http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=10765
Aspen law firm, two attorneys take on Google
June 1, 2010 by Dissent
Rick Carroll reports:
An Aspen law firm has filed a class-action complaint on behalf of millions of Google e-mail users, alleging the Internet host violated their privacy.
Filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court of Denver, the lawsuit seeks to attain class-action status on behalf of users of Google’s free e-mail service, Gmail.
Aspen attorneys John Case and Lauren Maytin are the two plaintiffs who represent the users in the class-action suit, which was filed by the Aspen firm Thomas Genshaft PC. Neither Maytin nor Case are members of Thomas Genshaft PC.
The suit accuses California-based Google of violating three federal communications laws — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — after it rolled out its Google Buzz social networking service Feb. 9. The suit also alleges violation of privacy under Colorado common law.
Read more on Vail Daily.
(Related) Apparently, Yahoo wants to emulate Google's success in the “Most sued” category.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/01/AR2010060100577.html
Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base
By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.
Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
...and of course, Facebook goes them all one better.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20006532-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Facebook 'Like' button draws privacy scrutiny
by Declan McCullagh June 2, 2010 4:00 AM PDT
When Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a "Like" button that publishers could place on their Web pages, he predicted it would make the Web smarter and "more social."
What Zuckerberg didn't point out is that widespread use of the Like button allows Facebook to track people as they switch from CNN.com to Yelp.com to ESPN.com, all of which are sites that have said they will implement the feature.
Even if someone is not a Facebook user or is not logged in, Facebook's social plugins collect the address of the Web page being visited and the Internet address of the visitor as soon as the page is loaded--clicking on the Like button is not required. If enough sites participate, that permits Facebook to assemble a vast amount of data about Internet users' browsing habits.
Is it also possible to use Facebook or Twitter to establish an alibi? “Chillin' at home. Not visiting the mistress tonight.”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=10776
Divorce attorneys catching cheaters on Facebook
June 2, 2010 by Dissent
It’s a bit risky to post personal info and photos on social media, as you never know how it might come back to bite you in terms of employment — or divorce. It seems that matrimonial lawyers are really using Facebook as a primary investigative resource to find evidence on cheating spouses and the like. And when Facebook changed its privacy controls and made more info public than users knew or wanted, some divorce lawyers had a field day.
Stephanie Chen reports:
[...]
Facebook — where attorneys find most of the evidence and leads — has gradually relaxed privacy settings over the last year. Attorneys say that enabled some members’ personal details to be leaked without the user realizing it, attorneys say. On May 26th, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem and, in a blog, announced new tools making it easier for users to tighten privacy settings and block outside parties from seeing personal information.
“It’s becoming all but impossible to protect your information unless you spend hours and hours figuring it out,” said Lee Rosen, a divorce attorney in North Carolina, who added he reaped the benefits of the tricky privacy controls in a recent case.
Read more on CNN.
A brief (126 page) summary
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=12002
Educational Security Incidents Year in Review – 2009
June 1, 2010 by admin
After a hiatus, Adam Dodge’s ESI blog is back, and Adam has published his analysis of education sector breaches in 2009. From his summary:
The ESI Year in Review – 2009 examines all of the information security incidents occurring at colleges and universities around the world as reported in the news during 2009.
The information security incidents reported by institutions of higher education throughout 2009 were down significantly in both the number of incidents and the amount of information exposed. This downward trend in higher education incidents follows a broader downward trend in breaches across all industry sectors in 2009 . As such, 2009 saw fewer institutions reporting a smaller number of breaches. During 2009, institutions of higher education showed no Loss-type incidents, a significant change over the past three years. In addition, only one incident reported in the news affected multiple institutions, a substantially smaller number than 2008. In fact, many of the numbers in the Year in Review 2009 are close to those reported in 2006. However, the large number of institutions involved in this one multi-institution incident once against caused the number of institutions suffering from a breach to be greater than then number of breaches reported.
You can read the entire report here (pdf, 1.09 MB).
Are they suggesting that this is a manual procedure?
Time Warner Cable "a good ISP for copyright infringers"
By Nate Anderson | Last updated a day ago
If you're wearing an eyepatch as you read this, pay attention: Time Warner Cable is the ISP for you. According to lawyers currently suing thousands of P2P users in federal court, TWC "is a good ISP for copyright infringers."
The outrageous behavior that provoked this claim? TWC's unwillingness to process in a timely manner hundreds or thousands of subscriber subpoenas sent from the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver.
… "Copyright cases involving third-party discovery of Internet service providers have typically related to a plaintiff's efforts to identify anonymous defendants whose numbers rank in the single or low double digits," the cable company told a federal judge earlier this month. "By contrast, plaintiff in this case alone seeks identifying information about 2,049 anonymous defendants, and seeks identifying information about 809 Internet Protocol addresses from TWC."
It continued: "If the Court compels TWC to answer all of these lookup requests given its current staffing, it would take TWC nearly three months of full-time work by TWC's Subpoena Compliance group, and TWC would not be able to respond to any other request, emergency or otherwise, from law enforcement during this period. TWC has a six-month retention period for its IP lookup logs, and by the time TWC could turn to law enforcement requests, many of these requests could not be answered."
