Texas Man Pleads Guilty To Building Botnet-For-Hire
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 29, @12:49AM
Julie188 writes
"A Mesquite, Texas, man is set to plead guilty to training his 22,000-PC botnet on a local ISP — just to show off its firepower to a potential customer. David Anthony Edwards will plead guilty to charges that he and another man, Thomas James Frederick Smith, built a custom botnet, called Nettick, which they then tried to sell to cybercriminals at the rate of US$0.15 per infected computer, according to court documents."
...and you thought Facebook's change to Opt Out was bad. Being sent to the “organ Banks” has been a SciFi horror theme for years.
http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=2570
Proposal: All New Yorkers Become Organ Donors
By Dissent, April 29, 2010 7:35 am
Organ donation has become a vital way to save lives around the world, but a vast shortage of donors continues to mean people are losing their lives while on waiting lists.
But there is a unique proposal that could change all that.
New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky nearly lost his daughter, Willie, at 4 years old when she needed a kidney transplant, and again 10 years later when her second kidney failed.
“We have 10,000 New Yorkers on the list today waiting for organs. We import half the organs we transplant. It is an unacceptable failed system,” Brodsky said.
To fix that, Brodsky introduced a new bill in Albany that would enroll all New Yorkers as an organ donor, unless they actually opt out of organ donation. It would be the first law of its kind in the United States.
Read more on CBS.
The article states that 24 countries have this type of automatic enrollment. What do you think? Should organ donation require opt-in vs. opt-out? My initial reaction is that it should require opt-in, but I’m willing to think about it.
“Yes the data is public (available on our website) but we expected users would look at only one or at most a few records each. Actually looking at everything we offer is obviously a crime.” This has implications for data you store in the Cloud!
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9533
Database builder faces web-scraping lawsuit
April 29, 2010 by Dissent
A US company faces a copyright, trespass and trade secrets lawsuit because it ’scraped’ the website of a rival on behalf of a client. The case underlines the legal uncertainty surrounding the practice.
Website ’scraping’ is the practice of automatically taking information from a website and can be used to retrieve the contents of entire back-end databases from other websites.
The legality of scraping is unclear in the UK and the US. Uncertainty still surrounds the degree to which it is copyright infringement, hacking, a violation of database rights or a breach of other laws.
Snap-on Business Solutions hopes that an Ohio court agrees with it that scraping is a violation of several laws. It has lodged a claim against O’Neil Associates over activity surrounding Mitsubishi’s moving of outsourced work from Snap-on to O’Neil.
Read more on Out-Law.com
[From the article:
Snap-on built a parts database for Mitsubishi so that dealers could access spare parts. It later moved the work to O'Neil and asked Snap-on for the database, which it saw as its property.
Snap-on, though, said that Mitsubishi would have to pay an extra fee to be given a copy of the database it had built.
O'Neil told Mitsubishi that it could 'scrape' the website to retrieve all the elements of the database. Mitsubishi gave it login details so that this could happen. Snap-on claims that this constituted an unlawful access to its database and unlawful copying of it.
I wonder if this was sponsored by the RIAA?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9521
Bluebear: Exploring Privacy Threats in BitTorrent
April 28, 2010 by Dissent
BitTorrent is arguably the most efficient peer-to-peer protocol for content replication. However, BitTorrent has not been designed with privacy in mind and its popularity could threaten the privacy of millions of users. Surprisingly, privacy threats due to BitTorrent have been overlooked because BitTorrent popularity gives its users the illusion that finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The goal of this project is to explore the severity of the privacy threats faced by BitTorrent users.
We argue that it is possible to continuously monitor from a single machine most BitTorrent users and to identify the content providers (also called initial seeds) [LLL_LEET10, LLL_TR10]. This is a major privacy threat as it is possible for anybody in the Internet to reconstruct all the download and upload history of most BitTorrent users.
To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor [LMC_POST10]. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.
Read more on Project Bluebear. Hat-tip, Slashdot.
Privacy in the automated data gathering and sharing age?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9539
Every move I make, every step I take, they’ll be watching me
April 29, 2010 by Dissent
If you are not already familiar with Erasing David, a documentary about privacy, surveillance, and the database state, you may want to read this article by David Bond in the London Evening Standard about his experience trying to hide while others tried to find him. It’s a chilling demonstration of how much information about us is out there.
You can find out more about the project and film on erasingdavid.com
Cyber War: Isn't this another face of asynchronous warfare?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9524
Online anonymity fueled ‘Web War’ on Estonia
April 28, 2010 by Dissent
Dan Goodin reports:
The attacks that paralyzed Estonian internet traffic for three days in 2007 were fueled by online anonymity and a phenomenon known as contagion, according to a report by three academics.
The paper, titled Storming the Servers: A Social Psychological Analysis of the First Internet War, is among the first to study the social and psychological forces that contributed to the massive DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks on Estonia. They are likely to play out in future online conflicts, the authors warn.
Read more in The Register.
