks in which the cost of false positives (FP’s) and false negatives (FN’s) may be traded off, in this setting both false positives and false negatives carry extremely high misclassification cost. Thus, both FP and FN rates must be driven toward zero, even for difficult edge cases.
The need for extreme reliability at scale necessitates the use of both automated and semi-automated methods in a tiered system. Automated detection methods, based on high-precision, large-scale machine learning methods, are able to handle the bulk of the detection work. High-recall models are then used in semi-automated fashion to guide the effort of expert humans who can resolve hard edge cases. Together, these approaches form the basis of a system that quickly and reliably identifies adversarial advertisements and blocks them from serving.
D. Sculley - Google, Inc. dsculley@google.com
Bridget Spitznagel – Google, Inc. drsprite@google.com
Matthew Eric Otey Google, Inc. otey@google.com
John Hainsworth Google, Inc. hainsworth@google.com
Michael Pohl Google, Inc. mpohl@google.com
Yunkai Zhou Google, Inc. yunkaiz@google.com
Researchers at the Münster University of Applied Sciences have discovered that it is possible to use electricity usage data from smart electricity meters to determine which programmes consumers are watching on a standard TV set
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reportsThe experiments were carried out as part of the state-funded DaPriM (data privacy management) project. By analysing electricity consumption patterns, it is, in principle, also possible to identify films played from a DVD or other source.
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Smart-meters-reveal-TV-viewing-habits-1346385.html
‘Free’, ‘open’, and especially ‘transparent’ are the buzzwords that have been shaping the platform of the Pirate movement since it first took shape five years ago in Sweden as a party born out of the struggle against existing copyright laws. One of the most important founding texts of the movement was the ‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’, which the former songwriter for The Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, published in 1996
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / AwarenessRailing against state efforts to regulate the Internet, he invoked the name of the great liberals Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Brandeis.
Doctrinal loyalty is not exactly a virtue
“These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers”, the manifesto goes. And: “We are forming our own Social Contract. Our governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.”
More:
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/969281-children-marx-and-microsoft
See also:
Anonymous relies primarily on three tactics: web site defacements; distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; and data theft. All are illegal. The first two violate free speech and the third is clearly cybercrime. Some Anons have claimed that DDoSing is a form of civil disobedience but that argument is difficult to swallow.
Civil disobedience entails breaking the law for a higher good; placing a burden on the system to arrest and process dissidents; and having one’s day in court.
Deliberately hiding behind a veil of anonymity is like sending a virtual servant down to the lunch counter because the master is too craven to go himself. Far from being civil disobedience, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow has described DDoSing as “the poison gas of cyberspace.” And things are going from bad to worse.
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/the-changing-landscape-of-hacktivism-1000691
and:
“My ambition in life is to eliminate broadcast media.”
http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=6014
Previously:
http://vrritti.com/?s=barlow
Tight security on Dutch “Prince’s Day”: People carrying banners with critical slogans need to identify themselves, their personal details being registered by Dutch law enforcement authorities
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / AwarenessOn Prinsjesdag 2010 a man threw a tea light holder against the Queen’s Golden Coach (which suffered minor scratches to the paintwork). The man has been detained on charges of assaulting the Queen for more than a year now.
Dutch language news article:
http://www.powned.tv/nieuws/politiek/2011/09/prinsen.html
See also:
http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/2620099/veel-toeschouwers-langs-route-koets.html
Italy moving from Three Strikes to merely One Strike and you’re out! In line with ACTA, incompatible with EU legislation
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, Illegal File Sharing, Public Policy, Three StrikesDutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/107984/itali—werkt-aan–one-strike-out–copyrightwet.html
National Intelligence Service of Korea has been using a technique known as “packet tapping” to spy on emails sent and received using Gmail, Google’s email service. This is expected to have a significant impact, as it proves that not even Gmail, previously a popular “cyber safe haven” because of its reputation for high levels of security, is safe from tapping
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data Protection, Public PolicyNow possible to filter and block more than 99.5% of all SPAM messages. False positive rates less than 0.20%
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Filtering, Stats / reports, Tech EvolutionDutch language news article:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/38550/1/Spamfilters_stoppen_99%25_van_alle_spam.html
Researchers to detail hole in Web encryption
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, Stats / reportsEU Commissioner Karel de Gucht directly appealed to copyright holders to increase their lobbying, because those darn critics of stronger copyright apparently are speaking up too much
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Public PolicyI would like to call upon you to support our efforts to improve and implement IPR regimes in a more active manner. The European Commission defends your interests by promoting the development of effective IP systems, within the EU and also in third countries. However, we are increasingly faced with loud voices that come out against IP for many different reasons, often unfounded. We need you to help us to help you by enlarging the debate.
Lawyer wants US Marshals to seize copyright troll’s bank account
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / AwarenessUK Liberal Democrat Party Votes to Repeal New DEAct Internet Piracy Laws
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Education / Awareness, Illegal File Sharing, Public PolicyTackling piracy is important, but it shouldn’t be seen as an end in itself. It’s more important to create conditions that reward innovation and talent, and ensure that creators get the benefits of their work.
Dutch GovCERT.nl did not release full list of cyber security incidents in response to FOIA request. Argues that they do not have information about pre-2009 cyber-incidents available and that they need not report on attacks at Europol nor TNO as those are not government organizations
Posted: 2011/09/20 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Stats / reportsPoliticians: “yeah, right” – New list in the works
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/107979/govcert-maakt-beveiligingsincidenten-zoek-.html
Previously:
FOIA fanatic public transport card hacker Brenno de Winter publishes previously confidential list of known cyberattacks on Dutch government organizations
http://vrritti.com/2011/09/19/foia-fanatic-public-transport-card-hacker-brenno-de-winter-publishes-previously-confidential-list-of-known-cyberattacks-on-dutch-government-organizations/
Dutch FOIA request reveals: 14 recent cyber attacks could have endangered the national security of The Netherlands
http://vrritti.com/2011/09/15/dutch-foia-request-reveals-14-recent-cyber-attacks-could-have-endangered-the-national-security-of-the-netherlands/
