The Website of Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences seems to have had what you call major security breach. The whole of the website complete with Server backups, Databases of Students, Site Databases, and the Complete directory structure have been leaked onto BitTorrent
DALLAS -- Dallas say the department shut down its Internet presence after a hacker took over its Web site and filled it with anti-American rants.
| IT'S 10 A.M. DO YOU know where your brand is?
From cyber squatting to domain kiting, a new study by an Internet security company that has been studying the issue finds that the brands most targeted for attack are those consumers expect to be the most secure: financial services and media companies. "Media companies draw the greatest Web site traffic, and financial services companies draw the highest premiums for pay-per-click keywords, making them especially attractive targets for brand abuse," says MarkMonitor's vice president of communications Te Smith. Financial services companies accounted for 41% of all phishing attacks during the first quarter of this year, a jump from 29% during the same period a year earlier. The yield for online banking credentials is "incredibly high" for phishers, making it no surprise that financial services companies are so often the targets of abuse. Brandjackers also prey on customer confusion resulting from myriad mergers and security system upgrades, she says. "These abuses can add up to big money, too," Smith says. "Customer support centers increase and ad dollars are lost to so-called traffic diversion. Ultimately, these threats contribute to a loss of control for brand owners in how their brands are perceived in the marketplace and threaten customer trust and loyalty, the greatest brand assets of all." The April 2007 "Brandjacking Index" tracked weekly samples of data provided by ISPs and e-mail providers in March and April of 25 brands in eight vertical segments culled from the 2006 Top 100 Interbrand listing. Cyber squatting--the unauthorized use of a brand in a domain name--is the most frequent form of abuse, and leads to other exploitations such as pay-per-click fraud and kiting. Online crooks are becoming more astute marketers, notes MarkMonitor CMO Frederick Felman. "Brand abusers employ online marketing techniques such as search engine optimization to siphon traffic from reputable sites," he says. The number of brands phished each month reached an all-time high of 229 in March compared to earlier studies, which MarkMonitor, a company that alerts others when their brand is being abused, attributed to more successful operations by the bad guys. "Botnets and phish kites have reduced the technology requirements and resources needed to execute attacks," Felman says. "Phishers are adopting direct marketing methodologies to experiment with brands, evaluate efficiencies and exploit lax enforcement." Marketers must keep a close eye on their brands online. According to the report:
|
What: Kansas state trooper stops truck driver, arrests him for alleged drug possession, and downloads contents of his cell phones.
When: U.S. District Judge Sam Crow in Kansas rules on April 12.
Outcome: Judge says copying of cell phones' contents was permissible.
What happened, according to court documents:
In December 2006, Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper Clint Epperly was staffing a drug checkpoint at a truck weighing station in Wabaunsee County. Rafael Mercado-Nava was driving a tractor-trailer and stopped at the checkpoint around midnight.
When Mercado-Nava got out of his truck at the scale house, the trooper was suspicious, claiming that the driver was sweating, overly friendly, and the truck was registered in California (which Epperly believed to be a source of illegal drugs).
Mercado-Nava's paperwork was in order. But during an inspection of the cab of the tractor-trailer, Epperly discovered a hidden compartment that allegedly contained 18 kilograms of cocaine under the floor.
The typical sequence of events ensued: Mercado-Nava was arrested, and a drug dog allegedly confirmed that the substance was cocaine.
What makes this case relevant to Police blotter is that Epperly and one of his colleagues copied the complete contents of the suspect's two cell phones. Mercado-Nava's attorney eventually filed a motion to suppress the digital contents from being used against his client in court, claiming they were seized illegally without a warrant.
The U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment, of course, prohibits "unreasonable" searches and seizures. In general, a search without a warrant is viewed as unreasonable.
But searches when a person is arrested are an exception to that general rule. In this case, the judge upheld the search as constitutional, saying that: "An officer's need to preserve evidence is an important law enforcement component of the rationale for permitting a search of a suspect incident to a valid arrest."
This raises issues--especially when hard drives that can store intimate life details are growing in capacity and shrinking in size. If someone is arrested for speeding and has a laptop next to him on the seat, Crow's reasoning could mean that a law enforcement officer is permitted to seize the laptop and copy its entire contents. Homeland Security already has the authority to do that at border crossings, according to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
One lesson that law-abiding citizens, who nonetheless want to protect their privacy, can take from this incident is to use encryption and a strong passphrase whenever possible. Here are some technical tips. Apple's OS X operating system includes a FileVault feature, and PGP offers whole disk encryption for Windows. In addition, there are some legal arguments that people accused of a crime cannot be compelled to divulge their passphrase.
Excerpt from the district court's opinion:
The sole evidence regarding this issue is that two cellular telephones were seized from defendant's person, without a warrant and without consent, contemporaneously with defendant's arrest, and their memories were downloaded at that time, before defendant was processed or booked. No evidence suggests that the contents of the phones were protected by a password or that the information retrieved by the troopers consisted of anything other than stored numbers of outgoing and incoming calls.
Traditionally, there has been no reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed on one's phone, since by voluntarily conveying numerical information to the telephone company and exposing that information to its equipment in the ordinary course of business, one loses any reasonable expectation of privacy in the existence and identity of such calls.
The same rationale has recently been applied to cell phones. Other courts have found that the expectation of privacy in similar cases is analogous to the expectation of privacy one has in the contents of a closed container, or in a personal telephone book containing directory information.
