Sunday, July 18, 2010

You say to-MAH-to.

I say ba-LO-ney

http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=12166

SC Court Revives Case Over Hacked Email Account

July 17, 2010 by Dissent

Jeff Gorman reports:

A woman who hacked into a man’s e-mail account to expose his extramarital affair may have violated federal law, the South Carolina Court of Appeals ruled.

Gail Jennings found a card for flowers in her car and correctly suspected that the flowers were not for her. Her husband, Lee Jennings, admitted to having fallen in love with another woman, whom he would not identify.

Gail’s daughter-in-law, Holly Broome, used to work for Lee, so she went into his Yahoo e-mail account by changing his password. [I have no idea what this means... Bob] Broome read e-mails between Lee and his girlfriend, and printed copies for Gail’s divorce attorney and the private detective Gail had hired.

Lee found out about the e-mail breach during the divorce proceedings. He sued Gail, Broome, Gail’s attorney and the detective.

The trial court ruled in Gail’s favor, stating that Lee did not prove the e-mails were in electronic storage, and that the defendants did not violate the Stored Communications Act (SCA).

On appeal, Judge John Geathers reversed the decision and ruled that Lee had presented enough evidence to bring the case to trial.

Read more on Courthouse News. A copy of the court’s opinion can be found here (pdf). From the opinion:

Wife, however, contends that Yahoo was acting as a “remote computing service” (RCS), rather than an ECS, at the time that the emails were accessed. RCS is defined as “the provision to the public of computer storage or processing services by means of an electronic communications system.” 18 U.S.C. § 2711(2) (2006).[6] The term refers to “the processing or storage of data by an off-site third party.” Quon, 529 F.3d at 901; see also Orin S. Kerr, A User’s Guide to the Stored Communications Act, and a Legislator’s Guide to Amending It, 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1208, 1213-14 (2004) (describing customers of RCS as those that “paid to have remote computers store extra files or process large amounts of data”).

In the present case, it is questionable whether Yahoo was providing RCS with respect to the emails in question. For instance, in Quon, the Ninth Circuit held that Arch Wireless, a company providing text messaging services to the city of Ontario, was not an RCS and that Arch Wireless therefore violated the SCA when it disclosed to the city the contents of text messages sent by city employees. Quon, 529 F.3d at 900-03.[7] Nonetheless, even if Yahoo was acting as an RCS with respect to the emails at issue, there is no question that Yahoo was also acting as an ECS with regard to those same emails. Husband’s account was still active, and Husband retained the ability to send (forward) any of the emails at issue to someone else. Notably, the House Report for the SCA indicates that, in such situations, the communications would still be protected under section 2701. See H.R. Rep. No. 99-647, at 63 (1986) (“[T]o the extent that a remote computing service is provided through an Electric Communication Service, then such service is also protected [under section 2701].”).



Hacking as a “Political” tool? e-Jihad? Cyber-war?

http://www.databreaches.net/?p=12546

Turks hack Israeli account details

July 17, 2010 by admin

Nitzan Sadan reports:

Turkish hackers have obtained the passwords and credit card details of 32,561 Israeli users, the Israeli We-CMS blog says.

According to the blog, a Turkish message board has uploaded a list containing credit card details, PayPal and bank usernames and passwords. The list is also said to contain more than 140 passwords to Israeli government websites and over 300 passwords for Israeli academic web pages.

Erez Wolf, owner of We-CMS, says most of the passwords were retrieved by a hacker into an Israeli commercial website whose name he did not reveal. On his twitter page, Wolf noted that a small number of the passwords was allegedly obtained from the Israeli articles.co.il website. The passwords and usernames were posted in an Excel document uploaded to the Turkish board by a surfer.

Read more on Ynetnews

The We-CMS blog now reports (translation by Google):

Update: There is a list of another 70 thousand accounts, and other sites.

[From the article:

Wolf added that a debate is currently raging on the Turkish board regarding what should be done with the stolen data. Some surfers claimed that the accounts must not be used or compromised, as the ultimate goal was to target Israel on the political level.

Other surfers, however, argued that as enemies of Islam, any harm to Israeli users was permitted. Some users referred to social, criminal and religious arguments and some went as far as quoting Quran passages on the assets of heretics.



If you believe Big Brother is a better parent than Parents, this make sense. After all, no kid would ever seek out games like this on their own.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/07/18/0531253/Apps-For-Healthy-Kids-mdash-Where-PC-Meets-PCs?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Apps For Healthy Kids — Where PC Meets PCs

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 18, @05:32AM

"Put the Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and Madden away, kids! Over at Apps for Healthy Kids, First Lady Michelle Obama has a whole new slate of games for you to play with! Voting on entries in the White House-backed game development competition has begun, and you'll find exciting titles like Balanced Meal (6 votes), Blubber Blaster (9 votes), Calorie Quest (10 votes), and Count Peas (7 votes) — and that's just for starters."



An Introduction to Hacking? Interesting Computer Security project: Fit It!

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/07/17/2136237/Damn-Vulnerable-Linux-mdash-Most-Vulnerable-Linux-Ever?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

Damn Vulnerable Linux — Most Vulnerable Linux Ever

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 17, @07:11PM

"Usually, when installing a new operating system the hope is that it's as up-to-date as possible. After installation there's bound to be a few updates required, but no more than a few megabytes. Damn Vulnerable Linux is different; it's shipped in as vulnerable a state as possible. As the DVL website explains: 'Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is everything a good Linux distribution isn't. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks. DVL isn't built to run on your desktop – it's a learning tool for security students.'"



For my students.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-great-resources-learn-code/

5 Great Resources To Learn How To Code

… more often than not, there seems to be a problem of actually finding good content online that can teach you to code. Experimenting with a language can only get you so far. To master it, you need to have proper guidance from people who actually know what they are talking about.

So where can you find expert guidance without shelling out a fortune for it? You could start with checking out the websites below:

Dream In Code

W3Schools My favorite for my website students.

Eloquent JavaScript

TryRuby

A Miscellany of HTML5 Tutorials

… check out some other programming / coding posts that we have done in the past, for further inspiration :

Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers – by Ryan
Learn To Code At Any Level With Google Code University – by David
4 Great Websites To Make You A Visual Basic Guru – by Ryan
6 Beginner Resources For Learning Mac Programming – by Bakari
6 Free Sites To Learn About Programming in PHP – by Jack
Top 5 Sites To Learn CSS Online – by Daniel



Includes an interface to Mindomo...

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/creaza-free-video-audio-editor

Creaza: All In One Free Online Video/Audio Editor & Cartoon Maker

With Creaza, you can do a lot – the site can help you write a thesis, help your children with their school science project, and help you create family videos. The website is a free to use web service merging many functions into a single dashboard.

www.creaza.com

Similar tools: Kaltura, Pixorial, VideoToolbox, BrushVideo and Asterpix.



I've learned to give articles like this one to my students ONLY in the last class meeting – otherwise I don't see them for a week or so...

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-07/clone-yourself-paper-week-long-diy-project

Build a Life-Size Paper Clone of Yourself for Under $40

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