Non-stories I'd like to see more of...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071013081324106

MSU computers hacked

Saturday, October 13 2007 @ 08:13 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Montana State University security experts have determined that an unknown hacker remotely accessed a computer server that housed records containing credit card numbers and social security numbers of students who enrolled online for MSU Extended University courses during the last two years.

The data in question were encrypted, [See! Not everyone is ignorant. Bob and there is no evidence that personal information was stolen. However, the Extended University is sending information by mail to 1,400 people known to have personal information on the server. The letter includes information on how to receive a free credit report, flag a credit file with a fraud alert and monitor accounts for suspicious activity.

Source - The Billings Outpost

“During school hours, your children belong to us!” Strange this would happen in the most liberal part of the state?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071013122459470

ACLU decries school cellphone searches

Saturday, October 13 2007 @ 12:24 PM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Minors & Students

The ACLU of Colorado sent a complaint Wednesday to the Boulder Valley School District accusing administrators of "committing felonies" and violating students' rights to privacy when they searched students' cellphone text messages last year.

The letter, signed by American Civil Liberties Union legal director Mark Silverstein, cites an incident last year at Monarch High School in which a student was sent to an administrator's office for allegedly smoking cigarettes.

"After a search of the student's pockets and backpack turned up nothing, the administrator searched the student's cellphone," according to the letter.

Source - Denver Post

Related - ACLU Press Release and ACLU Letter to Boulder Valley School District Board of Education [pdf]

China does not have a hacker monopoly... Russia just uses a more capitalistic model.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/14/0115251&from=rss

Profile of the Russian Business Network

Posted by kdawson on Saturday October 13, @10:09PM from the where-the-bad-guys-are dept.

The Washington Post has an article detailing what is known of the workings of the Russian Business Network, a shadowy entity based in St. Petersburg that hosts a good fraction of the world's spammers, identity thieves, bot herders, and phishers. RBN is not incorporated anywhere and may not technically even be violating Russian law. It provides "bulletproof hosting" for about $600 a month to a wide range of bad guys. The author of the Post story, Brian Krebs, supplements it with two blog posts. One provides more detail and back story including a look at one ISP's security admin who decided last summer to ban all RBN traffic from his network, with outstanding results. The other post maps some of the RBN's upstream suppliers and details the extent of the RBN's involvement in recent cyber-attacks: "Nearly every major advancement in computer viruses or worms over the past two years has emanated from or sent stolen consumer data back to servers" in the RBN. [Now that's an insult to American hackers! Bob]

We should have this figured out – right after the next election.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/13/1653203&from=rss

Florida Literally Scraps Touch-Screen Voting

Posted by kdawson on Saturday October 13, @01:15PM from the do-not-want dept. Security United States Politics

Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts." [It will be interesting to see who buys machines even Florida admits don't work... Bob]

I'm actually surprised this wasn't done earlier...

http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/clipstar--Win-A-Million-Dollars/

ClipStar.com - Win A Million Dollars

Want to make a million dollars? Who doesn’t? Well if you submit your short video to ClipStar.com you have a chance at winning a grand price of one million dollars. How does the contest work? Well you need to create a short film, maximum of 10 minutes and 100MB is the maximum size. You must be 16 years old to participate. When you upload you video to ClipStar.com you must choose a category for it to be filed in, either; Singers, Band or Group, Comedy, Acting, Director or Film, Animation, Dance, Music or Any Other. The contest has 4 quarterly competitions, every three months. One person will win each quarterly competition and will win $10,000 and proceed to the final competition where they will face off with the other winners of the other quarterly competitions. The voting history of each film is wiped out for the final competition and the best film will win the grand prize of one million dollars. Besides the contest ClipStar.com is a great community to share videos on. Create a user name and upload your videos and send them to friends. Vote for other users videos and browse through all of the unique video clips. Join or create groups and participate in the fun.

http://www.clipstar.com/index.jsf

Not sure this is for real, but the comments are amusing...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/13/2121250&from=rss

Bill Gates Denied Visa To Nigeria

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 14, @12:02AM from the let-the-419-jokes-begin dept.

Xight notes a Gizmodo story that is a few days old but hasn't gotten a lot of play. It seems that Nigeria recently denied Bill Gates a visa to travel there on his recent trip to Africa. The initial denial was "on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration." The comments to the post are worth reading too.