A warrantless search violates the Fourth Amendment unless it falls within one of the enumerated exceptions to the warrant requirement. These exceptions include, among others, warrantless searches incident to a lawful arrest.
Traditional search warrant exceptions apply to the search of cell phones. Where the accessing of memory is a valid search incident to arrest, the court need not decide whether exigent circumstances also justify the officer's retrieval of the numbers from it.
Police officers are not constrained to search only for weapons or instruments of escape on the arrestee's person; they may also, without any additional justification, look for evidence of the arrestee's crime on his person in order to preserve it for use at trial. The permissible scope of a search incident to a lawful arrest extends to containers found on the arrestee's person.
The need to preserve evidence is underscored where evidence may be lost due to the dynamic nature of the information stored on and deleted from cell phones or pagers. An officer's need to preserve evidence is an important law enforcement component of the rationale for permitting a search of a suspect incident to a valid arrest.
Because of the finite nature of a pager's electronic memory, incoming pages may destroy currently stored telephone numbers in a pager's memory. The contents of some pagers also can be destroyed merely by turning off the power or touching a button. Thus, it is imperative that law enforcement officers have the authority to immediately "search" or retrieve, incident to a valid arrest, information from a pager in order to prevent its destruction as evidence.
The court finds that under the circumstances of this case, the government has met its burden to show that the troopers' search of the cell phones by accessing stored numbers was justified as a search incident to arrest.
| Harris Reports Acceptance Of Mobile Ads On The Rise |
| by Emily Burg, Friday, Mar 16, 2007 6:00 AM ET |
| A NEW STUDY BY HARRIS Interactive finds that getting cell phone users to accept mobile ads might just be a question of matching the right incentive with the right demographic.
The study reports that while 90% of all cell phone users are disinterested in receiving mobile ads, that number drops to 64% if an incentive is offered. Of that overall percentage, the study group's willingness to watch mobile ads is then tempered by demographic, the type of ad displayed and the incentive offered in exchange for the ad. The good news for wireless carriers, advertisers and marketers is that it looks like there's a leak in the dam of cell phone users' tolerance. But with a very small percentage of 40- to-49-year-olds interested in receiving mobile ads at all, and only 13% of people with incomes of between $125,000 and $149,000 interested in receiving ads in exchange for some incentive, mobile advertisers and wireless carriers need to consider each group's tolerance level very carefully when developing a mobile ad strategy. |
GOOGLE'S ANNOUNCEMENT THAT IT WILL begin eliminating the connection between search queries and specific IP addresses after 18-24 months is a "good first step," say privacy watchdogs, but more needs to be done to protect users' privacy.
"If the data's there, there's all sorts of ways it can get out, whether by accident or perhaps through some sort of subpoena," said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokesperson for the Electronic Freedom Frontier. "They can always go a little farther."
Link: MediaPost Publications - Privacy Watchdogs Call Google Move 'Good First Step' - 03/16/2007.
"What is an Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificate? An Extended Validation (EV) SSL Server Certificate is a new category of SSL certificate created by an industry consortium called the CA/Browser forum. This new category of certificate was conceived in response to the growing threat of phishing attacks with a goal of increasing consumer confidence in online transactions. EV certificates will be issued to websites only after rigorous validation of their identity. Web browsers will reflect this higher level of identity assurance with prominent and distinct trust indicators, such as the green address bar used by Internet Explorer 7." For more information on Entrust Extended Validation (EV) SSL Server Certificates please visit
The Thermal-Eye Thermal Security Camera (TSC) is a plug-and-play infrared security camera that uses heat signatures to detect intruders and potential security breach activities. This thermal imaging camera provides night vision with no lighting or infrared illumination and allows for cost-efficient, thermal monitoring of perimeter or water areas, even in inclement weather.
Texas Criminal Defense Attorney JOHN H. READ II, is a well-known criminal defense attorney in the State of Texas. Main office in Dallas, Texas. John H. Read II is one of the well versed in criminal and civil trial law having tried over three hundred (300) jury trials. His trial experience has been developed in the District and Federal trial courts. John H. Read II has tried hundreds of felonies; Capitol Murders (State & Federal), Murders, Aggravated Robberies, Aggravated Sexual Assaults, Aggravated Assaults, Voluntary Manslaughter, Involuntary Manslaughter, vehicular Manslaughter and serious State and Federal Drug cases. John H. Read II has tried cases from as far away as Kansas City, Kansas - Manhattan, New York back to Dallas, Texas.
- My attorney and my friend.. He has gotten me out of somehting that I should not have gotten in trouble for. I'm an american and I should be allowed to have a gun. If I get pulled over 3 blocks from my house with that gun in my car, even if it's loaded I shou8ldn't have to go to jail, have my car towed, etc... He got it dismissed and will also get it removed from my record. If you or someone you know is in trouble this is the guy to call. Seriously.
Link: Paris Hilton Accused of Phone Phreakiness - Security Fix.
Paris Hilton Accused of Phone Phreakiness You may have read the story from a while back about how hackers broke into socialite Paris Hilton's cell phone account and posted online racy pictures of the hotel heiress stolen from her mobile device (turns out the perpetrators were the same people accused of hacking into consumer database giant LexisNexis last year). But could it be that Hilton herself has begun using some of the same hacker tactics leveraged against her in personal attacks against others?
