If you’re hosted on WordPress.com, there’s not a great deal you can do to harden your site. However, if you have your own server space somewhere and it uses WordPress as a content management system / blog software, there are a few simple steps you can take to make your particular part of the internet a little less inviting to hackers — via Lifehacker Australia
The Australian Federal Police (AFP), in conjunction with NSW Police, NSW Roads and Maritime Services, and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, has shut down the largest known carding operation in Australian history, and arrested those behind the operation.
The case has been worked on for more than a year, with the different agencies assembling an Identity Security Strike Team to investigate identity fraud and carding operations, beginning in April 2011. Its investigation focused on dismantling a Sydney-based identity fraud syndicate that was responsible for manufacturing credit cards, which the AFP has said could have potentially netted around AU$37.5 million — via redwolf.newsvine.com
When Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Tony Negus told a parliamentary hearing yesterday that he would ideally like telecommunications customer data kept indefinitely, it was clear that he was engaged in bargaining with the government.
We would like to have it indefinitely, and if we had [our way], we would definitely like to see this held indefinitely, and then we can go back and reconstruct issues or crime scene events that happened many, many years ago. But we understand that is not practical in the context of costs associated with that,
he told the committee.
He revealed that the AFP and other law enforcement agencies had asked the Attorney-General’s Department to keep so-called telecommunications metadata for longer — between five and seven years — but the department said that two years was more appropriate, given the privacy concerns and costs associated with implementing the changes. When the government released its discussion paper on the telecommunications reform proposals earlier this year, the backlash to even two years was strong.
Since then, telecommunications companies have flagged that — based on the European experience with data retention — six months is a more appropriate length of time to retain the data — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hoping to curb the ever-increasing piracy figures in Portugal, local anti-piracy outfit ACAPOR reported the IP-addresses of 2,000 alleged file-sharers to the Attorney General last year. This week the Portuguese prosecutor came back with a ruling and decided not to go after the individuals connected to the IP-addresses. According to the prosecutor it is not against the law to share copyrighted works for personal use, and an IP-address is not enough evidence to identify a person — via TorrentFreak
Have you been getting connection errors in the iOS 6 App Store? You’re not alone. I’ve also be getting the error message at right since updating to iOS 6. Fortunately, there’s a quick fix — via The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Testing for web accessibility (how usable a website is by individuals with disabilities) is an often neglected part of web design and development. Web accessibility is important not only because your content will reach a wider range of audience, but also because correcting web accessibility issues have secondary benefits such as cleaner and more semantic code and better indexibility on search engines — via Six Revisions
It started in July 2009. I’d been on Twitter for over 2 years at that point having joined in May 2007, and I’d never had a problem. My account was followed by a fairly innocuous looking one which I followed back and within 10 minutes I had received a Direct Message (DM) calling me a Dirty f*cking Jewish scumbag
. I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DM’s, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. So I made my account private and the problem went away for a short while. There were no problems on Twitter but my Facebook account was hacked, my blog was spammed and my email address was flooded with foulmouthed and disgusting comments & images. Images of corpses and concentration camps and dismembered bodies — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hitachi is showing off a storage system using quartz glass that it claims will retain data for hundred of millions of years.
Company researchers displayed the storage unit, consisting of a sliver of glass 2cm square and 2mm thick, which can hold 40MB of data per square inch, about the same as a standard CD. The data is written in binary format by lasering dots on the glass in four layers, but the researchers say adding more layers to increase storage density isn’t a problem.
The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven’t necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones,
Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii told AFP. The possibility of losing information may actually have increased,
he said, pointing out that CDs and tape storage are predicted to last less than a few decades at best, and in many cases fail within years — via redwolf.newsvine.com
New Zealand authorities have informed the nation’s High Court that individuals at the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants
in the case of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload service.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued a statement saying, in part, that “The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.” That information is said to have led to the arrests of some involved in the case.
Key has also announced an inquiry into the GCSB’s role. The statement says the inquiry will be conducted by New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Paul Neazor, whose role is spelled out here — via redwolf.newsvine.com
They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centres that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.
A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.
Most data centres, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centres can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.
To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centres has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centres appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.
Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centres in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I said at the start of this polemic that there’s never been a better time to go blind: we are busy converting the world to digital, and digital is supremely easy to convert.
The web is particularly excellent for this: it runs to open standards and, in general, you don’t have to know or care anything about what browser, what operating system, what network providers, what servers or what back-end software is involved in getting content onto your screen. For most of the history of computing, such a scenario was purely theoretical: open standards — and only open standards — have allowed it.
Anywhere that open standards can be excluded, they are. Anywhere open standards are excluded, the game changes — the people who control a closed system are at liberty to manage it according to their business model, and are free to deny whatever they feel goes against their interests. Whether they are actually against the business’s interests, or whether they’re actually very advantageous to the customer, are secondary considerations — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The WELL, the online community which started out life more than 20 years ago as the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, has been sold to a company founded by some of its long-time users. It has had many owners in its storied history, but its most recent owner, Salon, is the first public company to own the WELL, which raised numerous questions about whether Salon could legally sell the site to the users without trying to realise greater value for its shareholders, including through the sale of the well.com domain name.
Many WELL users have pledged money for a user buyout, and a group of them negotiated with Salon to make the purchase — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists have printed lasers using standard inkjet printers — a move that may lead to a much easier and cheaper way to make future laser devices.
