“The addition of MarkMonitor to our Intellectual Property & Science portfolio marks a transformational shift for our business,” said Chris Kibarian, president, IP & Science, Thomson Reuters. “Together, MarkMonitor and Thomson Reuters will provide customers with the world’s only end-to-end solution for online brand protection. We will continue to develop market leading innovations, helping clients drive brand revenue and protect their intangible assets.”
“Brand owners encounter a myriad of challenges in today’s online environment, from digital piracy, to counterfeiting through social media, to planning for the launch of more than 1,000 new gTLDs,” said David Brown, president, IP Solutions, Thomson Reuters. “MarkMonitor and Thomson Reuters will continue to invest in advanced technologies that enable customers to manage and scope their online brand risk, keeping one step ahead of brandjackers.”
Flagship offerings of MarkMonitor include MarkMonitor Brand Protection, for safeguarding brand equity, revenue and reputation from paid search scams, unauthorized channels, counterfeit sales, false association, impersonation, cybersquatting and other threats; MarkMonitor AntiPiracy, for monitoring, detecting and responding to piracy and related promotional activities; and Domain Management, for proactively seizing domain name opportunities and preventing others from undermining a company’s brand and revenue.
“Brands lost billions of dollars to online abuse last year, as brand saboteurs hijacked search engine marketing, infiltrated social media, stole web traffic and peddled fake goods,” said Irfan Salim, president, MarkMonitor. “MarkMonitor and Thomson Reuters together form the brand protection market leader, providing customers with efficient and effective brand protection solutions that secure their revenue and reputations.”
Willem Frederik Holleeder (born 29 May 1958, in Amsterdam, North Holland) is perhaps one of the best known Dutchcriminals. In 2007 he was sentenced to nine years in prison for several counts of extortion, including the extortion of Willem Endstra, who was murdered in 2004 after falling-out with Holleeder. He served his sentence in Nieuw Vosseveld and was released on the 27 January 2012. In 1983, Holleeder was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment for his involvement in the kidnapping of Heineken president Freddy Heineken, for which 16 million euro ransom was collected.
Born in 1958 in Amsterdam, Holleeder was the son of an employee at the Heineken breweries who lost his job because of alcoholism. As a teenager, he, along with his classmate Cor van Hout were part of a gang that worked for landlords in evicting squatters, and may have been involved in several robberies. Cor van Hout was later to become his brother-in-law.
Heineken kidnapping
In 1983, their relatively unknown gang abducted the Heineken heir Freddy Heineken (who had purchased back the family ownership of the brewery), along with his chauffeur in a daring kidnap. Ultimately, their demand for 35 million guilders ransom (Euro 16 mil.) was met by the family, although the police were against it. After Freddy Heineken’s release, the kidnappers – Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Jan Boelaard, Frans Meijer, and Martin Erkamps- were all eventually traced and served prison sentences. In this period Holleeder met many other gangsters, including John Mieremet, who was later accused of ordering the murder of Holleeder’s brother-in-law and co-criminal Cor van Hout.
After serving the Heineken sentence, Holleeder emerged as a high-profile criminal leader, riding scooters and buying goods on the main fashion streets of Amsterdam and hobnobbing with popstars. Several million of the Heineken ransom was never traced, and may have been part of his initial kitty with which he and Cor van Hout set up an extortion empire; there are said to be up to 24 people in his crime ring.
Initially, he was in a business relationship with real estate businessman Willem Endstra, possibly involving money laundering. After Cor van Hout was killed in 2003, Holleeder fell out with Endstra. Endstra secretly testified to the police about Holleeder, but was shot dead near his office in 2004. It is suspected that Holleeder, along with his partner-in-crime Dino S., ordered the murder of both Willem Endstra and John Mieremet, who was shot in Thailand on 2 November 2005. Holleeder’s name keeps turning up in this connection although three suspects in the Endstra murder, Ali N. (23) and C. Özgür (27) of Alkmaar and Cleon D. (27) from Almere have been released. According to Endstra, Holleeder was involved in 25 murders, including that of Cor van Hout.