Google This.
by Steve Plunkett
In June of this year Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, then to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary in July. Here is the definition:
“to search for information on the Internet, esp. using the Google search engine”
Before this, General Motors ran a commercial during the Super Bowl for its
brand. The TV spot showed the letters p-o-n-t-i-a-c being typed into a Google search field instead of giving the Web address www.Pontiac.com. The voiceover said, "Don't take our word for it. Google ‘Pontiac’ to find out!" Pontiac
You might think “Gee, that’s clever and hip!” Well, someone else obviously did – and sold the idea to
. It may be clever and hip, but Pontiac
is sending people to a place where it has no control over the content. Pontiac
The agency representing Mazda, on the other hand, knew a little bit more about search engines. It bought ads on Google because Mazda had information that compared its models to
models. When car shoppers Googled “Pontiac,” like the Pontiac
commercial told them to do, the search results included a webpage that sold Mazda as a better choice than Pontiac
. In essence, Mazda used Pontiac
’s investment to “piggyback” some of its own advertising. Pretty shrewd move by Mazda. And Pontiac
didn’t learn anything from the experience. Pontiac
Which brings me to, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.”
now runs similar spots in local markets. While watching television the other night, I saw a Pontiac
ad that said, “Just Google ‘ Pontiac
dealers dallas-ft.worth,’” so I did. The results were pay-per-click ads for a few local Pontiac
dealers. Problem is, studies show that quite a few people never click on pay-per-click ads. (Think about it; do you?) So, out of the predictably tiny percentage of viewers who actually did go to their computers and Google “ Pontiac
dealers dallas-ft.worth,” perhaps a fraction actually clicked the pay-per-click links to learn more. What a waste. Pontiac
And for
, the story gets even worse. Pontiac
When publishers announced that they would include the verb “Google” in their dictionaries, I blogged about the story. And because I used the phrase “Just Google Pontiac” in my post, guess what came up first in Google’s search results for “
dealers dallas-ft.worth.” Yep, my blog beat out the actual Pontiac
website and the local Pontiac
dealers’ websites. Pontiac
Being the SEO specialist that I am, I decided to experiment and try some of my Internet magic. Today, when you Google “
dealers dallas-ft.worth,” the first result will be the article you’re reading right now. Still not Pontiac
or Pontiac
dealer websites. I can’t tell you how I did it. It’s a trade secret. But go ahead and try it. Pontiac
The point is
has given up entirely too much control over its own advertising. A competitor or a prankster with the right Internet skills could hijack all of the company’s hard work, actually using Pontiac
’s investment to take business away from Pontiac
. Pontiac
spent millions producing TV spots, buying airtime and reserving pay-per-click ads. To put it mildly, someone is spending a lot of money poorly. Pontiac
should have hired an organic SEO specialist simply to optimize the websites for individual dealers and, in place of pay-per-click ads, the website of the North Texas Pontiac Dealers. If they had done that, the company would’ve saved itself a lot of money – and they’d be number one in Google instead of me, an SEO specialist with a blog. Pontiac
At a time when GM needs a happier ending, “the rest of the story” could’ve been far more profitable.
Link: Worm lurks behind MySpace profiles | CNET News.com.
A worm is targeting MySpace users, compromising their "About me" pages and infecting visitors to them, Symantec has warned.
When a logged-in MySpace user goes to another member's "About me" page affected by the ACTS.Spaceflash worm, they are quietly redirected to a URL that holds a malicious Macromedia Flash file, the security company said in an advisory on Spaceflash Tuesday. That file, in turn, will replace the visitor's own "About me" page with one that is compromised.
A prominent Republican in the U.S. Congress has backed away from plans to rewrite Internet privacy rules by requiring that logs of Americans' online activities be stored.
Wisconsin Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said through a representative this week that he will not be introducing that legislation after all.
The statement came after CNET News.com reported on Tuesday that Sensenbrenner wanted to require Internet service providers to track what their users were doing so police might more easily "conduct criminal investigations," including inquiries into cases involving child exploitation and pornography. The concept is generally called data retention.
Two New York teenagers have been arrested and charged with attempting to extort $150,000 from MySpace, the popular community Web site.
Shaun Harrison, 18, and Saverio Mondelli, 19, both of whom are from Suffolk County, N.Y., were arrested in a sting operation last week, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said Wednesday. The pair had traveled to Los Angeles to meet people they allegedly believed were MySpace employees, but who were in fact undercover investigators, according to the district attorney's statement.
The alleged crimes began late last year when the two young men took advantage of a flaw they had discovered in the MySpace Web site in order to obtain personal information on MySpace users, the district attorney said. MySpace discovered the intrusion earlier this year and blocked it. The Los Angeles-based company also reported the incident to authorities. During the course of the investigation, threats were made that unless $150,000 was paid, new exploit code would be released, according to the statement.
Link: Teens arrested in alleged MySpace extortion scam | CNET News.com.
With the launch of its PlayStation 3 video game console six months away, Sony is gearing up for an all-out battle to put the electronics and entertainment conglomerate back on a growth path.
At stake is not just pole position in the $25 billion video game industry, but dominance in the next generation of DVDs, the commercial viability of Sony's Cell microchips and possibly control over living-room electronics around the world.
Sony needs a hit. During the past four years, its revenues were virtually flat as its operating profit rose 3 percent.
By comparison, rival consumer electronics company Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of Panasonic brand products, boosted its sales by 20 percent and saw its operating profit soar more than threefold.
