A mystery electronic spy network apparently based in China has infiltrated hundreds of computers around the world and stolen files and documents, Canadian researchers have revealed. The network, dubbed GhostNet, appears to target embassies, media groups, NGOs, international organisations, government foreign ministries and the offices of the Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan exile movement. The researchers, based at Toronto University’s Munk Centre for International Studies, said their discovery had profound implications
The UK’s libel laws mean more and more web sites globally will be forced to respond to threats of litigation with the strategy of take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again
Presenters at the CanSecWest security conference detailed on Thursday how they can sniff data by analysing keystroke vibrations using a laser trained on a shiny laptop or through electrical signals coming from a PC connected to a PS/2 keyboard and plugged into a socket. Using equipment costing about $80, researchers from Inverse Path were able to point a laser on the reflective surface of a laptop between 50 feet and 100 feet away and determine what letters were typed
The American Civil Liberties Union is helping three teenage girls fight back against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who has threatened to charge the girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves. In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, ACLU lawyers accuse District Attorney George P Skumanick, Jr of violating the civil rights of the girls. The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute the minors is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head
iiNet is steadfastly refusing to admit that any of its users engaged in illegal downloading, despite forensic evidence presented by movie studios that apparently shows the date and time of thousands of individual copyright infringements. In the Federal Court today, where iiNet is being sued in a landmark case by seven major movie studios and the Seven Network for allegedly permitting customers to download movies illegally, iiNet’s lawyers said they would clarify their position on the issue by next Wednesday
There was the Minister for Communications on the ABC’s Q & A answering questions about the blocking of internet filters and an ACMA blacklist
which has been leaked and published. Conroy explained reports of a Queensland dentist’s web site had been inadvertently put on the list because it had been hacked by a Russian mob
. At the very same time, hackers had attacked the government’s Classification Board web site. The site remained hacked for several hours before it went offline
Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol
A big explosion, in the name of science, scared a lot of people in a small town. Mythbusters went to Yolo County and ended up with a bigger bang than expected.
It was a boom that was just — I had never heard anything like that before, it was really weird,
said Sherril Stephens. The explosion was so big it shook the town of Esparto, knocking Stephens off her couch and breaking her front window
Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway
, according Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s massive data centre operations. Google updates its software and systems on an ongoing basis, usually without incident. But not always. On 24 February a bug in the software that manages the location of Google’s data triggered an outage in Gmail, the widely-used webmail component of Google Apps
An Ontario court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The required information includes email and IP addresses. The case arises from a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman, the anti-hate fighter, against the site and the posters. The court focused heavily on the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, which contain a strong duty of disclosure on litigants
Police have raided a Wikileaks associate’s homes in Dresden and Jena after the web site published a list of banned web sites. Theodor Reppe owns the German domain registration for wikileaks.de, one of the many URLs used by the whistleblowing web site
Privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom want to close down Google Street View, only days after the service was launched in the country. Google has already received hundreds of requests to take down photos of various areas in the UK and could even face legal actions
YouTube confirmed its web site was being blocked in China, although the California firm offered no explanation for why Chinese authorities were barring access to the popular video-sharing service
Many moons ago, it seemed that the geek world stopped with every new Linux kernel release. Those days have long since passed and the most striking feature of the 2.6.29 release is the replacement of Tux the penguin with Tuz the Tasmanian devil. Born as the mascot for the 2009 instalment of linux.conf.au, Tuz was destined to go worldwide when Linux creator Linus Torvalds agreed that the 2.6.29 release should use the little guy as a replacement for the standard Tux image that appears during the start-up of Linux, in order to raise awareness about the plight facing the devil species
Application fees will be scrapped, cabinet documents will be made available sooner and a pro-disclosure culture encouraged under a Rudd Government overhaul of Freedom of Information laws announced today. Under the changes, announced by Cabinet Secretary and Special Minister of State John Faulkner in Sydney, all application fees will be abolished, and all charges for a person seeking access to their own information will be removed. The first hour of decision-making time will be free for all FOI requests, and there will be a five-hour charge-free decision-making period for requests made by not-for-profit organisations and journalists. Cabinet documents, which are currently kept secret for 30 years, will be available after 20 years, and the period for which cabinet notebooks are kept under wraps will be shortened from 50 to 30 years
TelstraClear, Telstra’s New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers — a teenager known as Akill
. Nineteen-year-old Owen Thor Walker became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cyber crime investigation spanning the United States, Europe and New Zealand and dubbed Bot Roast
. New Zealand police finally caught him last year and he admitted to being the ring-leader, code-named Akill, of a group known as the A-Team
iiNet has pulled out of the federal Government’s internet filtering trials. iiNet only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the filter was flawed and a waste of taxpayers’ money, iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. Mr Malone cited drawn-out negotiations with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), constant changes in policy, and last week’s leak of a secret internet blacklist as reasons for pulling out
An international team of researchers has successfully treated dogs with the canine form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rapidly progressing and ultimately fatal muscle disease that afflicts one out of every 3,600 boys. The researchers used a novel technique called exon skipping to restore partial function to the gene involved in Duchenne. The study, published in Annals of Neurology, gives hope that a similar approach could work in humans
Following a mountain of bad publicity and strong objections from just about everyone except the entertainment industries, New Zealand’s proposed guilty upon accusation
Section 92A anti-piracy law has been scrapped
Internet auction site eBay has defended the way in which it handles reports of counterfeit goods, saying that it has delisted millions of items and suspended tens of thousands of seller accounts last year. However, its actions may not be enough to stop a lawsuit brought by a luxury goods retailer, which maintains that eBay needs to do more to stop online auctions of counterfeit products. eBay spokesperson Nicola Sharpe notes that 100 percent of reported listings are removed, with 70 to 80 percent removed within 12 hours. Site policy has zero tolerance for sellers who list counterfeit items, and will also suspend any seller who lists a counterfeit item more than one time. Background information is also used to prevent sellers from creating a new profile and re-listing items. Sharpe reports that 2.1 million listings were removed in 2008 based on VeRO reports, and 30,000 sellers suspended
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