The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported on 16 July 2006, that Holleeder and Cor van Hout had planned to kidnap Prince Bernhard instead of Freddy Heineken in the 1980s. Thomas van der Bijl, who was murdered in his bar in Amsterdam in April 2006,made these allegations in a deposition before the Dutch national police.
Like electricity and hot water, pay TV has become a vital source of comfort in my home. But unlike the basic utilities, pay TV has become incredibly expensive. So while it’ll take a radical change in how I consume media, pay TV has got to go.
Pay TV puts hundreds, if not thousands, of channels at the fingertips of those willing to fork over a hefty sum for its warm glow. Entertainment is available on every channel (if you don’t count MTV) and it never sleeps. But, the nonstop onslaught of reality shows, nature documentaries and AMC Originals comes at a price I’ve decided I’m unwilling to pay. I’m walking away and not looking back.
When and if the CEOs discover the fact that their boardroom discussions have been intercepted via their iPhones, they just throw the phone away and buy new ones. The exact method of the data interception scheme has not been disclosed.
The original research conducted by the Carlos III University of Madrid in collaboration with the IMDEA Networks Insitute and other research groups, can be found here.
Although the Netherlands is a small country, with just about 17.5 million citizens, recent research reveals it has a significant role in the distribution of illegal content via The Pirate Bay and Mininova.
The Netherlands, after the U.S. and Canada, appeared to be the third country in regards of initial seeders of torrent files published on The Pirate Bay. Even though uploading of illegal content is considered copyright infringement, downloading from an illegal source is considered to be legal in the Netherlands, under the private copying exception. Judging from the research, the positive climate to downloading in the Netherlands could influence the perceptions on file sharing in general.
Even more remarkable, is that the Dutch regional University of Tilburg (15,000 students in 2010) shows up as the ninth largest ISP in regard of torrent uploads to The Pirate Bay, competing against ISP-giants such as Comcast Cable or Verizon Internet Services. The fact that the Netherlands is one of the top countries in regards of broadband Internet density and speed, the prime internet connections and the young audience of the Dutch universities, might give some explanation to the high use of Dutch university networks for uploading and downloading to file-sharing websites.
Epix, the pay TV service owned by Viacom, Lionsgate and MGM, has licensed movies such as the “Avengers” and “Ironman” for Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service.
First of all, what a terrible human to liken the Holocaust to abortion. I have said this to pro-lifers time and time again and they have no rebuttal: fetuses are not aborted because of their race or religion, they are not tortured, starved, raped and beaten, forced to watch their families, friends and fellow victims die brutal and unthinkable deaths. They were not living beings, walking around with a personality, established life, friends or family, they are not independent humans who live their own life and make their own choices. How in anyway, is the discontinuation of a pregnancy, the abortion of a fetus, like something as tragic and heartbreaking as the Holocaust?
Second of all, to relate those two things, wow the poor survivors of the actual Holocaust, or those with family and friends who witnessed it and lived it? Way to take away what an impact the Holocaust was, what a horrific time in history it was. How can anyone feel good about themselves saying they are a survivor of the abortion Holocaust when they have never lived through any of the horrors that Holocaust survivors did, or the conditions in Europe people had to live through at the time?
I find it sickening to know that there are people out there with the audacity to claim abortion is just as bad as genocide.
After comparing abortion to the Holocaust, and some people to Hitler (WOW), he bombards people with Bible verses and again, manipulating those who believe in the right those chose into saying they are immoral, he, very condescendingly, aks them if they believe abortion is a right (whatever happened to the separation of church and state is beyond me, conservatives seem to be very happy with knowing and exercising all their rights but this one).
Of course if you have very little knowledge, very little opinion and have just been emotionally manipulated, guilted and accused of being immoral and told fetuses are indeed babies and abortion is in fact murder, what are you going to say? You’re going to say abortion is wrong.
