Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming rates. The CIA, FBI, Justice Department, Defence Department, and other government agencies are at this very moment turning to a group of companies to provide them information that these companies can gather without the restrictions that bind government intelligence agencies. The information is gathered from sources that few would believe the government could gain unfettered access to, but which, under current Fourth Amendment doctrine and statutory protections, are completely accessible
Australians are paying the highest prices in the world for text messages, which cost the mobile networks practically nothing but earn them millions in profit each year. Australians are expected to send 20 billion texts this year, more than 20 per cent higher than last year. While the cost of mobile phone calls has declined in the past five years, the standard flat rate for a text message at Telstra and Optus has remained unchanged at 25 cents. At Vodafone, a text is 28 cents. According to research done for Fairfax newspapers, that is more than 10 times what it costs in many parts of Asia and almost a third higher than in Europe and Canada
Last year, Radiohead expressed their growing discomfort with record labels that abuse copyrights for their own benefit, while harassing their fans. In a recent interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said that he doesn’t believe piracy is killing the music industry, but that the industry will kill itself if it doesn’t adapt to the digital age
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will share about $US5.5bn ($6.1bn) in cash under plans revealed at the weekend to lighten their stake in the internet search giant. Under a five-year stock trading plan, Mr Page and Mr Brin, who met at Stanford University in the US in 1995 before starting Google, each intend to sell about 5 million shares. The plan would cut their combined holding from about 18 per cent to 15 per cent and reduce their voting stake from 59 per cent to about 48 per cent
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its new spam report which looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26/27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyses how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports
The BBC has been granted provisional approval for the BBC to introduce copy protection for content on the Freeview HD platform. With Freeview HD closing in on a commercial launch, focus has continued on what level of copy protection should be put in. The BBC believes that having no copy protection provides a barrier for getting content on to a platform, and believes that content makers will not be prepared to go the extra mile for Freeview HD unless they feel their intellectual property is protected
New malware is exploiting the Internet Explorer security hole used in attacks against Google and other companies. The new Trojan.Malscript!html targets web pages and APIs and suppresses warnings about malware downloads. Versions of IE6 not patched with Microsoft’s emergency update are at risk. The furor is pushing attacks into the spotlight
A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered material falsification
under federal law. The defendants in US vs Kilbride (9th Cir, 2009) were convicted under the CAN-SPAM Act in a case that involved criminal charges of intentional email spamming. Enacted by the US Congress in 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act prohibits false or misleading transmission information, deceptive headers, and requires email solicitations to give an easy opt-out method and be labeled as an advertisement, including the senders physical post address. Commercial emails that use false or misleading headers, or violate other CAN-SPAM provisions, such as falsified registration information, are subject to fines of up to $11,000 for each unsolicited email sent
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser, and adds further performance improvements to the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here — via Slashdot
The FBI was so cavalier — and telecom companies so eager to help — that a verbal request or even one written on a Post-it note was enough for operators to hand over customer phone records, according to a damning report released on Wednesday by the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. The 289-page report details findings of the DOJ’s investigation into the FBI’s policies for requesting phone records from 2003 through 2006. It found that in many cases the FBI issued written requests for telephone information, saying that it had secured the proper legal authority to make such requests, even though it didn’t. Also, the report found that the FBI used far more casual methods to obtain records, including verbal requests and requests written on Post-it notes. When the FBI did use formal written requests, it did not track their use or keep copies of them, the report found
Microsoft said it will issue a patch to fix the old version of its Internet Explorer browser that allowed recent attacks on Google’s network in China. The patch, due out tomorrow, addresses the vulnerability related to recent attacks against Google and a small subset of corporations,
said Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager at Microsoft. Once applied, customers are protected against the known attacks that have been widely publicised
Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering. Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge
This seems like a harmless tube. In fact, it was harmless: Israeli farmers used the first version to scare birds from crop fields. Then, somebody converted it into a crowd dispersion mechanism. And then, they discovered it could kill. The Thunder Generator uses mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in return generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 metres away. At that range, the weapon is absolutely harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten metres, the Thunder Generator could either cause permanent damage or kill any person
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy
comes a sudden realisation of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were loaned
last year by a cabal of organisations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself. From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book lending
takes place in libraries
. On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a card
. But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material
CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in US exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the terrorist threat posed by radicalised Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated
. Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes. If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims. It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. Muslims and their leftist dhimmi allies
respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that nearly all terrorists are Muslims
. But perception is not reality. The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion. On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on US soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005
The Gmail accounts of foreign reporters in at least two news bureaus in Beijing have been hijacked, a journalists’ group in China said Monday. The news comes just one week after Google said it had been targeted by recent cyberattacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The US search giant cited the attacks as one reason it has decided to stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may ultimately close its China offices, a threat China has dismissed. The hijacked Gmail accounts used by the journalists in Beijing had been set to forward all e-mails to a stranger’s address, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China said in an e-mail to members. The group did not name the news organizations hit by the attack or say when the hijacking occurred
Last week, CYBERsitter sued the People’s Republic of China, the two Chinese software makers, and seven computer manufacturers for distributing Web filtering software known as Green Dam with allegedly stolen code. This week, the law firm representing the company said that it had been targeted in a cyber attack from China. In a phone interview, Elliot B Gipson of Gipson Hoffman & Pancione described what amounts to a spear-phishing attack — the same technique used against Google in China. They were e-mails targeted at individuals in our law firm that were made to appears as if they were coming from other individuals at our law firm,
he said. They attempted to get the target to click on a link or attachment
The ongoing patent battle between Apple and Nokia escalated Friday, when Apple moved to block imports of Nokia mobile phones to the US. Apple made its request in a complaint filed with the International Trade Commission, an independent federal agency that examines issues including unfair trade practices involving patent, trademark, and copyright infringement
When Ross Clark read in New Scientist that the US military considered the Nintendo Wiimote controller accurate enough to control bomb disposal robots, it set him thinking. Could the Wii’s skiing and snowboarding attachment, the balance board, help rehabilitate people who have had a stroke? I wanted to know if it would be any good for assessing the standing balance of patients,
says Clark. He reasoned that being able to measure the centre of pressure of a person’s foot will be useful to a physio who is helping someone relearn how to stand. Yet the lab-grade force platforms
needed to do that cost more than £11,000 — putting them out of the reach of many physio clinics. So Clark and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Australia, took apart a Wii balance board and hacked into its strain gauges and accelerometers to tap into their raw data. We found the data to be excellent. I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up
In a statement issued today, the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (known as BSI) recommends that all Internet Explorer users switch to an alternative browser. They may resume using Explorer after a fix is issued by Microsoft for a critical vulnerability that has been implicated in the Chinese cyberattack against Google
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