Big, confusing and makes you wonder what goes on (or is turned off) in the mind of an e-Commerce entrepreneur...
http://www.databreaches.net/?p=16595
28 million Plenty of Fish users’ personal details hacked – report
January 31, 2011 by admin
The founder and CEO of dating site Plenty of Fish reports that the site has been hacked and users’ names, email addresses, and passwords may have been acquired. Whether PayPal account information and other personal details were also acquired is uncertain and depends on whose version of the hack you read. It’s also uncertain whether other large dating sites have also been hacked. The whole thing that seems certain right now is that this is already turning out to be a somewhat bizarre story.
In a blog post that is quite different than the usual breach disclosure, Markus Frind writes on his personal blog about the incident and the extortion attempt that allegedly accompanied it. He even names names. The blog post reads something like a thriller, although I cannot imagine anyone suspecting Brian Krebs of anything other than simply being a reporter who’s attempting to verify a story that came to him.
One of those Frind names, Chris Russo, provides a different version of what happened and his role. In a statement posted on Grumo Media, Russo writes:
Hi, I’m a security researcher from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Last Friday 21 of Januray, we discovered a vulnerability in www.plentyoffish.com exposing users details, including usernames, addresses, phone numbers, real names, email addresses, passwords in plain text, and in most of cases, paypal accounts, of more than 28,000,000 (twenty eight million users). This vulnerability was under active explotation by hackers.
So far, it seems reasonable, but the statement gets downright weird when Russo talks about how POF was going to hire him:
While we were creating the legal documents in order to proceed, Markus Frind got progressively more aggressive and unresposive with us, and told us to speak with their employees, Kate and Jay, because there was a serial killer, murdering people from the website.
The story also involves a mysterious request for POF user data, posted yesterday on Freelancer.com by “akshay3471,” whose profile lists him as being in Moradabad, India.
I’ll let you all follow the links and read for yourselves. I expect we’ll see a lot more coverage on this one. In the meantime, best to err on the side of caution and assume that the site was compromised and that any information you provided may have been acquired.
“Let's declare victory and go home...”
Connecticut AG Opts For Street View Settlement, Without Seeing the Data
"Verifying Google's data snare is crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat,' said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal last December in response to Google's 'accidental' collection of payload data from WiFi networks. 'We will fight to compel Google to come clean-granting my office access to improperly collected materials and protecting confidentiality, as the company has done in Canada and elsewhere.' That was then. Luckily for Google, there's a new AG in town, and Blumenthal successor George Jepsen said Friday that his office will enter into settlement negotiations with the company without reviewing the pilfered data, which Google has steadfastly refused to share with it. 'This is a good result for the people of Connecticut,' Jepsen said in a statement. A separate Jepsen press release suggested some of the blame for the privacy offenses laid with Google's victims, who were advised to 'turn off your wireless network when you know you won't use it' to thwart those who 'may be watching your Internet activity without your knowledge."
[From the press release:
Manufacturers often deliver wireless routers with the encryption feature turned off, Jepsen said. Consumers should consult the instructions for their wireless router or obtain additional information from the manufacturer’s website to enhance the security of their home networks.
OnGuard Online, a consortium of federal government agencies and technology industry experts recommends additional precautionary steps to secure wireless networks. Details are available at http://www.onguardonline.gov/topics/wireless-security.aspx.
The consortium recommends:
Use anti-virus and anti-spyware and a firewall.
Turn off identifier broadcasting.
Change the identifier on your router from the default.
Change your router’s pre-set password for administration.
Turn off your wireless network when you know you won’t use it.
Don’t assume that public “hot spots” are secure.
Be careful about the information you access or send from a public wireless network.
“All that is not forbidden is mandatory. All that is not mandatory is forbidden.”
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=20129
The Ugly Persistence of Internet Celebrity – and Our Failure to Address It
January 31, 2011 by Dissent
In a blog post titled, “The Ugly Persistence of Internet Celebrity,” Danielle Citron writes:
Many desperately try to garner online celebrity. They host You Tube channels devoted to themselves. They share their thoughts in blog postings and on social network sites. They post revealing pictures of themselves on Flickr. To their dismay though, no one pays much attention. But for others, the Internet spotlight finds them and mercilessly refuses to yield ground. For instance, in 2007, a sports blogger obtained a picture of a high-school pole vaulter, Allison Stokke, at a track meet and posted it online. Within days, her picture spread across the Internet, from message boards and sport sites to porn sites and social network profiles. Impostors created fake profiles of Ms. Stokke on social network sites, and Ms. Stokke was inundated with emails from interested suitors and journalists. At the time, Ms. Stokke told the Washington Post that the attention felt “demeaning” because the pictures dominated how others saw her rather than her pole-vaulting accomplishments.
Time’s passage has not helped Stokke shake her online notoriety.
Read more on Concurring Opinions.
Do we need reform that includes another kind of harm so that people can get relief from the courts? Those who dread and abhor the idea of the government regulating the Internet may shrug and say that we just have to accept that these things happen. But if you “walk a mile in their shoes,” it’s easy to see how life-changing in a negative way these types of things can be.
When kids commit suicide over the damage to their lives from the Internet, everyone runs around saying we need more laws and we see proposed laws that may make matters worse in other ways. When are we going to take the issue seriously and get everyone together to figure out what to do? The status quo may be acceptable to some – or even many – but how many lives are getting ruined so that others can enjoy the “freedom of the Internet?”
Isn't this “apathy voting?” “We don't need the best candidate – any of these guys are Okay...”
New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting
"The people at FreeKeene report: 'Four Republican state representatives have sponsored a bill that would replace first-past-the-post voting with approval voting for all state offices and presidential primaries. Under this system, voters would select every candidate they approve of (regardless of party), and the candidate with the highest overall vote total wins. This reduces strategic voting, and would often make elections easier for moderate and libertarian candidates. The bill, HB240, will have a public hearing Tuesday, February 1st, with the House Election Law committee.'"
Is it my patriotic duty to mention this to my students?
The White House Partners With Steve Case, Facebook, Intel, And Others To Jumpstart Entrepreneurship
As part of a White House effort to promote job creation, entrepreneurship and private-sector investment in startups, President Obama is announcing a new initiative today, called Startup America Partnership, to foster growth in the startup world and jumpstart job creation. The Partnership will be chaired by AOL co-founder Steve Case and will be partly funded by the Kauffman Foundation and the Case Foundation.
(Related) ...and remember students, I get 1% of your pre-IPO stock...
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-free-tools-plan-visualise-startup-business/
3 Free Tools to Plan and Visualise Your Start-Up Business
Might be useful for communicating with my foreign students?
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/026384.html
January 30, 2011
Google Transliteration
"Google Transliteration allows you to type phonetically using Roman characters. Simply type a word the way it sounds in English and Google Transliteration will convert it to its local script. We currently support 24 languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu."
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