Archive for 2012/07/01
Britain’s government wants to ditch sections of existing anti-piracy legislation that allow it to block copyright-infringing websites
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Blocking, Copyright, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Illegal File Sharing, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Public Policy, Stats / reports…following recent legal developments demonstrating that copyright holders are able to obtain the court orders necessary to instigate an embargo themselves
The Netherlands: What Can Apply To Whistleblowers, Can Also Apply To Politicians. Green MP Arjan El Fassed Said To Be Lacking The Drive To Act As A Leading Figure
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Stats / reports
Arjan El Fassed (born August 5, 1973 in Vlaardingen) is a Dutch politician, and former human rights activist and development aid worker. As a member of GreenLeft (GroenLinks) he has been an MP since June 17, 2010. He focuses on matters of development aid and foreign affairs.
Arjan El Fassed has a Palestinian father and a Dutch mother. In the second half of the 90′s he lived for about three years in Nablus on the West Bank. Bassam Shakaa, former mayor of this Palestinian city and victim of an Israeli bomb assault, is his uncle.
El Fassed studied political science at Leiden University and worked as a lobbyist and advisor for several humanitarian organizations, among others the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights (LAW), the Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO), Oxfam Novib as well as Oxfam International.
He is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada (ei), a website dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian point of view.
Since June 2010 he has been a member of the Dutch House of Representatives.
El Fassed has been well-known for his attempts to:
1. Get to the bottom of social media data interception activities by Dutch law enforcement
2. Prevent ACTA from being signed and ratified. He succeeded in that effort
3. Prevent 80 Dutch Leopard tanks from being sold to Indonesian authorities. He succeeded in that effort
Regardless of the above an internal committee within his own political party GreenLeft argued publicly that El Fassed lacked the drive to act as a leading figure. At a GreenLeft convention actual party members disagreed however and have now gone and placed him on a 7th spot for the next government elections, rather than the 9th spot the committee had recommended. The Green were able to put 10 politicians in the House of Representatives after the last elections.
Source material:
http://binnenland.nieuws.nl/704461/grashoff_en_el_fassed_stijgen_bij_groenlinks
http://www.rtl.nl/components/actueel/rtlnieuws/2012/06_juni/22/binnenland/kandidatencommissie-groenlinks-kritisch-op-eigen-lijst.xml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjan_El_Fassed
http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/110831/groenlinks–social-media-taps-onterecht-geheim.html
http://www.destentor.nl/nieuws/algemeen/binnenland/11270626/Bikkelhard-oordeel-over-GroenLinks-kandidaten.ece
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2012/06/25/kabinet-ondertekent-omstreden-acta-verdrag-niet/
http://www.powned.tv/nieuws/binnenland/2012/06/tankdeal_blijft_van_de_tafel.html
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2832093/openbaarheid-aftappen-sociale-media-in-strijd-met-staatsbelang.html
http://www.bnr.nl/topic/verkiezingen_2012/593594-1206/forse-kritiek-groenlinks-op-eigen-kandidaten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreenLeft
http://verkiezingen.groenlinks.nl/node/85392
The head of the United States Senate’s powerful intelligence oversight committee has renewed calls for Julian Assange to be prosecuted for espionage
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Public Policy, Stats / reportsThe US Justice Department has also confirmed WikiLeaks remains the target of a criminal investigation, calling into question Australian government claims the US has no interest in extraditing Mr Assange.
“Mr Assange should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act [of 1917],” the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Californian Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, said in a written statement provided to The Age.
“I believe Mr Assange has knowingly obtained and disseminated classified information which could cause injury to the United States. He has caused serious harm to US national security, and he should be prosecuted accordingly.”
Senator Feinstein’s call for the Obama administration to move ahead with plans to prosecute Mr Assange came as US Justice Department spokesperson Dean Boyd publicly confirmed that “there continues to be an investigation into the WikiLeaks matter”.
More:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/fresh-call-on-assange-espionage-20120701-21b59.html
Verizon’s Jaya Baloo: With The Way That We’re Doing Big Data And Big Data Aggregation, Eagle Eye Is Not So Far Fetched
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Future Developments?, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reports, Tech Evolution“The privacy legislation that is out there is really looking at protecting you, but you in relation to [only] your government.”
Direct link to relevant topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TD0OCHwkYNQ#t=1672s
Eagle Eye Movie Trailer:
Full presentation by Jaya Baloo:
In Germany 93% Of 12 to 19-Year-Olds Uses YouTube Rather Than Radio When Listening To Music. Have No Clue About Copyright Nor Risks Of The Net
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Copyright, Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Online advertising, Stats / reports, Tech EvolutionThe university of Leipzig in Germany has surveyed 3,800 youngsters. It’s clear that they’re only using their PC, smartphone and MP3-player to listen to music and their favorite platform is YouTube.
It is also clear that they are not watching YouTube at all, but are only listening to the music. Something which should interest online advertisers.
Researchers also found out that the people who were interviewed had no clue about copyright issues nor the dangers of the internet and as such, they make a plea for better education on German schools.
Dutch language news article:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2848872/youtube-vervangt-radio.html
UFC president says he helped put Anonymous’ hackers behind bars. Social engineering did the trick
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Network Security, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reports“You get these guys engaged, you get ‘em going, and that’s when you get the FBI involved,” he says. “Because there’s so much piracy of UFC merchandise, the FBI was already monitoring everything that was happening. But after Anonymous hacked our site, we also got U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, involved. And it helps when they know when and where the hackers are going to attack. So I put my chin out there, and we knew they were gonna punch it. Two weeks after they attacked me, a lot of them started getting busted. I think we contributed to that.”
Much more:
http://rt.com/usa/news/ufc-president-hackers-white-000/
Judges have clearly had it with pirates and hackers: One hacker has been warned he faces jail for stealing personal details of former PM Tony Blair and posting them online
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Cybercrime, Education / Awareness, Enforcement, Jurisprudence, Litigation, Network Security, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Public Policy, Stats / reportsJunaid Hussain, 18, swiped the sensitive information after accessing an aide’s Gmail account. A court heard Hussain led activists called Team Poison who also “attacked” the national anti-terrorism hotline with over 100 hoax calls.
He got hold of Mr Blair’s details after breaking into the personal account of Katy Kay, at one time the ex-Prime Minister’s special adviser. Using the ID “Trick”, he stole addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of Mr Blair, his wife Cherie, sister-in-law Lyndsey Booth and other relatives, friends, MPs and Lords.
Hussain, of Birmingham, admitted conspiracy and computer charges at London’s Southwark Crown Court. Ben Cooper, defending, said the offences had been a prank. But granting bail until sentencing next month Judge Peter Testar told Hussain he should be “under no illusions” that he could go to prison.
More:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4402973/Hackers-facing-jail-over-Blair-email-raid.html
The “leap second bug” hit just as the web was recovering from a major outage to Amazon Web Services, an online operation that runs as much as one percent of the internet
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Network Security, Stats / reportsSome operations, including Google, saw the leap second coming and prepared for it, but others weren’t so diligent.
Reddit, Mozilla, and possibly many other web outfits experienced brief technical problems on Saturday evening, when software unpinning their online operations choked on the “leap second” that was added to the world’s atomic clocks.
On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second.
Many computing systems use what’s called the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync with the world’s atomic clocks, and when an extra second is added, some just don’t know how to handle it.
More:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/leap-second-bug-wreaks-havoc-with-java-linux/
See also:
Time takes out the Pirate Bay
The popular torrent hosting site, The Pirate Bay went down late last night after a bug in the NTP daemon crashed the Debian Linux powered server. The SuprBay forum, hosted by ThePirateBay put details of what caused the crash. The first impression people got when the site went down was that site might have been blocked by the ISP or the site was taken down by government officials. It turns out that was not the case, as the post made on the forum describes that the site went down due to the bug. The NTP bug is to do with the leap second increment that is added at midnight. A bug in the kernel caused ThePirateBay and some other sites running similar software to crash.
http://tech2.in.com/news/web-services/leap-second-bug-in-server-takes-down-the-pirate-bay/321012
…or did it?
Because The Pirate Bay also suffered downtime when the leap second hit, many suggested that it might be related. The topic was actively discussed on The Pirate Bay’s forum where one of the moderators took a guess that the leap second may have been to blame.
“The crash appears to have been caused by the leap second that was issued at midnight,” Velvetfog wrote.
Several news outlets picked this comment up and posted it as fact, but it was just a guess, and one that turns out to be wrong when we look at the timing of the events.
