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Jordanian Mayor Angry Over "Alien Invasion" Prank 217

Posted by samzenpus
from the war-of-the-worlds dept.
krou writes "Jordanian mayor Mohammed Mleihan has taken a dim view of local newspaper Al-Ghad's April Fools prank, which saw a front page story claiming that 'flying saucers flown by 3m (10ft) creatures had landed in the desert town of Jafr.' The paper claimed that communication networks had gone down, and people were fleeing the area. The mayor called the local security authorities, who combed the area, but they were unable to find any evidence of the aliens. Mr Mleihan is now considering suing because of the distress it caused to residents: 'Students didn't go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town's 13,000 residents. People were scared that aliens would attack them.'" I guess they've never heard of Orson Welles in Jordan.

Comment: Re:Not happening to me (Score 1) 527

by GnomeThinker (#28282337) Attached to: Comcast Intercepts and Redirects Port 53 Traffic
I show that line on my comcast connect as well, however the tcp connect is blocked. TCP is not generally needed on a home connection as it allows for requesting larger UDP and that gets most people through. Of course 'most people' isn't everyone :( Digs with tcpdump show me talking to opendns's servers so does not appear to be a redirect. This is on a basic Comcast home connection however Comcast has the apperance of placing different rules in various parts of the country. Permalink on scan
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Researchers Discover How To Make the Perfect Phone Call 85

Posted by samzenpus
from the thanks-guys dept.
Having made amazing discoveries such as how to make the perfect cheese sandwich, linking heavy caffeine use to sleeplessness, and figuring out where all the teaspoons have gone, science has made the greatest breakthrough yet. They have uncovered the secrets of making the perfect phone call. The perfect phone call clocks in at a mere 9 minutes and 36 seconds, easily 11 minutes shorter than any conversation I've ever had with my mom. Unlike a call to mom, the perfect phone call is almost devoid of any gossip about her divorced neighbor and her heavily tattooed daughter. Instead three minutes should be spent catching up with news about family and friends, one minute on personal problems, a minute on work/school, 42 seconds on current affairs, 24 seconds on the weather, and 24 seconds talking about the opposite sex. What's left of your 9 mins 36 secs is a free for all.

Comment: Re:ABout time (Score 1) 153

by GnomeThinker (#22415064) Attached to: Multifunction Printers — The Forgotten Security Risk?

Any halfway decent sysadmin has about a dozen ways to punch holes in that particular scheme, and particularly at a bank you're almost certainly not going to get that to work. ARPtables, captive portals, fwknop, ssh, the list is endless of ways to stop that from working.
Sadly if you look less at the 'bank' world and more at the smaller 'Credit Unions' you'll quickly find little to no fully qualified sysadmins, instead you'll generally find over-titled help desk people with a bunch of vendors. Some have security vendors who MIGHT do continuous observations but generally do 'scans' at predetermined intervals. So yes there ARE endless ways to 'stop that from working' but sadly not all the people in position to use said ways are capable or have the time to do them.
Security

DNS attack ushers in new era of Phishing 2.0->

Submitted by Bergkamp10
Bergkamp10 writes "Researchers at Google and the Georgia Institute of technology are studying a new virtually undetectable form of attack that exploits 'open recursive' DNS servers, which are used to tell computers how to find each other on the Internet by translating domain names like google.com into numerical Internet Protocol addresses. Some 17 million open-recursive DNS servers are on the Internet, and unlike other DNS servers they answer all DNS lookup requests from any computer on the net, making them the perfect target for would be hackers and attackers. Criminals are apparently using these servers in tandem with new attack techniques to develop a generation 2.0 of phishing. Here's how an attack would work. A victim would visit a Web site or open a malicious attachment that would exploit a bug in his computer's software. Attackers would then change just one file in the Windows registry settings, telling the PC to go to the criminal's server for all DNS information. If the initial exploit code was not stopped by antivirus software, the attack would give attackers virtually undetectable control over the computer. Once they'd changed the Windows settings, the criminals could take victims to the correct Web sites most of the time, but then suddenly redirect them to phishing sites whenever they wanted — during an online banking session, for example. Because the attack is happening at the DNS level, anti-phishing software would not flag the phoney sites."
Link to Original Source
Social Networks

Facebook's Beacon Possibly Illegal->

Submitted by drwxrxrx
drwxrxrx writes "An associate professor at New York Law School has published a look at Facebook's Beacon service through the eyes of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, which prohibits "wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records". From the article: "I dug a bit into the legalities of the issue, and this is roughly what I came up with: Facebook and Blockbuster should hunker down and prepare for the lawsuits.""
Link to Original Source
Spam

Two Spammers Given Five Years for Porn Spam->

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "In an Arizona case, two porn spammers were given five years each in prison. From the article, "Over nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages, according to court documents. They were paid commissions based on the number of people who accessed the websites via the spam. Kilbride and Schaffer tried to make it seem as if they were sending messages from abroad by logging in to servers in Amsterdam. But those messages originated from Phoenix, prosecutors said. They were also ordered to forfeit $1.3m." Good to have them stopped but as always the real question is whether five years imprisonment for each of them is a little harsh. The case started on June 5th."
Link to Original Source
The Courts

How should I have responded to RIAA lawyer? 10

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's lawyers are a bit jumpy these days since their standard "making available" boilerplate was rejected by the Court in Interscope v. Rodriguez. But I still never expected, when I initiated a dismissal motion in Elektra v. Schwartz, that they would be reaching out to me , of all people, for help. But so they did, asking me "in the interest of efficiency... what precisely Defendant contends is lacking from Plaintiffs' Complaint for Defendant to consider it sufficient. Perhaps Plaintiffs may be able to satisfy these alleged deficiencies and spare both parties additional and unnecessary motions practice." Unfortunately my response was not very helpful; I couldn't think of anything better than to say, more or less, that "Plaintiffs have no case whatsoever against Ms. Schwartz, and their case against her was frivolous in its inception. Accordingly, there are no facts they can allege that will satisfy the plausibility standard." On reflection, I'm feeling kind of guilty that I didn't give them a more creative, and helpful answer, and I thought to turn to my friends at Slashdot, who are (a) almost always helpful, and (b) always creative. What would you have said?"
Communications

Tmobile DATA Centers Down?-> 1

Submitted by
Randy M. Karshner
Randy M. Karshner writes "Tmobiles Data Centers from the Mississippi East all seem to have went down around 7pm EST, With millions of customers they have managed to keep this rather quiet so far wouldn't you say? I first noticed about 7 when all text messages stopped, even those sent to my own hand set. A quick call to Tmobile confimed this and that the first ETA they had was hopeful to have it fixed by 10pm EST. Looks like they are two plus hours over and still climbing. Why no coverage on this?"
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The only constant is change.