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced a crackdown on five companies accused of illegally selling telephone calling records -- five months after the Sun-Times sparked national interest in the issue by highlighting Chicago Police and FBI fears about the security of their phone records.
The FTC sued the companies to stop them from selling phone records and to seize their alleged "ill-gotten gains."
"Trafficking in consumers' confidential telephone records is outrageous," said Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "It robs consumers of their privacy and exposes them to everything from snoops to stalkers. We intend to put a stop to it."
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have lashed out at a music pirate who leaked the funk-rock band's upcoming album onto the Internet, and urged fans not to download it illegally.
The band's spokeswoman said on Wednesday the offender was being tracked down. The group's first studio album in four years, "Stadium Arcadium," is still on track to go on sale on Tuesday via Warner Music Group's Warner Bros. Records, she said.
In a rambling open letter, the band's bass player, Michael "Flea" Balzary, said he and his colleagues would be heartbroken if fans downloaded the album beforehand.
"For people to just steal a poor sound quality version of it for free because some a--hole stole it and put it on the internet is sad to me," he said.
Link: Red Hot Chili Peppers angered by Net leak | CNET News.com.
Second only to watching a company achieve great technological and business success, there is nothing Silicon Valley enjoys more than figuring out how, once attained, that company's success might be outdone. A great deal of this scheming is currently directed at MySpace, the social-networking site that has become the online equivalent of the local mall, a place for teens and twentysomethings to spend lots of time -- lots! -- hanging out.
Because the MySpace business story couldn't be simpler or more spectacular -- two friends start it in 2003 and 24 months later it's bought by News Corp. for $580 million -- there are now dozens of start-ups trying to do to MySpace what MySpace did to the first big social-networking site, Friendster. (Buyouts are being made all the time, like the $102 million Viacom said it will spend for Xfire, a gaming site.)
Hundreds of business books and untold thousands of hours of consultants' time have been devoted to advice on how to make these sorts of industry "disruptions" happen. Many are a combination of deft strategizing, shameless copying, wishful thinking -- and some grasping at straws.
Always curious about how entrepreneurs approach the chessboard of competition, I found four MySpace pretenders and asked each the same question: If there is going to be the next MySpace, why is it going to be you? The question is necessary because to the casual observer, most of these sites look the same.
Link: WSJ.com - Portals.
LONGMONT, Colorado (AP) -- A man who said he bought a device that allowed him to change stop lights from red to green received a $50 ticket for suspicion of interfering with a traffic signal.
Jason Niccum of Longmont, Colorado, said the device, which he bought on eBay for $100, helped him cut his time driving to work.
"I guess in the two years I had it, that thing paid for itself," he told the Daily Times-Call on Wednesday.
Niccum was issued a citation March 29 after police said they found him using a strobe-like device to change traffic signals. Police confiscated the device.
Link: CNN.com - No green light for?driver?with traffic signal gadget - Apr 18, 2006.
Wired News: "Wondering if registered sex offenders with MySpace pages live in your neighborhood?
To investigate, you can search for your city or ZIP code on your state's online registry. Note: Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, D.C., don't currently provide this information online. For a list with links, visit the website of Prevent Abuse Now, or the National Sex Offender Registry.
Once you have a list of names, you can go to MySpace.com to search for them. You need to be a member in order to do this. An option enables you to narrow down common names you may be searching for by ZIP code.
Additionally, the monitoring service myspaceWatch.com makes it easy to monitor the MySpace activities of your teenager, as well as up to four others, for $6 a month. If you're generally interested in the emerging genre of MySpace-linked crime, a couple of blogs have sprouted up to track down and post the MySpace profiles and other public websites of sex offenders and murderers currently in the news.
MyCrimeSpace and The Dead Kids of MySpace both read like a veritable Who's Who of putatively perverted sickos on the social-networking site, as well as places like Blogger.com -- even though the crimes are often unrelated to the individuals' online activities." Read More @ Wired News
According to his MySpace page, the 41-year-old San Bruno, California, resident is single, a Sagittarius, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, and counts an online stripper among his six friends. But California's online database of registered sex offenders offers a different profile of the same man: convictions for forced sodomy, oral sex and "lewd and lascivious acts" -- all with a person under the age of 14.
A 22-year-old man in San Francisco comes off as a typical college student on MySpace, professing a love for beat poetry, nature and obscure coffee house bands. His profile doesn't mention that he's a convicted child molester.
Wired News ran the names of randomly selected registered sex offenders in San Francisco and neighboring Sonoma County through MySpace's user search engine, and turned up no fewer than five men whose self-reported names, photographs, ages, astrological signs, locations and (in two instances) heights matched those of profiles on the state's online sex offender registry.
In two additional cases, the information posted on MySpace was sufficient to suggest a probable but not certain match. Repeated e-mails to all seven men through MySpace were not answered.
None of the men appeared to have minors listed on their MySpace friends list. Assuming the profiles are authentic, the easily verified presence of registered sex offenders in the online community highlights the difficulties MySpace faces as it seeks to clean up its content and public image, while maintaining flexibility and privacy that has drawn more than 70 million users to it's website.
MySpace can be unfamiliar ground to busy parents, and not everything is as it seems on the site. So Wired News addresses some of the most pressing questions parents might have if they explore their teenager's relationship with MySpace. This FAQ relies heavily on an interview with UC Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd, who studied teens' ways during a two-year ethnographic study of the MySpace phenomenon. Boyd speaks on her findings in a recent lecture.