When the Pirate Bay went down yesterday we posted a quick update in our Bits section, and this was three hours before the leap second hit. In other words, The Pirate Bay downtime started hours before that of other sites.
One of the people in charge of the actual servers also confirmed to TorrentFreak that there’s no indication of any leap second trouble at The Pirate Bay. One of the server racks hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party was moved, and this took down a crucial TPB server.
And let’s be honest, If Hollywood can’t take down The Pirate Bay, why should a measly second make an impact….
http://torrentfreak.com/leap-second-did-not-crash-the-pirate-bay-120701/
At one point, Facebook employees reportedly had access to every single Facebook user’s account, including private messages
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reportsIn case you ever wondered what’s happening at the other side of your internet connection
Employees also used a secret app called Judgebook to score random Facebook users by their looks, Losse wrote.
Did Google Fire This Newly-Hired Redditor Simply for Posting Pictures of His Uniform?
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Google, New Business Models, Stats / reportsOn Friday afternoon, an anonymous Redditor posted a follow-up to a thread he’d since deleted, explaining that Google had fired him for posting pictures of his company uniform.
About the non-disclosure agreement, he writes:
“I thought it applied to what we were doing during training. Which makes sense, because they gave it to us before we were trained. AFTER training, they told us, go and tell people about the exciting product you represent. Even tho I didnt really talk much about the product, I did mention where we will be selling them, apparently the NDA about not talking or posting anything was still in effect.”
Is is fair for Google to have him fired for this?
See also:
Reddit, this is me. The newly hired chrome specialist from the other day. Well, turns out I was just fired for posting the picture of my uniform and being excited to work with what I thought was a great company. AMAA (self.IAmA)
submitted 1 day ago* by [deleted]
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/vssml/reddit_this_is_me_the_newly_hired_chrome/
Google Is Not The Only One Lacking Social Skills. Here’s Facebook’s Fiasco
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, New Business Models, Privacy / Data Protection, Stats / reportsAn alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.
Facebook users say contacts’ e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent — and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.
One very angry user is Adobe employee Rachel Luxemburg.
Much more:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464415-93/facebook-e-mail-mess-address-books-altered-e-mail-lost/
Previously:
Google revealed an unsettling lack of human understanding. Could it be that Google just doesn’t get real people?
http://vrritti.com/2012/06/29/google-revealed-an-unsettling-lack-of-human-understanding-could-it-be-that-google-just-doesnt-get-real-people/
How Defense Contractor Stork Was Lobbying Politicians To Have The Dutch Government Invest In The Joint Strike Fighter
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Stats / reportsA whistleblower previously employed by defense contractor Stork in The Netherlands has disclosed documents indicating that Stork had ties to (and financed) lobbying platform Juncta Juvant which was used to treat high level Dutch government officials and their partners to all sorts of exuberant festivities.
Stork participated in this initiative because it was expecting lots of Joint Strike Fighter related orders and purchases from Lockheed-Martin in the U.S, provided that the Dutch government would participate in the development of the fighter jet.
All of the politicians who were involved now deny being aware of the ties between Stork and Juncta Juvant, but the whistleblower argued that they all knew exactly what they were getting themselves into.
At the time, the whistleblower was both the organizer of the festivities and Stork’s marketing director.
He stated:
“The ties between Stork and Juncta Juvant as well as the purpose of the lobbying effort were a secret to the outside world, but not to those directly involved. It was all a big charade.’
The documents that were released clearly show Stork’s involvement as well as the involvement of several Dutch celebrities. In addition to that, the organizers used the Dutch charity for children “Europa Kinderhulp” as a cover.
Other information in the documents describes just how Stork engaged in a stealth marketing campaign as they labeled it themselves.
Dutch language news article:
http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2686/Binnenland/article/detail/3279047/2012/06/30/VVD-kopstukken-ingezet-door-JSF-lobby-van-Stork.dhtml
Two authenticated emails indicate that it was not al Qaeda behind the Daniel Pearl kidnapping, but Pakistani nationals, because of the F-16 deal
Posted: 2012/07/01 in Education / Awareness, Public Policy, Stats / reportsAn anti-terrorist judge in France has thrown weight behind claims that the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl and the bombing of French engineers in Karachi both had their roots in murky arms deals with Pakistani officials.
