Centennial Man

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

This could be a real embarrassment to Fox – is that why they are playing the blame game?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20076650-264/fox-news-reports-twitter-hack-to-secret-service/

Fox News reports Twitter hack to Secret Service

Fox News has alerted the U.S. Secret Service that the cable news show's Twitter feed was used today to publish false reports that President Obama had been killed.

… The tweets were still live on the Twitter Web site more than nine hours after being posted. The attack was on a verified Twitter account, one that Twitter has verified to belong to a specific person or organization.

Fox News said it alerted the Secret Service, the organization responsible for the president's physical safety. Fox News also is holding Twitter's feet to the fire.

"We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts," Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, said in the story.

It's possible, though, that Twitter wasn't responsible. For example, an attacker could have acquired a password by breaching Fox News itself, then simply logged on.

Twitter declined to comment beyond sharing its generic advice for keeping Twitter accounts secure.

A further statement from Twitter, though, indicated that the blame lay at Fox's own feet.

While Twitter does monitor accounts for brute-force login attempts and similar methods of attack, we're unable to anticipate compromises that take place due to offsite behavior.

Yesterday I posted an article claiming that China wanted to “invest” in Facebook. Today Microsoft will join with Baidu (to learn how to censor?) We are moving to a true global economy...

Microsoft Partners With Baidu, China's Top Search Engine

countertrolling writes with news that Microsoft has struck an agreement with Baidu.com, the most popular search engine in mainland China, to provide results for English-language queries. From the NY Times:

"Baidu, which dominates Chinese-language search services here with about 83 percent of the market, has been trying for years to improve its English-language search services because English searches on its site are as many as 10 million a day, the company said. Now it has a powerful partner. 'More and more people here are searching for English terms,' Kaiser Kuo, the company’s spokesman, said Monday. 'But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it.' Baidu and Microsoft did not disclose terms of the agreement. But the new English-language search results will undoubtedly be censored, since Beijing maintains strict controls over Internet companies and requires those operating on the mainland to censor results the government deems dangerous or troublesome, including references to human rights issues and dissidents."

Cisco Poised to Help China Keep an Eye on Its Citizens

Western companies including Cisco Systems Inc. are poised to help build an ambitious new surveillance project in China—a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras [The UK's surveillance lead is in jeopardy! Bob] that officials say will prevent crime but that human-rights advocates warn could target political dissent.

(Related) The downside of a global economy? (Right now there is a lot of content aimed at Libya)

US, UK Targeting Piracy Websites Outside Their Borders

"The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is going after piracy websites even if they aren't hosted in the U.S., by targeting those with .net and .com domain names, which are managed by U.S. company Verisign. Meanwhile, a lawyer suggests even that [kind of connection] isn't needed to take a site to court in the UK, saying as long as the content is directed at UK users, that's connection enough to ensure jurisdiction."

Toward more perfect surveillance...

Kinect-Based AI System Watches What You're Up To

"Researchers from Cornell have used AI to create a system based on the Kinect that can recognize what you are doing — cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard etc. In a smart home it could be used to offer help: 'Would you like some help with that recipe, Dave?' Or it could monitor patients or workers to make sure they are doing what they are told. The study also reveals that there is probably enough information in how activities are performed to recognize an individual — so providing yet more biometrics. There are clearly a lot more things that we can teach the Kinect to do with machine learning than just gesture recognition."

“Double Secret Probation” We know where the Senator went to school...

Law Professors vs the PROTECT IP Act

"Along with 90 (and still counting) other Internet law and IP law professors, David Post of the Volokh Conspiracy law blog has drafted and signed a letter in opposition to Senator Leahy's 'PROTECT IP Act.' Quoting: 'The Act would allow the government to break the Internet addressing system. It requires Internet service providers, and operators of Internet name servers, to refuse to recognize Internet domains that a court considers "dedicated to infringing activities." But rather than wait until a Web site is actually judged infringing before imposing the equivalent of an Internet death penalty, the Act would allow courts to order any Internet service provider to stop recognizing the site even on a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction issued the same day the complaint is filed. Courts could issue such an order even if the owner of that domain name was never given notice that a case against it had been filed at all.'"

(Related) Complying with “the letter of the law”

In Australia, Censorship vs. DNS, and Porn As Network Driver

"Remember how Australia's planning to censor its Internet? Well, it looks as though the country's second-largest ISP, Optus, has made a stumble right out of the gate. Optus today confirmed you could circumvent its filtering technology simply by setting your PC to use a different DNS server than the default. Yup, it's really that easy. Oops."

And why would anyone want to change their DNS settings? angry tapir writes

"While the Australian Government has extolled the virtues of its currently under construction National Broadband Network (NBN) in delivering e-health and government agency services to every Australian, adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption."

This is the Cloud as Storage Space... Why would Cloud providers be liable for what you choose to store? (It's where I'll store the Virus and Trojan samples used in my Computer Security classes)

Are Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player Legal?

"Earlier this year both Google and Amazon introduced cloud music storage where users could upload their music and listen to it wherever they had an internet connection. The music industry, however, was up in arms because they believed that Google and Amazon had to pay additional licensing fees for their music storage services. Tim B. Lee at Ars has written an excellent summary of the legal issues surrounding these services. His ultimate conclusion is that Google and Amazon would probably withstand any legal assaults, but it still remains a tough call."

Toward e-Currency? What will the digital 40% (268B) be buying? Games? e-Books?

Mobile Payments To Triple To $670B By 2015; Digital Goods Will Represent 40% Of Transactions

Juniper Research is releasing a new study today that reports that the transaction value of mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and NFC (Near Field Communications) transactions will reach $670 billion by 2015, up from $240 billion this year.

How anti-social is this! Apparently lots of people want to move to (or at least try) Google+ Unfortunately, Facebook owns all your data.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20076774-264/facebook-blocks-contact-exporting-tool/

Facebook blocks contact-exporting tool

Facebook has been blocking a tool intended to let people extract contact information their friends have shared with them, the tool's developer said today--but he's working on a way to evade Facebook's restrictions.

… The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+, Google's brand-new social network site.

(Related) It's also a bit disingenuous...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20076740-71/mark-zuckerberg-more-google-followers-than-anyone/

Mark Zuckerberg: More Google+ followers than anyone

For my Ethical Hackers: Several are named.

Ask Slashdot: Which Registrars Support DNSSEC?

"With GoDaddy being purchased by private equity firms (i.e. it will be sucked dry with service reduction and price increases until it dies) what other Registrars support DNSSEC? GoDaddy is the only registrar I could find that supports DNSSEC for registrees running their own DNS. It was fairly easy to add the Key Signing Keys' DS records to the parent zone using its DNS config. I did find a couple other registrars that were 'testing' DNSSEC or that would support DNSSEC if they ran your DNS. But I couldn't find any other registrars where you could just register, run your own DNS, and use DNSSEC (i.e. with your DS record in your parent zone). That being said, I was only able to research a small percentage of the registrars out there. Does anyone know of registrars, other than GoDaddy, that allow for DNSSEC? That is, registrars that have a method to pass the DS records to the parent zones for their registeree's domains?"

Another multimedia search aggregator.

Zomobo.com - Find Information From Multiple Sources

Self-defined as a real time encyclopedia, Zomobo enables anybody to search for information on sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter at the very same time.

… Zomobo is a free service, and there is no need for you to create an account in order to use it - searches can be executed the minute you have landed on the site, without needing to disclose any kind of information.

http://zomobo.com/

Humor, but I bet we could come up with much better

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/04/opinion/20110704_OPART.htm

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