October 2011
64 posts
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Firm Claims To Break Blackberry Device Password →
Research in Motion’s phones are considered the premiere maker of enterprise-grade mobile devices. But now a Russian firm says that a forensics tool it developed can reliably crack strong passwords used to secure the company’s BlackBerry phones. Elcomsoft, a computer forensics software maker, said on Thursday (PDF) that it has developed the ability to crack passwords used to protect...
September 2011
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Net neutrality supporters file lawsuit against net... →
When the Federal Communications Commission last week issued its final network neutrality rules and said they would go into effect at the end of November, lawsuits against the policy could finally begin. Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist...
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Pseudonymity to technofascism →
The current pseudo intellectualism surrounding all things-designated cyber is appalling in the entirety of lack of understanding all things-designated cyber. Intellectualism and discussion of the taxonomical and semantical constructs does not solve the operational needs and currently does not drive consensus or understanding. Society sits poised on the rim of a fertile valley that is filled with...
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OnStar Alters Course, Won’t Track Canceled... →
Bowing to public pressure, OnStar said Tuesday the Detroit navigation-and-emergency company would not monitor vehicles after customers cancel service. The decision to change course comes a day after Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. Schumer decried the surveillance as the most “brazen invasions of privacy in recent memory.” Sen. Al Franken...
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Even Those Cleared of Crimes Can Stay on F.B.I.’s... →
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped, according to newly released documents.
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VPN provider helped track down alleged LulzSec... →
UK VPN and web proxy service provider Hide My Ass! (HMA) says that it helped identify the alleged member of the LulzSec hacker group who was arrested by the FBI last week. The company explained that it had complied with a court order to disclose the IP address that the suspect used to log into HMA.
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Brian Stelter and the Pathology of Objectivity →
Last night, the New York Times’ Brian Stelter tweeted about the Occupy Wall Street protests, which have been ongoing for over a week now, but seemed to reach a tipping point yesterday. Stelter wrote, “2 hours ago Union Sq was the scene of an ugly battle btwn #OccupyWallSt protesters & police,” followed by a link to a YouTube video entitled “Occupy Wall Street Police Abuse.” The video depicts...
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FBI snatches a homeless CommanderX during recent... →
Documents posted to the Web by PublicIntelligence.net confirm that the homeless man arrested on Thursday by the FBI was Christopher Doyon, the leader of the People’s Liberation Front (PLF), also known as CommanderX. In addition, the indictment also names Joshua John Covelli, who was arrested in July for his part in the DDoS attacks on PayPal. Doyon and Covelli were named in an indictment filed...
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Arrested LulzSec Suspect Pined for Job at DoD →
A 23-year-old Arizona man arrested on Thursday in connection with the hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment last May was a model student who saw himself one day defending networks at the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency. Wired.com’s Threat Level, the Associated Press, and other news outlets are reporting that Tempe, Ariz. based Cody Andrew Kretsinger is believed to be a...
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FBI Snags Lulzsec Member Involved in Sony Hack →
The FBI continued its pursuit of members of the hacking group LulzSec on Thursday, arresting a 23 year old Phoenix, Arizona man believed to be part of an online hacking crew that attacked systems belonging to Sony Pictures, the Bureau said in a statement Thursday. The arrest, conducted by agents from the FBI’s Los Angeles office arrested Cody Kretsinger of Phoenix Arizona on Thursday....
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Small Particles Raise Big Questions About... →
“May the book bring some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought!!” Albert Einstein wrote that in 1916 at the end of the preface to his groundbreaking book, “Relativity: The Special and General Theory.” Scientists around the globe have since spent countless hours — some perhaps not so happy — thinking about Einstein’s work and the ideas he presented,...
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Yahoo Appears To Be Censoring Email Messages About... →
Thinking about e-mailing your friends and neighbors about the protests against Wall Street happening right now? If you have a Yahoo e-mail account, think again. ThinkProgress has reviewed claims that Yahoo is censoring e-mails relating to the protest and found that after several attempts on multiple accounts, we too were prevented from sending messages about the “Occupy Wall Street”...
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OnStar Tracks Your Car Even When You Cancel... →
Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers that discontinue monthly service. OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized...
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Al-Jazeera Director Announces Resignation →
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.
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If Righthaven Declares Bankruptcy, Expect Lawyers... →
There are lots of rumors swirling about a possible Righthaven bankruptcy, but that doesn’t seem to worry those pushing for class action lawsuits against the company. Lawyer Todd Kincannon, whose been leading the charge against Righthaven on that front, apparently told law professor Eric Johnson that he’ll keep going after other parties:
“I always knew Righthaven would file...
