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Government

Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Controls 421

Posted by timothy
from the y'know-voluntary-like-taxes dept.
The copyright battles going on right now are not all about SOPA, PIPA, or even the wider-reaching ACTA: suraj.sun snips thus from TorrentFreak: "At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites. ... If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear. The document, which describes a government-overlooked 'Voluntary Code of Practice' for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request."
Censorship

Dutch Court Forces ISPs To Block the Pirate Bay 304

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the censorship-is-hip dept.
New submitter swinferno writes "After recent successes in Finland, Italy and Belgium, the Dutch Copyright protection organization BREIN has obtained a verdict that forces two major ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay domains and gives them the right to submit future domains/IP addresses to be blocked in the future without court order."
The Internet

Average Web Page Approaches 1MB 319

Posted by timothy
from the includes-the-toaster-and-the-pool dept.
MrSeb writes "According to new research from HTTP Archive, which regularly scans the internet's most popular destinations, the average size of a single web page is now 965 kilobytes, up more than 30% from last year's average of 702KB. This rapid growth is fairly normal for the internet — the average web page was 14KB in 1995, 93KB by 2003, and 300KB in 2008 — but by burrowing a little deeper into HTTP Archive's recent data, we can discern some interesting trends. Between 2010 and 2011, the average amount of Flash content downloaded stayed exactly the same — 90KB — but JavaScript experienced massive growth from 113KB to 172KB. The amount of HTML, CSS, and images on websites also showed a significant increase year over year. There is absolutely no doubt that these trends are attributable to the death throes of Flash and emergence of HTML5 and its open web cohorts." If you have a personal home page, how big is it?

Comment: Leak, not a hack (Score 4, Interesting) 129

by Bostik (#37983200) Attached to: Anonymous Hacks Finland

Bit of background: Finland has pretty strict privacy laws, and compiling personal detail lists, such as this, is subject to regulation. Very few care about that. What really matters is that storing such lists has certain requirements - and disseminating them is explicitly unlawful.

The leaked list is apparently a compilation of 10 (or more) smaller lists. Criminal Bureau are going after the person who compiled and published the list, and the morons who compiled the original lists will probably get off with less than a slap on their wrists.

The original compilations have been passed around via mailing lists. I'll let that sink in.

[Puts on the cynic hat]
What should be a wake-up call to enforce the collection and dissemination rules will be used to drum up the threat of Anonymous and increased possibility to get spammed. The real problem, namely the near-criminal negligence with which this type of data is handled, will be ignored.

In a nutshell: someone who had access to multiple lists exposed a systematic indifference to privacy laws and the utter ignorance of decent practices. The leak itself will be vilified, while the practices which allowed this to happen with such trivial effort are unlikely to be addressed.

Facebook

Facebook Punishes Devs Who Shared User IDs 71

Posted by Soulskill
from the barn-doors-and-horses dept.
A couple weeks ago, we discussed news that some Facebook application developers were selling or accidentally sharing user IDs to advertisers and data brokers in violation of Facebook's privacy terms. Now, the company writes that they've updated the policy to dictate how UIDs can be handled within applications, and also punished the offending developers by blocking access to the site's communication channels for a period of six months. Quoting: "While we determined that no private user data was sold and confirmed that transfer of these UIDs did not give access to any private data, this violation of our policy is something we take seriously. As such, we are taking action against these developers by instituting a 6-month full moratorium on their access to Facebook communication channels, and we will require these developers to submit their data practices to an audit in the future to confirm that they are in compliance with our policies. This impacts fewer than a dozen, mostly small developers, none of which are in the top 10 applications on Facebook Platform. We have also reached an agreement with Rapleaf, the data broker who came forward to work with us on this situation. Rapleaf has agreed to delete all UIDs in its possession, and they have agreed not to conduct any activities on the Facebook Platform (either directly or indirectly) going forward."