I’m a pro-lifer. I oppose abortion, at least in most circumstances. But this movie is completely missing the point of the debate. In a variety of ways, he says that abortions are the same as the Holocaust. The heart of the actual debate is skirted around a couple of times: whether a fetus is a human life. Note that I use the word fetus, because one of the common pro-life tactics is to refer to a fetus as a baby, which leads you to the association by way of the linguistic choice that babies have life and therefore you shouldn’t end that life. In the movie he repeatedly uses baby, not fetus. Again, I believe that abortion is wrong at least in most circumstances, because I believe that a fetus is life, but it is a sneaky tactic that I’m not a fan of. By avoiding that question that defines the debate, he gets away with equating the Holocaust with abortion. If you accept that a fetus is a human life, then I can see the comparison, although there are big differences, too, like the motivation behind it (racism as opposed to not thinking you can handle the challenge of motherhood). If you don’t accept that, as pro-choicers don’t, then his argument is entirely useless.
Then after a very awkward segue, the movie progresses to talk about Heaven and Hell, and it is time for some good old fashioned turn or burn preaching. This is a common tactic. First, start by establishing that the other person is a dirty wretched sinner. I find this almost amusing sometimes, because honestly I think most people acknowledge that they aren’t perfect. They just don’t think it is that big of a deal. But he goes to great ends to establish that each person he is talking to is a liar, a thief, an adulterer (lust, which he doesn’t define), a murderer (anger, also not defined), etc. He even outright tells somebody that the only reason they don’t believe in God is because he is a giant list of sins to which the guy seems to have given up and says basically “yeah, sure, that makes sense”. And if you’re a sinner at all, then God is bound by the laws of the universe (that he set up) to send you to eternal torment in Hell. Therefore you are going to Hell. He spends no time explaining why this is so, and the people in the video never bother to challenge him.
So to wrap that up, I do have a problem with the turn or burn preaching, or maybe two problems to be more accurate. One, it doesn’t work anyway and I think it is far more often counter-productive than productive. It may convince people to say the prayer that you present as the magic get out of Hell free card out of sheer fear, but they’ll have forgotten about it the next day. Then they’ll go back to their normal lives but with more antagonism to Christianity since they now are more convinced that we are just about scaring people into agreeing with them. They’ll also catch on to most if not all of the logical inconsistencies. Two, it corrupts or at least waters down the actual Gospel, which is Good News indeed, no matter whether you focus on the remission of sins, the conquering of evil, the coming of the kingdom of God, or the end of religion. They now define the core of Christianity as avoiding the scary God bound by the rules of retributive justice to send them to Hell. They don’t think of Christianity representing a loving God, a gracious God, or a forgiving God, and they don’t think of Christians as any of those things either. So while maybe they gave in and said the Sinner’s Prayer to get you to go away or because you scared them too much, they’re left farther away from the real God instead of closer.
A movie comparing abortion to the Holocaust was handed out to students at Wagoner High School. Now parents demand answers. The movie titled “180″ opens with images of Hitler and the Holocaust where 6 million Jewish people were killed in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. After a brief discussion between the host and the interviewees, the conversation then turns to abortion and compares the two. It’s a movie with a clear pro-life message, and it found its way into classrooms and hallways of the school.
“She said that she had seen a DVD in school that basically said that if you have an abortion then you are no better than the Nazis and you will go to hell,” says concerned parent, Marty Angus. Angus was furious after his stepdaughter came home and told him she had seen it in class.
“She said well, we went to our lockers on break and there was a note that said come pick up your free DVD,” says Angus. We did some checking with the district, officials tell FOX23 a local family asked the principal at the school if they could give the DVD to students. The answer was yes, but only if the students got parental consent first. Superintendent Marte Thompson told FOX23 a student aide accidentally handed out the movies before the school got the needed consent. Once they realized the graphic nature of the movie, they confiscated all the DVDs and returned them. “When I contacted the principal about it he said he was very apologetic and very sorry that it came out like this, and this was not the way it was supposed to have been handled,” says Angus.