Can I search MySpace to see if my kid is on it?
MySpace profiles are searchable, and with little detective work you can probably find your offspring if they are participating. But should you? That probably depends on your relationship with them. UC Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd says it's a bad idea. "Don't go on and engage in surveillance. That makes things really hard for kids to engage with you as a parent." Instead, Boyd recommends parents talk with their youngsters, and ask their teens to show them their profile, if they have one.
I did it anyway. Should I be worried that my teenage girl is linked to so many male "friends?"
you can assume she's sending nudes.....
Link: Wired News:.
Bloggers are reporting that Yahoo will no longer allow advertisers to bid for trademarked terms they don't own.
There have been several legal battles over the act of selling trademarked keywords. But despite the case history, no federal appeals court has addressed the issue, meaning the law is still unsettled.
Posters in the SearchEngineWatch Forums reported that they have received e-mails from Yahoo stating that the company "will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks," starting March 1.
Bloggers speculated that Yahoo might be making the move to just get rid of the legal worries. problem. But they also pointed out that the company has been trying to lure big-name, mainstream advertisers, and this move might be a good way to convince them Internet advertising was a safe way to go.
The Washington Post's online arm has apparently been caught in a metadata gaffe that exposed the whereabouts of a 21-year-old hacker who confessed to controlling thousands of compromised PCs for malicious use.
Link: eWeek.
Corporate Blog Services Blogs are on fire as companies have discovered the marketing value of these unique resources. Compared to traditional websites, blogs provide a more human take on your company. Plus they offer readers regularly updated information. That makes a blog a great forum for connecting with your customers, keeping them updated on changes and showing that you’re responsive to their needs.
There is more to blogging than just website development, particularly blogs for business. For example, should your blog be public or private? At Fueled Communications, we can help determine if blogging is a good investment for you and help you avoid any legal liabilities that could otherwise arise. If you choose to build a blog, we’ll design, create and maintain it for you, even writing and updating content on an ongoing basis. Easy as that.
For some companies, blogging is one the most cost-effective marketing techniques available. Let’s see if you’re one of them. Ask about our blog services.
Google lashed out at the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, saying that a high-profile request for a list of a week's worth of search terms must not be granted because it would disclose trade secrets and violate the privacy rights of its users.
In a strongly worded legal brief filed with a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., the search company accused prosecutors of a "cavalier attitude," saying they were "uninformed" about how search engines work and the importance of protecting Google's confidential information from disclosure.
This response came after the Justice Department last month asked a judge to force Google to hand over a random sample of 1 million Web pages from its index, along with copies of a week's worth of search terms to aid in the Bush administration's defense of an Internet pornography law. That information is supposed to be used to highlight flaws in Web filtering technology during a trial this fall.
Link: CNET News.com.
When News Corp. bought the social-networking Web site MySpace.com last July, the media company got two surprises, one good and one bad.
The good part: The site, where teens and twenty-somethings post pages about themselves and communicate with friends, already was popular, but it suddenly took off. In the last six months of 2005, MySpace's monthly traffic nearly doubled to 36 million users, making it the eighth-most-visited Web site in January, according to comScore Media Metrix. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch declared it the centerpiece of his new Internet strategy of attracting a large audience in a bid to bypass portals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN in advertising revenue.
The bad part: MySpace has become the focus of criticism from authorities, teachers and parents that children are exposed to risqu頣ontent and are preyed upon by sexual predators who meet them on the site. Such episodes aren't unique to MySpace, but the site stands out because of its size -- 54 million registered users, with about 19% of monthly users under 17, according to comScore.
Link: WSJ.com .
Baltimore County police said an Internet date ended in homicide, and they have a suspect in custody.
The body of Josie Phyllis Brown was found off an Interstate 95 exit ramp in Arbutus Tuesday night, and by the next day, her alleged date remained in police custody.
WBAL-TV 11 News reporter Tara Mergener reported Brown disappeared last December. Brown, of Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood, was reported missing from Baltimore City.
Link: TheWBALChannel.com - News - Police: Former Student Admits To Killing Internet Date.
A worldwide battle for free speech is taking place, with Denmark at the center of the storm.
It all began last September when a Danish author writing a book on Islam was unable to find artists willing to submit illustrations because of the Islamic stricture against visual representations of Muhammad. To try and call attention to the issue, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten put out a call for cartoonists to submit depictions of Muhammad. Twelve cartoons were submitted and eventually printed in the newspaper.
There are numerous emerging security threats that can challenge the integrity of an IP telephony solution. Security vulnerabilities of a network are exposed before, during and after a system is installed. To help address these challenges for clients, NextiraOne is extending its expertise in voice, data and IP telephony engineering to introduce a full suite of information security consulting services.
The services are designed to help clients maintain the integrity, confidentiality, availability and reliability of their converged communications environments. “Information security is an integral part of our overall services value for our clients. We recognize that implementing proper security countermeasures is a critical step to ensuring the success of any convergence initiative,” said NextiraOne President and CEO Dale Booth. “With careful planning and precise engineering, our clients’ enterprise IP telephony systems can easily integrate with different information security tools to become as or more secure than existing PSTN systems, depending on the requirements of the application. Our new suite of consulting services was created to help our clients properly and successfully navigate to and through an IP telephony environment.”
