Nick Clegg: Snooper’s Charter isn’t going to happen

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26 April 2013
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Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has strongly rejected Home Office plans to massively ramp up surveillance of Brits’ internet activity in a very public rebuttal of Theresa May’s proposals this morning.

The ‘Snooper’s Charter’ isn’t going to happen — the idea that there would be a record kept of all your online activity, Clegg told listeners on his weekly LBC radio show. It won’t happen while Lib Dems are in government. Of course we need to support the police, they have significant powers already which I support them in using.

He added:

This idea of a ‘Snooper’s Charter’ — I think it isn’t workable or proportionate, before repeating it isn’t going to happen — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Finnish Websites Go Dark to Support a Fair Copyright Law

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24 April 2013
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Since last year the Finnish public had the option to suggest what laws they want to live under.

A recent modification of the national Constitution allows for citizens to make legislative proposals for the Parliament to vote on, providing it gets 50,000 supporters within 6 months.

One of the proposals that has submitted since calls for a fairer copyright law.

Termed To Make Sense of the Copyright Act, the proposal wants to reduce penalties for copyright infringement, increase fair use, and ease the ability for people to make copies of items they already own (for format shifting, or backups) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Web’s Most Popular JavaScript Library Drops Support for Older Versions of IE

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23 April 2013
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The popular jQuery JavaScript library has hit a major milestone with the release of jQuery 2.0. The 2.0 release is some 12 percent smaller than its predecessor, but the big news is that jQuery 2.0 drops support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.

Created to simplify the process of writing JavaScript and manipulating HTML, jQuery began life a mere seven years ago, but quickly found favor with developers sick of dealing with cross-browser JavaScript hassles. According to one survey published last year, jQuery turns up on roughly half of all sites on the web.

Will dropping support for older versions of IE change that? Probably not. If your site needs to maintain support for IE 8 and below (or even IE 9 and 10 running in compatibility mode) you’ll just need to stick with jQuery 1.9 or below — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Excite Mobile found guilty of outrageous customer deception

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23 April 2013
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South Australian mobile phone provider Excite Mobile has been found guilty of false, misleading and unconscionable conduct by the Federal Court after the ACCC took action against the company for faking a debt collection agency, creating a fictional complaints body, and misrepresenting scope of mobile coverage.

The Federal Court ruled Excite acted unconscionably in getting customers onto a 24 month phone contract, and used “undue coercion” when sending fake debt collection letters to 1074 customers, according to a statement by the competition watchdog.

The phone number included on the fake debt collection letters was answered by Excite Mobile staff.

The ACCC said the company had falsely stated on the letters that a court would make the customers pay 20 percent of the debt for failing to pay on time, and would order the repossession of all valuable assets owned by the customer, including children’s toys, to force late-paying customers to hand over the owed amount.

Excite Mobile directors Obie Brown and David Samuel were also found to have created a fake complaints company, called Telecommunications Industry Complaints, to deceive customers into believing their complaints were being handled externally and independently.

Additionally, the company told customers mobile service was available at their premises when it wasn’t, including in indigenous communities — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lesley Kemp faces libel suit over Twitter comments

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21 April 2013
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A woman who complained about an unpaid £146 invoice is facing a libel battle that could cost her more than £100,000.

Lesley Kemp, 55, took to Twitter claiming that a company based in the Middle East had failed to pay her promptly for transcription work.

Now the firm is suing Mrs Kemp, of Milton Keynes, for defamation, claiming up to £50,000 in damages and a further £70,000 in costs.

The company, Resolution Productions, based in Qatar, has yet to comment — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Small blogs to be exempt under press regulation plans

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20 April 2013
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Blogs with a turnover of less than £2m and those with fewer than 10 employees will not be subject to new press regulation, the government says.

The amendments — to go before MPs on Monday — also exempt small firms for whom news is not their core business.

A press watchdog is to be established in England and Wales by royal charter and backed by legislation following the Leveson inquiry into press ethics.

The government said the amendments clarify the position — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Search Engine More Dangerous Than Google

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16 April 2013
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Shodan is a search engine that is designed to look for devices on the net that are not really intended to be viewed and used by the general public. Devices include pool filters, skating rink cooling system, and other goodies. Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month. It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot. Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan … A quick search for default password reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use admin as their user name and 1234 as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all — all you need is a Web browser to connect to them — via Slashdot

Sydney train tunnels get phone reception

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15 April 2013
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The NSW government has been working with Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone to install more than 10 kilometres of cabling to provide reception for mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

The service is undergoing live testing, and will be switched on as early as Monday, Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian said.