BlackBerrys are Lawyer Toys.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=9511
Spy software watches BlackBerry, privacy advocates too
April 28, 2010 by Dissent
AFP with Lia Timson report:
US software firm Retina-X Studios has released a more vigilant version of its Mobile Spy program that captures every email and picture from BlackBerry smartphones, prompting Australian privacy advocates to call for order.
[...]
Roger Clarke, chairman, Australian Privacy Foundation, said such software was entirely inappropriate.
“We’re still in the wild west. Every time a new technology comes along it’s pretty much open slather for everyone to do anything they like, then courts and parliaments have to make rules.
Read more in The Age.
This is the Y2K scenario. Computers imbedded in devices with inadequate testing.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20003681-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Computer glitches in Toyota cars begin to pile up
by Brooke Crothers April 28, 2010 3:50 PM PDT
Wednesday's recall of the 2003 Sequoia marks the third computer-related recall for Toyota Motor this year.
The Japanese car company announced a recall of 50,000 Sequoia 2003 model year SUVs to address problems with the Vehicle Stability Control (VSC) System. If not fixed, some vehicles may not accelerate as quickly as the driver expects, Toyota said.
… In the glitch disclosed on Wednesday, Toyota said it made a production change during the 2003 model year and published a technical service bulletin to address the issue when it was first identified in the fall 2003. "Since that time, Toyota has been responding to individual owner concerns by replacing the skid control engine control unit in Sequoias impacted by this condition," Toyota said in a statement. The engine control unit, or ECU, is an onboard computer.
The Internet is more about Trade than Communications?
FTC Could Gain Enforcement Power Over Internet
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 28, @04:01PM
Hugh Pickens writes
"The Washington Post reports that under a little-known provision in financial overhaul legislation before Congress the Federal Trade Commission could become a more powerful watchdog for Internet users with the power to to issue rules on a fast track and impose civil penalties on companies that hurt consumers. 'If we had a deterrent, a bigger stick to fine malefactors, that would be helpful,' says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who has argued in favor of bolstering his agency's enforcement ability. This power would stand in stark contrast to a besieged FCC, whose ability to oversee broadband providers has been cast into doubt after a federal court ruled last month that the agency lacked the ability to punish Comcast for violating open-Internet guidelines. The provision to strengthen the FTC is in the regulatory overhaul legislation passed by the House, and although it is absent from the legislation before the Senate, some observers expect the measure to be included when the House and Senate versions are combined."
Even war isn't what it used to be...
Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says
By Nathan Hodge April 28, 2010 4:15 pm
The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.
Harold Koh, the State Department’s top legal adviser, outlined the administration’s legal case for the robotic attacks last month. Now, some legal experts are taking turns to punch holes in Koh’s argument.
It’s part of an ongoing legal debate about the CIA and U.S. military’s lethal drone operations, which have escalated in recent months — and which have received some technological upgrades. Critics of the program, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have argued that the campaign amounts to a program of targeted killing that may violate the laws of war.
Very interesting presentation.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-20003591-240.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
James Hamilton on cloud economies of scale
by James Urquhart April 28, 2010 4:26 PM PDT
While it is often cited that cloud computing will change the economics of IT operations, it is rare to find definitive sources of information about the subject. However, the influence of economies of scale on the cost and quality of computing infrastructure is a critical reason why cloud computing promises to be so disruptive.
James Hamilton, a vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon and one of the true gurus of large scale data center practices, recently gave a presentation at Mix 10 that may be one of the most informative--and influential--overviews of data center economies of scale to date.
Here are the key points that I took away from the presentation:
Everything is (probably) cheaper for a large scale service provider than for the average enterprise.
The two quickest hits in terms of data center operations are server costs and the cost of delivering power to servers.
Turning off a server is not as economically efficient as using the server fully at all times.
Large computing providers have a different relationship with their vendors than you do.
Buy a market.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20003716-260.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
With Palm, HP reboots mobile strategy
by Erica Ogg April 28, 2010 5:46 PM PDT
With its purchase of Palm, Hewlett-Packard acquired more than just a smartphone maker. It also picked up a whole new strategy for its mobile devices.
HP said Wednesday it plans to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion, or $5.70 per share, which amounts to a 23 percent premium over Palm's actual stock price at the end of the day. But for a leading technology company like HP with almost zero mobile phone presence and $13.5 billion in cash, picking up a company with a fully developed mobile operating system, a decent lineup of devices, and trove of mobile patents is a bargain. It will also make HP a viable competitor in the growing mobile market.
When new technologies (e.g. the iPad) come on the market, reporters look for industries or organizations that quickly adapt it – so they can figure out how it will be used. They always seem startled by how rapidly the Porn industry can move.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/23/porn.technology/
In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way
By Doug Gross, CNN April 23, 2010 -- Updated 2153 GMT (0553 HKT)
The Education Cloud?
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Congratulations to Teachers in Oregon!
Today, Google announced that the Oregon Department of Education is officially migrating to Google Apps for Education. All public schools in the state will have access to Google Apps for Education for students and staff. Google and the Oregon DOE estimate that this could save Oregon $1.5million/ year.
No comments:
Post a Comment