“Companies have discovered that they can lie in their [P3P policies] and nobody bothers to do anything about it,” the privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University writes.
Archive for 2012/02/20
Facebook and many other sites are using an almost identical scheme (to Google’s) to override Internet Explorer’s privacy setting
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Google, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reportsWhen the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too?
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Google, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reportsWe’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”
Book Publisher Penguin Will No Longer Provide eBooks To Libraries
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech EvolutionAllegedly this is because they can quite easily make money from similar services themselves and/or they want to renegotiate relevant contracts with both libraries and any new kids on the block.
Publisher Random House will continue to cater to libraries but may increase prices.
Publisher HarperCollins will allow libraries to provide access to their eBooks for (only) 26 times, after that the library has to purchase a ‘new edition’.
Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan are not catering to libraries at all in relation to their eBooks.
Dutch language news article
available via http://www.boekblad.nl/ (payment and registration required)
Promise recorders capture everything that crosses the airwaves on the 60-odd channels available on the UK’s Freeview service
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Tech EvolutionThere are several different recorders, which record all of the TV beamed to your house over a particular period of time. Everything. So you can decide you want to watch shows after they’ve already aired.
http://gizmodo.com/5886544/promise-boxes-are-tivo-for-everything-i-wish-we-had-them
New HSPA+ Multiflow Tech Could Double Your Download Speeds
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Tech EvolutionPirates And Nazi’s…What Do They Have In Common?
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Blocking, Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Filtering, Illegal File Sharing, Legislation, Public Policy1. They hate the US, that’s for sure
2. They like it when they can get stuff for free
3. They do not want to be disturbed during their search for treasure
4. They sometimes share servers (and revenue)
5. They dress funny
French National Front woos internet pirates
Extreme right backs music tax alternative to Hadopi
The leader of the French National Front party, Marine Le Pen, wants Hadopi scrapped and replaced with a blanket licence to compensate creative industries. The extreme right party’s freetard-friendly gambit has caused the Socialists, who also oppose Hadopi, to rethink their policies.
Alliances between the pirates and far right parties are increasing. Most notoriously, the Pirate Bay was bankrolled by Carl Lundström, the heir to the Wasabröd fortune. Lundström financially supported the Progress Party and the racist Keep Sweden Swedish campaign, and was linked to a racist attack in 1985. [Swedish / English Translation.]
Much more:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/20/freetards_vote_for_us/
Previously:
Pirate Bay’s neo-Nazi sugar daddy - And the strange silence of the Freetards
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/
Wikileaks–in the news after publishing classified U.S. military documents–is connected to “Pirate Bay,” the patron of which is the Nazi-affiliated Carl Lundstrom.
http://spitfirelist.com/news/wikileaks-connected-to-swedish-nazi-milieu/
Assange’s Extremist Employees. Meet Russian-born, Swedish-domiciled, multi-aliased anti-Semite and Holocaust denier currently writing under the name “Israel Shamir,” a.k.a. Adam Ermash or Jöran Jermas
http://vrritti.com/2010/12/24/assanges-extremist-employees-meet-russian-born-swedish-domiciled-multi-aliased-anti-semite-and-holocaust-denier-currently-writing-under-the-name-%e2%80%9cisrael-shamir%e2%80%9d-a-k-a-adam-ermas/
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Stitcher first with Facebook Timeline news radio integration
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, New Business ModelsACTA is part of a multi-decade, worldwide copyright campaign
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Public PolicyGeist believes that the interests behind SOPA and ACTA are likely to view recent defeats as temporary setbacks. “They’re not playing for next year,” he said. “They’re playing for 10 years and 20 years in the future.”
He said that reformers can resist their agenda, but only if they play the same “long game” as their opponents. Ordinarily, the most important thing a citizen of a democracy can do to stop bad public policies is to call their legislators. But in this case, most of the action is occurring in international organizations where individual legislators have little influence.