The lack of coverage in our CBD tunnels has been an ongoing concern for customers over many years, and quite frankly an embarrassment for our city, she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Hacked WordPress Plug-in Put On Double, Secret Probation

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14 April 2013
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A plug-in that was pulled from the official WordPress plug-in directory has been restored, but will be monitored closely, after the plug-in’s owner claimed a rogue contractor introduced malicious code into the popular web publishing add-on.

Social Media Widget, a free plug-in for the WordPress blogging platform with more than a million downloads, was restored to the WordPress.org official plugin directory on Thursday, days after it was found injecting WordPress websites with spam links to web sites offering Pay Day Loans. In a post on a support forum for Social Media Widget, Samuel Wood, a WordPress administrator, said that WordPress.org was willing to give the owner and the plug-in, Brendan Sheehan, a second chance — via redwolf.newsvine.com

French spies do a Barbara Streisand over secret nuke radio base

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11 April 2013
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A Wiki page about a French military base has gone viral after Gallic spooks tried to censor it.

French internal spies at the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur called in a volunteer Wiki editor to their Paris office and ordered him to spike an entry about the Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute, a military radio base in central France.

The volunteer, named in the French media (en Francais) as Pierre-Carl Langlais, a 30-year-old curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, quickly agreed to their demands even though he did not write the original entry.

However, despite his warnings on a discussion thread that anyone who reposted it would be engaging in criminality, the page was quickly uploaded again by another Wikimedia volunteer before being translated into several languages.

The page, which apparently contains very little (or nothing) in the way of sensitive information, had been almost unvisited up to that point.

Following its reinstatement by enraged French Wiki users the page received 120,000 views over the weekend of 6/7 April, according to some reports — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Sky Email Avalanche Angers Customers

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9 April 2013
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Sky customers are complaining they were bombarded with literally thousands of old email messages when the company switched email provider from Google to Yahoo last week.

Sky has been looking into the issue since Friday, but has so far failed to find a solution — so on Monday afternoon, users are still reporting a flood of old messages. The company’s only advice so far has been to delete the unwanted emails through Yahoo’s cloud client — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The British Library saves the .uk web, starting 20 years too late

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9 April 2013
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A long-running scandal finally ended on Friday with the signing into law of new legislation that allows the British Library and other legal deposit libraries to archive around 5 million websites in the .uk domain. British content on other domains, such as .com and .org, will be added later.

While the legislation is to be applauded, it’s two decades too late to capture the early history of web development in the UK. Massive amounts of valuable data have presumably been lost forever, and there will always be a digital black hole in British history. The consolation is that the Internet Archive, founded by American digital activist Brewster Kahle in 1996, scooped up and preserved some of it in its Wayback Machine.

The British Library has been one of the UK’s copyright libraries since 1662, which means publishers have been legally obliged to give it free copy of everything they print. This has resulted in a priceless archive, albeit one that takes up 500 miles of shelf space.

It would have been logical to make the BL similarly responsible for storing copies of web-based publications as well. If it didn’t feel it had the legal right, or the money, the British government should speedily have provided both — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Waiting for a train that has yet to be built

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8 April 2013
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Gen Okajima is waiting for a train. He knows it won’t arrive soon, not even in the next few years, but he isn’t feeling anxious or impatient. He says it will come once Australia is ready for it.

Mr Okajima, general manager of the Sydney office of Japan’s biggest railway company, is waiting for the day Australia builds a high-speed rail line between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the subject of a federal government study.

It is his job to ensure that when or if that happens, Australia uses Shinkansen, the bullet trains that carry hundreds of millions along Japan’s great network of high-speed rail lines.

Since the Shinkansen technology is a world-class system, we are proud as a nation, Mr Okajima said. And Australia is such an important friend to Japan we are looking to share its benefit.