Comment: It's still nothing new (Score 1) 151

by Bostik (#29515295) Attached to: Microsoft Awarded Patent For Peer-To-Peer DRM

From the article:

The Microsoft patent uses partial licenses, consisting of both a public and a private key, to provide customers with the right to decrypt the content they access over the peer-to-peer network.

So it's a combination of two things:

And for this they have been granted a patent? *le sigh*

Security

Stealing Data Via Electrical Outlet 208

Posted by timothy
from the accidentally-forget-to-label-some-220v-outlets dept.
Ponca City, We love you writes "NetworkWorld reports that security consultants Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco are preparing to unveil their methodology at the Black Hat USA conference for stealing information typed on a computer keyboard using nothing more than the power outlet to which the computer is connected. When you type on a standard computer keyboard, electrical signals run through the cable to the PC. Those cables aren't shielded, so the signal leaks via the ground wire in the cable and into the ground wire on the computer's power supply. The attacker connects a probe to a nearby power socket, detects the ground leakage, and converts the signal back into alphanumeric characters. So far, the attack has proven successful using outlets up to about 15 meters away. The cost of the equipment to carry out the power-line attack could be as little as $500 and while the researchers admit their hacking tools are rudimentary, they believe they could be improved upon with a little time, effort and backing. 'If our small research was able to accomplish acceptable results in a brief development time (approximately a week of work) and with cheap hardware,' they say, 'Consider what a dedicated team or government agency can accomplish with more expensive equipment and effort.'"
Security

Windows 7 Users Warned Over Filename Security Risk 613

Posted by timothy
from the death's-too-good-for-some-people dept.
nandemoari writes "Would-be Windows 7 users have been warned to change a default setting which could leave them vulnerable to attack via bogus files. As a result, Microsoft is taking flak for failing to correct a problem found in previous editions of Windows. The issue involves the way Windows Explorer displays filenames. In all editions of Windows after Windows 98, the default setting hides the filename extension (which identifies what type of file it is). This means that a Word file titled 'partyinvite.doc' will show up in Windows Explorer as simply 'partyinvite'. The only exception to this rule is if Windows does not recognize the file type. The reason for this setting is that it makes for a less cluttered look and avoids filling the screen with redundant detail. However, a flaw in the way it works leaves it liable to exploitation by hackers. They can take an executable file (which can do much more damage to a computer when opened) and disguise it by calling it 'partyinvite.doc.exe.'"

Comment: Re:Aquaria (Score 1) 116

by Bostik (#24660863) Attached to: Top Indie Games You Wouldn't Mind Paying For

Oh yes, and it works with wine. Tried the demo and was impressed enough to actually buy the game.

What really brings Aquaria together is the marvelous soundscape. Factor in some good voice acting (one exception in very late game) and the way the story is built, it's definitely worth the price.

I just wish the authors would release a soundtrack soon.

Privacy

Protecting Online Identity Through Cryptography 87

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the don't-show-me-yours-and-i-wont-show-you-mine dept.
A new startup, Credentica, hopes to offer the ability for you to perform secure transactions using the smallest amount of personal information possible. Their goal is to both protect privacy and enhance security, which they hope will be a mutually inclusive process. "The technique employs secure multi-party computation, a branch of cryptography that can calculate meaningful answers about secret information by knowing only some non-revealing clues about that secret. The underlying theory was demonstrated in 1982 by Andrew Yao in the so-called Millionaire's Problem [...] U-Prove employs an ID token, a special kind of digital certificate that allows for minimal selective disclosure. The tokens can store all kinds of information, but users can disclose only the minimum amount of data required in any given transaction. They leave no unwanted data trails and permit both anonymity and pseudonymity."
Encryption

Quantum Crypto in the Real World 91

Posted by CowboyNeal
from the people-really-use-this-stuff dept.
bednarz writes "Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland during parliamentary elections to be held Oct. 21, marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for election protection purposes. "We would like to provide optimal security conditions for the work of counting the ballots," said Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor. "In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage.""

But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery -- go! -- Mark "The Bard" Twain