To fight agreements like ACTA requires organizations with the sophistication and resources to navigate the complex world of international diplomacy. Geist pointed to Knowledge Ecology International, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation as examples of organizations with a track record of resisting the drive toward ever-stronger copyright protection.
These organizations are “WIPO regulars” well positioned to stay in the trenches and ensure the public interest is well-represented regardless of the venue. Geist said that donating to these organizations is the most effective way for ordinary voters to help resist the worldwide trend toward ever-more-extreme copyright laws.
More:
Dutch Government: KPN Hackers Were Able To Manipulate Internet Traffic. Have They Caused Recent Outages?
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Stats / reportsDutch tech news website Tweakers.net is wondering whether recent DNS and VOIP disruptions, which coincided with KPN’s attempts to remedy the problems, can be attributed to the hackers
Dutch language news article:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/80160/kabinet-hackers-konden-kpn-verkeer-manipuleren.html
Previously:
http://vrritti.com/?s=kpn
Samsung OZ Scores Major Blockbuster Movie Deal
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, New Business ModelsSamsung Australia is set to deliver thousands of Blockbuster movies to their new range of Smart TV’s along with Samsung Galaxy devices spanning both smartphone and tablets after the Korean Company scored a global Company deal with Australia’s largest provider of rental movies
http://smarthouse.com.au/TVs_And_Large_Display/Industry/Q3A7X2R3
Greek police say they have arrested an Athens schoolboy and identified two more suspected of a computer hacking attack on the Justice Ministry website
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, EnforcementA police statement says the three claim to be part of the international “Anonymous” activist collective, which has attacked computers in several countries.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9T14EG00.htm
See also:
Dutch Criminal Court condemns suspect for illegal film distribution
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, EnforcementThe criminal chamber of the Court of Appeal in The Hague condemned a suspect for being responsible for the large-scale illegal production of various Bollywood films and having them available for commercial distribution. These were films such as “Bunty aur Babi”, “Veer-Zaara”, “Parineeta”, “Sarkaar” and “Viruddh”.
With this illegal trade, the suspect infringed copyrights of Yas Raj Films International Limited and Tip Top Entertainment Limited. Therefore, the Dutch Criminal Court condemns the defendant to community service for the duration of ninety hours and, if not properly carried out, this will be replaced by forty-five days in prison.
More:
Applied Operations -> Pirate Bay Discussion Leads To Sean ‘Napster’ Parker
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Illegal File Sharing, Stats / reportsOnline discussions about why exactly Dutch traffic to ThePirateBay.org is being routed via the US have pointed to the fact that the most popular site hosted at Applied Operations (AppliedOps.net AS40475 which is advertising ‘Pirate Bay Prefix’ 194.71.107.0/24) is Sean “Napster” Parker’s Causes.com.
Sean Parker Founder and Chairman
Sean Parker, Chairman and Founder of Causes, is an entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies that reinvent ways to spread information online. In 1999, at the age of 19, Sean co-founded Napster with Shawn Fanning and changed how people think about and share music. In 2001, Sean co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral engineering technology for updating contact information. Sean served as Plaxo’s president until 2004, around which time he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to launch the online social network Facebook. Sean was the founding president of Facebook from 2004-2005, again turning a technology start-up into an industry giant. Sean is also a Managing Partner of venture capital firm Founders Fund, where he looks for and supports this spirit of innovation in up-and-coming developers.
http://www.causes.com/teamCauses is the world’s largest platform for activism and philanthropy. Causes was co-founded by Sean Parker and Joe Green. Sean’s background is in consumer internet products such as Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook and Joe comes from a background of grassroots organizing, having worked on the ground in political campaigns on the city, state, and presidential level. They combined their knowledge of offline organizing and online social networking to create Causes.