NextiraOne’s five security consulting services provide a concrete return on investment across the IP telephony implementation lifecycle. From a pre-implementation perspective, NextiraOne offers two assessment services. The IP Telephony Pre-Implementation Assessment Service assesses the feasibility of VoIP and IP telephony voice communications and applications from a network performance and information security perspective. This offering yields specific recommendations that are intended to help clients ensure the successful implementation and performance of an IP telephony solution.
The second pre-implementation solution, the IP Telephony Network & Vulnerability Assessment Service, provides a technical, risk and vulnerability assessment and corresponding recommendation to clients that are considering the purchase of an IP telephony solution or who have been working on an existing IP telephony implementation. Clients benefit from recommendations focused on alleviating risk mitigation concerns and addressing required security controls and countermeasures. The post-IP telephony implementation services include the IP Telephony Post-Implementation Assessment, IP Telephony Compliancy Service and IP Telephony Architecture & Framework Service.
The IP Telephony Post-Implementation Assessment is designed for companies with an existing IP telephony implementation that may be experiencing performance and security issues. This service provides clients with information regarding performance enhancements and known vulnerabilities and recommendations for system administration as well as ongoing support to make the converged environment perform at its optimum level. The second consulting service, the IP Telephony Compliancy Service, is for companies with an existing IP telephony system that are under a new or existing compliancy law, mandate or regulation that requires documented security controls and an IT security architecture and framework.
The third service, the IP Telephony Security Architecture & Framework Service, helps clients create and implement information security policies, standards, procedures and guidelines for IP telephony systems that are part of their IT infrastructures. “These new consulting services allow us to address a broader scope of our clients’ needs while incorporating proper security controls and countermeasures into the IP telephony planning process,” adds Booth. “This allows our clients to mitigate risk and align security priorities with the key business drivers that led them down the convergence path.”
Additional managed security services, which complement the consulting practice, will be introduced during the next few months as part of NextiraOne’s maintenance of high voice and data implementation standards.
About NextiraOne
NextiraOne North America is a leading provider of integrated enterprise network, IP telephony, voice and data solutions and services that enable effective business communications. Built on a foundation of telecommunications industry experience dating back to the 1970s, the company’s expertise ranges from planning to the implementation, support and management of traditional, IP and converged voice and data communications networks. NextiraOne also provides solutions featuring best-in-class technologies from leading manufacturers and vendors. The company offers consultation and solutions development ranging from contact center applications to unified messaging and IP telephony. NextiraOne also provides the professional services, including information security services, required to make these applications and networks efficient, reliable and secure. The NextiraOne companies enjoy a rich history that has been woven from the fabric of Williams Communications Solutions, Milgo Solutions, Racal-Datacom, Timeplex and Executone. For more information, please visit www.NextiraOne.com.
NextiraOne is owned by Platinum Equity (www.platinumequity.com), a global acquisition firm specializing in the strategic operation of mission-critical services and solutions businesses according to a unique M&A&OSM model of value creation.
When Leslie Miller, 22, showed up this summer for her first day at StartingBloc, a midtown nonprofit, she was surprised at how intimately her boss seemed to know her. “Right from the start, he was teasing me about Duncan Sheik and interpretive dance. When I finally asked him how he knew so much about me, he said that of course he’d looked at my Friendster profile prior to hiring me. It really caught me off guard.”
Link: NY Metro.
"I will make sure you will never be able to place an order on the internet again." "I'm an attorney, I will sue you." "I will call the CEO of your company and play him the tape of this phone call." "I'm going to call your local police and have two officers come over and arrest you." "You'd better get this through your thick skull." "You have no idea who you are dealing with."
Link: PriceRitePhoto on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.
- I'm sure this website will be burned for anyone else they want to scam...
The End Result of the PriceRitePhoto Day... Hacker Thursday
Abusive New York Camera Store Threatens Blogger
- so picture this... guy buys a camera... gets hosed and shares the info with his friends online.. well never, ever fuck over a hacker.. I mean especially when they are being legit. It used to be hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Hell is chump change when you have someone who understands how the internet works, really.
Hackers usually have friends the work for credit bureaus sometimes they have friends that know meth heads that will do anything for money that the hacker doesn't need to be involved in, (hackers sometimes like to stay up for an entire weekend to get to a certain level of an online game or they may want to pull an exploit over a weekend while someone doesn't have access to their account), some hackers actually live in the legit world and have real jobs like credit bureaus, web programmers, some of them actually wear suits to work and live and breathe in the professional business world, sit on the board of community or professional organizations, etc.. The thing is.. never, ever fuck over a hacker. Payback is a bitch. Check out the link. Watch how hackers are going to put a bad business person out of business.
The University of Pennsylvania has charged at least one student with sexual harassment and misuse of electronic resources after he posted pictures on the Internet that show students apparently having sex while standing beside a large window in one of the university's high-rise dormitories.
- ya never know what people are fliming and when, pictures you send out will be redistributed and when you can be videotaped without your knowledge doing a sexual act, only to have it resurface without your knowledge at a later date. So Ladies please be careful.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment for including "spyware" software on its media player designed to thwart music copying.
According to the lawsuit filed in Travis County, several of the company's music compact discs require customers to download Sony's media players if they want to listen to the CDs on a computer.
Link: Reuters Business Channel .
