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Security

Submission + - Anonymous & LulzSec Initiate #OpPayPal (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Anonymous and Lulz Security, in an open letter to PayPal and its customers titled, “A message to PayPal, its customers, and our friends,” is taking a new approach to punish the company, this time legally.

In a continuing protest against PayPal as it continues to withhold funds from WikiLeaks, the hacktivists are urging users to close their PayPal accounts. “We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative. The first step to being truly free is not putting one's trust into a company that freezes accounts when it feels like, or when it is pressured by the U.S. government,” the statement said.

In addition to encouraging users to close accounts, in typical Anonymous & Lulz Security fashion, the hacktivists taunted PayPal and the FBI via the @AnonymousIRC twitter feed. “So #Paypal You sue our people for $500.000 | it'll take you years to get a fraction of that. Let us show you what we can do in one day,” they wrote.

Privacy

Submission + - Banks Find Way To Sell Consumers' Shopping Data (forbes.com)

nonprofiteer writes: Banks plan to compete with Groupon and LivingSocial by targeting coupons and deals at credit card holders based on their shopping habits. They found a way to do it without violating financial privacy laws...

"They’re “selling” shopping habits the same way Facebook “sells” personal data about its users: in-network. It’s a clever privacy work-around. Just as Facebook allows advertisers to specifically target certain kinds of users based on their profile information (without actually providing that profile information to the advertisers), banks plan to allow advertisers to send deals and coupons to their customers based on what they’ve bought before. That way, no user data actually leaves the network — instead, deals just enter the network. Each time a customer cashes in on one of those deals, the bank gets a commission."

Government

Submission + - Anonymous Hacks Booz Allen Hamilton: 90k Accounts (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: According to Anonymous, in what the hacker group is calling, “Military Meltdown Monday,” they have acquired and released to the public, a list of approximately 90,000 military emails and md5, non-salted password hashes, after hacking into systems from Booz Allen Hamilton, the large government contractor that works closely with many defense, intelligence, and civil sectors on cyber security.
Businesses

Submission + - Driven off the Road by MBAs 1

theodp writes: In his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, legendary car-guy Bob Lutz says to get the U.S. economy growing again, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show. The auto industry, writes TIME's Rana Foroohar, is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business. In the first half of the 20th century, industrial giants like Ford, GE, AT&T and others used new technologies to create the best possible products and services with the idea that if you build it better, the customers will come. But by the late '70s, if-you-can-measure-it-you-can-manage-it MBAs were flourishing, and engineers were relegated to the geek back rooms. While the whiz-kidding of American business yielded some positives, moving numbers around can do only so much; over the long haul, you've got to invent or improve real products and services to grow. 'Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys,' argues Lutz, 'and software firms by software guys.' Learning that China plans to open 40 new graduate schools of business in the next few years, Lutz quipped, 'That's the best news I've heard in years.'
Twitter

Submission + - Twitter Buys Analytics Startup BackType (digitizor.com)

dkd903 writes: Twitter has just acquired social analytics startup BackType in a deal undisclosed. BackType will be joining Twitter’s platform team in San Francisco, where they will be focusing on creation of tools for Twitter’s publisher partners.

Submission + - Man gets past airport security with invalid pass (msn.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi cleared security at John F. Kennedy International Airport on June 24 and successfully boarded Virgin America flight 415 — even though his boarding pass was not issued in his name and was for a flight the day before...But neither Virgin America nor the Transportation Security Administration noticed that Noibi's identification — a University of Michigan student card — did not match the name on his boarding pass." — Can we PLEASE get rid of the TSA and the over the top security checks now? Please?