Dutch language article & comments:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/40418/1/Nederlands_verkeer_Pirate_Bay_gaat_via_VS.html
English language analysis
http://www.mountknowledge.nl/2012/02/01/ziggo-and-xs4all-block-of-thepiratebay-org-technical-details/
http://en.wikipopia.org/as40475
http://www.appliedops.net/contact/
http://www.appliedops.net/clients/
Previously:
Dutch Traffic To ThePirateBay.org Is Being Routed Via California And No One Knows Why
http://vrritti.com/2012/02/20/dutch-traffic-to-thepiratebay-org-is-being-routed-via-california-and-no-one-knows-why/
The filesharing website The Pirate Bay has come a step closer to being blocked in the UK after the high court ruled that the site breaches copyright laws on a large scale
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Blocking, Copyright, Education / Awareness, Filtering, Illegal File Sharing, JurisprudenceIn a judgement handed down at the high court in London on Monday, Mr Justice Arnold ruled that The Pirate Bay and its users unlawfully share copyrighted music.
The Pirate Bay is one of the world’s longest-running and biggest filesharing sites. According to record labels, The Pirate Bay generated up to $3m in advertising revenue in October last year by making 4m copies of music and films available to its 30 million worldwide users. The site has 3.7 million users in the UK, according to comScore.
The high court is expected to rule in June whether the ISPs should prevent their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay.
Much more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/20/pirate-bay-blocked-uk-high-court
The consumer cloud storage consensus is that you should get consistent access to your cloud stored files across your desktop and mobile smart devices
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Tech Evolution, The CloudThey should be as as accessible to apps on these devices as they would be if the files were stored locally on the device – which, with Dropbox, they are – and should be synced across all connected devices when a version is updated on one of the devices. Some slug of basic storage is free, initially anyway, with extra capacity available at a cost.
There is a distant risk appearing that your cloud storage will be linked to that supplier’s content-playing apps and to that supplier’s content displaying/processing devices, putting you inside an initially lovely walled garden as a a silken-bound captive. You would use iMac, iPad or iPhone to buy music and videos from iTunes, ditto iBooks, store them in iCloud, play/process iCloud data with Apple’s apps, perhaps watch videos on iTV, and be content, locked-in fanbois and fangirlz ever after. Except for the consideration that other suppliers’ content isn’t available, either to buy or to play with.
Google has already started down this path, as has Microsoft and, in the far-off distance, perhaps so will Amazon and Facebook. Granting any supplier a monopoly over significant slugs of your digital data consumption, storage and processing is a risky proposition and open standards are the escape route.
We’ve all been there before and suppliers have supported open standards generally. Whether they’ll continue to do so in the walled smartphone gardens that appear to be coming our way is another matter.
More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/20/skydrive_brazilian/
Dutch Traffic To ThePirateBay.org Is Being Routed Via California And No One Knows Why
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Blocking, Education / Awareness, Filtering, Illegal File Sharing, Stats / reportsTech expert Richard van den Berg of the company Mount Knowledge has conducted an analysis in relation to the recent Dutch Pirate Bay blockade.
He has demonstrated that traffic from The Netherlands to Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is hosted, is ‘hopping’ via servers in the US. Those servers belong to Applied Operations, LLC AS40475.
Van den Berg says that there is no technical explanation for this. Someone in California is simply interested in monitoring traffic to thepiratebay.org. He argues that that is quite peculiar.
Relevant articles and information:
(Dutch)
http://www.security.nl/artikel/40418/1/Nederlands_verkeer_Pirate_Bay_gaat_via_VS.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/geblokkeerd/
(English)
http://en.wikipopia.org/as40475
http://www.appliedops.net/contact/
http://www.appliedops.net/clients/
http://www.robtex.com/as/as40475.html
The government should not change UK copyright laws until supposed problems with the current framework can be assessed in light of how a new ‘digital copyright exchange’ (DCE) works, the Publishers Association has said
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, Legislation, Public PolicyRichard Mollet, chief executive of the association, said that the benefits the DCE could bring could eradicate the need for new exceptions to copyright to be introduced.