It was just a tiny thumb drive, but now, it's a pretty big problem for a Hawaii hospital. And what happened there could eventually become a problem for you, too.
Last month, Wilcox Memorial Hospital in Kauai had to inform 120,000 past and present patients that their private information had been misplaced. Their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, even medical record numbers had been placed on one of those tiny USB flash drives — and now, according to the letter, the drive was missing.
Link: MSNBC.com.
The music industry's top lobby group said on Tuesday it was launching new legal action against those who illegally share files over the Internet, which it blames for diminished sales.
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said it was launching 2,100 legal cases and extending the action to five new countries in Europe, Asia and, for the first time, South America.
It said file-sharers in Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Hong Kong and Singapore faced prosecution for the first time.
Link: CNET News.com.
Hide My Ass is a free online web service which offers users to browse the web anonymously. If you are at work and need to access a filtered web site, simply use our free service to bypass the network filter.
Link: About Hide My Ass!.
The Bush administration on Thursday announced that it is lobbying for new laws that would bump up criminal penalties for pirates, expand criminal prosecutors' powers and punish anyone who "attempts" to infringe a copyright.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, speaking at an antipiracy summit here hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Department of Justice recently submitted to Congress a "legislative package" aimed at toughening up intellectual-property enforcement amid evolving technology.
According to a copy of the proposal obtained from the department, the measure would create a new crime called "attempting to infringe a copyright." The proposal would also permit authorities to seize and destroy pirated and counterfeit goods--with a special nod to music, movies and digitally obtained materials. Also on that list are any goods used to produce pirated or counterfeit material, as well as property obtained with the proceeds of those goods.
Link: CNET News.com.
Instant messaging is emerging as a favorite communication tool among teenagers and young adults, with a good number of them sending more IMs than e-mails, a new survey says.
Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year, according to an America Online-commissioned study of instant messaging trends.
Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails.
One-fourth of users would like to see entertainment content within instant messages, while 20 percent want to make phone calls from their messaging service. Already, 33 percent of users send mobile IMs from their cell phones at least once a week. Another 12 percent say they would be interested in an IM-based VoIP service that could replace their primary household phone line, the survey said.
Link: CNET News.com.
Friendster recently sent a mass e-mail to try to make new friends for its social network. Instead, it made some enemies. The one-time hot spot dug deep into its network to pull out the e-mail addresses of people who didn't initially respond to friends' invites to join the online social network a year or more ago.
The e-mails implied they were coming from a friend when, in fact, they were being sent by the company. The e-mails, which went out during the last two weeks, show just how tough the competition is getting for Friendster as it battles growing online giant MySpace.com.
Link: CNET News.com.
- well... at some point someone recommended friendster to someone which is where the e-mails came from... MySpace kind of sucks and has actually screwed up friendster and made it a less uniform, more chaotic place to be with all the music videos loading, customize your page crap...
A Manhattan judge has ruled that two women whose expectations were dashed after they signed on with the Internet dating service Great Expectations are entitled to refunds of all fees they paid.
Civil Court Judge Diane Lebedeff awarded one woman, identified by the pseudonym Jennifer Doe, the $1,000 she had paid for a six-month membership after the woman said she had met no one through the service. The judge awarded the other woman, Debra Roe, the $3,790 she paid for a 54-month deal.
Link: Newsday.com.
Some consumers are discovering that when they bid on eBay, they're opening a portal to problems.
Tina Schimke and her husband, Dwayne, began having trouble with eBay when they placed a bid on a bike from what looked to be a legitimate seller, San Diego television station KGTV reported.
"He had quite an ad on the site -- it had lots of bikes. I admit, I didn't completely read the ad," Tina Schimke said.
When the Schimkes e-mailed back with a question about the shipping cost, the seller allegedly blasted them with a nasty e-mail.
"As soon as he got my e-mail, he was pounding the keyboard and venting," Tina Schimke said.
The anger didn't stop there, she said.
The seller allegedly left her a message that said, "Hey there, schmuck boy -- not answering the phone now?"
The alleged eBay bully was on a roll.
Link: 10News.com - Technology .
THE magnetic hotel room key, one of the lodging industry's most popular but controversial creations, is losing some of its attraction.
New technology and old worries are edging the systems closer to extinction. Perhaps at no time will that be more apparent than at next week's International Hotel/Motel and Restaurant Show in New York, billed as the world's largest hotel industry event.
"Technology moves in cycles, and the cycle may be turning away from magnetic systems," said Richard Siegel, who publishes the trade magazine Hospitality Upgrade. "There are a lot of new technologies that hotels are intrigued by."
According to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, 83 percent of hotels have electronic locks, and a majority of these use magnet swipe-card technology. No one expects these systems to vanish overnight. For one thing, they are cheap - plastic keys cost about 10 cents each. They are also a snap to use - just swipe the card through the reader and you are in your room. And they are without question more efficient than the old-fashioned, easy-to-lose metal keys.
But they also have a bad reputation among some business travelers. For several years, rumors have circulated on the Internet about privacy concerns with magnetic cards. The rumors appeared to originate in 1999, when the police department in Pasadena, Calif., investigated a claim that personal information had been extracted from a hotel key card. Officials ultimately concluded that private data was not being downloaded onto the cards.
Link: New York Times.
Slate uses cookies. So do the New York Times, the Washington Post, and almost every media site on the net. Popular blogs like Daily Kos and Powerline have embraced them. Google and Yahoo! dispatch them to better target ads. Retailers like Amazon rely on them to fulfill orders. Even Sesame Street deploys them on its Web site.