But for Marty, an apology is not enough. ”I thought it was graphic and a clear violation between church and state and it was just awful to be shown to a high school student,” says Angus. In the future the district says it will be much more careful as to what types of material is allowed to be distributed to its students. The DVD was shown in two classrooms. Wagoner Schools takes full responsibility for what happened. http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story/Movie-comparing-abortion-to-the-Holocaust-shown/QXe8XbPZ3EmGI_ETKKtGsA.cspx
I’d like to take a moment to intercede the back-and-forth. I actually have seen the documentary 180, and I’ve judged it to be entirely irrelevant to the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate. I have my personal opinions on the matter (that change quite often as I do more and more research), but the truth of the matter is that 180 does an awful job at its intended goal. I have decently minded, secular pro-life friends who wouldn’t touch this documentary with a ten-foot-pole in an attempt to explain the pro-life point of view. I will try to summarize some of the reasons for this: 1. Ray Comfort’s Terrible Sources, 2. Ray claims that Hitler didn’t see Jewish people at people. Just like we don’t see fetuses as babies!, 3. Appeal to Emotion, Not Reason, 4. Comparison of Abortion to the Holocaust
Melbourne IT is busy securing servers after customer AAPT was breached by Anonymous, the company’s CEO, Theo Hnarakis, said in a conference call about its first-half 2012 results.
Despite the data breach and other setbacks related to credit card fraud and losing Microsoft as a customer, Melbourne IT reported results flat with the same period last year, and expects growth in the second half.
Out of adversity … opportunity arises, Hnarakis said of the AAPT data breach. Certainly we have been working with customers where we believe there might have been a vulnerability to upscale the solution they have. Melbourne IT has not lost one customer as a result of the AAPT data breach, he said, and instead, the breach has increased customer demand for bolstering security. Melbourne IT is rolling out new security services, including tools to defend against phishing and distributed denial of service attacks, he said.
The company has cooperated with all the authorities investigating the AAPT data breach, and is working closely with AAPT and other customers to make sure we dont see a repeat of that incident, Hnarakis said in the call. The company has invited security specialists to forensically review our procedures and our own infrastructure to ensure there [are] no other potential weaknesses in the system.
We were in some ways an unintended victim of this process, Hnarakis said. The intention of Anonymous was to prove the vulnerability of the data sitting on the AAPT server. The attack hit three out of 4000 servers at Melbourne IT, and the servers were at least nine years old and operated (Adobe) ColdFusion, which had a vulnerability that was not detected by anybody, he said.
The small business division faced quite a few challenges, but should recover in the second half, Hnarakis said. Revenue for the division dropped 8 per cent year-over-year to $42.6 million and EBIT tanked 27 per cent to $5.9 million. We started the year reasonably solidly and then in February and March we were attacked by a credit card scam out of Asia that clogged up our Web sales where we were being smashed by these various fraudulent transactions.
Following his arrest last week, it has now been confirmed that Gottfrid Svartholm will be deported from Cambodia. Following a meeting this morning with Swedish authorities, Cambodia’s deputy police commissioner said a decision was taken to kick the Pirate Bay co-founder out of the country. “Wherever he goes, we don’t know,” he said.
Today we have confirmation that Svartholm will indeed be leaving Cambodia, sooner rather than later.
According to a report from the local Phnom Penh Post, this morning a meeting took place between National Deputy Police Commissioner General Sok Phal and Swedish authorities. Due to the lack of an extradition treaty, Sweden made a request for Svartholm to be deported. Cambodian authorities appear to have agreed.
“We will use the Immigration Law against him to deport him out of our country and Minister of Interior Sar Kheng will sign on the deportation request letter from the police commissioner soon,” said Phal.