Submission + - Hacker group 'Anonymous' prepares DDOS attack on t (mondoweiss.net) 1

Smiths writes: The latest target of Operation Anonymous, which following the dissolution of LulzSec is the last substantial non-amorphous hacker collective left out there, could lead to some substantial geopolitical fallout. That is because the target of the just announced upcoming DDOS attack is none other than the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, and while Israel has allegedly been happy to dispense hack attacks in the past, the onslaught on the Iranian nuclear power plant courtesy of the Stuxnet virus coming to mind, we doubt it will as happy to be seen on the receiving end of decentralized computer warfare.
Security

Submission + - ISP Outage, Not Anonymous, Sank MasterCard Site (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: An Internet Service Provider outage, not hackers, was to blame for the unavailability of MasterCard's website early Tuesday morning, the company has confirmed.

It was previously thought the site had been knocked offline after being hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack six months after the company’s refusal to handle donations to controversial whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

Submission + - PBS and Writerspace Hacked Again (thehackernews.com)

Endoflow2010 writes: Looks like PBS and Writerspace have been hacked again. The 'hacker' taking credit for the hack goes by the handle Warv0x and is also know by Kaihoe. The previous PSB.org hack was claimed by Lulzsec to be a zero day exploit for MoveableType . This time Warv0x (AKA Kaihoe) expose the whole Database of PBS.org using and SQL injection attack.

According to Warv0x (AKA Kaihoe) "This wasn't done for fame or fun,just proving LulzSec aren't as good as they think they are. I haven't rooted the box or been up to crack the hashes, I'm just proving that most of their attacks are very lame and basic (i'm pretty sure and automated) SQL injections and further privilege escalation, which is just matter of time." He also said "Support for WebNinjas & Jester, good job at exposing them. Sad to mention, but I really agree with th3j35t3r & WebNinjas — LulzSec are just a bunch of script kiddies..."

Submission + - GoDaddy for Sale (foxnews.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: After the owner said he would never sell it looks like 2 Billion Dollars or 2.5 Billion dollars makes anyone want to get out of the business.
Privacy

Submission + - LulzSec Document Dump Shows Cops' Fear Of iPhones (itworld.com)

jfruhlinger writes: "People are starting to comb through the details of the law enforcement documents made public by LulzSec. Blogger Kevin Fogarty noticed one interesting trend: The cops seem very anxious about iPhones, particularly apps that would allow encounters with a police officers to be recorded. Ironically, the cops seem extremely concerned with protecting their own privacy, but the documents encourage police to examine iPhones during the course of interacting with the public to see what apps they have."
PHP

Submission + - War Between LulzSec and The Jester Intensifies (zeropaid.com)

Dangerous_Minds writes: There's an increasingly testy war between LulzSec and The Jester as of late. The Jester recently posted chatlogs and compromising data on LulzSec security leader Sabu. In response, LulzSec ridiculed The Jester by belittling his efforts to take down terrorist websites and even going as far as rewriting one of The Jester's PHP scripts from 60 lines to 3. One can only expect more fireworks between the two after this.
Linux

Submission + - Linux 3.0 Will Be faster Than 2.6.39: Linus (muktware.com) 1

sfcrazy writes: While we were thinking that the announcement of 3.x branch was nothing more than Linus' mood swing, it seems there is more to it.

Linus wrote on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, "3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39 due to the other changes made (ie the read-ahead), so yes, the regression itself is fixed."

Android

Submission + - Almost 50% of US smartphones Android (canalys.com) 1

Gumbercules!! writes: Android's phenomenal rise continues, with 49% of the US market and 35% of the World phone market (200% year on year growth — meaning they're now well ahead of iPhone and growing much faster, as well). How long before developers start to put more emphases on Android than iOS?
Android

Submission + - Hulu App Now Available To Android (hulu.com)

FredFredrickson writes: "Just in time for Verizon Wireless' bandwidth cap news, Hulu has made available an Android Hulu Plus app during their first phase of their android rollout.

Hulu Plus is available on six phones, including the Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, Motorola Droid II, Motorola Droid X, and the Motorola Atrix. They expect to add more devices throughout the year.

Just like the Netflix app, the Hulu Plus app has left quite a few phone models in the dust for their launch, though Netflix recently added many more phones to their lineup. Let's hope that Hulu follows suit."

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