This relates to the back and forth
between Saudi and Israeli hackers...
Facebook
denies that “Hannibal” has hacked Arabs’ Facebook accounts
January 16, 2012 by admin
In a series of posts on Pastebin, a
hacker who calls himself “Hannibal” (for Hannibal Lecter), has
dumped thousands of e-mail addresses and plain-text passwords that he
claims are from Arabs’ Facebook accounts. Yesterday, he posted
20,000. Today, he posted 30,000 more.
I contacted Facebook for a statement on
the allegations that they have been hacked. In response, a
spokesperson provided the following statement to DataBreaches.net:
This does not
represent a hack of Facebook or anyone’s Facebook profiles. We
have spent time investigating the information and have determined
fewer than a third of the credentials were valid and almost half
weren’t associated with Facebook accounts.
Additionally, we
have built robust internal systems that validate every single login
to our site, regardless if the password is correct or not, to check
for malicious activity. By analyzing every single login to the site
we have added a layer of security that protects our users from
threats both known and unknown. Beyond our engineering teams that
build tools to block malicious activity, we also have a dedicated
enforcement team that seeks to identify those responsible for threats
and works with out legal team to ensure appropriate consequences
follow.
People can protect
themselves by never clicking on strange links and reporting any
suspicious activity they encounter on Facebook. We encourage our
users to become fans of the Facebook Security Page
(www.facebook.com/security (<http://www.facebook.com/security>)
for additional security information.
Hannibal did not respond to an e-mail
request sent by this site last night inviting him o respond to
Facebook’s denial or to provide proof that Facebook was actually
hacked. If he does provide a statement, I will update this entry.
Clearly they can block content (just
claim to own the copyright) but India wants it blocked without
intervention on their part.
"Facebook and Google told the
Delhi High Court today they
cannot block offensive content that appears on their services.
The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked
to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and
the Indian government has given the green light for their
prosecution. Although India is democratic (in fact, it's the
world's largest democracy), many
fear the country will resort to censorship."
Good marketing: Brag about your massive
failure! (You can learn from autopsy records, but can RSA?)
"Last year's industry-shaking
RSA
Security breach has resulted in customers' CEOs
and CIOs engaging much more closely with the vendor to improve
their organizations' security, according to the head of RSA.
Discussing the details of the attack that
compromised its SecurID tokens has made RSA sought after by companies
that want to prevent something similar from happening to them,
Executive Chairman Art Coviello said in an interview with Network
World. 'If there's a silver lining to the cloud that was over us
from April through over the summer it is the fact that we've been
engaged with customers at a strategic level as never before,'
Coviello says, 'and they want to know in detail what happened to us,
how we responded, what tools we used, what was effective and what was
not.'"
Wow! You don't often see a politician
admitting to being completely clueless. But still, it's an arrogant
ignorance...
Ken
Clarke: ‘I see no case for privacy law’
January 17, 2012 by Dissent
PA Mediapoint reports:
Justice secretary
Kenneth Clarke yesterday told MPs he saw no case for introducing a
specific privacy law to curb the activities of the press in the wake
of the phone-hacking affair.
Giving evidence to
the joint parliamentary Committee on Privacy and Injunctions Clarke
said: “I don’t think at the moment we are very clear what a
statute would say.”
Read more on Press
Gazette.
[From the article:
I couldn't draft a law myself that I
thought would be much use and I therefore don't see the case for
one."
Clarke acknowledged there were problems
in enforcing the law as it related to such matters as court
injunctions on the internet - an issue raised by some newspaper
editors.
He suggested that one solution was to
make the "providers" who provided the platforms for the
information legally responsible.
… "The reason that the Prime
Minister and I have hesitated to say that we want to keep
self-regulation is because self-regulation is very often
characterised as something which is very similar to the current
system [Translation: it IS the current system Bob]
and clearly some very significant failings have emerged on that."
Take that, zoomies! (Because we have
to provide more data than analysts can possibly sift through?)
Every
Day, Army’s Panopticon Drone Will Collect 80 Years’ Worth of HD
Video
… By the spring, soldiers will
remotely pilot Boeing’s A160 Hummingbird helo — ... — to see
across vast swaths of Afghanistan, thanks to the ultra-powerful
Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance
Imaging System, or ARGUS. [I should have copyrighted
that phrase... Bob]
Ready, Fire, Aim! If this is
ineffective and overly costly, but we were forced to buy it anyway,
should we unleash the Class Action Lawyers?