This partnership would include sharing research and development costs with the Central Japan Railway Company, Mr Okajima’s employer. But the company has been waiting 26 years for high-speed rail to come to Australia. It opened its Sydney office in 1988. For now, its main line of business is exporting Australian wine and snacks such as beef jerky to Japan to be sold on the Shinkansen — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Technology

Who Wrote the Flashback OS X Worm?

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4 April 2013
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A year ago, I published a series that sought to identify the real-life hackers behind the top spam botnets. Using much the same methodology, I was able to identify and locate a young man in Russia who appears (and privately claims) to be the author of Flashback. As it happens, this individual hangs out on many of the same forums as the world’s top spammers (but more on that at another time).

Given Flashback’s focus on gaming Google’s ad networks, I suspected that the worm’s author probably was a key member of forums that focus on so-called black hat SEO, (search engine optimisation), or learned in illicit ways to game search engines and manipulate ad revenues. Sure enough, this individual happens to be a very active and founding member of BlackSEO.com, a closely guarded Russian language forum dedicated to this topic.

Below is a screen shot taken from a private message between a VIP user named Mavook and a top forum member on BlackSEO.com. The conversation took place on 14 July 2012. A rough translation of their conversation is superimposed on the redacted screen grab, but basically it shows Mavook asking the senior member for help in gaining access to Darkode.com, a fairly exclusive English-language cybercrime forum (and one that I profiled in a story earlier this week).

Mavook asks the other member to get him an invitation to Darkode, and Mavook is instructed to come up with a brief bio stating his accomplishments, and to select a nickname to use on the forum if he’s invited. Mavook replies that the Darkode nick should be not be easily tied back to his BlackSEO persona, and suggests the nickname Macbook. He also states that he is the Creator of Flashback botnet for Macs, and that he specialises in finding exploits and creating bots — via Krebs on Security

Create infographics and online charts

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31 March 2013
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Infogr.am is a free webapp that ingests spreadsheets and .csv files, and spits out gorgeous, interactive infographics. If your job involves distilling and presenting data, infogr.am might be your new best weapon. Once you’ve imported your data, you can illustrate it with standard bar, line, and pie charts, as well as a dizzying selection of customizable templates and interactive elements. For example, if your data has a geographical element, you can incorporate a zoomable map. If it involves sorting people into different groups or demographics, you can do that with a cloud of color-coded human outlines. The finished product beats the pants off of anything you could make in Excel, and you easily share it on social networks or embed it on your own site

The Executive / Datamancer

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29 March 2013
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The Executive / Datamancer

The Executive is an all aluminium polished keyboard with a clean black and silver theme. The elements of this wonderfully hand crafted keyboard declare confidence and boldness — traits typically reserved for people of great attainment. Just as a company’s executive defines the success of the business, the Executive keyboard defines the success of one’s work space — via Etsy

Amazon Is Buying Goodreads

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29 March 2013
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Noted online bookstore and retailer Amazon is buying the excellent online books-related social network and information portal Goodreads. Well, that’s a deal that makes a lot of sense.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Goodreads, the online books portal is a place where users can connect with each other and keep track of the books they’re reading as well as what they’d like to read. So, you know, it’s exactly the type of service that Amazon would want to acquire, given that it’s in the business of selling books — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Hits Internet

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28 March 2013
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It’s one for the history books. In what security experts are describing as the largest cyberattack in history, the world’s Internet is being slowed down by a battle over spam.

At least five countries reportedly have investigators looking at the slowdown, and there is growing concern that the impact could affect worldwide commerce. Geneva-based Spamhaus, a non-profit organisation that fights spam, recently put on its blacklists a Dutch hosting service, called Cyberbunker.

Spamhaus’ blacklists are intended to help e-mail providers and others filter out spam by identifying the hosting sources. The non-profit organization said that it is under a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by Cyberbunker, as reprisal for the blacklists — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Want faster fibre? Get rid of the glass

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27 March 2013
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One of the most irritating expressions people can use, broadband at the speed of light, is a little closer to coming true thanks to researchers from the University of Southampton, who have demonstrated air-filled fibres with propagation happening at 99.7 percent of c.

By getting propagation speed up to 99.7 percent from 70 percent of light-speed, the best-case trip from Australia to the US would be cut from about 43 milliseconds to about 30 milliseconds (ignoring router hops and regeneration). In the world of long-distance communications, the lower latency would be beloved of gamers, and also in the world of high-speed financial trading — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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