In what TorrentFreak is informed is typical of the way issues like this are handled in Cambodia, General Sok Phal said although Svartholm would be deported, he didn’t know where the Swede would end up.
“We will have to just deport him, wherever he goes, we don’t know, but he has to be out of Cambodia,” he said.
Unless special arrangements are made it’s likely that Svartholm will end up at Cambodia’s deportation jail, 7 km west of Phnom Penh opposite Pochentong Airport. He is currently being held at an unknown location by the Ministry of Interior’s immigration department.
According to most polls the Pirates have a decent chance of securing at least one seat, a milestone for the movement as it would be the first democratically chosen Pirate in a national parliament. One of the main goals of the Pirates is to fight increased censorship and the growing influence of the copyright lobby.
The $497 (£313) software package, TrafficPaymaster, creates web pages by “spinning and scraping” content from other sites to attract advertising from Google.
Millions of people who have blogs or websites are paid for hosting ads on Google’s behalf using the AdSense service, which scans a web page and posts adverts related to the content. TrafficPaymaster creates an instant cashflow by appearing to plagiarise information.
Google has strict rules on “unoriginal content”. Its AdSense policy says: “Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarised. Scraping content and passing it off as one’s own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies.“
Shapps, a rising Tory star who many say could end up as party chairman in the reshuffle, set up web sales business HowToCorp in 2005.
Going under the name Michael Green and casting himself as an internet marketing guru, Shapps in 2007 claimed audiences could “make $20,000 in 20 days guaranteed or your money back” – if they spent $200 buying his bespoke software.
Shapps previously told journalists he used the name Michael Green for the business to keep it separate from his political work.
In 2008 Shapps transferred his share of the company to his wife, Belinda. The family business continues to sell online toolkits such as Michael Green’s “How To Bounce Back From Recession”.
In a post to an online forum this year, HowToCorp’s Sebastian Fox – who also signs off as Michael Green – dismissed Google’s attempts to police the internet. He said: “The real question is whether there are any signs about how a page has been created. If the answer is no, well then it doesn’t much matter what Google officially thinks.”
On Sunday sources at Google confirmed TrafficPaymaster was in “violation” of its policies and that its search engine’s algorithms had been equipped to drop the ranking of any webpages created using HowToCorp’s software. Officially, Google said it does not comment on individual cases.
“We have strict policies in place to ensure web users are presented with useful ads when browsing sites in our content network and to ensure our advertisers reach an engaged audience. If we are alerted to a site which breaks our AdSense policies, we will review it and can remove it from our network.”
This is the second time in recent weeks Shapps has found himself at the centre of an internet row. In July the MP was forced to deny he used software to boost the number of followers to his Twitter account, after an online argument with Lord Prescott, the Labour former deputy prime minister.
Shapps is followed by 57,000 people on Twitter and says he achieved this by following and unfollowing thousands of people each week. In the week to 16 July, he had followed and unfollowed more than 3,000 people – an average of nearly 450 per day.
However, in an email to subscribers entitled “How To Build a BIG List”, HowToCorp recommended people purchase TweetAdder, an automated tool for mass following and unfollowing people on Twitter. Until June, Shapp’s wife Belinda, the sole director and owner of HowToCorp, had not used Twitter regularly and wrote on her own website that she was a “self-confessed social media novice”.
When contacted by the Guardian, a spokesman for Shapps denied the minister set up the business, saying it was “always a partnership between Mr and Mrs Shapps” which began in 2000. He added: “Grant Shapps derives no income, dividends, or other income from this business, which is run by his wife Belinda with a registered office in Pinner in north-west London. He is quite simply not involved in this business.
“Mrs Shapps runs her own online business, uses freelancers, moderators and programmers to post on forums, generate products and maintain a help desk.”
A former captain in the Russian Federal Security Guard Service* has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison after he was convicted of involvement in the kidnapping Ivan Kaspersky, son of Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene, the Moscow Timesreports.
