newtley writes "What do Canada's Wayne Crookes, the Big 4's RIAA, Hollywood's MPAA and brand new ICE agent Andrew Reynolds have in common? They all claim linking is the same as publishing. Crookes is using it to demand Canada's Supreme Court effectively shut down the net in Canada. With the RIAA and MPAA providing the 'initiative,' the Obama government is using Andrews [read ICE — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to try to shut down innocent sites for, and on behalf of, Hollywood and Big Music. The sites are 'accused of contributing to online piracy, and it was essential for the domain names to be seized without a trial and without giving the sites a chance to respond. Why? Such sites are 'destroying the US economy.' Forget about legally appointed courts, proof or due process. Hollywood and Big Music rule."

Nite_Hawk writes "Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of directors' and senior executives' names followed by 'sucks' and 'blows.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that millions of Skype phone users worldwide couldn't make calls or were dropped in mid-conversation because of a network connection failure that began about 9 AM Wednesday PST. 'For a communications system this large to go down, it's almost unheard of,' says Charles S. Golvin, a Forrester Research analyst. 'Usually when phone lines are disrupted, the blackout is confined to a specific geographical area. This is worldwide.' In theory, Skype, which is based on peer-to-peer networking technology, shouldn't see an outage, but that is not really the case — the company has a massive infrastructure that it uses for purposes such as authentication and linking to the traditional phone networks. 'The outage comes at a time when Skype is starting to ask larger corporations for their business,' writes Om Malik. 'If I am a big business, I would be extremely cautious about adopting Skype for business, especially in the light of this current outage.'"

Bruce Schneier says "I've written a lot on the 'War on Photography,' where normal people are harassed as potential terrorists for taking pictures of things in public. This article is different; it's about recording the police: Allison's predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones..."

theodp writes "Microsoft's Kinect has been out for less than two months and already there's an adult company looking to produce a 3-D sex game for the Xbox 360 console. But Microsoft immediately shot down any speculation that the game will pass the certification process. 'This isn't the first example of a technology being used in ways not intended by its manufacturer, and it won't be the last,' a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement. 'Microsoft did not authorize or license its technology for this use. Xbox is a family friendly games and entertainment console and does not allow Adults Only content to be certified for use on its platform, and would not condone this type of game for Kinect.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Back over Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) made a lot of news by seizing over 80 domain names. While many of these involved sites that sold counterfeit products, five of the domains involved copyright issues. Four of them involved hiphop-related blogs — including ones that hiphop stars like Kanye West and others used to promote their own works, and the last one was a meta search engine that simply aggregated other search engines. Weeks went by without the owners of those sites even being told why their domains were seized, but the affidavit for the seizure of those five sites has recently come out, and it's full of all sorts of problems. Not only was it put together by a recent college graduate, who claimed that merely linking to news and blog posts about file sharing constituted evidence of copyright infringement, it listed as evidence of infringement songs that labels specifically sent these blogs to promote. Also, what becomes clear is that the MPAA was instrumental in 'guiding' ICE's rookie agent in going after these sites, as that appeared to be the only outside expertise relied on in determining if these sites should be seized."

letsurock writes "The 68-page confidential report prepared by Swedish police got leaked which tells the police version on the alleged sexual misconduct by the Julian assange. The Swedish report traces events over a four-day period in August this year when 39-year-old Assange had what he has described as consensual sexual relationships with two Swedish women."

Trailrunner7 writes "A new project has produced a large and growing list of the private SSL keys that are hard-coded into many embedded devices, such as consumer home routers. The LittleBlackBox Project comprises a list of more than 2,000 private keys right now, each of which can be associated with the public key of a given router, making it a simple matter for an attacker to decrypt the traffic passing through the device. Published by a group called /dev/ttyS0, the LittleBlackBox database of private keys gives users the ability to find the key for a specific router in several different ways, including by searching for a known public key, looking up a device's model name, manufacturer or firmware version or even giving it a network capture, from which the program will extract the device's public certificate and then find the associated private SSL key."

schliz writes "Vint Cerf, Google, ICANN and California Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack have opposed a recently revealed UN initiative to regulate the internet. Congresswoman Mack put forward a US resolution that the United Nations and other international governmental organisations maintain a 'hands-off approach' to the internet, arguing that 'the internet has progressed and thrived precisely because it has not been subjected to the suffocating effect of a governmental organization's heavy hand.' Meanwhile, the so-called 'father of the internet,' Vint Cerf, called on stakeholders to sign a petition to mobilize opposition of the UN's plan. 'Today, I have signed that petition on Google's behalf because we don't believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance,' said Cerf, who is also Google's chief internet lobbyist."

achowe writes "Steve Linford of Spamhaus sent this to a private anti-spam list and asked that the message get out far and wide: 'For speaking out about the crime gangs located at the wikileaks.info mirror IP, Spamhaus is now under ddos by AnonOps. As our site cannot be reached now [actually sporadic], we can not continue to warn Wikileaks users not to load things from the Heihachi IP. ... AnonOps did not like our article update, here is what we said and what brought the ddos on us.'" At the conclusion of this message: "Spamhaus continues to warn Wikileaks readers to make sure they are viewing and downloading documents only from an official Wikileaks mirror site. We’re not saying 'don’t go to Wikileaks' we’re saying 'Use the wikileaks.ch server instead.'" Here is Spamhaus's full warning.

Chaonici writes "The first actual bank to do so, Bank of America has decided that it will follow in the footsteps of PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, and halt all its transactions that it believes are intended for WikiLeaks, including donations in support of the organization. 'This decision,' says the bank, 'is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.' Coincidentally, in a 2009 interview with Forbes magazine, Julian Assange stated that he was in possession of the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, and that he planned to release information about a major bank early next year."

jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."

Aggrajag and Mortimer.CA, among others, wrote to inform us that Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his NDA with the FBI has expired. The code was originally added ten years ago, and over that time has changed quite a bit, "so it is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are" says Mr. de Raadt. He added: "Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of the code are now found in many other projects/products." (Freeswan and Openswan are not based on this code.)

dkd903 noted that Stallman is speaking out about the risks of Chrome OS and giving up all your local data into the cloud, pushing people into "Careless Computing." Which is a much more urgent concern than something like calling it GNU/Chrome OS.

healeyb noted that Voyager 1 has now reached a distance from the sun where it is no longer able to detect solar wind. Launched in 1977 to get up close and personal with our solar system's gas giants, scientists estimate that in another 4 years it will cross the heliosphere.