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? →
Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the...
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Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of... →
Researchers have discovered a serious weakness in virtually all websites protected by the secure sockets layer protocol that allows attackers to silently decrypt data that’s passing between a webserver and an end-user browser. The vulnerability resides in versions 1.0 and earlier of TLS, or transport layer security, the successor to the secure sockets layer technology that serves as the...
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DigiNotar Files for Bankruptcy in Wake of... →
A Dutch certificate authority that suffered a major hack attack this summer has been unable to recover from the blow and filed for bankruptcy this week. DigiNotar, which is owned by Illinois-based Vasco Data Security and was the primary provider of digital security certificates for domains owned by the Dutch government, was breached in early June due to lax security.
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After a massive security breach - DigiNotar files... →
DigiNotar, the Dutch Certificate Authority (CA) that suffered a massive security breach, resulting in nearly 300,000 Iranians being compromised, has filed for bankruptcy. The voluntary petition was granted on Tuesday by a court in The Netherlands. DigiNotar filed for bankruptcy on Monday, less than 24-hours later the petition was approved. In a statement, DigiNotar’s parent company, Vasco,...
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Sony: Waive your right to sue or face a lifetime... →
Sony has added an arbitration clause to its newest Terms of Service (ToS) documentation, which prevents any future class-action lawsuits. The move leaves many gamers with little choice, forcing them to accept their loss of rights or leave the PlayStation Network (PSN). “Any dispute resolution proceedings, whether in arbitration or court, will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a...
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Sony Forces Gamers to Promise They Won’t Sue... →
After being spectacularly hacked multiple times earlier this year, Sony has decided it’s tired of being sued for its security failures and other issues and is requiring gamers on its Play Station Network to sign an agreement saying they won’t join class-action lawsuits to take the tech giant to court in the future. Sony quietly updated its terms of service (.pdf) last week to require online...
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US Rep: Copyright has actually been an... →
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) has a rejoinder to those who argue copyright laws must be further strengthened: “I think if we were to do nothing on copyright law, we would be getting it just about right.” Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley, spoke this week at a meeting of the Intellectual Property Breakfast Club in Washington, DC. She offered her typically blunt assessments of digital...
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Orin Kerr: Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a... →
Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet. So you could be jailed for lying about your age or weight on an Internet dating site. Or you could be sent to federal prison if your boss told you to work but you used the company’s computer to check sports scores online. Imagine that Eric Holder’s Justice Department urged Congress to...
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Copyright Troll Righthaven Says It’s Nearing... →
The Las Vegas copyright-trolling firm Righthaven told a Nevada federal judge Friday it might file for bankruptcy protection, or cease operations altogether. To prevent that, Righthaven is asking U.S. District Judge Philip Pro to stay his decision requiring Righthaven pay $34,000 in legal fees to an online commenter it wrongly sued for infringement.
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Report - A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our... →
An ACLU report release to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 warns that a decade after the attacks, the United States is at risk of enshrining a permanent state of emergency in which core values must be subordinated to ever-expanding claims of national security.
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How Online Privacy Has Become an Oxymoron →
Within days of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, politicians, social scientists and anyone else who could find a microphone was repeating a line that would soon become a mantra: Americans will have to make some sacrifices in the name of greater security and safety. Viewed now through the prism of privacy, that looks like the understatement of the century. Americans have surrendered virtually all of...
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Ten Years After, the Attackers Have Taken the Lead →
In the days following 9/11 we heard alarmist warnings of a coming wave of cyberterrorism. In the early days of the war in Afghanistan when an Al Qaeda computer was found, it was treated as evidence that terrorists knew how to use computers so therefore they would soon be sending worms to shut down or blow up our power plants. During that time I was interviewed on a CNN talk show describing what...
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Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat Apple... →
My desktop isn’t the only computer I plan to replace in the next few months. I need a new laptop too, and my goal is simple: to find a 13” MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple. It turns out that I’m not the only one wanting this mythical non-Apple MacBook Air. Intel wants them too—it calls them Ultrabooks. The chip company has been kicking the Ultrabook idea around for a...
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The New Apple Advantage →
Peter Bright wrote a good piece earlier this week at Ars Technica, documenting his attempt to buy a MacBook Air-like Windows laptop (he doesn’t want an Air running Windows using Boot Camp because he doesn’t like Apple’s U.K. keyboard) and finds the experience confusing (too many models to choose from) and expensive (comparatively-spec’d machines from Dell, HP, and Lenovo cost considerably more...