Cookies are simply text files sent by a Web site to your computer to track your movements within its pages. They're something like virtual license plates, assigned to your browser so a site can spot you in a sea of millions of visitors. Cookies remember your login and password, the products you've just bought, or your preferred color scheme. Sites that ask you to register use cookies to target advertising—someone who claims an annual salary of $35,000 might see ads for Boca Burgers rather than foie gras.
Link: Slate.com.
Cisco Systems released a patch for what has become known as the Black Hat Bug: a serious vulnerability in the operating system running Cisco routers, which drive traffic through much of the internet and control critical infrastructure systems.
Cisco's move closes the book on a controversy that began last July, when Mike Lynn, a computer security researcher speaking at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, demonstrated that an attacker could use the bug to crash Cisco routers or control them remotely. Before Lynn's talk concluded, the dark conference room was already lit with the glow of cell phones from audience members urging their IT departments to immediately patch their Cisco routers.
Link: Wired News.
Sony rightly came under fire last week from programmers and Internet users for injecting an undetectable copy-prevention utility into Microsoft Windows when certain CDs are inserted.
Now the lawyers are taking aim, too. Robert Green, a partner at the San Francisco firm of Green Welling, says he's readying a class action lawsuit against Sony.
"We're still investigating the case and talking to different people about what happened to them," Green said on Friday. He plans to argue that under California law, if you buy a copy-protected CD from a music store, you should be informed that a spyware-like utility will be implanted on your hard drive.
Link: CNET News.com.
In the first U.S. prosecution of its kind, FBI agents arrested a 20-year-old Los Angeles man Thursday on charges that he cracked some 400,000 Windows machines and covertly installed pop-up-generating adware on them, in a scheme that allegedly brought in $60,000 in ill-gotten profits.
Jeanson Ancheta faces a 17-count federal indictment charging him with two counts of conspiracy and various forms of computer intrusion and money laundering. The government is also seeking the seizure of more than $60,000 in cash, a used BMW and some computer equipment from the alleged hacker.
Link: Wired News.
Michelle Teran is the pied piper of wireless networks. Leading a band of followers through the city streets, the Canadian artist drags along a screen embedded in a suitcase that is showing supposedly secret images captured from cameras inside surrounding buildings.
Call it war-driving for video. Although many people assume new surveillance technology that lets cameras transmit footage wirelessly to TVs and computers is private, Teran is on a mission to show them otherwise.
Link: Wired News.
The number of threats targeting instant messaging has soared, according to IMlogic, which tracked a 1,500 per cent increase in the past year.
IMlogic's Threat Center said its data showed that huge increase in malicious code aimed at IM services between October 2004 and October 2005. Of these, 87 percent of unique IM-targeted attacks were worms, 12 percent were viruses and one percent was client vulnerabilities, according to the research.
Very few of the attacks have caused serious damage, according to IMlogic. However, an unlucky 13 companies on the Fortune 50 have been hit with an IM-related security incident in the past six months, said Francis De Souza, CEO of the company, which provides products to protect messaging systems against attacks. He cited one instance in which 10,000 desktops were taken out.
Link: CNET News.com.
Link: CNET News.com.
A British teenager has been cleared of launching a denial-of-service attack against his former employer, in a ruling that delivers another blow to the U.K's Computer Misuse Act. At Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London, District Judge Kenneth Grant ruled Wednesday that the teenager had not broken the CMA, under which he was charged. The defendant, who can't be named for legal reasons, was accused of sending 5 million e-mail messages to his ex-employer that caused the company's e-mail server to crash. The teenager greeted the news with relief, although an appeal by the prosecution is still possible. "I feel very happy. This has been going on for two years. At the moment, this is no longer hanging over my head," the teenager told ZDNet UK. The CMA, which was introduced in 1990, does not specifically include a denial-of-service attack as a criminal offense, something some members of the U.K. parliament want changed. However, it does explicitly outlaw the "unauthorized access" and "unauthorized modification" of computer material. Section 3 of the act, under which the defendant was charged, concerns unauthorized data modification and tampering with systems. A denial-of-service attack is one in which a flood of information requests is sent to a server,
The goblins you face this Halloween season may not be costumed children at your front door.
Instead, you very well might be the online victim of viruses, phish, spam or denial-of-service attacks. Tricks, to be sure, these attacks offer no treats.
Worse yet, some of these attacks do not come from the "outside," and instead can emanate internally from within a business organization. One common example: computers infected by malicious software that later get used to launch online attacks. This is problematic, given that 45 percent of IT professionals recently surveyed by MailFrontier Research reported that their e-mail security systems do not safeguard their business from such attacks launched internally.
The collective impact of these various attacks can be significant. Some of the possible consequences include business interruption, remediation expenses, loss of critical data, and compromised intellectual property.
Link: CNET News.com.
Consumers should gird for a big wave of unwanted commercial e-mail in the weeks leading to Thanksgiving, when the amount of spam could double as marketers try to reach holiday shoppers, Internet security experts say.
Contributing to the spamalanche: More viruses are spread via popular — and vulnerable — instant-messaging services to infect PCs and turn them into spam-spewing machines. Spammers are sending more e-mail in shorter bursts to overwhelm spam defenses. And blogs have become a fertile ground for spammers to create