A University of Cambridge team has used liquid crystals in place of ink to print tiny dots on a surface covered with a special coating.
Once the coating dries, the dots become lasers, the researchers wrote in the journal Soft Matter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire block of /8
IPv4 addresses that is unused and an e-petition has been filed in this regards asking the DWP to sell it off thus easing off the RIPE IPv4 address space scarcity a little.
John Graham-Cumming, who found this unused block, wrote in a blog post that the DWP was in possession of 51.0.0.0/8 IPv4 addresses. According to Cumming, these 16.9 million IP addresses are unused at the moment and he derived this conclusion by doing a check in the ASN database. A check of the ASN database will show that there are no networks for that block of addresses,
he wrote — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Victoria’s public transport authority is increasingly handing over information about myki users’ movements to police, raising concerns that the smartcard is being used as a tracking device.
The Transport Ticketing Authority says police have made 113 requests about myki users since the smartcards were introduced in late 2009.
There have already been 71 requests for customer movements this year, more than three times the number of requests received last year.
Under the TTA’s privacy policy, police can make a written request for information about a customer’s movements without court oversight — via redwolf.newsvine.com
More than 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell, you might think the Stasi had been consigned to history. But a new generation wants to know what the East German secret police did to their parents, and computing wizardry is about to make it easier to find out.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its agencies did not disappear immediately once the Berlin Wall fell.
For some weeks afterwards many Stasi staff remained in their offices, trying to destroy evidence that could land them in jail or expose their spies in foreign countries.
But they ran into technical difficulties.
The Stasi was an organisation that loved to keep paper,
says Joachim Haussler, who works for the Stasi archives authority today.
It therefore owned few shredders — and those it did have were of poor East German quality and rapidly broke down. So thousands of documents were hastily torn by hand and stuffed into sacks. The plan was to burn or chemically destroy the contents later.
But events overtook the plan, the Stasi was dissolved as angry demonstrators massed outside and invaded its offices, and the new federal authority for Stasi archives inherited all the torn paper.
It amounts, says Haussler, to the biggest puzzle in the world
, estimated at between four and six hundred million pieces of paper — some no larger than a fingernail — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google today announced it is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 8 in Google Apps, including its Business, Education, and Government editions. The kill date is 15 November 2012. After that, IE8 users accessing Google Apps will see a message recommending that they upgrade their browser.
Why that date you may be asking? Well, Internet Explorer 10 launches on 26 October (the day Windows 8 goes on sale), so Google is giving its customers ’til the middle of the next month to upgrade — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph features a call to action — an Internet petition to stop trolling (the media definition of any offensive or deliberately hurtful behaviour online, not the traditional definition). This is both terrible journalism and falling for a trap.
In the last couple of weeks offensive online behaviour has taken a bit of limelight. First Charlotte Dawson, a host of a reality TV show, was hospitalised seemingly because she was driven to harm herself by a round of online abuse. A few days later rugby league player Robbie Farah was also abused online with taunters targeting the fact he recently lost his mother to cancer. Classy.
In the wake of the Farah incident NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell publicised that he’d be talking to the Australian Federal Police, which is odd – I was unsure why a premier needs to intervene. I started to become nervous when I saw the Prime Minister had arranged a meeting with Farah to ostensibly discuss what can be done about the trolls
.
The bottom line of course is that nothing can be done. Or rather that it’s already been done. Subjecting someone to an outpouring of abuse on Twitter is an offence under S474.17 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 – a law which was originally designed to prohibit nuisance phone calls by regulating behaviour on “a carriage service”.
Later law and definitions include the Internet as a carriage service so the three year holiday in Long Bay available to anybody who makes offensively harassing and threatening calls is also available to anyone who mounts a Facebook campaign. At the state level there’s also various pieces of legislation, typically designed to prohibit stalking, that make that behaviour illegal. Courts can and have made orders that people not contact other people online or use services that would enable them to do so as a result of them not being able to do it lawfully and civilly — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australian tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph has started a campaign to Stop the trolls
.
The campaign’s roots lie in recent incidents that saw a reality television hostess’ Twitter account subjected to ridicule and a Rugby League footballer’s account receive vile comments about his recently-deceased mother.
The footballer struck back, threatening to rip the balls off
the troll, followed by a call to Australia’s Prime Minister to do something about trolls. That call saw the Premier of the State of New South Wales weigh in, agreeing that trolls must be stopped.
Things then snowballed as reports emerged the Prime Minister had granted the footballer an audience to discuss the troll menace, an odd gesture but one that makes sense given current debate in Australia about links between online bullying and youth suicide.
All of which explains why the Telegraph gave over its front page, depicted aboveand helpfully parsed by Twitter user HyperBrendan, to its new Stop the Trolls campaign — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google has just acquired VirusTotal, a free security service that analyses suspicious files and URLs, for an undisclosed amount. According to VirusTotal’s announcement, the two companies had been partners for quite some time, and now VirusTotal will continue to operate independently, reaping the benefits of Google’s resources.
Per the agreement, which was spotted by Mikko Hypponen, VirusTotal states that it will maintain its partnerships with outside antivirus companies and security experts. As for Google, this move clearly shows its interests in beefing up its security resources, making this acquisition relevant to nearly all of its services, like Gmail, where files and links are constantly exchanged — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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