Massive Denial Of Service Attack Severs Myanmar From Internet

The nation of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, found its access to the Internet severed by a massive denial of service attack, according to a report by Arbor Networks.

The source or motivation of the attack isn’t known, but it is believed that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have targeted the country’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (or PTT), the main conduit for Internet traffic in and out of the authoritarian nation — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Anonymous DDoS Takes Down The United States Copyright Office

As part of its ongoing punishment of any institute or company that defends copyright, Anonymous has now taken down the website of The United States Copyright Office. The group managed to take copyright.gov offline for half an hour. After that the website started to respond again slowly, with occasional outages — via redwolf.newsvine.com

File-Sharers To Receive Warning Letters, But No 3 Strikes

In an effort to reduce illicit file-sharing, draft legislation was passed in Finland last week which will require Internet service providers to send letters to customers suspected of unauthorized sharing. The warnings will be initiated by copyright owners, but at no stage will Internet subscribers’ identities be compromised. A three strikes-style regime is not on the agenda — via redwolf.newsvine.com

UK Government Wants to Make ISPs Responsible for Third Party Content Online

The UK governments Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, has ominously proposed that broadband ISPs could introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Vecebot botnet strikes Vietnamese anti-communist blogs

A botnet has been systematically attacking Web sites that post blogs or forums containing content critical of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The botnet, thought to include about 15,000 bots, is launching massive denial-of-service (DOS) attacks to make the content unavailable, according to security firm SecureWorks — via redwolf.newsvine.com

MI6 chief Sawers: we have nothing to do with torture and rights abuses

MI6 has declined to pass on information about individuals to foreign countries if it could lead to torture even though terrorist activity could be the end result, the head of the agency said.

Sir John Sawers, responding to persistent allegations of collusion in torture by the security and intelligence agencies, described the potential to save lives but said the risk of human rights abuse threw up real, constant, operational dilemmas — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Visitors to declare illegal porn to customs officers

Visitors have been ordered to reveal illegal pornography to customs officers in a move which has been criticised as totally confusing and an invasion of privacy.

Justice Minister Brendan O’Connor said that illegal material must be declared on arrival, watering down recent rules that asked for all pornography to be revealed.

But he said anyone who is not sure whether they have illegal pornography should reveal it just in case. The revamped rule is outlined on arrival cards which are filled in by travellers coming to Australia — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Government sponsors encryption on the cheap

The Federal Government has tipped $1.2 million into locally-developed quantum cryptography technology, which will be available to buy in a year.

The second-generation technology, called the Quantum Link Encryptor (QLE), promises to dramatically lower the cost of unbreakable quantum cryptography systems by using off-the-shelf telecommunications equipment, which is possible thanks to the use of a finely-tuned laser that transmits data — via redwolf.newsvine.com