“The DCE speaks to a market-based, fully voluntary, facilitation of licensing, where IP is respected and used as the basis for driving economic growth,” Mollet said in a blog post.
“However, the consultation looks to weaken copyright, undermine licensing and forestall the development of new business models, with a clear detrimental impact on growth. The government should suspend progress with its proposed radical re-writing of copyright law until such time as the DCE has got off the ground and into operation,” he said. “If, as all believe, it could greatly improve the speed and ease of copyright licensing, then many of the problems identified by Hargreaves will disappear. This will obviate the need for policies that weaken copyright and which, at the last time of checking the IPO’s assessment of their impact on growth in the British economy, were predominantly described with the phrase, worrying for its vagueness, ‘not quantified’.”
Dutch hackers were able to manipulate SCADA system of swimming pool, remotely via the internet
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Network SecurityThey were able to manipulate everything from the water slide to the temperature of the water. Chlorine levels could not be adjusted in this particular case
Dutch language news article:
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/109573/attracties-van-zwembad-door-hackers-te-beheren.html
The family estate of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick has dropped a vexing lawsuit against movie producers Media Rights Capital and filmmaker George Nolfi, the team behind the film The Adjustment Bureau
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, LitigationIn October the Philip K. Dick family launched a legal attack against The Adjustment Bureau team, which wouldn’t agree to pay royalties from the 2011 film starring Matt Damon. The film producers claimed that they were not liable for an kind of royalty payment because the story that formed the foundation of the film was “in the public domain.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/19/dick_adjusted_by_hollywood/
Responsible-disclosure.com – Our goal is to collect, verify and publish security risks found on the web
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / Awareness, Network Security, Privacy / Data ProtectionWe want to raise public awareness about the risk of entrusting your personal data to unsafe services. We also hope to encourage companies to pay more attention to the protection of the users of their services. Some of them will be left with no choice, because their security flaws will be published on this site!
But we do want to offer companies the chance to remedy their mistakes. This is why we will always notify the owner of a compromised website first and give them enough time to resolve the issue, before it is published on our site. This method of exposure is commonly known as responsible disclosure.
How does it work?
- Someone submits a security issue for a website or service to Responsible Disclosure
- Responsible Disclosure will confirm the validity of the issue
- Responsible Disclosure will contact the owner of the site or service involved
- A deadline for fixing the issue is set in consultation with the owner – until the issue is published, only Responsible Disclosure, the owner and the submitter will be aware of the risk
- When the deadline is passed Responsible Disclosure will check whether the issue has been resolved (if the issue is not resolved or the owner is not cooperative we will go full disclosure).
- The issue will be published on Responsible Disclosure
You must appreciate the 90s depiction of the hacker, when the stereotype was a cunning scofflaw with a Marlboro hanging from his lips
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness…rather than a 13-year-old asshole cursing at you via Xbox Live as he downloads Anonymous software
And what do we have now? Kids like this.
http://gizmodo.com/5886362/hackers-were-scary-in-1990
Previously:
Judges Facing New Types Of Crimes, New Types (And Levels) Of Damage, New Types Of Suspects? (MegaUpload)
http://vrritti.com/2012/02/18/judges-facing-new-types-of-crimes-new-types-and-levels-of-damage-new-types-of-suspects/
Spanish anonymous members had the balls to crash the equivalent of the Oscars ceremony in Madrid
Posted: 2012/02/20 in Education / AwarenessThree members of Anonymous sneaked past extreme police and private security controls to jump onto the stage as the event was at one of its highest points, as this image shows.
Meanwhile, the Spanish film academy web page was under attack. Anonymous also published contact information of actors, actresses and directors who supported the so-called Ley Sinde, a SOPA-like law designed to kill any kind of web pages without a court order.
More:
http://gizmodo.com/5886437/anonymous-invades-the-spanish-academy-awards-ceremony-for-real