Ivan Kaspersky was kidnapped in Moscow April 2011 by a gang who attempted to extort €3m from his parents for his safe return. The plot failed and the then 20 year-old student was recovered five days later without any bloodshed, following a police operation.
On a frequent basis we encounter hackers who do not dare to publish the security issues they have discovered. Not every business understands that they’re just trying to help out. That’s why RevSpace has provided an e-mail inbox where hackers can submit information about these security incidents anonymously. RevSpace will then go and act as an intermediary or messenger.
RevSpace has already received three notifications. It passes on relevant information to companies involved and / or internet service providers.
E-mail address: meldanoniem@revspace.nl (The hacker space advises to use Tor and an anonymous webmail account when submitting information)
The Netherlands Was Center Of One Of The World’s Largest Spam Botnets: The Grum Botnet
The Netherlands is the preferred choice for those engaging in online piracy, hacking, phishing, spam and other types of online fraud, predominantly because of the excellent IT infrastructure, the low chance of getting caught, low or non-existent sanctions and the ability to purchase goods and services – needed for the illegal activities – anonymously.
A book containing over 7,000 emails sent and received by Anders Breivik was released Monday by a Norwegian publisher. The correspondences show how the extremist prepared for his July 2011 attacks, which left 77 people dead.
A video clip shot yesterday at Columbus Ohio Airport illustrates how the Transportation Security Administration has dreamed up a bizarre new way to waste time and taxpayer dollars – by testing drinks purchased by travelers for explosives inside the airport long after they have already passed security.
Next up: security checks in the plane and during the flight. Possibly also when you’ve reached your destination AND when you wake up the next morning.
An online hacker group associated with Anonymous claims to have posted 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) by breaching FBI security.
UDIDs are the unique string of numbers that individually identifies each iOS device and formerly used by developers to track their app installations across Apple’s user base.
In all, AntiSec claims to have obtained more than 12 million UDIDs, including user names, addresses, and notification tokens from a laptop used by an FBI agent. In a missive posted to Pastebin, the hacking group explains how it obtained the data from an FBI agent’s laptop:
During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of “NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv” turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.
Although Apple has already said it would begin restricting developer access to the identifiers, the Pastebin post says the group posted the data out of suspicion the FBI was using the UDIDs for nefarious purposes, such has people tracking, as well as to protest the use of UDIDs in general.
we always thought it was a really bad idea. that hardware coded IDs for devices concept should be erradicated from any device on the market in the future.
Even though it says it has more than 12 million UDIDs, AntiSec says it settled on posting only 1 million, trimming out personal information such as full names, cell numbers, and addresses.
we left those main columns we consider enough to help a significant amount of users to look if their devices are listed there or not. the DevTokens are included for those mobile hackers who could figure out some use from the dataset.
CNET has contacted Apple and the FBI for comment and will update this report when we learn more.
Going beyond the stream, app refresh will allow users to store programs on their iPhone or iPad for viewing even when a broadband connection in unavailable
Apple, Amazon and Google also apply restrictions to what you can do with the music that you buy. It’s a standard practice across most if not all online music because it’s the copyright owners who set down restrictions on who can do what with the content they produce.
The likely truth is that the contract between you and the service you are using — say Apple in this case — is terminated as soon as the person dies. In that event, the contract expires and the person’s account and any purchased products cannot be transferred to anyone else.
There was an advantage to buying physical copies, so it seems…
At first it was funny, a man of Chinese descent continuously talking into two mobile phones (simultaneously) during a football match in The Netherlands. The audience even offered him their mobile phones.
But suddenly strange things happened: three ‘red cards’ were issued against one football club and then those events were followed up by strange decisions by the referees. The audience started to connect these events to the presence of the so called ‘phone-Chinese’, a phenomenon known to be tied to local gambling houses and bookmakers. The man, who did not speak the Dutch language, needed to exit the stadium while being escorted by security guards.
The Dutch football association KNVB is now going to investigate these peculiar events.