"With a stoichiometric
ratio far lower than that of gasoline (much lower than the price
difference), buying the E85
ethanol fuel blend instead of gasoline was already hard to justify.
Unless you raced your car on a track where E85 provided a great
alternative to race fuel, it really didn't make financial
sense. And there are other reasons not to buy E85, too.
Like the impact corn-based ethanol is having on food prices or the
questionable
emissions results (PDF). So, now that the ethanol subsidies
provided by the U.S. federal government are scheduled
to end this summer, it's going to be even harder to justify E85
(at least in the U.S.). This change will basically make a gallon of
E85 cost
the same or slightly more than gasoline. With so many things
working against it, are the days numbered for readily available E85
at your local gas station? And should it have ever even been made
available to begin with? How much did all that government-backed R&D
and tax credits cost us for something that was pretty clearly
questionable to begin with?"
There is good and bad here. Fast, easy
way to raise money but also looks like a real target for hackers
(fast, easy way to steal money)
January 15, 2012
Pew
- Real Time Charitable Giving
Real
Time Charitable Giving - Why mobile phone users texted millions
of dollars in aid to Haiti earthquake relief and how they got their
friends to do the same - Aaron Smith, Pew Internet Project, Senior
Research Specialist
- "Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone. And these text donors are emerging as a new cohort of charitable givers. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors—which analyzed the “Text to Haiti” campaign after the 2010 earthquake—finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks. Three quarters of these donors (73%) contributed using their phones on the same day they heard about the campaign, and a similar number (76%) say that they typically make text message donations without conducting much in-depth research beforehand. Yet while their initial contribution often involved little deliberation, 43% of these donors encouraged their friends or family members to give to the campaign as well. In addition, a majority of those surveyed (56%) have continued to give to more recent disaster relief efforts—such as the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan—using their mobile phones. These are among the findings of a new study produced by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the mGive Foundation."
Perhaps this will help me understand
the ethics of CyberWar...
"The Stanford Law Review Online
has just published an Essay by Yale's Stephen L. Carter entitled 'The
Iraq War, the Next War, and the Future of the Fat Man.' He
provides a retrospective on the War in Iraq and discusses the ethical
and legal implications of the War on Terror and 'anticipatory
self-defense' in the form of drones and targeted killings going
forward. He writes: 'Iraq was war under the beta version of the Bush
Doctrine. The newer model is represented by the slaying of Anwar
al-Awlaki, an American citizen deemed a terror threat. The Obama
Administration has ratcheted the use of remote drone attacks to
unprecedented levels — the Bush Doctrine honed to rapier sharpness.
The interesting question about the new model
is one of ethics more than legality. Let us assume
the principal ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare —
to wit, that the reduction in civilian casualties and destruction of
property means that the drone attack comports better than most other
methods with the principle of discrimination. If
this is so, then we might conclude that a just cause alone is
sufficient to justify the attacks. ... But is what
we are doing truly self-defense?'"
If I collected and published all the
TSA stories circulating, I'd never be allowed to fly again.
Fortunately, I always fly under an assumed name, using the
credentials of a certain Law School Professor that I know.
Cleared
for Takeoff: Rhode Island Bakery Creates TSA ‘Compliant Cupcake’
An ingenious
business plan has developed out of the turbulent saga the TSA has
christened Cupcakegate.
It all began last month when security agents confiscated a “cupcake
in a jar” at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, citing
its gel-like icing as a potential national security threat.
The incident
inspired Kelly Colgan, owner of Silver
Spoon Bakery in Providence, R.I., to create a travel-friendly
treat: the TSA Compliant Cupcake. The $4 confection is topped with
exactly 3 ounces of frosting and sold in a TSA-mandated clear,
quart-size plastic blag. The decorative photo of Richard Nixon with
the parodied words “I am not a gel” comes optional.
Heads up! I've
been suggesting that textbooks were going interactive – looks like
a few people actually listened! (I'll take full credit if this takes
off...)
Apple
To Announce Tools, Platform To ‘Digitally Destroy’ Textbook
Publishing
Apple is slated to announce the fruits
of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its
special
media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation
has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter
have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create
interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to
speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone
and iPad users.
… Apple is expected to announce
support for the ePub 3 standard for iBooks going forward.
… The current state of software
tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with
several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor
would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a
song in GarageBand.
Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.
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