Another Korea rant (sorry)
If your campaign platform is the same as North Korea’s, are you a fool or a tool?
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/BreakingNews/View/35160
South Korea probes war rumours ahead of elections
South Korean police are probing leaflets and Internet messages spreading rumours of imminent war and questioning an investigation into the sinking of a naval vessel which they say could affect Wednesday's local elections.
The ship sinking has become the top campaign issue, with the liberal opposition accusing President Lee Myung-bak of provoking tension after a decade of warming ties with reclusive and impoverished North Korea.
But polls showed Lee's uncompromising stand against the North has helped keep support ratings for him near the 50 percent mark in recent weeks.
… The crackdown on Internet rumor mongering is likely to resurrect a frequent opposition complaint that the government is trampling on democracy and free speech.
… An officer at Seoul police HQ said investigators were looking for the source of leaflets that said the results of the probe on the navy ship sinking had been fabricated.
Some leaflets say the government has been taking pictures of its troops as preparations for their funerals in anticipation of war with North Korea, he said.
(Related) Cyber-harassment? Cyber-propaganda? “…the continuation of politics by other means?”
http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1274260&lang=eng_news
SKorea accuses NKorea of identity thefts
By SANGWON YOON Associated Press 2010-06-01 09:08 PM
North Korea is stealing ordinary South Korean citizens' identities to open Internet accounts and post messages denying Pyongyang's involvement in the recent sinking of a South Korean warship, Seoul's top spy agency said Tuesday.
.. North Koreans have been registering with South Korean identification numbers to post material claiming the ship sinking as an event staged by Seoul, a National Intelligence Service official said Tuesday. In South Korea, people need to provide their ID numbers when they open a Web account.
The posts called the sinking of the 1,200-ton patrol ship "a staged fabrication" and questioned the veracity of the multinational investigation findings, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unnamed government source.
These cyberattacks are an advanced form of North Korea's psychological warfare against the South, designed to cause social panic, distrust, and instability, according to Yonhap.
Seoul resumed psychological warfare operations last month, which include radio broadcasts into the North and placing loudspeakers at the border to blast out propaganda, as a part of its punitive measures for Pyongyang.
North Korea _ which flatly denies involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan _ responded by threatening to cut ties with South Korea, wage "all-out counterattacks" against psychological warfare operations and bar South Korean ships and airliners from its waters and airspace.
Last year, North Korea was suspected in cyberattacks that paralyzed the sites of South Korean government agencies, banks and Internet sites.
Why would this surprise anyone? Think of it as another share of the market AT&T chooses not to contest.
AT&T Announces New Data Plans, Unlimited Data Nowhere To Be Seen
For my Computer Forensics students. First, you need the database...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/01/enf_met_police/
Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'
Power lines act as police informers
By Chris Williams Posted in Policing, 1st June 2010 11:16 GMT
Police scientists have hailed a new technique that recently played a pivotal role in securing a murder conviction as the most significant development in audio forensics since Watergate.
The capability, called "electrical network frequency analysis" (ENF), is now attracting interest from the FBI and is considered the exciting new frontier in digital forensics, with power lines acting as silent witnesses to crime.
… ENF relies on frequency variations in the electricity supplied by the National Grid. Digital devices such as CCTV recorders, telephone recorders and camcorders that are plugged in to or located near the mains pick up these deviations in the power supply, which are caused by peaks and troughs in demand.
… At the Metropolitan Police's digital forensics lab in Penge, south London, scientists have created a database that has recorded these deviations once every one and a half seconds for the last five years. Over a short period they form a unique signature of the electrical frequency at that time, which research has shown is the same in London as it is in Glasgow.
On receipt of recordings made by the police or public, the scientists are able to detect the variations in mains electricity occuring at the time the recording was made. This signature is extracted and automatically matched against their ENF database, which indicates when it was made.
An example of a ethical hacking tool. (They have a simple way to ensure that you own the website)
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/zerodayscan-com-scan-how-secure-your-site-is
ZeroDayScan.com - Scan How Secure Your Site Is
ZeroDayScan is an online security scanner that can be used by webmasters that want to learn how secure their sites are both directly and cost-effectively. That is, having a site analyzed entails little more than providing the URL in question, and the whole process is free from start to finish.
For my Hackers...
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-install-mac-os-x-on-a-pc-without-using-a-mac/
How to Install Mac OS X on a PC (Without Using a Mac)
In fact, I use some of these. They are quite useful.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/expand_your_browser_universe
32 Incredible Bookmarklets for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer
Just because I'm a Muppet fan.
http://technologizer.com/2010/05/31/ibm-muppets/
The IBM Muppet Show
Before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson made short films for Big Blue. The tech may be archaic, but the entertainment is timeless.
A tool for research papers?
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/scribtex-online-latex-editor
ScribTex: Free LaTex Editor Online
LaTex is a markup language and a document preparation system, widely used by academics and other fields. ScribTex is an online editor that lets you create, edit and share LaTex documents on the web. You can not only share documents with your friends but also give them persmission to edit the documents while keeping track of each revision.
If you don’t like a change you or somebody else has made, just undo it. ScribTex also lets you add images and other media to your LaTex documents. Once you are done, simply compile your document as a PDF file and share it anyway you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment